Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume One (41 page)

“Christ, Eddie, I’m sorry. Here you are as sick as a dog, and I’m going on like a hysterical grandmother.”

“I’m not that sick,” I said and raised my head to prove it. “It just seemed like as good a way as any to listen. It’s a pretty incredible story, you have to admit.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t heard nothing yet. Chris thinks that Rudeman is haunting her. And why not? If you know you can see the past, where do you draw the line at what is or isn’t possible? She’s certain that he found a way to come back and enter her mind, and she’s having a harder and harder time holding on to the present. She thinks he’s having revenge. He always threatened her with a relapse if she didn’t cooperate wholly with him in his research.”

Lenny’s big face registered despair and hopelessness. He spread his hands and said, “After you swallow half a dozen unbelievable details, why stop at one more? But, damn it, I can’t take that, and I know something has driven her back to the wall.”

I stood up then and looked through the drawer where I had put the bourbon. Then I remembered that it was in the bathroom. When I came back with it, Lenny took the bottle and said, “When did you eat last?”

“I don’t remember. Yesterday maybe.”

“Yeah, I thought so. I’ll have something sent up, then a drink, or you’ll pass out.”

While we waited I said, “Look at it this way. She sees things that no one else sees. Most people would call that hallucinating. She thinks her dead husband is haunting her somehow. What in hell are you proposing to do, old buddy?”

Lenny nodded. “I know all that. Did you know that Eric is color blind?” I shook my head. Eric was his middle son. “I didn’t know it either until he was tested for it at school. A very sophisticated test that’s been devised in the past twenty-five years. Without that test no one would have suspected it ever. You see? I always assumed that he saw things pretty much the way I did. I assume that you see what I see. And there’s no way on this earth to demonstrate one way or the other that you do or don’t. The mental image you construct and call sight might duplicate mine, or it might not, and it doesn’t matter as long as we agree that that thing you’re sitting on is a bed. But do you see that as the same bed that I see? I don’t know. Let me show you a couple of the easy tests that Karl Rudeman used.” He held up a card and flashed it at me. “What color was it?”

I grinned. I had expected to be asked which one it was. “Red,” I said. “Red Queen of Hearts.”

He turned the card over and I looked at it and nodded, then looked at him. He simply pointed again to the card. It was black. A black Queen of Hearts. I picked it up and studied it. “I see what you mean,” I said. I had “seen” it as red.

“Another one,” he said. “How many windows are in your house?”

I thought a moment, then said, “Twenty-one.”

“How do you know?”

“I just counted them.” I was grinning at him and his simple-minded games. But then I started to think, how had I known, how had I counted them? I had visualized room after room, had counted the windows on the walls that I had drawn up before that inner eye. The bellboy rang and came in with a cart. I tipped him and we sat down to eat sandwiches and drink coffee. “So?” I asked, with my mouth full. “So I visualized the windows. So what does that mean?”

“It means that that’s how you remember things. If you had an eidetic memory, you would have seen the walls exactly as they were when you memorized them, and you could have counted the books in your line of vision, read off the titles even. The question is: are you looking into the past? No answer yet. That’s what Chris can do. And that’s how she sees the past. That clearly. And she sees the anomalies. You see what you expect—a red Queen of Hearts. She sees what is. But, as you say, no psychiatrist would believe it. Rudeman didn’t for years.”

I was wolfing down the sandwiches, while he was still working on the first one. I felt jubilant. He didn’t know. She didn’t know. Karl haunting her! That was as good a thing for her to think as anything else.

“Okay,” I said, pouring more coffee. “I see that she’d have a problem with a psychiatrist. But what’s the alternative, if she’s as—sick—or bothered as she seems to be?”

“The answer’s in the notebooks,” Lenny said. “She knows it. She tried to find it at the farmhouse, but it was impossible to work there. And now she’s afraid of Rudeman all over again. She believes that somehow she caused his death. Now she has to pay.”

The strong waves of guilt I had got from her. But why had he wandered out in the fields barefoot and in pajamas?

“What scares me,” Lenny said, “is the slowness of getting through those notes. Bad enough while he was sane, but immeasurably harder as his psychosis developed, for the last seven or eight years. It’s like trying to swim in a tar pit. By the end he was certifiable, I guess. He knew the contents of those notebooks would invalidate all the work he had done in the past. Chris doesn’t want to talk about it, and all I know for sure is what I’ve been able to dig out of that code he used.”

