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a moment, then, as he started to walk away, she opened her eyes and looked at him.
"What's your problem."
"I thought you looked like somebody I knew," Jim lied.
"Sure I do. I think you just want somebody to talk to. You look kind of sad. You can sit down if you
want." The woman motioned with her hand.
He sat down. At close range, the woman looked somewhat younger than he had thought, no more than
twenty, or so. Her brown eyes glanced at him, then closed again.
"Could you move over a little? You're blocking the sun." He moved over to his left until he no longer cast
a shadow on her. "You must not have been here long. You're kind of pale. My name's Marlena."
"I'm Jim. Are you visiting too, or do you live here?"
"I'm a resident. I work over at the spaceport air traffic control. They give us a lot of time off so we don't
get crazy. I work on my tan a lot, I don't like doing anything that takes effort. I get enough tension on my
job." She brushed away a stray lock of hair from her forehead and he saw a thin white scar near her
hairline. An electronic implant. Air traffic controllers, like many other technicians, had to become part of
the computers that aided them in their tasks.
"What's it like, having an implant in your head?" he asked, suddenly curious.
"A lot of people ask that. You don't even notice it most of the time. The implant's only activated when
you're working. But I'll tell you something, Jim." Marlena turned over on her stomach and propped
herself up on her elbows. "There's nothing else like being tied into a big machine like that, seeing
everything it sees, being part of a tremendous mind. I can't describe it. Actually, the computer mind does
most of the work; we just have to be there to override or take over in case of an emergency. But it's
exciting, I'll tell you. Everything else seems kind of boring afterwards."
He shuddered. "Don't you have to have a lot of training?"
"Oh, sure. I've been training ever since I was fifteen, and I only started working this year. You have to
learn how to be aware of a lot of different things at once, plus training your body so that your physical
reactions don't affect you on the job. We slow down our physical processes to the minimum when we're
tied in, but we have to be ready to act instantly if something goes wrong. It can be a strain, I'll tell you."
She sprayed some oil into her hand and rubbed it on her nose: "Jesus, I should shut up a minute and let
you say something. What are you doing here?"
"Waiting for an opening on a moon flight." Remembering his purpose in being here suddenly made him
depressed again.
"You going to work up there?"
"No, just visiting." He grew silent and Marlena folded her arms and lowered her head.They'll all be
surprised to see me , Jim thought,Hidey was shocked when l called him up . He had told Hidey
nothing about Carole or his plans after discovering that all the others were on the moon. He had not even
known, until he arrived in Florida, that he would attempt to join them. It had been an impulse. He had
nothing else to do, and he could hope that the alien environment might heal him somehow. Perhaps he
could find something there that had eluded him throughout all his travels on Earth. For him, the trip would
be a pilgrimage.
Or maybe he was simply trying to escape the punishment he kept meting out to himself in his sober
moments. Carole was gone and he was to blame. His mind's pain was at once so sharp that tears sprang
to his eyes.If this was physical pain, I could not bear it, I would be dead by now. But the mind, that
traitorous torturer, the mind can suffer anything, for any length of time, over and over again .
"What do you do?" Marlena said, raising her head slightly
He closed his eyes and waited for his pain to pass. "Nothing," he answered at last. He opened his eyes
again. "I wander a lot. I was living about a mile outside a village in Bhutan for a while. It was the most
peaceful place I'd ever known. I felt calm for the first time in my life but, believe it or not, I couldn't write
there. I could hardly write at all, except for some poems, they'll be published soon."
"You're a writer?"
He nodded. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
