Orbit 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  He was always a little apprehensive when he had to go in a classroom now. Already this semester he had received two student senate reprimands for speaking sharply to undergraduates (“in such a manner as to impugn or debase the human dignity of those addressed . . .”), and he could not afford a third.

  On the other side of the door he could hear the coughing and shuffling of feet; he reminded himself that these were only more of the sleek young people he had watched streaking across the campus on their bikes a few minutes before. He glanced furtively at his notes, then entered the room and walked to the projector console. Several of the students, the good ones, or perhaps only those who hoped to lull his suspicions, called out, “Hiya, David,” or “Hi, Dave,” as he made his way up the aisle. He forced himself to nod and wave, although he would have preferred to ignore these greetings. A few instructors did, but they were the ones who were always having complaints lodged against them. “Well, what did you think of it?” he asked.

  There was a roar of comment, suggesting mixed reactions. He seated himself and allowed it to continue—not that he could have stopped it—as the more vociferous gathered knots of others around them and shouted to make themselves heard above the din. It occurred to him as it had many times before that it should be possible for them to do all this ranting before he came in; but he knew psychologists felt the effect would not be the same, and from what he had observed himself, they were correct. Without an instructor present the subject matter of all this gabble would rapidly swing to the eternal topics of politics, sex, and sport.

  Gradually the volume of sound diminished, and when only a few diehards were holding out he rapped gently for order. Some of them, he knew, considered that an undemocratic procedure, but it was not forbidden yet, and clearing his throat simply did not work. By a gesture he called on a girl in the front row, choosing her because he knew she had a clear, sweet voice which would help quiet the noisier boys. She rose gracefully, a courtesy he could not demand but appreciated, and parted the long hair hanging over her face before she spoke. “I thought—” she said, and then paused, embarrassed. She was wearing the broadest possible belt, and in spite of the painted arrows stabbing inward on her thighs it seemed probable that she had not yet rejected completely the conservative influence of an old-fashioned family—an impression reinforced by the demure pink pastel she had selected for her breasts.

  “I thought it was just lovely,” she finished. “The lovely park, whatever it was—”

  “The Champs Elysées,” he prompted.

  “Yes, and the lovely old carriage the woman rode in—I mean, I thought it was just shattering.” She sat down abruptly.

  He nodded in appreciation and said, “Let’s see it again, shall we?” touching a button on the console before him. Instantly the scene filled the wall in front of the class, an ink drawing filled in with broad splashes of tempera. From memory he quoted, “The idea of perfection which I had within me I had bestowed, in that other time, upon the height of a victoria, upon the raking thinness of those horses, frenzied and light as wasps upon the wing, with bloodshot eyes like the cruel steeds of Diomed, which now, smitten by a desire to see again what I had once loved, as ardent as the desire that had driven me, many years before, along the same paths, I wished to see renewed before my eyes at the moment when Mme. Swann’s enormous coachman, supervised by a groom no bigger than his fist, and as infantile as Saint George in the picture, endeavored to curb the ardour of the flying, steel-tipped pinions with which they thundered along the ground.”

  The legend over Mme. Swann’s head, enclosed in a balloon whose outlines were of the puffy sort used to indicate thoughts rather than speech, seemed hardly necessary—the cartoonist had conveyed them well enough in the look she directed toward a strolling group of high-hatted gentlemen—but his students were rereading them nonetheless, as he saw by their moving lips: “ ‘Oh yes, I do remember quite well; it was wonderful!’, to another: ‘How I should have loved to! We were unfortunate!’, to a third: ‘Yes, if you like! I must just keep in the line for a minute, then as soon as I can I will break away.’ “ Far in the background the slender figure of the young Marcel expressed mute admiration.

  He was about to wipe out the picture when he sensed a disturbance far toward the back of the room, where the tiered seats rose in semicircles. Heads were turning toward the door leading to the corridor belt and he heard a girl giggle nervously. Then something black and shapeless entered and sat down. There were more giggles.

  For a moment he did not know what to do, then stabbing his fingers down at random he replaced Mme. Swann’s victoria with another scene and announced briskly: “Student dialogue on this one; Shepherd and Weeks.” Shepherd and Weeks were two of the brightest as well as the most talkative; they could be depended upon to keep their discussion going without him for as long as needed. The picture the projector had produced was of Marcel stealing glances at the former Princesse des Laumes as she sat with her feet on the tomb of Gilbert the Bad. He left it on long enough for the class to study it, then changed to a magnified view of the room itself with Shepherd and Weeks in the foreground. When they were well under way (“She represents the unattainable woman to him—he’s more comfortable with that”), and the class had been at least partially distracted, he switched his personal monitor to a camera covering the back of the room.

  In the last row, in the seat nearest the door, sat a figure completely draped in black cloth. Instead of the sandals worn by most students the feet were shod in black, very formal and rather old-fashioned, masculine shoes; and under the cloth, apparently, something like a box was worn over the head. Its square outline could be seen just above the triangular holes which allowed the wearer to see.

