“Lorin, where are you?” He heard Jan’s call and wished she hadn’t come out. She called again, closer. Reluctantly he left the tree trunk he had been leaning against and answered.
“I’m here, Jan. I’m coming.”
He knew she couldn’t see him in the dark under the mammoth trees, but she was plainly visible in the clearing at the edge of the woods: a slender, spectral figure with loose white-blond hair blowing in the wind, gleaming under the full moon. She had a long wrap about her, and it too was luminous in the silvery light. He hurried a bit; probably she was cold, and he sensed her fear. It had been in her voice; it was in her stance, her refusal to enter the woods to find him. She saw him then and took a step toward him, but again stopped and waited. When he reached her she threw her arms about him and clung for a moment.
“I was so worried,” she said. “You were gone for hours.”
“Honey, I’m sorry. I thought you were asleep.” He turned so that he could see the forest over her head. The smooth trees at the edge of the woods reflected the pale moonlight, and behind them there was a solid black wall. No wind stirred under the trees; no sound was there. High above, hundreds of feet over them, the tops of the trees made whisper-soft rustlings. He remembered how it had been walking under the black canopy, and he yearned to return to it, with Jan at his side sharing his awe. She was pulling him back toward the ship, and he put his arm about her waist and turned his gaze from the forest.
She was saying, “I was asleep, but when I woke up and found you gone, I couldn’t go back to sleep. It was too quiet. I waited over an hour before I came out... I didn’t tell any of the others.”
He tensed with a flash of anger. It died rapidly. He was acting erratically; she was loyal and wouldn’t report him. Simple as that. And she had shown courage in waiting alone, going out alone. He said nothing and they walked toward the dome-shaped tents at the side of the ship. The tents were all dark and silent. He paused once more and glanced back at the still woods, then they went inside their tent.
“I made coffee. It’s so late . . . Maybe we should just go to bed.”
“Jan, don’t talk around it. We’ve never done that with each other. Not this time either. Okay? There’s nothing wrong with my taking a walk in the night. I do it a lot.”
“Yes, but that’s different. People in the city wait until night but this is so ... I just wish you wouldn’t do it here.”
He laughed and caught her to him, hugging her hard. She shivered and he realized how cold she was. “Honey, I’m sorry. You’re freezing.” He rubbed her arms and back briskly, then put her to bed, pulling the cover to her chin. He sat on the edge of the bed with his coffee. “Come out with me tomorrow. Let me show you the forest and the clearing I found.”
“I did go for a walk with you, remember? Miles and miles of walking.” She snuggled down lower in the bed and yawned.
“But that was with the group . . .” Jan had closed her eyes already, and her face had softened with relaxation. Lorin kissed her forehead, then walked to the tent flap and stood looking out until the moon was hidden by clouds and there was only darkness. He put down the cold coffee and got into bed beside her. She fitted herself to his body without waking and with his arms around her he listened to the silence.
“It’s such a lonely world,” Jan had said the first night, staring at the dense blackness that was the forest. “It is so still that it is nightmare-like. Nothing but wind, sighing like ghosts through the trees. Whispering. Don’t you feel it, Lorin, the whisper, too faint to catch the words?” She had cocked her head with an abstracted look on her pale face, and Lorin had caught her arm roughly.
“Jan, snap out of it! It’s just silence. For the first time in your life you know what silence is like. The stuff we prayed for night after night.”
“Never again,” she had said, with a stiff, set look on her face, a look of fright denied, of anger at the causeless fear.
Lincoln Doyle, the leader of the expedition, worked them all unmercifully, but even with the full schedule there was not enough work to shut out the world that surrounded them. All the others seemed to share Jan’s reaction to the silent world. There were twelve of them, all with sunup-to-dusk tasks to complete, and all with the same listening look when there was a pause in their own noise. Doyle turned on the recorder, blasting music through the valley, and that helped. But at night the silence returned, deeper, more ominous.
