by Damon Knight
Monday morning, while they were having breakfast, Jim’s phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and said, “Yeah?”
“Mr. Woodruff, we have a collect call for you from Mrs. Morrison, will you accept?”
“Yeah, put her on.” He covered the phone with his hand. “It’s Debbie.”
“Dad?” said the voice in his ear.
“Hello, sweetie.”
“Are you all right? We’ve been so worried.”
“Yeah, we’re okay. How are the kids, how’s Ted?”
“We’re all fine, but what about you? We heard there was this terrible epidemic, and we’ve been trying to call you for days.”
“Yeah, well, we tried to call you too, Sunday, but the lines were all jammed.” Emily was gesturing at him. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”
Emily took the phone gingerly and held it half an inch from her ear. “Hello, Debbie?”
“Yes, Mom. I was just telling Dad, we’ve been so worried.” Debbie was their younger daughter; she was thirty-five, married to a systems analyst in Boston. “Where are you, in your room now?”
“No, we’re in a restaurant, having breakfast, dear. How are Robbie and Michael?”
“They’re fine. Michael had the New Flu, he was out of school for two weeks, but he’s okay now. Mom, don’t you think you should eat in your room?”
“It’s so small,” Emily said.
“What?”
“The room is so small.” She couldn’t bear it for more than an hour or two at a time, except at night when she was asleep, because it seemed to get even smaller, as if the walls were thickening and growing inward, as thick as mossy stone, and the doors growing into the walls. “Is Michael all right now? Why didn’t you tell us he was sick?”
“Well, we didn’t want to worry you and spoil your vacation. When do they think they’ll cure the epidemic?”
“I don’t know, dear. Is Ted all right?” Ted Morrison was a pale, silent man who could not seem to stand Emily’s company; on the few occasions when they had met, he had hardly said a word.
“Yes, he’s fine. He’s thinking of starting his own company.”
“Isn’t that nice!”
“Yes, and if you and Dad wanted to buy some shares, it would really be a great investment. He’s going to send you a fax about it.”
“That’s nice, dear.”
“Well, I really wish you’d stay in your room more.”
“It’s so small,” Emily said.
“I’m glad you’re okay, anyway. Let me say good-bye to Dad. You be careful, Mom.”
“Yes, I will. You too.” She handed the phone to Jim. He listened, spoke a few words, and put the phone away.
“Some cockamamie scheme,” he said. “Every time they call up, it’s money. Eat your eggs, Em, they’re getting cold.”
19
The messages flowed from Sea Venture’s communications center through the antenna on the superstructure to the comsat overhead and back again:
“… at fifteen and put it into Police Industries… tell Mother I’m perfectly all right, not to worry at all… and if we have to cancel, there’s going to be big bucks going down the tube, so why don’t you… Larry, I want this favor. I want it. Do you understand what I’m telling you?… Conditions here are absolutely outrageous… not even a real doctor, just some kind of G.P., and this guy Bliss is… dying and she needs you… if he thinks he can get away with this just because I’m out of touch… talked to Jim Farbarn on the Hill today, and he says… be sure to take your pills…”
And the newspapers, faxed in every day, were full of excited headlines: CV RAVAGED BY DISEASE… PLAGUE MAY FORCE CANCELATION OF CONCERT… DOOMED PASSENGERS RIOT IN PANIC… FARBARN URGES PROBE OF CV…
Eddie Greaves was saying to his agent in New York, “If we have to cancel Tokyo I’m going to be in deep shit, Marty.”
“I know that, Eddie. I’m working on it, believe me.”
“You talk to Byers yet?”
“Yes, and he’s going to take it to the White House as soon as the President gets back from Monterey. I think we have a good shot.”
“Good shot isn’t good enough. I’m talking deep shit, Marty.”
“I know that, Eddie.”
“All right, who else can we get? You talk to Greg?”
“He’s in Vegas.”
