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Orbit 4 - Anthology

Page 12

by Edited by Damon Night


  Rudy went back upstairs. On the first floor he found the one who was the blonde girl, whose name was Adrianne. She layout thin and white as a tablecloth on the dining room table as three of the others he had not seen in a very long while put their teeth into her, and through their hollow sharp teeth they drank up the yellow fluid from the bloated pus-pockets that had been her breasts and her buttocks. Their faces were very white and their eyes were like sootsmudges.

  Climbing to the second floor, Rudy was almost knocked down by the passage of something that had been Victor, flying on heavily ribbed leather wings. It carried a cat in its jaws.

  He saw the thing on the stairs that sounded as though it was counting heavy gold pieces. It was not counting heavy gold pieces. Rudy could not look at it; it made him feel sick.

  He found Kris in the attic, in a corner breaking the skull and sucking out the moist brains of a thing that giggled like a harpsichord.

  “Kris, we have to go away,” he told her. She reached out and touched him, snapping her long, pointed, dirty fingernails against him. He rang like crystal.

  In the rafters of the attic Jonah crouched, gargoyled and sleeping. There was a green stain on his jaws, and something stringy in his claws.

  “Kris, please,” he said urgently.

  His head buzzed.

  His ears itched.

  Kris sucked out the last of the mellow good things in the skull of the silent little creature, and scraped idly at the flaccid body with hairy hands. She settled back on her haunches, and her long, hairy muzzle came up.

  Rudy scuttled away.

  He ran loping, his knuckles brushing the attic floor as he scampered for safety. Behind him, Kris was growling. He got down to the second floor and then to the first, and tried to climb up on the Morris chair to the mantel, so he could see himself in the mirror, by the light of the moon, through the fly-blown window. But Naomi was on the window, lapping up the flies with her tongue.

  He climbed with desperation, wanting to see himself. And when he stood before the mirror, he saw that he was transparent, that there was nothing inside him, that his ears had grown pointed and had hair on their tips; his eyes were as huge as a tarsier’s and the reflected light hurt him.

  Then he heard the growling behind and below him.

  The little glass goblin turned, and the werewolf rose up on its hind legs and touched him till he rang like fine crystal.

  And the werewolf said with very little concern, “Have you ever grooved heavy behind anything except love?”

  “Please!” the little glass goblin begged, just as the great hairy paw slapped him into a million coruscating rainbow fragments all expanding consciously into the tight little enclosed universe that was The Hill, all buzzing highly contacted and tingling off into a darkness that began to seep out through the silent wooden walls....

  The new gods move in mysterious ways,

  their will to make known: business as

  usual, with miracles as loss-leaders.

  Brings to mind the ancient Chinese

  admonition, “Be careful what you wish

  for...you might get it. “

  <>

  * * * *

  “By February the lump was the size of a bushel basket and had separated itself from him except for a gristly shining skin-covered tube, that pulsed with his heart like an obscene umbilicus. . .

  * * * *

  THIS CORRUPTIBLE

  By Jacob Transue

  And so, after thirty-five years, they would be face to face again.

  Andrew eased his car up under a big white pine and cut the motor. The place didn’t look like much. One old pickup truck parked between the two quonsets, a barn tucked against the forest, an unmowed meadow full of daisies and black-eyed susans on the south.

  Andrew got out of the car and stood in the shade of the pine. His sense of uneasiness increased sharply. Of course, he was alone out here. He wasn’t used to being alone anymore. He was used to traveling with a swarm of secretaries, servants and assorted sycophants. He felt naked.

  It ought to be refreshing. No planes, no cars, no engines of any kind. Nothing but the sputtering of summer insects. A wilderness. Anything could happen out here and no one would ever know.

  Nonsense. Paul was a scientist. Men like him were too selfish, too single-minded to risk the interruption of their work for anything so sterile as vengeance. Paul always had been secretive. It was characteristic of him to insist Andrew come alone.

  Andrew crossed the brown pine-needled ground toward the huts.

  “Hello!” he called.

  A leggy brown-haired girl wearing trousers peeped through the door and vanished as silently as a deer.

  “Paul?”

  And there, suddenly, was Paul behind the screening. “Hello, Andrew.”

  The nylon netting was a dazzle of white between their faces, too blinding to penetrate. Then the door opened and Andrew stepped through, his hand extended in greeting. But Paul had already turned away to lead him inside.

  It was cool and gloomy and dimly sparkling with long rows of chemical glass, glass cabinets, two tall glass closets so steamed with interior humidity their contents could not be seen. A long work counter ran the entire length of the building, with sinks and shelves, burners, centrifuges and other equipment he did not recognize. Off in one corner, squeezed between two huge filing cases, was an old gray metal desk.