At first no one had believed Lorin’s report that there was no animal life, but they had come to accept that, as they had come to accept the mammoth conifers that grew where oak and maple and birch trees had stood. The trees were giants, three hundred feet or higher, with tops that met and tangled in an impenetrable web of needled branches. Their trunks were from ten to thirty feet through. There was scant undergrowth in the pervasive gloom of the forests, but at the river’s edge where the ship stood, and in the clearings, there were bushes and vines and a vivid green, mossy groundcover. Other places had waist-high grasses, and he had seen a grove of deciduous trees in the distance on one of his exploratory trips. But no animal life. No birds. No insects. No fish. And stillness everywhere. As he was falling asleep the silence became an entity, a being with cradling arms and soothing fingers that penetrated him, searching out and healing bruised and torn nerves.
They had breakfast with the others in the group. The music blared so that talk was in shouts. Doyle looked especially grim that morning. He was a small, thin, intense man. Lorin could imagine him on a high stool frowning over a ledger after hours in a musty office.
“Steve tells me we can expect a storm tonight or in the morning,” Doyle said precisely, clipping off each word, as if he had to pay for them in cash. “We have to get as many of our samples in today as possible. When the cold front comes through with the storm, we could get snow, and that would upset our schedule. Barring that, I am confident that we can finish here within a week, as planned.”
Since there was no work for a biologist in this lifeless time, Lorin’s daily tasks varied with the requests for assistance from the others. Today he was to accompany Lucas Tryoll to the coast, follow it south to the tip of Florida, go inland, and return over the area of the Mississippi River taking pictures of the land. He was pleased and excited by the assignment.
They flew due east to the coast where New York City once had been. Manhattan was gone, as was Long Island. There was only a bay that reached far inland, and was twenty miles across. Most of the New Jersey coast had been swallowed by the ocean, and Delaware Bay was indistinguishable from the rest of the sea. A solid green roof of treetops hid the land almost to the edge of the ocean. There were no offshore islands.
“Spooky, isn’t it?” Tryoll said after several hours. “I still say we should have settled for the last time.”
Lorin looked at him quickly, but there was no humor on the man’s brooding face. Lorin remembered the last time they had arrived to find people turned savage, and animals even more savage. They had all been in the last stages of severe malnutrition and radiation sickness. He tried to recall a time that he preferred to this, and failed. Sickness, or overcrowding, or a wasteland of radioactivity, or glaciation ... He touched Tryoll on the arm and pointed: there was no Florida, no islands as far as they could see, hundreds of miles out of unbroken deep blue-green water.
Tryoll turned the plane and followed the coast to the delta of the gargantuan river that emptied into the Gulf. From their height they could see the brown water-swirl pattern as the river flowed into and finally became part of the pale blue of the sea. The Mississippi was miles wide here, shallow, and brown with silt. They followed it north, and the scenery below them was the same as everywhere else: forests, no signs of life. There was a great, shallow inland sea over what had been Nebraska, Kansas, or Iowa. Lorin couldn’t tell where they were. Clouds were forming to the north of them when Tryoll turned eastward again, coming to mountains, and then heading north. There were only clouds under them now, gray concrete, rolling plains, but still the cameras worked, taking infrared movies through the dense layer, mapping the land that lay invisible under them. Once Tryoll said that they would have to land, and Lorin felt his heart thump with excitement. But Tryoll flew on grimly and Lorin knew that he’d risk crashing into the mountains or being iced by the storm rather than land and spend the night here in the silent forests.
When they put down at the camp site a hard rain was driving in, cold and stinging against their faces as they raced back to the ship. Lorin showered and changed into warm clothing, then went to dinner with Jan.
“We’re all going to sleep inside tonight,” she said. “Steve predicts an all-night rain, and possibly snow by morning.”
“Inside? But we have heat in the tent.”
“But if it snows ... It will be more comfortable inside the ship on a night like this.”
Lorin put down his fork and took her hand between his. “Jan, please come back to the tent with me. Have you ever slept where you could hear rain in the night right over your head? Have you ever seen fresh white snow falling, covering everything with dazzling white?”
“You know I haven’t.”
“When we get back home we’ll be on the sixty-third floor again, with forty-seven floors over us. All we’ll ever see of rain is a dirty suspension of grime running off our windows, or down our clothes. Can you imagine what this rain will be like?”
“It might be ‘hot.’ “
“You know it isn’t.” He resisted the pull of her hand as she tried to free it. “Jan, we’ve been through a lot together. Remember the wild cats?”