“Psychotic how?”

“Oh, God! I don’t know what name they’d put on it. In the beginning he thought she was a puppet that he could manipulate as he chose. Then gradually he became afraid of her, Chris. Insanely jealous, mad with fear that she’d leave him, terrified that someone would find out about her capabilities and begin to suspect that there was more. Just batty.”

“So what do you intend to do?”

“That’s what I came up here to talk to you about. I’m going to marry her.” I jerked my head around to stare at him in disbelief. He smiled fleetingly. “Yeah, it’s like that. Not until next year sometime. But I’m taking her on a long, long trip, starting as soon as we can get the books we’ll need ready. That’s why I want to wrap up a deal with Weill as fast as we can. I’ll need my share. We can handle the shop however you want—keep my bench waiting, or buy me out. Whatever.”

I kept on staring at him, feeling very stupid. “What books?” I asked finally, not wanting to know, but to keep him talking.

“Rudeman used his library shelves as keys throughout. Things like 1-11-298-3-6. Top row, eleventh book, page 298, line three, word six. First three letters correspond to ABC, and so on. He’d use that for a while, then switch to another book. Only a madman would have dreamed up such a laborious system. Chris memorized those shelves, so she can find the key books. Stumbled onto it a couple of years ago. That’s why she dragged all of his books with her when she ducked out of that house. She just didn’t have time to go through the notebooks to sort out the ones he had used.”

“Lenny, are you sure? Isn’t it just the sick bird syndrome? I mean, my God, maybe she really is crazy! A lot of beautiful, charming, talented people are.”

“No. She isn’t. Rudeman would have known after all those years. He wanted her to be, but he couldn’t convince himself in the slightest that she was.” He stood up. “I didn’t expect you to believe me. I would have been disappointed in you if you had. But I had to get it out, get some of this stuff said. Let you know you’ll have the shop to yourself for a year or so.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Go home. Move in the Donlevy house. She’s on tranquilizers, and they make it awfully hard to hold on to the present. She keeps wandering back and forth. It’ll take a week to get things ready to leave.” He mock-cuffed me and said, “Don’t look so worried. I know what I’m doing.”

When he was gone I wished that he had a real inkling of what he was doing, and I knew that he would never know. I thought about that line that everyone has that he can’t cross, no matter what the evidence, unless there is an inner revelatory experience. Rudeman couldn’t believe she looked into the past, until he experienced it through her. Then he drew the line at possession, until it was proven again, and with its proof he had come to doubt his own sanity. Lenny could accept the research that proved she could see the past, but no farther. Whatever Rudeman had said about possession he had written off as insanity. And I had blundered in and swallowed the whole thing without reservation, through experience, firsthand experience. I tried to think in what ways I was like Rudeman, making it possible for me to do what he had done, wondering why Lenny couldn’t do it, why others hadn’t. My gift. Like my fingerprints were mine alone. I gave Lenny ten minutes to make sure that he really was gone, then I looked in on her. I said it to myself that way, Think I’ll look in on her now.

Met by a wave of hatred stronger than anything I’d ever experienced. Resistance. Determination not to be taken again. Thoughts: not going crazy. You’re real and evil. Die! Damn you, die! I killed you once! How many times!
Die
!

I drew back, but not all the way. She thought she was winning. She conjured a vision of a man in pajamas, orange and black stripes, walking, a pain in the chest, harder and harder, gasping for air… I clutched the arms of the chair and said, “No! Stop thinking. No more!” The pain returned, and this time I was falling, falling… I had to get out. Get away from her. The witch, bitch, which witch bitch. Falling. Pain. I couldn’t get loose. Falling. Out the window, and let go.

I lay back in the chair, trying to catch my breath, trying to forget the pain in my chest, my shoulder, my left arm. I didn’t have a heart condition. Perfectly all right. Medical exam just last year. Perfectly all right. I flexed the fingers in my hand, and slowly raised the arm, afraid the pain would return with movement.

Bitch, I thought. The goddam bitch. She hadn’t taken the tranquilizer, she had been waiting, steeled against me, ready to attack. Treacherous bitch. I pushed myself from the chair and stood up, and saw myself in the mirror. Grey. Aged. Terrified. I closed my eyes and said again, “Bitch!”

