Orbit 18

by Damon Knight

  (d)

  Or he had perhaps still another name, other credentials. Ron Graff, statistician; or Merrill Kost, economist; or Mark Esprit, psychologist; or Moe Ibmore, computer programmer; or Wendell Farraday, electronics engineer; or John Slick, technical writer.

  (e)

  The train sped. Utility poles clicked off frames in the every-morning newsreel. Snowed-over meadow. Snowed-in woods, trees tottery with sliding white. Highway heavy-equipment yard, the driveway a hatch of muddy ruts. Then a set-back Victorian monstrosity, Eastlake influence. A ditto, Queen Anne influence. A ditto-ditto in stockbroker’s Tudor. Then a smaller house of no identifiable architectural influence at all. Another. Another. Another. Then a frankly tract house. And another-another-another. Murky breath of the city. Industrial fringe. Congested heart. Lurching stop.

  (f)

  Hebe, his secretary, came into the office bearing a plastic cup.

  Her name wasn’t Hebe, of course, but there was obviously no way to avoid thinking of her that way, and after a decade more or less he had given up trying.

  She was reed-lithe and dark, bronze-haired and enticingly freckled, ash-blonde with a surprising olive skin and brown eyes, black-tressed with brows like strokes of a new felt pen and well-distributed flesh running slightly to overweight in a way that was curiously provocative.

  But not having looked up—he was busy with the eleventh-hour paperwork—he saw only the vaporous container of coffee being slid into position in front of him. “Thanks.”

  “Welcome. And happy moving day. It’s been good working for you. If you ever need a recommendation as a real-boss boss, let me know.”

  “Easy. Flattery goes straight to my head and I have to keep at least a couple brain cells clear to close out the project here and find my way to the airport. I appreciate the charming encomium. though. Same to you. What time does my plane leave, anyway?”

  “Noon. But I can get a later reservation if you like.”

  “No, I think I can make it. But maybe I ought to call home and say what time I’ll be there.”

  Obediently she disappeared, and in a moment returned to report that the line to his home was busy. Did he want her to keep trying?

  “Never mind. I’ll call from the airport. That is, I will if you can give me the phone number. I know it’s somewhere in the new assignment sheets, but it’s awkward to keep opening my briefcase to find out where I’m going.”

  She laughed and handed him a memo slip with his home telephone number and an address. He put the paper carefully away in his wallet.

  He finished the work on his desk as one by one, or sometimes by twos or threes, the men and women he had worked with on the project dropped into his office on their way out.

  Goodbye. Goodbye. Here’s luck. See you. See you. See you in Denver next spring. Tucson in February. Detroit if I can make it. Sometime, somewhere. Take care. Take care.

  (g)

  Despite a nap on the plane, or perhaps because of it, he was yawning-tired when the DC-10 touched down on a sprawling cushion of heat-filled midafternoon smog. Home again, he thought, but not quite. At the beginning of the flight, he’d been as unsuccessful with the phone call as his secretary had been earlier in the day. He hoped nothing was wrong. None of the children were sick. No one had been in an accident.

  For in the end he was strictly a family man: dedicated father, generous provider. He cared about them. Human relationships were what it was all about.

  But the failure of the call meant he wouldn’t be met at the airport, a niggling inconvenience. He’d have to try the house again, say he was coming by taxi. That was only fair, to announce himself. A man going home after a day’s work.

  He stepped out of the plane into a hot wind blowing across the runway, descended the steps and started toward the terminal, a glass-and-steel enclosure fringed by a narrow landscaped strip growing a few breeze-whipped palmettoes, fuchsia, and cotoneaster. Only the cotoneaster was at its seasonal best, its fat clusters of berries smoldering richly in the muted sunlight. “Here I am, darling,” she said. “Surprise.”

  “Hey! Surprise is right. How did you know what plane to meet? I wasn’t expecting you.” Her cheek tasted cool and fragrant in the surrounding heat.

  “I called your office. Your secretary had been trying to get me too. Good thinking on your part to have your ribbon on.”