  Twisting a knob, he zoomed the image in until he seemed to stand alongside the shrouded figure. The student—surely only a student would undertake such a prank—sat motionless, utterly quiet in his broad-armed chair.

  It was, as he realized after a moment, a particularly difficult situation. Any of the fifty thousand students at the university could monitor any class he chose; the right had been acquired as the result of undergraduate demonstrations at some time in the remote past, and in theory aided them to decide whether or not to register for the subject in a future semester. In practice it was most frequently used by campus agitators who wished to disrupt a class without paying tuition for it. He could ask the student under the cloth to establish that he was a student, but if he was it would gain nothing; and he might be walking into a trap, since if, as seemed likely, the student was an agent provocateur for some dissident group, this challenge was presumably what he was expecting and awaiting.

  But for the time being at least he was well behaved and quiet; the wisest course was probably to ignore the whole matter until some overt action changed his own position from that of presumptive aggressor. Abstractedly he thought of how the boy must be sweltering under his shroud. His own clothing, tropical-weave coveralls whose design imitated the sweatshirt and jeans of more formal times, oppressed him in the underground heat. Still watching the monitor, he plucked at it to draw cooler air in at the neck. More conservative—and perhaps better salaried—faculty members stuck to the time-honored slogans for their shirts, the more respected because they were outmoded: things like GET OUT OF VIETNAM and GOD GROWS HIS OWN. The legend on his own chest read: MAKE LOVE NOT SLUDGE. Not prestigious, but the National Sewage Authority paid him a stipend for the space.

  The remainder of the period seemed to pass without leaving an impression on his memory, and although he was certain afterward that he had asked the normal questions to begin discussions and elucidated correctly the few points referred to him, he could recall nothing of it when the class was shuffling out into the hall. He remained at the console, waiting to see if the dark figure at the back of the room had left with the others, and by some trick of thought he felt he had been watching the proceedings himself through the eyes behind those black holes, and had found them remote and incon
sequential.

  The dark figure had not gone, but was still seated and, it seemed, staring at him across the long rows of empty chairs.

  This was his last class of the day, and he was conscious of an overpowering urge to finish it without a disturbance; to go home and talk to Ruth and rest. The eyeholes which were the only visible feature of that strangely shaped, hooded head seemed to hold no malice or even impulse of activity, and for a moment he wondered if the student behind them could be asleep. Slowly he got up and walked toward an exit, ignoring him as well as he could. He reached the door and risked a glance over his shoulder. The black figure was standing now; he went out, grateful for the soft shushing the door made behind him.

  He was halfway to the elevator when he heard the slow tread of heavily shod feet, very different from the patter of sandals or bare soles. He walked faster, pressed the elevator button, and was fortunate enough to have the doors open immediately. When they closed, the black figure was still fifteen feet or so away.

  His bicycle was in the faculty rack at the south end of the campus and he made his way to it as quickly as he could, looking over his shoulder from time to time with the illogical feeling that he was still being followed. Somehow the sight of his own name, David P. Paramore, on the registration tag dangling from the handlebars, reassured him. He mounted and pedaled off toward home.

  As always there was a multiplicity of bikes and pedal carts on the streets, plus a sprinkling of the slow and costly electric cars and a few heavily taxed internal combustion trucks, mostly diesels. Since the government did not care much if the members of the liberal arts faculty survived a bomb blast or not, the underground on-campus apartments were the prerogatives of members of the scientific departments. He had worked his way through the traffic for nearly an hour and was approaching his own neighborhood before he glimpsed the dark figure far behind him. The student under that black cloth, whoever he was, had a bike too; a much newer one than his own, just as his legs were no doubt younger and his wind better. Block by block he gained steadily until he was not more than a few seconds behind.

  A pushcart man from whom David sometimes bought vegetables waved from the curb: “Hiya, Professor, what’s y’hurry?” and then was gone, a blur of unshaven face and glinting teeth. Twenty years ago he had ridden these same streets in this same way, commuting to the campus, thinking of the great day on which he would get his doctorate and anticipating a meeting with Ruth at the Student Center for lunch; and it suddenly occurred to him to wonder why indeed he was hurrying, now that all the goals he had set himself were reached in emptiness and it was possible to set no more. What could the student under the black cloth do to him that time had not? For a moment he slacked his pace, then the repulsion he had felt earlier for that enigmatic figure returned and he bent over the handlebars again, the breath whistling in his chest.

  The house his mother had left him was two-storied, the ground floor of brick veneer, the second of the overhanging wooden construction the contractors of her period had found so cheap to build and so attractive to buyers. He careened up onto the lawn as recklessly as a boy, left his bicycle lying on the grass instead of pulling it up onto the porch, and slammed and locked the door behind him.