Was she panting also, like a fighter between rounds? If I went again now, would she be able to attack again so soon? I knew I wouldn’t try. The pain had been too real.

I looked at my watch then and nearly fell down again. An hour and a half? I held it to my ear, and shook it hard. An hour and a half! Shakily I called Weill’s office and told Hendrickson that he could have the machine tool picked up any time. I was going home.

There wasn’t much else there, nothing that I couldn’t get to the car alone. And by five I was on the highway. An hour and a half, I kept thinking. Where? Doing what?

She would kill me, I thought over and over. Just like she killed her husband. The notebooks, I had to get them myself. I couldn’t let Lenny take them away. Rudeman must have discovered too late that she had power too. But he must have suspected before the end. His psychosis. The new code, afraid she had learned the old one. He must have learned about this. He had kept her ten years before she killed him. It would be in the notebooks. I drove too fast, and got home in six hours. And not until the car squealed to a stop in the driveway did I even think about what I would tell Lenny or Janet. But I didn’t have to tell her anything. She took one look at my face and cried, “Oh, my God!” And she pulled me from the car and got me inside and into bed somehow, without any help from me, but without hindrance either. And I fell asleep.

I woke up when Janet did to get the kids off to school. “Are you better? I called Dr. Lessing last night, and he said to bring you in this morning.”

“I’m better,” I said wearily. I felt like I was coming out of a long drugged sleep, with memories hazy and incomplete. “I need to sleep and have orange juice, and that’s about it. No need for you to stay home.” She said she’d see about that, and she went out to get Rusty up, and to find Laura’s red scarf. I hadn’t seen them for almost a week, hadn’t even thought of them. They would expect presents. They always expected presents. When Janet came back in fifteen minutes, I convinced her that I really was all right, and finally she agreed to go on to work. She’d call at noon.

I had breakfast. I showered and dressed. And smoked three cigarettes. And convinced myself that I wasn’t sick at all. And then I walked over to Christine’s house.

Lenny met me at the door. “What the hell are you doing up and out? Janet said you came in sick as a dog last night.” He gave me more coffee. At the kitchen table.

“I kept thinking about what you were saying about her.” I indicated the rest of the house. “And I was sick, feverish, and decided I couldn’t do anything else in Chicago. So I came home. Anything I can do to help?”

Lenny looked like he wanted to hug me, but he said merely, “Yeah, I can use some help.”

“Tell me what to do.”

“Just stick around until Chris wakes up. I gave her a sleeping pill last night. Should be wearing off soon. What I’ve been doing is going down the notebooks line by line and every time he used another book for his key, Chris visualizes the shelf and finds it there. Then we find that book in the boxes. And I go on to the next one. While she rests, or is busy with her work, I find the key words in the books and decode a line or two to make sure. Rather not lug that whole library with us if I can avoid it.”

I was watching him as if he were a stranger. I was thinking of him as a stranger. I had no definite plan worked out, just a direction.
She
had to get rid of him. Before he learned any more from the notebooks.

And her. What did she know? I knew I had to find out without any more delay. I tried to reach her and found a cottony foggy world. The sleeping pill. I tried to jar her awake, and got glimpses of a nightmare world of grey concrete expanses. A hall, the grey of the floor exactly matched the grey of the walls and ceiling. The joints lost their squareness ahead of me, and the hallway became a tube that grew narrower and narrower and finally was only a point. I was running toward the point at a breakneck speed.

You’re not Karl! Who are you?
I pulled out. What if she brought the pain again? The pseudo heart attack? I was shaking.

“Jesus, Eddie, you should be in bed.” Lenny put his hand on my forehead. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

I shook my head. “I’m okay. Just get a chill now and then. How about the couch here? At least I’ll be handy when she gets up.”

He installed me in the study on the deep green couch, with an Indian throw over me. I drifted pleasantly for a while. Then,
Get out! Who are you?—I’ll never get out again. Karl knew, didn’t he? I’ll finish what he started. You can’t hurt me the way you hurt him. I’m too strong for you. We’ll go away, you and me.
I laughed, and laughing pulled away. At the same instant I heard her scream.