“So talk to him in Vegas.”
“He’s either on, or he’s at the crap table, or he’s rolling some broad, Eddie. You know how Greg is. The minute he heads back for Hollywood, I’ll have him on the phone, I give you my solemn promise. Meanwhile, look, aren’t there some folks with clout on CV? They’re probably just as antsy to get off as you are. Go talk to them, Eddie, tell them what we’re doing, find out what they can do. If we start putting pressure on from six different directions—”
“Okay. Good idea. Okay.”
“And keep your ass sweet, kid.”
The waiter approached the nice young couple with his carafe. “More coffee?”
“Yes, please,” the man said. The waiter poured hers first, then the man’s. As he turned away, something about the woman’s expression remained in his mind, and he slipped out across the cold fuzzy void in the slow motion of that place toward the starflake pattern that was hers, and as he slipped in again, the colors and scents crashed against her more strongly than ever, and she raised her head, seeing the waiter’s body sprawled on the floor, the carafe rolling, coffee in a long steaming splatter almost to the next table. People were standing up to look. Her husband leaned toward her.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“Yes, are you?”
“Yes.” But she knew better. In spite of the shock, she had realized instantly what had happened, and had known what she must do.
“Thank heaven,” said Malcolm. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I want to go to the ladies’ room first.” She got up and walked out. Her perceptions were blurred; she felt choked inside with sorrow for herself, for Malcolm, for the relationship they had had together. She was thinking that it was probably the second or third time in their married life that she had told him an untruth; also that it was a good thing that she had been able to turn away quickly so that he could not see the expression on her face.
She took the first elevator going down and rode it to E Deck, where she had never been before. She was interested to notice that the corridors were narrower here, the walls and carpets plainer. The people she saw were wearing clothing which she recognized as ready-made, and they were a little younger than the passengers on the upper levels; the restaurants had plain white tablecloths, and there were snack bars with plastic chairs. It was all part of the monetary system, apparently; the people here had paid less for their passage, and therefore the furnishings were less expensive; the people were younger because younger people had less money. Was it because they were younger that they also appeared less cheerful?
She came to a movie theater, paid and went in without noticing what the film was, but the observer inside her was able to read part of the sign over the entrance: … IDE OF THE ROCKIES. LANCE MAHONEY. She had never seen a film in a theater before, although she had experienced many on the television screens in passengers’ rooms, and deeply appreciated them as an art form as well as a wonderful source of information.
It was interesting that people would go to a theater to see films when they could see them as well in the privacy of their rooms: that was their contradictory gregariousness; they valued privacy so much that they were willing to pay high prices for the rooms whose smallness they complained of, and yet at every opportunity they sought the company of their own kind.
On the screen, a man in a checkered red jacket was paddling a canoe down a river. Her attention was not on it: she was looking at the people who sat in the darkness in couples and small groups far removed from each other—another illustration of the paradox, for she was aware that this was customary behavior even when there was no threat of infection. T
hat was fascinating, and so was the almost uncontrollable emotion she was feeling as she sat down behind two men, one of whom had his arm around the other.
The woman knew that she was infected, although she mistakenly believed her illness was bacterial in nature; from the first moment, her concern had been that she should not pass on the infection to her husband. She believed she was going to die without seeing him again, and this was the cause of the sorrow that made her whole body tremble, an emotion as pure and intense as any she had so far experienced; and yet—another paradox—it did not occur to her to gratify her wish by staying with him for the time she had left. She had not encountered this particular response before, and it struck her as beautiful as well as mysterious.
She was able to follow the plot of the movie, more or less, since her eyes remained fixed on the screen although unfocused and blurred by warm moisture: the man in the checkered shirt, who had now abandoned his canoe and was walking through the forest, was escaping from pursuers in red uniforms, “the Mounties,” evidently law-enforcement officers; it was not clear what crime he was suspected of, or whether or not he was guilty. There was an encounter with some Indians and a beautiful blond girl; the man in the checkered shirt rode with them in their vehicle until some tension developed between him and their leader; then there was a fight, and the checkered-shirt man defeated all the Indians by striking them with his hands and feet, and rode away in the vehicle with the girl.
