by Damon Knight
Seventy years. And right then, with the image in his head of that bottle bobbing around and around the Pacific current since before his parents were born, he knew what he wanted to do with his life.
Then college, and the M.S., and the goddamn dissertation, garbage done the way his professor wanted it. He had known it would be hard work, and he had realized the importance of objectivity. You could not afford to let your romantic feelings get in the way: you had to look at the instruments. One Sunday afternoon, about six months after he came to Sea Venture, he was on the Sports Deck looking out through the screen, and he realized suddenly that he hated the sight of the ocean. He never went up there again, and on his next vacation he went as far inland as he could get.
He had told McNulty that he wasn’t buying the stuff he used to swallow, and that was true, but it was more than that. He felt now that he had been supremely, unbelievably dumb for the last ten years.
He looked at the racks of water samples, then got up and took off his lab coat.
Vincent came out of his lab as he passed the fish tanks. “Everything okay?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Where you going now?”
“Out. If you see Yvonne, tell her I quit.”
Vincent followed him down the hall. “Randy, are you still sick?”
“Hell, no, I’m feeling fine, but this is a dumb job and they can shove it.”
“Now wait a minute.” Vincent caught up to him and grabbed him by the sleeve. “Are you telling me you’re going to walk out and leave me to do my work and yours too?”
“Take your hand off me, you stupid bastard.”
“What? Listen, Geller, I’ve taken about enough—”
Geller hit him in the mouth as hard as he could. Vincent went sprawling on the floor. When he got up, Geller hit him again; this time he stayed down.
24
There it came, down the long corridor, crickety, crickety, crickety. Emily stopped, turned her head to listen.
“What’s the matter now?” said Jim.
“Don’t you hear it?”
“Hear what?”
“The grocery cart.” It was coming nearer, crickety, crickety.
Jim took her arm. “What are you talking about, for God’s sake?”
“It’s his grocery cart.” A tall, sour-smelling man was coming toward them down the corridor; the sound trailed behind him, ghostly, echoing. The man turned and went down a side corridor, and the sound went with him. Emily started to follow, but Jim was holding her arm.
“Whose grocery cart?”
“Danny’s. He’s here, he wants to tell us something.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Jim. He looked as if he were about to cry.
McNulty walked into the room where his patient was waiting, introduced himself, shook hands and sat down with his elbows on the desk. “You say it’s about your wife, Mr. Woodruff?”
Woodruff was in his mid-sixties, red-faced and white-haired; he looked like a man who had been prosperous most of his life, but there was something wrong with the look in his eyes. McNulty had seen that look before, in the eyes of people who had gone through some shattering loss; it was a wounded look, hard to describe—the scleras a little darkened, maybe, a pinched expression in the eyelids.
“She’s hearing things,” Woodruff said. He was holding onto one hand with the other, hard enough to make the fingers turn red and yellow.
“What kind of things does she hear?”
Woodruff swallowed. “A grocery cart. She hears a grocery cart coming down the hall behind some guy, and then she wants to follow him.”
“How many times has this happened?”
“Twice. The first time was yesterday. Then she heard it again this morning when we were on our way to breakfast, and she followed this same guy into the restaurant. Then we ordered, and halfway through breakfast, this guy fell over out of his chair.”
McNulty perked up. “Where was this?”
“In the Madison Restaurant, where we always eat.”
“About nine-thirty, was it?”
“Yeah, about that.”
McNulty doodled a big check mark on his pad. “That’s interesting. Then what?”
“Then she heard the noise again when somebody else got up from another table. A woman. And she got up too and followed her out. I had to talk her out of getting in the elevator. I took her back to the room and made her take a pill.”
“What kind of medication is she on?”
“Valium, and some other stuff for sleeping pills, I forget what it is.”
McNulty made another doodle, a spiral this time. “Has she ever had any mental disturbance before?”
“Yeah,” said Woodruff, and looked down at his hands. “She had a nervous breakdown after our boy died in seventy-three. She was in the hospital for five months.”
“What kind of treatment did she get there, do you know?”
“Insulin.”
“Insulin shock?”
“Yes.”
“Surprised to hear that,” McNulty said, and looked at his doodles. “What about afterwards—did she ever hear things until now?”
“No. She’s always been nervous. She’s a nervous woman.”
“Now,” McNulty said, “what about the grocery cart? That seems like a funny thing to hear. Does it mean anything to you?”
Woodruff did not answer for a moment. When McNulty looked at him, tears were spilling over his eyelids. “Yeah,” he said hoarsely. “Yeah. It was Danny.”
Danny was their youngest, born when Emily was thirty-five. When the boy was about two years old, Jim found an abandoned grocery cart in a weedy lot down the street. There was nothing on it to show where it belonged, so he brought it home just to keep it from being an eyesore. He thought he might give it to the handyman, or something, but when Danny saw it, he claimed it for his own. It was his favorite toy. There was something wrong with the wheels; they made a cricking sound when he pushed it, around and around through the house. “At least you always know where he is,” Jim had said.
