Orion o-1

by Ben Bova

  I slid behind my desk and told my computer to phone St. Mercy’s Hospital. The hospital’s answering computer told me, in the warm tones of a trained human actress, that visiting hours were from two to four p.m.and six to eight in the evening. Ms. Promachos was listed in good condition. She could not come to the phone; the doctor was examining her at the moment.

  I left a message saying that I would be there at two. Then I did a day’s work, and more, that morning. For some foolish reason I felt wonderful. It was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes or a window had suddenly opened to reveal a lovely landscape to me. Yes, I was aware that my memory was virtually a blank, that I did not know who I was or why I was here. I realized that my life was probably in the gravest sort of danger. But even that knowledge was wonderfully exhilarating. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been an emotionless automaton; I hadn’t even guessed that most of my memory had been erased. I was merely going through the motions of being alive. I breathed, but I didn’t feel. Now it was like coming up to the beautifully sunlit surface of the sea after spending much too long in the murky darkness of the depths.

  I worked right through the nominal lunch hour; I was much too excited to eat. Like a teen-ager running eagerly to his first date, I left the office just beforetwo o’clockand hailed a taxi down on the crowded, rushing avenue and fidgeted impatiently as the cab wormed its way through the afternoon traffic to St. Mercy’s Hospital.

  “Ms. Promachos,” said the nurse behind the desk at the entrance to Aretha’s ward, “checked out about half an hour ago.”

  I felt stunned. As if someone had clubbed me between the eyes. “Checked out…?”

  “Yes. Are you Mr. O’Ryan?”

  I nodded mutely.

  “She left a message for you.” The nurse handed me a folded scrap of paper. My name was penciled on it, in what looked like swift, rushing strokes. She had misspelled O’Ryan. I opened the tablet sheet and read: No time. The dark one … Then, in an almost undecipherable scribble, Underground.

  I crumpled the sheet in my hand.

  “When did you say she left?”

  The nurse was an experienced old bird. The look in her narrow eyes told me that she did not want to get involved in a lover’s triangle.

  “When?” I repeated.

  She glanced at the digital clock on the panel in front of her seat. “Twenty-eight minutes ago, to be exact.”

  “Who was with her?”

  “I didn’t get his name. She signed herself out.”

  “What did he look like?”

  She hesitated. I could see a struggle going on inside her head. Then: “A big man. Not quite as tall as you, but… big. Y’know? Wide as a bus. Like a Mafia hit man, only worse. He looked… threatening. Scared you just to see him.”

  “Dark complexion, black hair, bushy brows.”

  “That’s him.” She nodded. “Only… Ms. Promachos didn’t seem to be afraid of him. I was, but she didn’t look scared at all. Acted like she knew him, like he was a member of her family.”

  “Some family.”

  The nurse had no idea where they had gone. It was against hospital rules for her to give me Aretha’s home address, but she did it anyway, with only the slightest urging from me. The dark one had truly frightened her.

  I took another taxi to the address the nurse had given me, far downtown, near the Brooklyn Bridge. The driver, a Latino from Central America, was quickly lost in the maze of Lower East Sidestreets. I paid him off and walked several blocks, searching for Aretha’s apartment.

  There was no such address. The information was fake. I stopped on a street corner, beginning to feel conspicuous in my business suit where everyone else was wearing jeans, fatigues, tee shirts, even shawls that had once been tablecloths. I wasn’t afraid of being mugged; I suppose I should have been, but I wasn’t. I was concentrating too hard on trying to figure out why Aretha had given the hospital a phony address. I was certain that the nurse had told me the truth; it was Aretha herself who had falsified her address.

  Underground. What did she mean by that? Underground. I looked at the time. She had left the hospital nearly an hour ago. In an hour they could have gone anywhere in this vast, teeming city.

  “Hey, that’s a nice watch you got, man.”

  I felt the prick of a knifepoint against my back as the foul breath of the man who held it warmed my neck.

