Orbit 8 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  For fifteen minutes they worked, grunting, saying nothing, trying to hold the door closed and get the bench under the knob without losing any more ground. Finally it was done. The door was open six inches, white packed snow the entire height of it. Crane fell onto a bench and stared at the open door, not able to say anything. The woman seemed equally exhausted. At the top of the door, the snow suddenly fell forward, into the station, sifting at first, then falling in a stream. Icy wind followed the snow into the room, and now that the top of the column of snow had been lost, the wind continued to pour into the station, whistling shrilly “Well, we know now that the drift isn’t really to the top of the building,” the woman said wearily. She was staring at the opening. “My words, almost exactly,” Crane said. She always said what he planned to say. He waited.

  “We’ll have to close it at the top somehow.”

  He nodded. “In a minute. In a minute.”

  The cold increased and he knew that he should get busy and try to close the opening, but he felt too numb to cope with it. The furnace couldn’t keep up with the draft of below-zero air. His hands were aching with cold, and his toes hurt with a stabbing intensity. Only his mind felt pleasantly numb and he didn’t want to think about the problem of closing up the hole.

  “You’re not falling asleep, are you?”

  “For God’s sake!” He jerked straight up on the bench and gave her a mean look, a guilty look. “Just shut up and let me try to think, will you?”

  “Sorry.” She got up and began to pace briskly, hugging her hands to her body. “I’ll look around, see if I can find anything that would fit. I simply can’t sit still, I’m so cold.”

  He stared at the hole. There had to be something that would fit over it, stay in place, keep out the wind. He narrowed his eyes, staring, and he saw the wind-driven snow as a liquid running into the station from above, swirling about, only fractionally, heavier than the medium that it met on the inside. One continuum, starting in the farthest blackest vacuum of space, taking on form as it reached the highest atmospheric molecules, becoming denser as it neared Earth, almost solid here, but not yet. Not yet. The hole extended to that unimaginable distance where it all began, and the chill spilled down, down, searching for him, wafting about here, searching for him, wanting only to find him, willing then to stop the ceaseless whirl. Coat him, claim him. The woman belonged to the coldness that came from the black of space. He remembered her now.

  Korea. The woman. The village. Waiting for the signal. Colder than the station even, snow, flint like ground, striking sparks from nails in boots, sparks without warmth. If they could fire the village, they would get warm, have food, sleep that night. Harrison, wounded, frozen where he fell. Lorenz, frostbitten; Jakobs, snow-blind. Crane, too tired to think, too hungry to think, too cold to think. “Fire the village.” The woman, out of nowhere, urging him back, back up the mountain to the bunkers that were half filled with ice, mines laid now between the bunkers and the valley. Ordering the woman into the village at gunpoint. Spark from his muzzle.

  Blessed fire and warmth. But a touch of ice behind the eyes, ice that didn’t let him weep when Lorenz died, or when Jakobs, blinded, wandered out and twitched and jerked and pitched over a cliff under a fusillade of bullets. The snow queen, he thought. She’s the snow queen, and she touched my eyes with ice.

  “Mr. Crane, please wake up. Please!”

  He jumped to his feet reaching for his carbine, and only when his hands closed on air did he remember where he was.

  “Mr. Crane, I think I know what we can use to close up the hole. Let me show you.”

  She pulled at his arm and he followed her. She led him into the ladies’ room. At the door he tried to pull back, but she tugged.

  “Look, stacks of paper towels, all folded together. They would be about the right size, wouldn’t they? If we wet them, a block of them, and if we can get them up to the hole, they would freeze in place, and the drift could pile up against them and stop blowing into the station. Wouldn’t it work?”

  She was separating the opened package into thirds, her hands busy, her eyes downcast, not seeing him at all. Crane, slightly to one side of her, a step behind, stared at the double image in the mirror. He continued to watch the mirror as his hands reached out for her and closed about her throat. There was no struggle. She simply closed her eyes and became very limp, and he let her fall. Then he took the wad of towels and held it under the water for a few moments and returned to the waiting room with it. He had to clear snow from the approach to the door, and then he had to move the bench that was holding the door, carefully, not letting it become dislodged. He dragged a second bench to the door and climbed on it and pushed the wet wad of towels into the opening. He held it several minutes, until he could feel the freezing paper start to stiffen beneath his fingers. He climbed down.