  He cast a half glance at his own lapel where a discreetly narrow scrap of scarlet ribbon crawled, like a Ugion d’honneur badge. Except that he was no legionnaire. Nor had he put the ribbon there himself. He hadn’t remembered. It must have been done at home last night, or early this morning, before he’d caught the train. The ribbon exactly matched one pinned to the sleeveless knit blouse worn by the woman now walking at his side. The presence of the ribbon made them, in fact, a couple, two people wholeheartedly committed to each other. Which they were, of course; they must be. That was what life was all about.

  As they hurried through the crowd in the waiting room, she slightly in the lead now, because she would take him to where she’d parked the car, he looked at her. She was as tall as he, athletic-looking, sun-browned, yet intrinsically feminine. Angular but quite beautiful face, he noted as she turned back to tell him; “Before I forget, you have a meeting tonight. You’re chairman of the county planning commission and there’s a red-hot problem about whether to approve the building of a half-acre condominium at the sacrifice of that much greenbelt.”

  He groaned and said truthfully, “I’d rather stay home with you. Sometimes I think I’m into too much volunteer work.”

  Then they were in the parking lot and she was unlocking a new Chrysler station wagon with a beach ball and some sand pails and things tumbling around in the back.

  As they hummed through city traffic and then speedily out a parkway, between two lines of royal palms like ushers at a military wedding, he continued to watch her as much as he politely could, without seeming to stare. Her long, careful hands lay lightly upon the wheel of the Chrysler. He could not see her eyes but seemed to recall that when she had removed her sunglasses in the terminal the irises had been gray. A light gray or perhaps very pale green, ringed with deep turquoise. Prominent bones at cheek, shoulder, wrist and hip. With the gray-blue knit top she wore elegantly tailored trousers of a darker blue, and white sandals.

  He mentally reran the information culled hastily that morning from the new assignment sheets and thought: Dinah. I must remember. Dinah. Dinah. Dinah.

  As if he’d spoken her name aloud, Dinah turned to him and smiled.

  (h)

  The apartment seemed small to him, too small, though it was ground-floor, and though it had three bedrooms—one for them, one for the children, and a third done over by the decorator as a study—as well as a large Ianai with a barbecue arrangement and outdoor furniture around a small swimming pool. The pool, however, was shared with the apartment across the central court.

  “I’m not mad for it either,” Dinah admitted. “It’s just what we happened to And during a time when housing was scarce around here. But that situation has loosened a little since, or so I’ve heard.”

  “Then maybe we could look for a place farther out in the hills. A house, ranch even. Better for the children.”

  “Do you think we can afford it? After this month’s support payments to the pediatrician and the orthodontist, I mean?”

  “Don’t worry about that. I had a raise just last quarter.”

  “Lovely. Then we could start investigating this weekend, if you aren’t too snowed with work. There’s a party at the Petersons’, but Sunday’s free all day. If we should land a country place Kimmie’ll be thrilled. She’ll start planning for a horse right off.”

  “Kimmie? Her name is Kimmie? That’s funny, I—”

  But Dinah hadn’t heard him. She’d gone back to the kitchen to make him a drink. Which was fortunate. This was the second time in a day he’d flipped a little. Once in the car this morning. And now. Third, if he counted forge
tting all about the ribbon. Maybe things were beginning to get to him. He hoped not. That would mean the beginning of the end for him, in every way. He would be let go in favor of a newcomer with a better set of nerves. Reject in a throwaway society, canceled cell in a kinetic universe.

  (Who was the true father of interchangeable parts, anyway? Eli Whitney? Samuel Colt? Henry Ford?)

  He wondered idly, but not for the first time, what the women did. There had been women on every one of the projects so far. Women engineers. Women physicists. Did they go home in the evenings too? (Personal lives were not discussable, naturally.)