  “I really like that watch, man,” he said, low, trying to sound menacing.

  I was in no mood to be mugged on a busy street corner in broad daylight. This fool was standing close behind me, pressing his knife into the small of my back, trying to rip me off without letting anyone walking past know what was happening.

  “Just gimme the watch, shitface, and keep your mouth shut.”

  I lifted my hands as if to slip the watch off my wrist, then whirled and gave him an elbow in the abdomen and a backhand chop across the bridge of his nose. The knife clattered to the pavement. The blow to his middle had cut off his wind so he couldn’t even yelp. He sank to his feet, nose broken, blood gushing over his ragged clothes and spattering the cement. I grabbed a handful of his filthy hair and jerked his head back. His face was covered with blood.

  “Get out of here before I lose my temper,” I told him. With my left foot I kicked his knife into the gutter.

  Gagging, wide-eyed with pain and shock, he staggered to his feet and limped away. A few passersby glanced at me, but no one said a word or lifted a hand to intervene. The city at its finest.

  Underground. I heard a subway train rumble beneath my feet, its wheels screeching on the iron rails. Underground is a British word for subway. There was a subway station just outside the hospital’s main entrance. Looking across the street from where I was standing, I saw the entrance to another station. I dashed across the street, leaving a chorus of bleating horns and cursing drivers behind me, and raced down the steps. In the grimy, urine-stinking underground station, I went from one map of the subway system to another until I found one that was readable beneath the spraycan graffiti. Sure enough, a red line connected the station at the hospital with this station downtown.

  Underground. They had come down here on the subway and gotten off at this station. I was certain of it. That’s what Aretha’s hastily scribbled message meant.

  Now what? Where had they gone from here? A four-car train pulled in, roaring and squealing to a stop. The cars were decorated with bright graffiti paintings, cartoons and names of the “artists.” I found myself scanning the words on the sides of the cars, looking for a message. Foolish desperation. The doors hissed open and everyone got out. I started toward the first car, but a black man in a Transit Authority uniform called out to me:

  “End of the line. This train’s goin’ t’ the lay-up. Next train uptown in five minutes. Next train over th’ bridge on the other level.”

  The doors hissed shut and the train, empty of passengers, lumbered away from the platform and screeched around a bend in the track. I listened as carefully as I could, filtering out the other echoing noises in the station: the conversations, some kid’s radio blaring rock music, high-pitched laughter from a trio of teen-aged girls. The train went around that curve, out of sight, and then stopped. “The lay-up,” the Transit man had said. Trains taken out of service are kept there, down the track, until they are needed again.

  I looked around. No one was paying attention to me. I walked to the end of the platform, vaulted easily over the padlocked, heavy wire gate that barred entry to the tracks, and went down the steps that led to the floor of the tunnel. The steps, the tunnel walls, the railing I touched were coated with years of filth, of grease and accumulated grime. The floor of the tunnel was like a sewer with tracks. In the dim lighting I saw that the electrified third rail, which carried enough current to drive the trains and kill anyone who touched it, was covered by wooden planking. I stepped up onto that; my shoes were already dank from the foul-smelling wetness of the tunnel floor.

  In the distance I heard a tr
ain approaching. The walls were scalloped with niches for a man to stand in, and as the train’s headlamp glared at me and its whistle hooted, I pressed myself against the grimy wall and let the juggernaut whoosh past. Despite myself, it took my breath away to have the train roar past just a few inches from me.

  I pulled myself together and headed along the track after the train had passed. Sure enough, around the bend there were a dozen or more trains standing quiet and idle, side by side. Each of them was decorated with graffiti from one end to another. The overhead lights were spaced far apart; they threw weak pools of dim light into the grimy darkness that enveloped the layup.

  They’re here, I told myself. They’re in here somewhere. I stopped and held my breath, listening. Eyesight was of little use in this darkness.