She nodded. “I still don’t see how domestic cats could change like that. But don’t you see the difference? You know I’m not a coward. I just don’t like the silence. I keep listening harder and harder for something, anything. It’s as if I know that something is out there, but I haven’t been able to listen hard enough to catch it yet, and I have to keep straining . . .”
He had tried and failed to understand how it was with them, the ones who found it eerie and alien. He said, “Jan, we have only one more week here, then back to make our reports and wait for reassignment. It could be months, or years before we’re alone like this again. Pretend we’re on vacation. Pretend it’s a vacation zone, will you.”
She made a derisive sound. Her hand in his yielded and relaxed though, and she said, “You’re playing dirty. You pushed that button on purpose, didn’t you?”
He laughed with her. He had done it deliberately. They had met in upper New York State Vacation Zone Number Eighty-two. He remembered the long lines of people, antlike on the concrete mountain paths, bunched at the overlooks, spread twenty-five feet apart everywhere else. They had met at one of the view spots—Lookout Nineteen.
Arm in arm they left the ship and ran to the little tent in the blinding rain. After changing from his wet things Lorin stood in the tent opening, watching the storm. “This will reinforce the cyclic theory. Back to the forest primeval. Doyle is bound to recommend this zone for exploitation. You can tell he’s eager to get back and report this find. An army of men will come and mine and timber and raise animals for meat. Let’s come back with them, Jan. There are things we could do. . . .”
“What? I’m a bacteriologist, and you’re a biologist. Can you locate ores, or handle cattle, or build a slaughterhouse? It will be mostly automated anyway. There won’t be any research done beyond what we do now in the preliminary probe. Lorin, do close the flap now. It’s getting cold in here.”
He knew it wasn’t, but he pulled the flap partially closed, and continued to look out toward the black trees blowing in the wind. Racing sheets of rain obscured everything, thinned to allow a view of the forest, and then came back redoubled in strength.
“We could learn to do something that would be useful here,” he said softly. Behind him he could hear Jan making the bed. The aroma of coffee filled the tent: she had been keeping herself busy, trying not to see out, trying to shut out the storm noises, and the feeling of aloneness. For a moment Lorin almost wished that he had not pressed her to stay out with him, wished that he had come back alone. The moment passed and he let the flap close the rest of the way and went to sit by her and sip coffee with her.
“Jan, try to see what I mean. We could have a good life here. You could have children who would have room to run and play in the forests, swim in the river ...” She was staring at him wide-eyed, her face very pale. “You would get used to the quiet . . .” She shook her head.
“I would go mad,” she said finally. “Always listening for something that isn’t there. Later, after they get the town built, maybe after they get the town built, maybe then we could come back. . . .”
“How many other places like this have they already found? Five, ten? We don’t even know. Are we allowed to go to them?” His voice became bitter. “No one goes to them except the workers who get paid a bonus for ‘extraordinary conditions’ in the environment. No other people go. Too costly. It will always be like that, Jan. Always. The only way we can come back is as workers who really hate the place. We’d have to pretend. . . .”
“They’ll find a way around the energy exchange,” she said, but without belief.
“Never. There has to be an equal mass-energy exchange or the ship doesn’t make it. Period.”
“You’re not being reasonable,” Jan said, with a show of temper. “They wouldn’t let you abandon your profession now. You are doing valuable work. Anyone can come and do the rest after we locate the zones and check them out. Besides, we won’t go back to our old apartment. This trip qualifies us for one of the garden apartments, and a raise. What’s got into you, Lorin? You never talked like this before.”
“I never saw a zone like this before. I didn’t know there could be one like this. I thought all that talk was only talk. Why else give the men that kind of bonus for working in a place like this? Bonus! They should be charged for the privilege. Garden apartments! Two windows instead of one.”
“Lorin, not now, please. I’m too tired to argue with you. Even if you don’t have work to do every day, I do. That’s your trouble, no work of your own.” She crawled into the bed and pulled the cover up to her chin. “Are you coming?”
“In a minute. Just a minute.”