  “Sit down,” said Paul, seating himself behind the desk. “I’m sorry we’re rather primitive here. Take that crate,”

  Andrew sat down uncomfortably. It had been years since his flesh had had to accommodate itself to such makeshifts.

  “Well,” said Paul, “it’s been a long time.”

  Able to see him clearly at last, Andrew clenched his jaws in surprise. It must be true, then, the incredible rumor his investigators had brought him. Paul had not changed at all. His thin dark hair, perpetually on the brink of baldness, was the same. The round child’s face had no dewlaps, no wrinkles. The beanpole body was still taut and narrow. Andrew’s hand crept surreptitiously under his coat. His tailor had again altered his measurements two months previously in London.

  “Yes, a long time,” said Andrew. “What are you doing away out here?”

  “Cheap land. Cheap labor. I have one girl here in the lab and a man up at the barn for the heavy work. Local people. I never had much money to operate with, you know.”

  Was it a cut at him? Andrew felt for his cigar case, extended it and, when Paul shook his head, fumbled one out for himself.

  Paul watched him light it. “I see your hands mended quite nicely. I didn’t think you’d ever be able to use them again.”

  Andrew held them out for him to see. The palms and fingers, clear to the tips, were scar tissue, hard and white. The other memento of their last day of partnership. Scars on his hands and a fortune in his pocket.

  “A whole beaker of acid,” said Paul. “It’s amazing you have hands at all.”

  “I was preoccupied that day.”

  “It was even convenient for you, wasn’t it. It gave your departure such logical urgency.”

  “It ruined me for working,” said Andrew. He flexed his hands, stiffly, clumsily.

  “Fortunately, you don’t need them for work,” said Paul and smiled thinly. “Tell me, how did you manage to find me?”

  “It took me three years.”

  “You must want something very badly.”

  “You know what I want,” said Andrew.

  Paul was silent, gazing at his desk-top. Andrew watched him narrowly. What was going on in his mind? Was that satisfaction, to have Andrew come seeking him out at last? Or was it perhaps caution, after what had happened so long ago?

  “Now look,” said Andrew bluntly. “I’m not skillful at working people around. Power does that to you, I suppose. You get used to giving orders.”

  “You have a great deal of power, haven’t you.”

  “Yes. Now, I regret that thirty-five year
s have gone by since we worked together. But I make no apologies. You and I were different kinds of men. You were after knowledge. You’ve got it. I was after power. I’ve got it. You know yourself that in order to get what you wanted, you had to eliminate a lot of things from your life. I imagine you’ve had to slice your ethics pretty thin sometimes. So have I.”

  “What have ethics to do with it?” asked Paul.

  “You’re right,” said Andrew. A cloud of fragrant cigar smoke drifted between them. “Men like you and me operate on a different code. We have no families, no private lives. We each had one goal and everything else was sacrificed.”

  “You mean that when you sacrificed me, it was according to your code.”

  “In a manner of speaking. But you had what you wanted when you discovered that formula. It was of no further use to you. On the other hand, it was of great use to me. I’ve built an empire with it. At the time I had no money to either buy or lease that formula from you. Now, however, it’s a different story. Perhaps I can make it up to you.”

  Paul’s spectacles flashed as he turned his head away. “That is not what you have come here for.”

  Andrew lipped his cigar in silence for a moment. “All right,” he said at last. “My investigators picked up rumors of your work. At first I doubted the whole thing. Then I put my secretary on it and his report seemed to confirm the rumors. Now that I see you myself, I have to believe them.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Look at me. And look at you. We’re both sixty-eight years old.”

  “Well, the exercise of power is rather hard on the organism, I should think. I lead a quiet life.”

  What did he want? To see the rich man crawl? Andrew studied him in silence for a moment. “My investigators tell me you have found a way to lengthen the life-span indefinitely. To reverse the aging process.”

  “Science is always the subject of wild rumors. You know that.”

  “They have seen your eight-year-old monarch butterfly and your ten-year-old shrew.”

  That got to him. The pause lengthened as Paul fingered his lower lip. At last he said, “Which of my assistants was indiscreet?”

  Andrew gave a grunt of amusement. “Money talks. I heard it from my checkbook.”

  Paul stood up and went to the window. Outside, the meadow shimmered in the sun, the insects chittered and buzzed.

  Andrew leaned forward on the crate. “I’m prepared to give you half of everything I possess.”

  Paul smiled. “You said yourself that money was not my goal.”

  “No, but knowledge is power, they say. Maybe we’re not so different after all.”