  “That should do it,” the woman said.

  “But you’re dead.”

  Mary Louise threw the sugar bowl at him, trailing a line of sugar across the room.

  He smiled. “Wishful thinking,” he/she said.

  “You’re dead inside. You’re shriveled up and dried up and rotting inside. When did you last feel anything? My God! You can’t create anything, you are afraid of creating anything, even our child!”

  “I don’t believe it was our child.”

  “You don’t dare believe it. Or admit that you know it was.”

  He slapped her. The only time that he ever hit her. And her so pale from the operation, so weak from the loss of blood. The slap meant nothing to him, his hand meeting her cheek, leaving a red print there.

  “Murderer!”

  “You crazy bitch! You’re the one who had the abortion! You wanted it!”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was terrified. You made the arrangements, got the doctor, took me, arranged everything, waited in the other room writing policies. Murderer.”

  “Murderer,” the woman said.

  He shook his head. “You’d better go back to the ladies’ room and stay there. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “Murderer.”

  He took a step toward her. He swung around abruptly and almost ran to the far side of the station, pressing his forehead hard on the window.

  “We can’t stop it now,” the woman said, following him. “You can’t close the door again now. I’m here. You finally saw me. Really saw me. I’m real now. I won’t be banished again. I’m stronger than you are. You’ve killed off bits and pieces of yourself until there’s nothing left to fight with. You can’t send me away again.”

  Crane pushed himself away from the glass and made a halfhearted attempt to hit her with his fist. He missed and fell against the bench holding the door. He heard the woman’s low laugh. All for nothing. All for nothing. The bench slid out from under his hand, and the drift pushed into the room like an avalanche. He pulled himself free and tried to brush the snow off his clothes.

  “We’ll both freeze now,” he said, not caring any longer.

  The woman came to his side and touched his cheek with her fingers; they were strangely warm. “Relax now, Crane. Just relax.”

  She led him to a bench, where he sat down resignedly. “Will you at least tell me who you are?” he said.

  “You know. You’ve always known.”

  He shook his head. One last attempt, he thought. He had to make that one last effort to get rid of her, the woman whose face was so like his own. “You don’t even exist,” he said harshly, not opening his eyes. “I imagined you here because I was afraid of being alone all night. I created you. I created you. “

  He stood up. “You hear that, Mary Louise! Did you hear that? I created something. Something so real that it wants to kill me.”

  “Look at me, Crane. Look at me. Turn your head and look. Look with me, Crane. Let me show you. Let me show you what I see ....”

  He was shaking again, chilled through, shaking so hard that his muscles were sore. Slowly, inevitably he turned his head
and saw the man half-standing, half-crouching, holding the bench with both hands. The man had gray skin, and his eyes were mad with terror.

  “Let go, Crane. Look at him and let go. He doesn’t deserve anything from us ever again.” Crane watched the man clutch his chest, heard him moaning for Mary Louise to come help him, ` watched him fall to the floor.

  She heard the men working at the drift, and she opened the office door to wait for them. They finally got through and the ticket agent squirmed through the opening they had made.

  “Miss! Miss? Are you all right?”

  “Yes. I broke into the office, though.”

  “My God, I thought . . . When we saw that the door had given under the drift, and you in here . . . alo- “The ticket agent blinked rapidly several times.

  “I was perfectly all right. When I saw that the door wasn’t going to hold, I broke open the inner office and came in here with my sketch book and pencils. I’ve had a very productive night, really. But I could use some coffee now.”

  They took her to the diner in a police car, and while she waited for her breakfast order, she went to the rest room and washed her face and combed her hair. She stared at herself in the mirror appraisingly. “Happy birthday,” she said softly then.

  “Your birthday?” asked the girl who had chosen to wait the night out in the diner. “You were awfully brave to stay alone in the station. I couldn’t have done that. You really an artist?”

  “Yes, really. And last night I had a lot of work to get done. A lot of work and not much time.”

  <>

  * * * *