The rain and wind were abating. The storm was over. He went again to the flap and was struck by an icy blast of air when he opened it. He adjusted the pressure inside the tent, making an invisible wall between him and the cold air outside. A fine freezing mist was falling; he put his hand out and felt the needle-like sting. Suddenly he wished they hadn’t found this time zone at all. Earlier he had said there was a cyclic pattern, but not now, not since the Bok-Gressler-Harney Temporal Mass-Energy Exchange Theory had been proven empirically. The theory stated in mathematical terms that a body could move forward in time, giving the formula for the energy demanded for such a displacement. It was like being at the end of a rubber band, Lorin thought, standing with his hand out in the freezing mist. They were at the end of it and with every passing minute it was stretching farther, growing tauter. At the end of a preset interval it would snap back into place, and they’d be back there. Doyle could change the duration of their stay; he could shorten it as much as he chose, but he could not lengthen the interval in the future by even one second.
That was the first drawback. The second was that the mass had to be exactly the same for both directions. If there was any difference in mass when the snap came, the ship vanished. Finis. No one knew where it went. Some said a dimensional transference took place, but no accepted theory had been advanced yet.
The cost was beyond comprehension, but not so great that trips couldn’t be made in the endless search for raw materials that sustained the world, and food to keep the people on the right side of starvation. Doyle’s team had trained together for three years before their first probe, and there had now been seven probes for them, each one costing upward of five hundred million dollars. With an estimated four billion years in Earth’s future to explore, an infinite reserve seemed available to mankind. Even as he had talked to Jan about returning to work in this time zone, Lorin had known that he was talking nonsense. His training made him valuable only where he was now. Economics dictated that he would never see this world again once he had left it. He pulled his hand inside the tent and pressed it to his cheek. His fingers tingled and started to hurt. Slowly he got into bed beside Jan.
The next morning the trees were sheathed in silver. Emerging from the tent, Lorin caught his breath and stared at them. They were like intricately wrought silver columns reflecting the milky sunlight. At the breakfast meeting when Doyle checked their assignments, he asked to be allowed to take soil samples from deep in the woods. He would bring out cores for testing. Permission was granted and he slung his pack over his shoulder as soon as he could leave the meeting and tramped through the mossy ground-cover that was brittle with ice. Inside the woods, the trees were convex, obsidian wall sections topped with etched glass branches that gleamed and sparkled and became prisms where the sun shone through them. The tangle of vines and shrubs was a fantastic exhibition of twisted glassware bent into impossible designs, with impossible joinings. As Lorin worked collecting his soil samples, the ice broke and fell; the ice from the shrubs and vines hit with soft tinkles of melody; the upper branches of the trees dropped their sheaths with crashes of thunder that reverberated throughout the forest.
And there was another sound, a soft plop, plop on all sides of him. The needles of the giant evergreen trees developed in clusters of fives, and at the base of each fan a nut had grown and ripened. The needle clusters had been pointed slightly upward before the freeze; now they drooped and the nuts rolled loose and fell to the ground.
Lorin picked up one of the nuts and found it surprisingly heavy. It was a rich, golden tan, about as big as a golf ball, and the covering was suede-like, soft, slightly rough, indented to form five sections. He peeled one of the sections back, exposing snow-white meat. He finished peeling it, saving the skin for testing, and saw that the meat was in five wedges, not divided, but clearly marked. Probably as it dried and shrank, there would be oil, and the sections would be separated. He cut a thin slice off, smelled it, and finally bit into it. The meat was crisp and tender, slightly salty, completely satisfying. He ate it and gathered more of them.
He didn’t return for lunch, but worked through until it began to grow dark under the dense trees. All about him the tinkle of dropping ice, the less frequent explosions of thunderous sheets crashing to ground, and the ceaseless plop, plop of nuts falling was like an orchestra heard in rehearsal. When he went back, his step was light, and his face peaceful. He approached the ship in darkness and outside the door he paused for one last look at the deeper shadow of the woods behind him. He could hear Doyle’s voice from the other side of the ship’s doorway; the door was open.
“No need to delay any longer. Further testing and probing would merely confirm what we all know now. . . .” There was the less forceful voice of Tryoll, his words indecipherable. Doyle said, “Tomorrow night, at the latest. Just long enough to finish the tests that have been started...”