  Paul turned toward him. It was impossible to see his face against the light pouring in through the window. “We’re entirely different,” he said. “I would never have allowed that formula to get out of my hands. I knew from the beginning it would be put to a lethal use—”

  “But this isn’t lethal!”

  “Oh, think, man! The planet is already staggering under its superfluous populations. Nobody deserves to live indefinitely. Why, death by superannuation is the only thing that frees us from pampered dictators in all walks of life—of whom you are one, more than likely. What makes you think that you should live forever? Do you contribute something so precious to the world?”

  “Do you?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Then what’s the use? Why did you involve yourself in this?”

  “Curiosity.” He could hear the smile in Paul’s voice.

  “Then it’s futile!”

  Paul’s narrow shoulders lifted in a shrug. “In the last analysis, it’s all futile. All ultimates are ultimate nothing, from the human point of view. We pass our tiny span with tiny games—bridge or biology, it makes little difference.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Andrew, “I don’t believe you’d look the way you do in the natural course of time.”

  “As I said, I lead a quiet regular life. I’ll probably outlive you by a good many years.”

  Andrew lapsed into silence again and a strange little sensation came over him. He had felt it before. Ephemeral as a spiderweb, it closed over him and left its small stickiness, its impalpable repulsiveness. It was the sense of approaching death. He felt like a child, ready to cry out in wild anger and rebellion. It was not fair! Here he was with unlimited opportunities. It took years to reach such a position and what good was it if time was about to run out? It was so preposterous, so badly arranged, so paradoxical. Why should life be so idiotically perverse? And there stood that prim ass with the secret in his skull, presuming to withhold it.

  “You’ve become quite a moralist, haven’t you,” he said ironically. “Fit to judge the whole world!”

  “I’m not judging you, Andrew.”

  “If you have the means to keep me alive and you don’t use it, that constitutes a judgment.”

  “Why should I give it to you and not someone else?”

  “Because I know you.”

  “I know lots of people.”

  “Because I know you can.”

  “Now you’re tempting me, Andrew.” Paul sat down again at his desk, pressing his hands flat on the top of it. “My two vulnerable points. Curiosity and a logical aversion for you.”

  Craftily, Andrew kept quiet. There always came a time when you had to be quiet and let a man talk himself into doing what you wanted.

  “I’ve succeeded with animals, but a human being— with the unpredictable human mind. I ought to be willing to sacrifice you, since you’ve already found me expendable. Here you are urging me, offering yourself. I can’t imagine why I hesitate.”

  “Liar,” said Andrew calmly, watching his obviously youthful face.

  For a moment they were both quiet, eyeing each other with mutual skepticism.

  “You have no idea what it entails, Andrew,” said Paul at last. “You see, your investigators didn’t get it quite right. I don’t lengthen the life of your organism. I have a procedure by which you produce yourself a new one.”

  Andrew puffed at his cigar. “What’s the difference?”

  “The psychological hazard. It’s terrifying.”

  “You can do it, then!”

  “It’s also very painful.”

  “Worse than dying?”

  “It would take a year.”

  “Give me six weeks to get my business in order.”

  “You’re determined, then?”

  Andrew carefully scraped the ash off his cigar into the saucer on the desk. Now why was the man so carefully decontaminating himself of all trace of responsibility? Was there more he had not disclosed? Or was it a last attempt to frighten him off? Oh, I know you, Paul. You’d complete an experiment if it cost your own life, much less saving mine. “Yes.”

  * * * *

  When Andrew returned to the laboratory, the hardwoods were turning color and the katydids had replaced the locusts. He brought with him a physician’s report, which Paul had insisted upon, attesting to the soundness of his heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.

  Changes had occurred at the laboratory during the interval. A new cinderblock wing jutted from the end of the quonset. It housed a small operating room and the room which Andrew would occupy for a year.

  “I have some tests of my own to make, first,” Paul told him, and for two weeks Andrew submitted to brief agonizing encounters with tubes, needles and the rest of the distasteful panoply of research. The experience of suffering was new to him. Not even the accident to his hands had hurt very much—too much nerve tissue had been destroyed. Now, for the first time in his healthy life, he suffered the intrusion of reality upon his intellectual horizon, a reality that probed deeper and deeper into the fortress of his mind, laying waste whole concepts by the quick dazzle of pain, the hollow echoes of relief. He was astounded and exasperated at the ease with which his body could dominate his attention. His buffeted ego retched, too, as he lay vomiting after one particularly trying exploration. He might have quit the whole
attempt then and there had it not been for the old cold habits of his years in commercial chemistry. One did not easily relinquish the fruit of a three year search. Any new enterprise was like a boil, growing more tense and painful until it finally erupted in success.

 

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