A Saucer of Loneliness (48 page)

“Chandler Behringer,” she said. “It sounds like a little wind catching its tail around a—” she dipped into him swiftly—“palm frond.”

“Huh!” he shouted. It was one syllable of a laugh, and it was sheer delight. Then he found the rest of the laugh.

He put his hand on her arm just above the elbow and steered her off the beach. The feel of her flesh under the flat close fabric caused a shock that ran up his arm and straight through his defenses.

“Here’s my place,” he said, with all the wind and none of the cordal vibration necessary to make a voice. He moved away from her and marched up the slope, frowning, leading the way. He ducked into a lean- to porch and fumbled too busily with a latch. “You’d better wait for a moment while I light the lamp. It’s sort of cluttered.”

She waited. The doorway swallowed him, and there was a fumbling, and a scratching, and suddenly the cabin had an interior. She moved inside.

“You needn’t be afraid to look around,” he said presently, watching her.

She did, immediately. She had been looking straight at him, following his critical inventory of the entire place, and she now knew it every bit as well as he. But, “Oh,” she said, “this is—” she hesitated—“cozy.”

“A small place,” he said, “but it’s dismal.” He laughed, and explained apologetically, “I got that line from a movie.”

She sorted out the remark, wondered detachedly why he had
made it, half-heartedly probed for the reason, then dropped it as unessential effort.

“A nice soft blanket,” he said, lifting it. Her hands went reflexively to the top button of the trench coat and fell away at his next words. “When I go out, you just wrap yourself up nice and snug. I won’t be long. Now give me the number.”

His mental code for “number” was so brief and so puzzling—a disk with holes in it superimposed on ruled paper—that she was quite at a loss. “Number?”

“Your friends. I’ll phone them. They can bring you some clothes, take you home.” He laughed self-consciously. “I’ll try to say it so that … I mean, make it sound … Do you know, I haven’t the first idea of just what I’ll tell them?”

“Oh,” she said. “My friends … have no phone.”

“No—oh. What, no phone?” He looked at her, around at the walls, and inevitably at the bed. It was a very small bed. He gestured weakly at the door. “A … telegram, maybe, but that would take a long time, and … Oh, I know. I have clothes, dungarees and things. A lumberjack shirt. Why didn’t I think of it? Girls wear all that kind of—but shoes, I don’t know … And then I’ll get you a taxi!” he finished triumphantly, and the chaos within him was, to misuse the term, deafening.

She considered very, very carefully and then said, “No taxi could take me back. It’s much too far for a taxi to travel.”

“Isn’t there anyone that—”

“There isn’t anyone,” she said firmly.

After a long, complicated pause, he asked gently, “What happened?”

She averted her face.

“It was something sad,” he half-whispered, and although he was quite still, she could feel the tendrils of his sympathy reaching out toward her. “That’s all right, don’t worry. Don’t,” he said loudly, as if it were the first word of a very important pronouncement; but it would not form. He said at last, inanely, “I’ll make coffee.”

He crossed the room, raising his hand to pat her shoulder as he passed, checking it, not touching her at all, while the echo of that
first shock bounded and rebounded within him. He bent over the stove, and in a moment the evil smell of the lamp, which had been pressing closer and closer upon her consciousness, was eclipsed completely by what was to her a completely overpowering, classic, catastrophic and symphonic stench. Her eyelids flickered and closed as she made a tremendous nervous effort and at last succeeded in the necessary realignment of her carbon-oxygen dynamic. And in a moment she could ignore the fumes and open her eyes again.

Chan was looking at her.

“You’ll have to stay.”

“Yes,” she said. She looked at his eyes. “You don’t want me to.”

“I want you to,” he said hurriedly, “I want …” He thought
She’s in trouble and she’s afraid I’m going to take advantage of it
.

“I’m in trouble,” she said, “but I’m not afraid you’ll take advantage of it.”

He flashed a startling white grin.
She trusts me
. Then the grin faded and the internal frown clamped down. But it could not hide the thought:
She’s … she expects … she’s maybe the kind who …

“I’m not the kind,” she said levelly, “who—”

“Oh, I know I know I know!” he interrupted rapidly, and with it he thought
Why is she so damned sure of herself?