Lorin felt rooted for a long time. One more day only. Slowly he entered the ship where Doyle met him. He made his weight exchange carefully, and watched as Doyle checked it and checked and okayed the specimens he took inside. Lorin took the discarded material to the side of the ship and left it there with the rest: a growing pile of trash, boxes of junk that couldn’t be used any longer for any purpose, some of it poisonous, radioactive, indestructible. He felt a surge of anger at the pile of refuse, and wished they could at least bury it. But that was no answer. Buried, it would still be poisonous, obscenely out of place on this pristine world.
Jan refused to stay outside with him again. “I keep waking up and listening,” she said. “In here, at least, there are the sounds of machinery, and other people. Something. I don’t like it out there, Lorin. I simply can’t get used to it. I am frightened, cut off . . .” She shrugged helplessly and he didn’t urge her. He decided to sleep in the tent alone. The others looked at him uneasily; no one understood his behavior. They would all be glad when they were away from this silent, dead world, back making their reports, sleeping in their beds again, getting ready for another probe. Lorin waved and walked to the tent.
The weather had turned quite cold following the storm, and snow was expected that night. He made coffee and drank it, waiting for the snow to begin. When it came he stood watching it for an hour, then pulled on his outer clothing and went outside. The silence of the world was deepened by the snow; it was a black and white silent scene, like a pastoral charcoal drawing come to life. The snow fell straight down, it changed the landscape, made the forests more alien, hid the tent from view almost instantly, and softened the outlines of the ship, making it appear dreamlike and hazy.
He walked along the edge of the woods, lifting his face from time to time to catch the falling snow on his cheeks, feel it stinging his eyes. From time to time he looked back at the ship, growing dimmer and dimmer, until finally it was gone. He took a deep breath, but there was an ache deep within him at the thought of Jan sleeping apart from him. He walked for an hour before he turned back, going into the woods for the return trip. There was little snow under the trees; it had been captured by the roof of green that was fifty, one hundred feet thick in spots. There was only an occasional plop of a falling nut now; that phase was over. The quiet of the forest was deeper than he had known before, a sleeping forest under a snow featherbed. When he listened for the river he could hear the rushing water splashing over rocks off to his left. He guided himself by the sound of the river, drifting out of range now and then, only to veer to his left until it was there again.
The pure, cold river, the meat of the nuts, oil for burning, for candles, mushrooms, roots, the strange waist-high grasses with cornlike ears on them. It was a bountiful time on Earth, more so than he had known.
When he finally got back to his tent, he felt his exhaustion as a weight pulling him down on the bed still fully clothed. He fell asleep instantly, and his sleep was deep and restful.
Before breakfast he called Jan to the tent and showed her the nuts he had found, and when he finished telling her of his day’s work, he knew that Doyle must have had time to make his announcement about departure.
“Honey, get some sample bags together, will you?” he said to Jan. “I’ll go check the day’s assignments for us.”
She nodded and started to check the contents of his bag. Lorin met Doyle at the ship door.
“Where’s Jan? I want her to hear this, too,” Doyle said.
“I’ll fill her in. She’s busy right now checking our stuff for today. I found a swamp yesterday that is exuding heat and fumes. I think she should get samples from it. If you don’t have other plans for us.”
“That’s okay,” Doyle said uninterestedly. “But get back before dark. We’re going back immediately after dinner.” He turned away without waiting for an answer. Lorin took a tray with coffee and biscuits for Jan and went back to the tent. She looked surprised at the service, and he said quickly, “Big day for us, honey. Doyle wants samples from a swamp I stumbled over yesterday. We’re to eat and start right away. It’s a long walk.”
She stiffened and he added, “I had to argue with him to let me go with you, and he isn’t happy about it. He might still change his mind and send me out with Tryoll again, so we’d better hurry.”
Jan reached for the biscuits and coffee. They finished quickly and he led her straight into the woods, not giving her a chance to stop and talk with any of the others, and not until they were a mile from camp did he start to relax. He whistled then and presently she joined him, whistling harmony.
There was no trace of the snow remaining, and the ground under the trees was dry and springy. A pungent odor filled the air. Lorin detoured from his planned route and pointed out the reason for the smell. Where the snows had fallen through the treetops and melted, thousands of mushrooms had sprung up overnight. Looking at them spread like a carpet Lorin was reminded of a painting he had seen once of a courtyard of white cobblestones. The shiny white caps touched one another, were packed into an area twenty-five feet by forty. They skirted them. There was a look of wonder on Jan’s face.