  A scampering, slithering sound. The scrape of something hard sliding across the metal tracks. Then a squeaking, cluttering noise. Something brushed against my ankle and I jerked my foot away involuntarily, almost losing my balance on the sagging planks above the electrified rail.

  Rats. I peered into the darkness and saw baleful red eyes glaring back at me. Rats. Many of them.

  But then I heard voices. I couldn’t make out the words at first, but I could hear that one voice was a woman’s and the other the harsh, ugly, menacing kind of voice that I instantly knew belonged to the dark man I had seen so briefly in the restaurant.

  I followed the voices, moving as silently as a wraith, ignoring the evil red eyes of the rats that hovered in the darkness around me.

  “What did you tell him?” the man’s voice insisted.

  “Nothing.”

  “I want to know how much you told him.”

  “I didn’t tell him anything.” It was Aretha’s voice, no doubt of it. But then I heard her gasp and give out a painful, frightened sob.

  “Tell me!”

  I abandoned all attempts at stealth and ran along the warped, loose planks toward their voices. Aretha screamed, a strangled, agonized cry, as I dashed between two of the idle trains and finally saw them in a circle of light.

  They were at the end of the tunnel. Aretha was sitting in the filth of the floor, her arms pinned behind her back, the bandage still on her forehead. The dark one stood off to one side, half in shadows, staring down at her. She was surrounded by dozens of rats. Her feet and legs were bare and bleeding. Her blouse was ripped open and a huge rat, malevolent as hell itself, was standing on its hind legs, reaching for her beautiful face.

  I gave a wordless roar and charged straight for them. I saw the dark one turn toward me, his eyes as red and vicious as the rats’ own. He seemed to recognize me as I charged down the tunnel toward him, and he backed away into the shadows.

  Weaponless, I kicked wildly at the swarm of rats around Aretha, bent down and grabbed one of them in each hand and threw them with all my might against the walls. Turning, wheeling, kicking, flailing, I scattered them in every direction. They fled, screeching, into the protective darkness.

  Suddenly they were all gone, and the man with them. I looked down at Aretha. Her eyes stared up at me blindly. Her throat had been ripped out. Her bright red blood spattered my grimy shoes and trousers.

  I dropped to my knees and lifted her from the filth. But I was too late. She was dead.

  CHAPTER 4

  I spent the next two days in a sort of rage induced state of shock, clamping down on my emotions so hard that I felt nothing. Police interrogations, lie detector tests, medical examinations, psychiatric tests — I went through them all like a robot, responding to questions and stimuli without an outward trace of emotion.

  For some reason I told no one about the dark man who had killed Aretha. He had murdered her, somehow controlling the rats that had torn out her jugular vein, using them the way another man would use a gun. But I made no mention of him. I merely told the police and the doctors that I had followed Aretha from the hospital and found her as the rats attacked her in the subway lay-up. I was too late to save her. At least that last statement was the truth.

  Something buried deep inside my consciousness warned me not to mention the darkly evil man. Far down within me, where the fires of fury lay banked and smoldering, I knew that it would cause me more trouble with the police and the psychiatrists if I mentioned his existence. But more than that, I wanted to track him down and find him myself. I wanted to deal with him with my own hands.

  So I withheld the facts. The police detectives I spoke to were no fools. They knew that a woman does not wander into the subways to be attacked by rats and followed by a stranger who had met her only the day before — when they had both been victims of a terrorist bombing. They made it clear that they didn’t believe me and that they wanted to use the lie detector on me. I agreed, as coldly indifferent to their questions as if they had been asking me the time of day or the color of the sky. The lie detector told them what I wanted it to, of course; controlling my pulse rate and perspiration was no great feat for me.

  After an overnight atBellevuefor psychiatric observation, the police reluctantly released me. I went home to my apartment and telephoned my employer that I would be in for work at the normal time the following morning. He sounded surprised, asked me how I was feeling after two ordeals in the same week.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  It was the truth. I was physically unharmed and emotionally under tight control. Perhaps too tight.