“I just don’t know
what
to do!” she said.

He smiled again. “You just leave everything to me. We’ll make out fine, I mean you’re quite safe, you know. And in the morning everything will look a lot brighter. Oh, that coat, that wet old coat. Here,” he bustled, “here—here.”

From curtained clothes-pole and paper-lined orange crate came blue denims, a spectral holocaust in woolen plaid, a pair of socks of a red that did not belong within four miles of any color in the shirt. She looked at the clothes and at him. He turned his back.

“I’ll go on with the … cook-cook-coffee and you know,” he said nervously.

She took off the trench coat and while her fingers solved the logical problem called buttons and the topological one whereby a foot enters a sock, she pondered Chandler Behringer’s extraordinary sensitivities.
Either this species must overpopulate its planet in nine generations, she thought whimsically, or it must die from nervous exhaustion in four. The dungarees gouged and rasped her skin until she damped its sensitivity, but the feel of the heavy, washed wool of the shirt was delightful.

He set out plates and in a moment slid a handsome orange-and-white edible onto them. She looked at it with interest, and then her eyes traveled to the small table by the stove, and she saw the shells.
By the Fountain Itself
, she said silently,
eggs! They eat EGGS!

She forced her feelings into a desensitized compartment of her mind and corked it. Then she sat opposite Chandler and ate heartily. The coffee was bitter and, to her palate, gritty, but she drank her second cup with composure.
He’s so very pleased that I eat with him
, she thought.
They probably do everything gregariously, even where cooperation is not involved
. She was conscious of no disgust, for that, too, was insulated—and so it must stay for the rest of her imprisonment, which is to say the rest of her life.

The food seemed to have relaxed him; a sphygmomanetic allocation, she deduced. And involuntary. How very confining. His chatter had eased and he was taking a silent pleasure in watching her. When she met his eyes finally, he leaped up nervously and scraped and washed the plates energetically. He thought
, I wonder if she liked it
. And:
She knows how to be a guest, and how to keep herself from plunging into the dish-washing, putting them back in the wrong place and all
. And
: I like doing things for her. I wish I could do everything for
 … And then the frown.

Suddenly in a rush of embarrassment and self-accusation, he spun around and said, “I haven’t even asked you, I mean told you, if you, I mean, well, this is just a shack and we haven’t all the fixtures.”

She looked at him blankly, then probed.

Oh. This is loaded, too. But not eating. Amazing.

She made it as easy for him as she could. She rose and gave him the quick nervous smile that was correct.

“It’s outside,” he said. “To your left. That little path.”

She slipped outside, stalked directly down to the water’s edge and with as little effort and even less distress than a polite cough might
have cost her, she vomited up the eggs and the coffee. She had eaten, after all, only two days ago.

He had the bed made up when she came in, the pillow smooth, crisp sheets flat and diagonally folded at the head end.

“I bet you’re as tired as I am,” he said. “And that’s a whole lot.”

“Oh,” she said, looking at the bed. For sleeping! What would she want sleep for? Because of a phylic habit unbroken in these savages since they were forced to spend the dark hours immobile in a rocky hole to save themselves from nocturnal carnivores? But she said, “Oh, how neat. But I can’t take your bed. I’ll sit up.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” he said severely, and her eyes widened. He busied himself with a blanket roll and sleeping bag, which he put on the floor just as far—four feet or so—as it could possibly go from the bed. “I love this old bag. Look, nylon and down—the only expensive thing I own. Except my guitar.”

She visualized “guitar” and immediately put it down as something to investigate. The flash she got in his coding was brief, but sufficient for her to recognize its size, shape and purpose, and to conclude that although its resonant volumes were gross and its vents inaccurately placed, it was closer to the engineering she knew and understood than most things she had glimpsed here so far.

“You didn’t tell me you played the guitar,” she said politely.

“I get paid for it,” he said, yawning, and she knew that this yawn belonged to this remark and not to the circumstance of somnolence. “Ready for bed?”

Patiently she bowed to his formalities. “You’re very kind.”

He went to the lamp and turned it out. The low moon streamed in.