“They are all edible,” she said. “That’s the same kind that we found down nearer the river. Do you know how much they cost back home?”
“Everything here is edible, and free,” Lorin said happily. “Not a poisonous plant, or spore, or virus, or bacterium. It’s a lovely world now, Jan.”
She squeezed his hand in reply, and he noticed that some of the stiffness had left her, and that she no longer was listening quite so hard. After a while she complained of tiredness and asked how much farther it was.
“Let’s have some lunch and rest,” Lorin said. They had been walking for over four hours. He lowered his pack and took out a plastic cover that he spread out for her to sit on. She rested with her back against one of the trees while he prepared their food: he boiled water over a tiny fire of nut skins, and to the pan of boiling water he added mushrooms and sliced needle nuts, and a handful of the green moss. Jan watched without speaking. When he handed her a cup of the soup she stared at it for several seconds, then said, “Didn’t you bring any of our dri-freeze food? Why this?”
“For fun,” Lorin said. “Try it.” He lifted his cup and sipped the broth and found it even better than he had expected. After a moment Jan tasted hers. They smiled at each other and finished the pot of soup without speaking again. For dessert Lorin peeled raw needle nuts and cut the sections apart. “All things to all men,” he said solemnly. “Fried in their own oil, they are better than potatoes; ground, they make a dandy flour . . .”
Jan looked troubled, and he stopped talking and took her hand. “You are having fun, aren’t you, honey? It isn’t so bad now, is it?”
She shrugged and glanced about her at the trees and the deepening gloom that filled the spaces between them. “I don’t like it; I don’t feel safe here, but as long as I don’t think about where we are, just remember that we are here together, then I’m all right. If you went away even for two minutes I might start screaming.”
“I won’t go away even for one minute,” he said. He turned her around and pointed to the tree that had been her backrest. “Look at the pattern it makes, honey. Like great scales overlapping, climbing up the tree in a spiral, getting smaller and smaller as they get near the top.” He rubbed his hand over the smooth glossy tree, and when Jan moved slightly away without touching it, he didn’t force the issue. There would be time. She began to roll up the plastic cover, not looking at him. “We’d better be getting on. Is it much farther?”
“Not much now,” he said. He repacked and they walked again. After another hour Jan began glancing at her watch from time to time, and a worried pucker appeared on her forehead.
“Lorin, do you remember exactly where the place is? Are you sure?”
“I think so,” he said. “It can’t be much farther now. Tired?”
“No, of course not, but we have to get back before dark. . . . Maybe we should start back now. I don’t think we’ll have time before it gets too dark in here.”
“Half an hour more, then if we don’t find the swamp, we’ll go back. I was sure I could go straight to it again.”
After the half hour was up Jan insisted they turn back. An hour later they both knew they couldn’t get out of the woods before night fell.
“Lorin, we can’t stay out here overnight. I won’t. I can’t!”
“Honey, it’s all right. There’s nothing here at night that wasn’t here in the daylight. I’ll be with you. I even have a tent we can pitch.”
Jan whirled about and stared at him unbelievingly. “You did it on purpose! You deliberately brought me out here too far to get back before dark! What will Doyle say? And the Directors when he reports it?”
“We got lost, that’s all. Who can say anything about that? We got lost.” Lorin caught her to him and pressed his face against her hair for a moment. He said softly, “I had to come out for one night, Jan. I had to bring you with me. I couldn’t help myself.” She didn’t relax in his arms, however, and he kissed her forehead, then got busy with the tent. He made a fire before the tent, and there was the light inside it. He started to cook their meal and presently Jan came out to help him; they sat before the crackling fire and ate, and Jan kept her gaze on the flames and didn’t look beyond the light at all. Later he made love to her, and after she was asleep, he left her side and stood in the dark forest for a long time, simply feeling happy.
The next day Lorin increased their distance from the ship, knowing instinctively which direction he wanted, not able to tell how he knew from hour to hour when he couldn’t see shadows or the sun’s position. But he knew. And slowly Jan grew to understand what he was doing.