  He remembered that when he was younger, just out of job training so there was utterly no excuse, he’d had an overwhelming, almost irresistible impulse to write a note—a love letter it would have turned out—to Ann. (Or had her name been Cathy? Yes, he believed it was Cathy.) More, he had gone so far as to wonder if she had ever wanted to write to him, to affirm the reality of what necessarily for them had to remain an illusion. Fortunately for him the sickness had passed without crisis. Not that the problem was so unusual, evidently; it was at least common enough for Personnel to have a coinage for it, the Lot’s Wife Syndrome. For the firm had no choice but to deal harshly with those who turned back. Sentimentality was grossly uneconomical. (To err is human; to forgive is not company policy.)

  He rubbed his eyes now with the heels of both hands, trying conscientiously to expunge all that had been in his thoughts before this moment of the living present, to make his mind a blank, an empty receptacle for all that would now come.

  Then he sighed and leaned back in the chair on the lanai, watching the reddening sun begin to tip toward the horizon of indigo mountains. It was still hot, but with a promise of late-afternoon chill.

  It would be hot again when he went to work tomorrow. But he would have thinner suits in his closet than the one he presently wore.

  It occurred to him that he didn’t know when the children were due home or even where they were.

  Dinah brought him a glass, satisfyingly cold and squat, Scotch on the rocks, the way he preferred it, and he watched her settle with seeming content into the chair opposite. Yes, her eyes were gray, luminous. She had changed into shorts and a halter. Her feet were bare. He wondered how much time they would have alone together, before the kids came in from wherever they were.

  On the other hand, he didn’t want to rush things, make her uncomfortable. They’d have a lot of time together. Seven weeks that he knew of for sure. That was how long the project was scheduled to run. And then it might be extended, depending on how things went.

  He let his eyes drift shut, which was his fourth mistake, for the images of the day just past began coming back at him like a card pack in a fast shuffle. In self-defense he rose suddenly from the chair, setting down his drink so abruptly that icy liquid sloshed over his knuckles. “Oops. Sorry. I—”

  “You’re nervous,” she said with a concern undeniably genuine. “You’ve been working too hard lately. Better lie down for an hour before the meeting tonight. There’ll be time.”

  (How loyal was she to the company herself? Would this incident be reported? But no, he was far off base even to have such a thought.)

  “No, really,” he said. “I’m all right. I’m fine.”

  And searched his mind for blessings he could count to reassure himself. Of course he stumbled over one right away: at least ennui was not a problem.

  The morning’s snowfall had by noon been translated into a seething slush over the roads, and then frozen at nightfall so that she had to drive to the station very slowly, favoring the ailing clutch.

  In the back seat the children, bundled to the eyes, were sullen with hunger and the pent energies of indoor confinement, so she felt less guilty than glad when she found that the train had already come and he was there, waiting in the parking lot.

  She stopped the Rover and opened the door.

  “Welcome home, darling,” she said.

  THE M&M, SEEN AS A LOW-YIELD THERMONUCLEAR DEVICE

  Making someone good is just a matter of operant conditioning— and if that doesn’t work, there’s always Lobey the Needle.

  John Varley

  1. B. T. THE SKINNER

  B.T. the skinner is coining to the ward. B.T. is no ordinary skinner; he’s the Big Gingerbread Man, the All-day Sucker. Just look, look at how all the other skinners get out of his way.

  His face is round, a perfect compass tracery. Yellow he is, with a smiling countenance. You’ve seen it. Two little raisins for eyes and an upturned mouth with a sketched dimple at each end, and a . . . nose … it has to be a nose, it’s right there in the middle of his face, isn’t it, but it looks like nothing so much as a Phillips-head screw.

  You know why that is. It’s so he can turn his face around. Watch him, when the behaviors get undesirable. He’ll put his hands to his face and rotate it magically and he is … pensive? thoughtful? worried? His little antsy eyes are now low on his face, his crescent mouth now a wrinkle on his brow. It’s hard to make out, but it’s worrisome. You’d never get the impression that he was actually pleased, but it’s hard to tell what it means. Bad behavior.