  Ruth had heard him, and she called to him from her room at the top of the stairs. After a moment he began the daily ritual of his visit with her, mounting the steps one at a time and pausing a little to catch his breath at each.

  She had fluffed and arranged her hair for him today, and applied the cosmetics she kept on the stand beside her bed. Seeing her smile, the little attempts she had made to please him, he knew he could not tell her what had happened today; then he saw the smile fade and remembered that Ruth had always known when anything went wrong for him. It would be kinder to tell her than to leave her in suspense.

  Sitting on the bed beside her he described everything: the shrouded figure coming into his classroom, the pursuit home.

  “But it’s so easy!” she said when he had finished. She had held his hand pressed between hers as he talked, and now she gave it a little pat. “They did it before, years ago— when you and I were in school ourselves. A boy got into a big black sack and began attending classes that way; he wouldn’t tell anyone who he was, or speak above a mumble at all. At first everyone laughed, and then when he kept coming day after day like that they were rude to him and began to play cruel jokes. Finally when he still wouldn’t tell them anything they just ignored him. Then at the end of the term it came out that it was an experiment some graduate students had worked out with one of the men in the psychology department.”

  He looked at her, wanting to believe.

  “It’s so obvious, David. Someone has revived that old experiment. We say we’re so much freer and more humane than people used to be, but are we really? Well, he’s going to make the same test again and see if the results are any different. David, don’t look so frightened.”

  “Why did he wait for me after class, then? Why did he follow me home?”

  She squeezed his hand, as though trying to show physically her sincerity. “He wanted to see how you’d react, so he had to give you time to react in. And I don’t believe he followed you at all. Don’t you see, he couldn’t take off the bag on campus, or someone would see who he was; he was probably on his way home, and it just happens to be down our street. There are lots of those boarding houses for students who can’t get dorm space scattered all over.”

  He said nothing, but she could see he was still unconvinced.

  “He didn’t actually stop here, did he, David?”

  “I didn’t wait to see.” He was already ashamed of having run. “I just went inside.”

  “There, you see! He hasn’t rung the bell or anything, has he? Or tried to climb through a window? Go out and look around for him. I’ll bet you can’t find him anywhere.”

  He did not go outside, or even look through the windows that evening, but nothing happened to prove Ruth incorrect. He did his usual housework, watched television with her for an hour, and read himself to sleep.

  The next morning the dark, shapeless figure was waiting for him, and it attended every class he gave for the next two days.

  He made an appointment with Saunders, the head of his department. Saunders’ secretary, it seemed to him, looked at him oddly as he came in, but he managed to smile at her while she spoke into the intercom.

  Saunders fancied himself a sportsman and had had his office decorated that way, absurd as it was for a room a hundred and fifty feet below ground. Stuffed fish and color photographs of glacial lakes adorned the walls; there was even a copy of Sassoon’sMemoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, bound in scuffed leather and left lying conspicuously on top of a microfilm cabinet. David had always felt ill at ease in this room, psychically shaken by its falsity.

  Saunders was leaning back in his swivel chair and staring at the ceiling as he came in, and did not immediately look at him. “What is it, Paramore? The girl said you wanted to see me. Sit down.”

  The chairs were covered with vinyl made to look like cowhide and rather too strongly impregnated with the real substance’s odor. David settled himself gingerly in one as Saunders shifted his weight to tilt his seat forward until he could see him. “Well, what is it? Paramore, you look awful. Are you sick?”

  As briefly as he could he described what had been happening for the past three days. When he had finished Saunders remained silent.

  “Can’t you see?” David leaned forward, trying to make the man understand. “It’s an attempt to entrap me, or the department, or the school. They’re waiting for us to do something, or to say something that can be used against us. Then there’ll be another riot, just like the old days. Speeches—demonstrations—and when it’s all over—”

  “We haven’t had many riots since we moved the campus underground,” Saunders said mildly. “After all, they can’t break our windows when we haven’t got any, and the belts in the corridors just keep sweeping along anybody who sits down o
n them until they get dumped off at the end. When did you say this started?”

  “Monday.” He had lost. Saunders was not willing to recognize what they were trying to do.

  “You say he sleeps on your porch at night?” Saunders was shuffling through the papers in a desk drawer and did not look at him as he spoke.

  “Yes.” It was an effort to prevent his voice from cracking. “Yes, just like a dog someone won’t let into the house at night, with his back against the front door.”

  “But your wife has never seen him?”

  “What difference does that make? Ruth is an invalid; you must know that.”

  Saunders had found the paper he had been looking for, and disregarded the last remark. Reading it upside down from his position on the far side of the desk, David saw that it was his own class schedule. “What do you want with that?” he asked.

  “Monday the subject of your class was Swann’s Way. One of your favorites, isn’t it?”

  “I wrote my thesis—”

  “And Tuesday you covered A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs— Within a Budding Grove; yesterday’s schedule calls for The Guermantes Way, and today—”