That summer of 1973 Jim had bought a big new motor home, and it was all packed for their vacation. A neighbor, Walt Singleton, was standing at the end of the driveway to help Jim when he backed the motor home out of the garage. Emily had gone into the house to get some last-minute thing, and he had tired of waiting for her. He remembered the new-leather smell of the upholstery, the brightness of the sunlight through the blue-tinted windshield. He remembered starting the engine and listening to its confident purr. Watching Walt in the rearview mirror, he put the gearshift into reverse and drifted slowly backward. Then he felt a bump, and heard Walt scream.
“Doc, that was twenty-five years ago,” he said. “What the hell, can’t we ever—” His voice broke.
25
Two weeks after the horror began, panic was growing in Sea Venture. Instead of going to restaurants for their meals, many people made forays on the kitchens, grabbed whatever food they could, and carried it back to their rooms. Sometimes other passengers took it away from them in the corridors. The reckless few who spent their time in public places were becoming more violent and unpredictable. The casino had to shut down after a series of free-for-alls; nearly all the shops and most of the restaurants were closed. Vandalism was becoming a problem; deck chairs and equipment were hurled about on the Sports Deck; light fixtures in the ceilings were broken.
At one of the staff meetings, now being held daily, they talked about the food problem.
“Let’s set up food-distribution stations in the lobbies,” suggested Arline Truman. “Just a line of tables—let people take what they want. Maybe it’ll be more orderly if they know we think it’s all right to take the food.”
“They’ll hoard it,” said Armand Schaffer.
“Well, perhaps, but then they won’t have to come back every day.”
“That means a lot of wastage. What if we do it this way—make up cartons of staple food, either cans or the kind of thing that will ke
ep in refrigerators. Try to get some kind of nutritional balance. Buffet food. Ham, cold chicken, roast beef. They can survive on that awhile. Then you don’t have them grabbing for this and that. I agree that would be a mess.”
“What about deliveries to people who can’t get out so easily?”
“We can handle that,” Skolnik said. “I’m a little more worried about sanitation. Those rooms must be getting filthy—the maids can’t get in. We’re trying to keep up deliveries of clean sheets and towels and so on, but we’re shorthanded even for that. What if we get another outbreak of disease here? That would really put the capper on it.”
Luis Padilla wheeled his cart up to the door of 18 and knocked. “Just a minute,” came a slurred voice.
The door opened and Mrs. Emerton stood there, swaying a little. “Oh, it’s Luis,” she said. Her eyes did not quite focus. “Luis is back, isn’t that nice, David? Come in, Luis. Look, David, it’s Luis.”
She stumbled as she walked ahead of him. She was wearing a negligee, a blue one through which he could see the gleam of her enormous buttocks. Mr. Emerton, with a glassy smile, was sprawled on the divan with his necktie hanging. Mrs. Emerton made an elephantine turn, tipped and sat down heavily beside him. “Put there,” she mumbled. “Luis.”
Padilla moved the highball glasses aside and unloaded his cart: caviar, of course, crackers, a split of champagne. Mr. Emerton’s eyes were closed; he had slipped a little farther down the sofa. Mrs. Emerton mumbled something else; then her eyes closed and her mouth fell open. Mr. Emerton was snoring.
Beyond her, on the dressing table, he could see the open jewel box with necklaces scattered beside it.
“Mrs. Emerton?” he said, leaning over. She did not answer.
Padilla walked silently around the end of the divan and looked at the jewels. The emerald alone was probably worth fifty thousand dollars. In the jewel case was a star-sapphire ring, almost as big. The pearls were certainly genuine. Padilla picked them up and slipped them into his pocket, then the emerald and the sapphire, then two diamond clips and a solitaire. Together they might bring seventy or eighty thousand dollars in Manila; his cousin Renaldo would know how to dispose of them. With this and his savings, he could buy the home for his father’s retirement now.
He tiptoed back to the table, replaced the things he had brought on his cart, moved the highball glasses to their former positions.
Outside in the corridor, he left the cart beside the door. If he said he had knocked and no one answered, they would remember nothing when they woke up. In the service elevator, he began to whistle.
26
When Stevens found out that Professor Newland was convalescing in the room next to his, he was sufficiently amused to drop in and introduce himself. By comparing notes, they discovered that they had been stricken within a few minutes of each other. The infection had passed from Stevens to a woman in the elevator, from her to the steward Kim Lee, and from Kim to Newland. “It almost makes you think there’s some meaningful connection, doesn’t it?” Newland said.
“As if we were intended to meet?” Stevens said. “I should have preferred some other way.”
Newland smiled. “Well, I would too, but we don’t always get to choose. Don’t you feel, when you look back at your life, that everything important has been the result of some accident?”
“No,” said Stevens. “I don’t believe in accidents.”
It had crossed his mind, in fact, that there might be nothing accidental about the epidemic; that it might be the work of the group that employed him; certainly, if he had identified them correctly, nothing could have been more apt to their purpose. But if they had planned such a thing, his employment would not have been necessary and he would not be here.