  He crunches and crackles as he walks. The pockets of his white lab coat are bulging out from the goodies he has brought for the boys and girls whose behaviors have been so desirable all week long. Jelly babies and jujubes, chocolate raisins and malted milk balls and kisses, and sweet-tart lemon drops, orange candy corn, caramel popcorn crackerjacks and chewy delights with nougat centers and dripping maraschino cherries. Crunchies and goo-shies and scraped-coconut snowballs. Taffy, butterscotch hard candy wrapped in yellow twists of cellophane sticky and crinkly. M&Ms like red and green and yellow and brown hand grenades that melt in your mind, not in your hand, and candy-cane tactical peppermint nukes, and golf-ball jawbreakers rated at fifty megatons. Zowie! Here comes B.T. the skinner!

  In his penguin coat beneath the lab smock there are rolled and tattered pulp comics. He shakes his sleeve and pigeons flutter out. They scamper jerkily around the floor, eying the happy children, until they fall under the influence of B.T. They begin to execute perfect school-figure 8s for the morsels of grain he offers them.

  The children are delighted.

  We are at the National Behavioral Institute for the Study of Non-Smiling Syndrome in Pre-Delinquent Children, Number 3490, Hershey, Pennsylvania. B.T. the skinner is making his weekly rounds.

  2. PROBLEM #1: CRIES

  DATE: 8/4

  PROBLEM NUMBER: 1/1/1

  TARGET: Tantrums.

  OBJECTIVES: TO decrease crying behavior from one hour per day to fifteen minutes per day by 9/4.

  PLAN: Client will be ignored when crying behavior occurs. The moment crying behavior shuts off, behavior will be reinforced by praise, M&Ms, and physical attention. Flow sheets will be completed daily.

  RESULT: by 9/4, crying behavior had extinguished. Flow sheets attached.

  DATE: 9/4.

  PROBLEM NUMBER: 2/1/1 TARGET: Speaking out of turn.

  OBJECTIVES: Resident will decrease speaking-out-of-tum behavior in hyperactive clients. Starting from an observed base number counted on 9/4, residents will decrease frequency of speaking-out-of-turn behavior by 50% by 9/11. plan: Client will be ignored . . .

  3. ACCENT THE POSITIVE IGNORE THE NEGATIVE

  Murray the skinner enters Ward 47b of the East Wing of the Institute. In another part of the building B.T. is cavorting and spreading happiness and tooth decay like nitrous oxide. He will not arrive in this part of the building for several hours yet.

  “Hey, kids, guess who’s going to be here today?” Murray yells.

  Twenty-five scrubbed hands go into the air, flutter over twenty-five scrubbed and smiling faces split wide to flash thousands of properly scrubbed teeth. Call on me, Murray, call on me. But no one speaks out of turn.

  “Billy, who’s coming?”

  "B.T. the skinner’s coming!” Billy yells, and stands in smiling, trembling anti
cipation, wondering if he’s overstepped the bounds of good behavior. Murray has never yelled at them like this before. Was he supposed to yell back? His salivary glands open and close uncertainly.

  Oh, wonderful. He’s reaching into his baggy pocket and coming out with the M&M, which he pops into Billy’s mouth.

  “Good boy, Billy. We love you.” Murray pats the child on the head, thinking what a good client he is. Not like Terrible Theresa.

  He gets a twinge in the facial muscles when he thinks of her. There she is, sullen, perpetually confused, picking her nose and trying to hide it.

  Ignore it.

  He goes down the line of desks, smiling at each client.

  “Let’s see that smile, Beatrice. Let’s see that smile, Jeremy. Let’s see that smile, Christopher.” The faces split even wider, and open to accept the M&Ms. Down the line, down the line, at last coming to number twenty-six, the class dingdong, the girl with the permanent dunce cap, Terrible Theresa.

  Quit squirming, Theresa. Can’t you sit still? What’s the matter with you? Are you going to start that crying behavior again? Oh, no, Theresa, don’t do it, don’t, that’s it, bite down on that snotty lip, don’t snuffle like that, you sound like a pig, what’s a pretty girl like you doing with an expression like that, it’s almost a frown —excuse me—and here he comes, here he comes, oh dam he’s passed me up again . . . what did I do . . .