When she balked, Lorin put his pack down and caught her arms. “You can’t help yourself, Jan. Don’t you see that? I love you too much to leave you behind, and I can’t go back again. Not now.”
She said, “We have three more days here. Then we have to go back, Lorin. You know that?”
“I know.”
She nodded; looking at his face, studying his eyes, his mouth, she said, “All right. I’m with you. I wouldn’t have come if you’d told me what you planned, but I am here, and I won’t spoil it for you.”
Arm in arm they walked again, whistling, singing, stopping to gaze in awe at a waterfall they found, laughing at each other’s clumsiness in crossing the brook that formed the falls. They found a cave and stepped inside it, and Lorin said thoughtfully, “It would make a good home when the tent wears out, or if it gets too small.”
Jan stiffened again at his words, and her tension stayed with her for the next hour, fading gradually as the cave was left behind. Lorin didn’t refer to it again, but he made a mental map, locating the cave on it for future reference.
On the third day Jan knew he wasn’t going to take her back at all. She sat down on a boulder and kicked the deep mat of needles and nuts. “I won’t go any farther. You could kill them all by this, and you know it. If we turn back right now, and don’t waste any time, we can make it before the snap takes them back.” She kicked a nut viciously. “You would murder them all without a thought?”
“I left a complete list with weights on it for Doyle to substitute,” Lorin said. “He’s no fool. He’ll be careful when he knows he has to make substitutions. They’ll be all right.”
“And if they die, won’t that be even better for you? Then no one would ever discover this time zone. You know they never double check if they lose a ship. They assume that it was a bad time and let it go at that. Is that what you hope for?”
He hadn’t thought of it consciously, but with her words, he knew that the thought had been there. He jerked the pack up and slung it over his shoulder. “All right, so that’s what I hope for. You know who will get to come to a zone like this? Those who hate it. Like Doyle, and you. They’ll come here and sweat out the minutes until they can leave again, living only for the bonus that’s waiting for them, afraid all the time, wishing the zone would burn up, or sink into the ocean, dumping filth here, taking what’s good and clean, leaving their filth behind. Can you imagine what this place right here will look like in ten years? When they finish with it, it’ll be as bad as the fire-bombed ruins we found on the third probe. I don’t care if Doyle and the others live or die. If they’re careful they’ll get back. But are they alive, will they ever be again? Alive in hell?”
He started to walk. She had to follow; she had no choice but to follow, and he would make her forget the other world, the other time that was like a fading nightmare.
A searing pain hit the back of his head, and he clutched it, staggering, thinking she had thrown something. The pain deepened and he fell, and abruptly there was only blackness.
* * * *
He heard, from a great distance, “He’s okay. He’ll wake up in a moment. Negative.”
He waited without moving, trying to remember, and there was a blank. Hands were fumbling about the back of his head and he opened his eyes warily. A nurse smiled at him. “I’m just removing the electrode wires. Relax a few minutes, and then you can get up.”
“The test is over?”
“That’s right.” She finished, and wheeled a portable psych machine away to the corner of the room. She returned and placed coolly professional fingers on his wrist for a moment. “You can sit up now, if you want.”
“How did I do?”
“Dr. Doyle will be in in a moment. He’s talking to your wife now, I think.”
Lorin sat up and the pain in his head made him blink. He touched the back of his scalp gingerly. The nurse laughed. “The electrodes are still there. Just below the skin. We don’t take them out, so if you ever need a good psychoanalysis, you’re all set. Compliments of the house.” She laughed to show that she joked, and after a bad moment he grinned back at her. Although he couldn’t find the thin platinum wires with his fingertips, he would be wired the rest of his life, ready to be plugged into a psych machine and played like a record. He stood up carefully, but there was no dizziness, and the headache was fading. He looked at the clock over the door. He had been there four hours.
Dr. Doyle came in and shook his hand enthusiastically. “You go home and get some rest now, Lorin. We’ll call you in a day or two, after we analyze the results. If you don’t hear by Monday, report back to your regular job and wait. We never know what kind of bugs we’re going to find that will delay us.” He shook Lorin’s hand again and was gone before Lorin had a chance to ask him a single question.