  “You sure you don’t want to take the rest of the week off?” my boss asked me. His normally gruff features looked quite solicitous in the telephone’s small picture screen.

  “No. I’m fine. I’ll be in tomorrow morning. I hope my being away hasn’t fouled things up too badly around the office.”

  He attempted to lighten the situation. “Oh, we can get along without you — for a while. We’ll all look forward to seeing you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks.”

  By the time I had replaced the phone in its cradle, my mind was away from the office and onto the problem of finding Aretha’s murderer. The dark one. He and the golden man. The two of them were part of — what? My own life, from what Aretha had hinted at.

  I tried to remember how they had behaved at the restaurant. They had not said a single word to each other; I was certain of that. They had barely looked at each other, now that I thought of it. But the one glance they had exchanged was not in friendship. Their eyes had locked for the briefest fraction of a second in a link forged by pure hate.

  They knew each other. They hated each other. I realized that if I could find one of them, I would certainly find the other close by.

  How do you find two individual men in a city of seven and a half million? And what if my conclusions were wrong? Was I insane? Had I caused Aretha’s death, as the police detectives had insinuated during their long interrogation of me? Why couldn’t I remember anything further back than three years ago? Was I an amnesia victim, a paranoid, a madman building murderous fantasies in his mind? Had I invented the two men, created imaginary creatures of light and darkness within the tortured pathways of my own brain?

  There was one answer to all these questions. It took me a sleepless night of thinking to find that single, simple answer, but I have never been much of a sleeper. An hour or two has always been sufficient for me; often I have gone several nights in a row with nothing but occasional catnaps. My fellow workers have sometimes complained, jokingly, about the amount of work I take home with me. Once in a while the jokes have been bitter.

  The next morning, once I said hello to the office staff and fended off their questions and wondering stares, I went to my cubicle and immediately phoned the company physician. I asked him to recommend a good psychiatrist. On the phone’s small picture screen the doctor looked slightly alarmed.

  “Is this about the trouble with the police you’ve been caught in for the past few days?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said to him. “I’m feeling… a little shaky about it.”

  Which was no lie.

  He
peered at me through his bifocals. “Shaky? You? The imperturbable Mr. O’Ryan?”

  I said nothing.

  “H’mm. Well, I suppose having a hand grenade go off in your soup would shake up anybody. And then that girl dying that way. Pretty grisly.”

  I said nothing and kept my face expressionless. He waited a few seconds for me to add something to the conversation, but when he saw that I wasn’t going to, he muttered something to himself and turned aside slightly to check his files.

  He gave me the name of a psychiatrist. I called the man and made an appointment for that afternoon. He tried to put me off, but I used the company’s name and our doctor’s, and told him that I wanted only a few minutes for a preliminary talk.

  Our meeting was quite brief. I outlined my lack of memory and he quickly referred me to another psychiatrist, a woman who specialized in such problems.

  It took several weeks, going from one recommended psychiatrist to another, but finally I reached the one I wanted. He was the only specialist who agreed to see me at once, without hesitation, the day I phoned. He sounded as if he had been expecting me to call. His phone had no picture screen, but I didn’t need one. I knew what he looked like.

  “My schedule is very full,” his rich tenor voice said, “but if you could drop into my office around nine tonight, I could see you then.”

  “Thank you. Doctor,” I said. “I will.”

  The office was quite empty when I got there. I opened the door to the anteroom of his suite. No one was there. It was dark outside, and there were no lights on in the anteroom. Gloomy and dark, lit only by the glow from the city’s lights out on the street below. Old-fashioned furniture. Bookshelves lining the walls. No nurse, no receptionist. No one.

  A short hallway led back from the anteroom into a row of offices. A faint glow of light came from the half-open door at the end of the hall. I followed the light and pushed the heavy door fully open.

  “Doctor?” I didn’t bother speaking the name that was on the door. I knew it was not the true name of the man in the office.