Then, by a transition she could not follow, the man and the girl were seated at a camp fire in the wilderness. Presently they got into a tent and appeared to perform a reproductive act. By the expression on the girl’s face, which was shown highly enlarged, she was able to determine that the actress was attempting to counterfeit sexual emotion. It was surprising, she thought, that in the interest of realism as well as for the intense pleasure it gave the participants, the actor and actress had not engaged in a genuine act of copulation. Possibly, by convention, the act was performed only in private, in which case it was curious that it should be even simulated in public; or, perhaps, different circumstances were required.
After the film ended, with the man and the girl driving down a dusty road toward an incandescent sunset, the theater lights came up and the audience filed out. She went with them, thinking that she must find another place that offered concealment as well as the company of other people. She was feeling a dull disappointment that she had not collapsed in the theater. It would have been easy to grant her wish, but the situation was so novel that she was unwilling to leave her host until she saw how it would turn out.
In the corridor, she started when she heard a voice from the loudspeakers: “Paging Mrs. Malcolm Claiborne. Please come to the nearest courtesy phone. Paging Mrs. Malcolm Claiborne.”
She was thinking how frantic Malcolm must be, of his relief if he found her. She went into a women’s room and sat for a long time in a booth. “Honey, is anything the matter?” said a large woman with brass-colored hair as she came out.
“No, I’m okay. Thanks.” She made herself smile.
She went into a coffee shop and ordered a sandwich, which she did not eat. She was thinking that it must happen soon now. It would be most interesting, the observer thought, to see what she did when night came.
20
It was very late, and the crowds in the corridors were thinning out. As she walked past the lighted windows of the shops in the mall, she heard a voice from a distant loudspeaker.
“… since early this morning. When last seen, she was wearing a pale yellow skirt and blouse.” In a television screen at the end of the lobby, she caught a glimpse of a photograph, a woman squinting into the camera. She recognized it as a photograph Malcolm carried; it seemed no more herself than any stranger’s face.
She was thinking now with leaden disappointment that the thing was not going to leave her. She must find someplace to hide, to sleep.
What did people do who had nowhere to go? There were the lounges, but a sleeping person would be conspicuous there; probably a steward would come to wake her up. Thinking of night and air, she got into the next elevator she came to and rode up to the Sports Deck. No one was in the lobby. She opened the weather door and stepped out onto the deserted tennis area. The moon and stars were brilliant in a Prussian blue sky. She crossed to the barrier and looked up. Out there, perhaps, was the star she had come from, uncounted millennia ago. It was possible, she thought, that between her sleeping and waking the whole vast wheel of the galaxy had made a quarter-turn in its silent revolution. How many of her siblings had survived she could not know; probably none, unless the universe was richer than they had imagined. She herself had had the greatest possible luck: she had wakened among an intelligent, technically skilled, and highly sensitive race whose culture and psychology were a puzzle that could occupy her happily for centuries.
There were many things she did not yet understand. She knew that she was aboard a floating construction adrift, for reasons incomprehensible to her, on an enormous ocean of water, but she also knew that human beings were a land-dwelling race, with many great cities on the continents and islands of this world, and that Sea Venture was intended to land at a place called Guam, and then at another place called Manila, which she visualized as sunny and green.
She turned, and saw someone coming toward her along the deck: it was a man, young, with a silly soft cap on his head. His hands were in his pockets. As he came nearer, she saw that he had a weak pale face.
“Good evening,” he said, touching the visor of his cap. He was dressed in dungarees, much faded and patched, in the style of a generation ago; there was a flowered scarf at his neck. He looked anything but dangerous; he was about to pass on, but she said, “Can you tell me what time it is?”