The nurse ushered him from the room to another room where more nurses were busy at desks. He went to a desk with an information sign over it and asked for his wife.
“I really couldn’t say,” the nurse said, without looking up.
“But we both took the tests. She should be through now too...”
“Not my department. You’d better go on home and wait for her.” The nurse opened a ledger and started to run her finger down columns of figures.
Lorin tried to get back inside the test room, but the door was locked now. None of the nurses knew anything about the tests, and finally he went to the door marked “Exit.” It opened only halfway and he squeezed through into an anteroom that was a bedlam of confusion and noise. He tried to open the door again, but it wouldn’t open at all from this side. Someone caught his arm: “My husband, tall, heavy, bald, did you see him? Is he in there? He went in two weeks ago. . . .” Lorin shook his head. “Is Dr. Doyle in there?” someone else yelled. Someone else was holding a snapshot before his eyes; he thought it was of a woman. The press of people was so thick that he couldn’t go straight to the street door, but had to squeeze through openings, to be forced backward, to inch forward again painfully. He saw an opening and stepped into it, relieved at the lessening of the pressure of bodies. Then he saw why there was the open space. A psycho in the telltale yellow coverall. Revolted, he turned back to the crowd. The psycho followed him. It was a woman. She screamed at him, “Stop! Tell me what happens in there! What do they do? What did they do to me?”
The crowd gave ground before her and he knew that the look of disgust that was on everyone else’s face was also on his. He managed to get people between himself and the yellow-clad woman. The noise was deafening. Every time the door to the inside offices opened, there was a surge toward it, and the cacophony increased. His headache returned, stronger than before.
He finally got to the outside door, but hesitated again. He took a deep breath; the fetid air in the room was better than the air out in the street would be. He went outside and was caught up immediately in the swell of people on the sidewalk. Three hours later he arrived at his own building, exhausted and panting. The elevators that went to his level were out of order, so he rode to the fiftieth floor and walked up the next thirteen flights of stairs, stumbling over the gray children who played there. Jan was not in the one-room apartment.
He waited for her all afternoon, listening to the neighbors above and below and on both sides of his small room. Children screamed and shrieked in play through the halls and on the stairs. Women shrilled and men cursed. Radios played out of synch, on different stations; airplanes overhead and traffic below competed with rising decibels; sirens, the blare of advertising trucks, the screech of the elevator again in service. He pressed his hands over his ears; his headache was blinding. Why didn’t she come home? The lights came on: neons, street lights, traffic lights; haze descended and haloed the lights. He fell asleep toward dawn.
That day he returned to the test center and waited along with all the others in the anterooms. Jan didn’t come through the doors from the inner rooms. On the third day he returned to work.
He was stopped at the door of the biology lab by his supervisor, who handed him an envelope and hurried away without speaking. Lorin opened it with shaking fingers, his heart thumping wildly. He was certain it was his test confirmation, and orders to report back to the test center. . . . He stared at the curt message: Report for analysis 9 A.M. Mon. Thurs. Fri., Rm. 1902 Psych Bldg.
He didn’t enter the lab. He knew his bench would be occupied by someone else. He went to the psych center and was issued his yellow coverall, and shown his iron frame cot. The other men in the ward didn’t stir as he entered, no one looked up at him. He felt his cheeks burn with shame and he sat on the edge of his cot and waited for 9 A.M. Thursday to come. He knew why Jan hadn’t returned, would never come back to him. He ground his hands into his eyes and tried to remember the test, what he had done wrong, how he had revealed insanity. When a sonic boom shook the building, he covered his ears and pushed hard against them, trying to think. He wished he could go for a walk, but the thought of walking in the center of a circle that moved with him everywhere he went, of seeing the disgust and loathing on the faces of those he approached ... He sat on the edge of the cot and waited, and tried to remember, and when night came he lay down wearily and stared at the ceiling, trying to remember what he had done wrong, and he listened to the clamor of the city that never was still: traffic; voices singing, shouting, cursing, screaming; sirens; jets; foghorns; elevators; sound trucks; televisions; phonographs; buses; elevated trains . . . Nearby a jackhammer started, and an alarm went off. Lorin stuffed his fist into his mouth to keep from screaming, and lay staring at the ceiling trying to remember.