He hesitated, slid into his sleeping bag after removing only his shoes. There ensued a considerable amount of floundering, ducking, and thumping on the floor, and at last he brought his trousers out, folded as small as possible. He wadded them between the corner of the sleeping bag and the wall as if they were a secret. Then he sat up and took off his shirt. He hung it on the corner of the window sill,
lay down, zipped the bag up to his neck, and ostentatiously turned on his side with his face to the wall. “Good night.”

“Good night,” she said. Resignedly she got between the sheets, as indicated by the folded-down corner, pulled up the blanket, porpoised out of her trousers, folded them, brought them out and hid them; removed her shirt, reached out a long arm and hung it on the other corner of the window sill. Did he still have his socks on? He did. She wriggled her toes and slightly desensitized her ankles where the weave pressed them.

“You’re perfectly safe. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“Thank you, Chan. I feel safe. I’m not worried. Good night.”

“Good night.
Dru
,” he said suddenly, lifting himself on one elbow.

“What is it?”

He lay down again. “Good night.”

She watched with deep interest the downward spiralings of his thoughts into the uprising tides of sleep. It happened to him suddenly, and the “noise” factor of his conscious presence slumped away out of the room.

And the torture began.

She had known it was there, but Chandler Behringer was a fine foil for it. He alleviated nothing, but he set up a constant distraction purely by the bumbling, burrowing busyness of his mind. Now it had faded to a whisper, to an effective nothing, and her torture poured down on her. From the warp-shielded, indetectible satellites which guarded the prison planet and administered the punishment, agony poured down to her.

Thus it will be tonight, and the next and next nights, and every night for all of my own forever. Hushed in the day and hungry and sweet at night, it will rain down on me. And I can lie and relax, and I can harbor my anger and anchor my anguish, but the tide will rise, the currents will tug until they break me; if it takes two hundred years. And when I’m broken by it, the torture will go on and on—and on.

Most of the torture was music.

Some of the torture was singing.

And a little of the torture was a thing hardly describable in Earthly terms, which made pictures—not on a screen, not on the mind like memories, however poignant—but pictures so clear and true that the sudden whip of a pennant brought, a second later, spent wind to buffet the eyelids, pictures wherein one walked barefoot on turf and knew a mottling of heat and coolth in the arches, with the moisture of the grass its broken green bleeding. These were pictures where to loose a sling was to know the draw of the pectorals and the particled bite of soil under the downdriven toenails, and to picture a leap was to kick away a very planet, to have that priceless quarter-second of absolute float, and to come back to a cushioning of one’s own litheness.

This was music of an ancient planet peopled by a race far older. This was music with the softness and substance of weathered granite, and the unwinding intricacies of a fern. It was ferocious music with a thick-wristed control of its furies so sure that it could be used for laughter. And altogether it was music that rose and cycled and bubbled and built like the Fountain Itself.

This was the high singing of birds beauty-lost in altitude, and the heavier, upward voices expressed by the reaching of trees. It was the voice of the tendon burst for being less strong than the will, and the heart of the sea, and its base was the bass of pulsations of growth (for even a shouldering tree trunk has a note, if listened to for years enough) and altogether these were the voices that made and were made by the Fountain Itself.

And these were the pictures of the Fountain Itself …

And such were the tortures of those who were exiled, imprisoned and damned.

She lay there and hated the moonlight; the moon she regarded as ugly and vulgar and new. It seemed to her an added lash, as were all things similar and all things contrasting to the world she had lost. She turned eyes grown cold on the sleeping man, and curled her lip; the creature was a clever counterpart, a subtle caricature, of the worst of the men of her race, in no way perfect, in no way magnificent, but in no way so crude an artifact as to permit her to forget what was surely its original.

By comparison and by contrast, Earth, this muddy, uncouth ball of offal, pinioned her soul to her home. Earth had everything that could be found on her world—after a fashion—racecourses comparatively an armspan wide, racing dun rats ridden by newts in sleazy silks … men whose eyes sparkled in the sun not quite as much as her racial brother’s might when he, with only his shaded hand to help him, sought and found a ghostly nebula.