He had wondered, too, whether there was any point now in the assassination he had been paid to carry out. Again assuming that he knew his employers’ motives, surely Newland’s death would go almost unnoticed in the general catastrophe and would serve no purpose. But he was not paid to speculate. He had received no new instructions, and did not expect any.
More to the point, he no longer knew what he wanted. He found that he rather liked Newland; under other circumstances it would have been a pleasure to cultivate his friendship. It amused him to contemplate the fact that Newland’s life hung on an essentially whimsical decision which he had yet to make.
For the first time in many years, he was curious about his own motives. For the fanatics and tyrants who employed him he had nothing but contempt. He had never killed out of passion or conviction. Professionalism aside, he killed in order to confront death by giving it.
Now he had begun to wonder if his attitudes and beliefs were merely the chemical residues of early experiences in his brain, like those of other men. Would he have been different if his father had not killed himself, in a dirty Paris hotel, when Stevens was thirteen? Or if his childhood lover, Maria Talliavera, had not been killed by her stepfather in the attic of the house on the rue des Jardins? Was there another Stevens who might have existed, might still exist, crying inside like an unborn twin?
The talk turned to L-5 and then to Sea Venture. “I can see all the obvious similarities,” Newland said. “They’re striking, and they were very effective on Capitol Hill. Sea Venture is the prototype of a self-sufficient habitat in a partly explored element; it has some of the same technical problems—integrity of the hull, life support, communications, airlocks, and so on. Even some of the solutions are the same.”
“Then, do you think it makes sense to go into the oceans instead of into outer space?” Stevens asked politely.
“If we can’t do both?” Newland said. “I honestly don’t know. I suppose it depends on what you want. One of the great attractions of L-Five was always that it meant going into an absolutely alien medium, a place where humankind had never been. Extending our range, not by just a few million square miles, but almost indefinitely. That had a very powerful appeal. But I’m not sure anymore why we do what we do.”
“Or whether it is a good thing for human beings to exist?”
Newland glanced at him curiously. “That’s something I hadn’t given much thought to. I suppose we take it as a given.”
“But not for any logical reason?”
“No, not a logical reason. Do you hate the human race, John?”
“Oh, no. Schopenhauer said that to hate every miserable creature one meets would take all one’s time, whereas one can despise them with perfect ease.”
“I see.” Newland stroked his chin. “And that’s your philosophy?”
“Like you, I’m not sure anymore what my philosophy is. At one time I thought it was enough to be aware of the absurdity of the human animal, to eat well, sleep well, and have a healthy conscience.”
“And how do you manage that?”
“I don’t anymore. A healthy conscience, I must tell you, is like a healthy liver—when it is healthy, it doesn’t bother you. But that was when I was thirty-nine.”
“How old are you now?”
“I was forty three days ago.”
“A great age,” said Newland gravely.
Stevens grinned. “Touché. And you, Paul, how old are you?”
“I’m sixty-three. For what it’s worth, I’ve been through four of these age things. The first one was when I was a little over thirty. I thought, here I am, thirty-one or thirty-two, my life is half over, and what have I done?”
“Yes.”
“And then again in my forties, and fifties. And the sixties. It’s the numbers; they’re like the numbers on an odometer; every time the big one changes, it calls your attention to the time that’s gone.”
Stevens was watching him intently. “Do you ever think it would be better just to have done with it?”
“Oh.” Newland looked at his hands. “No, not seriously. There’s always been something more to do, and I’ve always known that when you get out of one of these troughs, things look bright again.”
“Darkest b
efore the dawn,” said Stevens, not quite keeping the irony out of his voice.
Newland folded his hands. “All I can tell you,” he said, “is that I still have a strong sense of some meaning in life, even if I can’t say what it is. We all have to decide for ourselves whether that’s enough. Give yourself a chance.”
27
His first meeting with Julie and her parents after their recovery was a subdued occasion. They had lunch in the Prescotts’ suite—ham sandwiches and tea. Prescott went out for supplies every other day; except for that, they did not venture out of their room, and Mrs. Prescott, although she tried to seem gay, was obviously in a state bordering on hysteria.
When Stevens suggested a walk on the Promenade Deck with Julie, Mrs. Prescott was horrified. “You mustn’t go out there!” she said. “I forbid it, Julie.”
“Mother, I’ve had the disease already,” she said wearily.
“That doesn’t matter! There are people roaming around, doing terrible things. Lionel, tell her she mustn’t!”
Prescott looked embarrassed. “Julie, I really think it might be better—”
“I have something to talk over with John,” she said. “We won’t be long.”
“I’ll bring her back safely, Mrs. Prescott.”
The Promenade Deck was almost deserted. Scraps of paper littered the carpet; the trash cans and ash receivers were overflowing. Outside, the sky was brilliant over a glittering sea.
“Let’s sit down here,” said Julie. Her face looked drawn. “Do you want to see me again?” she asked after a moment.
“How can you ask?” Stevens bent toward her, put a hand on her arm.