He stopped and looked at his ring watch. “It’s three-fourteen. Pretty late. Can’t sleep, huh?”
“No. That is—I have a problem.”
He came a step closer. “What’s the problem?”
She tried to smile. “No place to sleep. I—had a quarrel with my husband.”
“Oh.” He peered at her face. “Aren’t you—I saw the squib on the p.a.—Mrs. Claiborne?”
“Yes. Please don’t tell you saw me.”
“Okay, but your husband—won’t he be pretty worried?”
“I can’t go back there. Tomorrow, maybe, when he’s had time to cool down…”
“Would he hurt you?” His face had turned anxious and sympathetic.
“He might.”
“Well, look—” In the dim light she could see him flushing with embarrassment. “If you wouldn’t mind—you could sleep in my room if you want. I mean, I stay up all night sometimes.”
“That’s very generous of you, Mr.—”
“Norm Yeager.” He put out his hand awkwardly, and she took it. He pulled it away again a moment later, as if she had burned him. That was interesting; he seemed to be thinking of copulatory behavior and yet not to desire it.
“Well, then, if it’s okay?”
“I am awfully sleepy.”
His room was on the Promenade Deck near the bow. When he opened the door for her, the lights came on and music began to play. “I’ll turn that off,” he said hastily.
“No, I like it. It’s Boccherini, isn’t it?”
“You know music? That’s great.” He looked around the little room, darted at the bed and swept up a pile of magazines. “Uh, can I get you anything? Are you hungry?”
“No, I just want to sleep.” She pulled back the coverlet, kicked her shoes off, and lay down. “Thank you very much,” she said, and closed her eyes. She felt the blackness welling up, and let it come.
The man leaned over to listen to her breathing. She was asleep already, he thought. He went to his relaxer and sat down. He had never had a woman in his room before, not like this, and it was exciting and dangerous. He felt that he had done something noble and strong; he loved her for accepting his protection, and he was glad that she was asleep so that he d
idn’t have to talk to her.
His name was Norman Peale Yeager; at twenty-five, he was in charge of Sea Venture’s two independent computer systems, not in name but in fact; his boss, Dan Jacobs, attended the staff meetings, made out the reports, and gave Yeager orders, but it was Yeager who knew the systems through and through, and Yeager who had to fix them if anything went wrong. He did a few hours of maintenance a week, and he was on call twenty-four hours a day, but most of his time was his own, and that was the way he liked it.
On his shelves he had dozens of old LPs, silky plastic discs whose almost invisible spirals gleamed iridescent when he tilted them to the light, and he had a lovingly restored 1982 stereo to play them on. In the evenings, alone in the lamplight, he played them over and over, loving the rich sounds hiding behind the hiss and crackle like music from the past filtering up through layers of time.
Even older things obsessed him; he liked tales of dragons and heroes, of fair maidens carried fainting over saddlebows, of caves and quests and treasures. He daydreamed of living in a higher and nobler age, when a man could fight for good against evil and could triumph in victory or make himself immortal in defeat. Everything that was modern seemed to him an offense: the clothes people wore, the way they talked and moved, the blemishes on their skin. It seemed to him that some apocalypse must come, to burn and wash away the grimy world he knew.
He turned the music down and dozed in his chair. In the morning, not wanting the steward to see who was in his bed, he went out for breakfast. A little after noon, when he came back, he saw that the maid had been in the room, but Mrs. Claiborne was still asleep. About two o’clock he tried to waken her, and it was only then that he realized that it was not sleep but something else.
21
On Tuesday Bliss invited McNulty to attend the weekly staff meeting in his office. Present, besides Bliss, were Armand Schaffer, the head of food services, Pete Williams, the maintenance chief, Arline Truman, passenger services, Walter Taggart, engineering, Dan Jacobs, electronics, Charles Skolnik, chief steward, and Erik Seaver, purser.