Specimens Part 9

Too bad. Being seen around with a black girl would certainly draw him more attention from the world, and getting more attention seemed to be one of the few things that might possibly help.

For the moment, he told himself yet once more, just keep going. Something will turn up.

Here, only a few paces farther along the curving walk, came a second girl, a lanky near-colorless blonde, pushing a white-haired and white-stubbled old man in a wheelchair. Dan played it a little easier this time. He smiled and just barely nodded as he pa.s.sed the girl, then looked quickly away as if he were a trifle shy himself. Before looking away he had just time to catch her answering smile of greeting, which was quite brief but seemingly unguarded. They both strolled on.

He took a side path that bypa.s.sed the black girl on the next lap of the sizable, roughly oval course, and then he made sure to intercept Blondie once again. "Beautiful day," he commented this time, smiling.

''For a change.'' Her voice was flat and unattractive. Smiling improved her face a little, though you still couldn't call it pretty.

He shot a tentatively friendly glance toward the wheelchair, but the old man seemed to be taking no notice of Dan or anything else in his immediate environment.

To the girl Dan said: ''I suppose you 're glad when you can get out of that place for a while.'' He had been often enough inside nursing homes, visiting Josie's late mother, to know what even the good ones tended to be like inside.

"G.o.d, yes." She stopped the chair, momentum transferring to the occupant's head, which began to nod gently and continuously as he continued to contemplate eternity, or maybe only the slightly browning gra.s.s beside the walk.

"Have a smoke?" Dan pulled the pack out of his shirt pocket and offered it, half- empty now.

"I shouldn't, but what the h.e.l.l. Thanks." She accepted his match flame too. "Until you've worked in one of those places, you don't know what it's like."

"I can imagine."

"No you can't. Not until you work there." She started the chair moving again with a push that had something in it of the energy of anger, and the patient's head responded as if with an agreeing nod of extra vehemence.

Dan faced about and walked beside her as she pushed the chair. What did you used to say to them, Dan? How did the old-timer in the story put it? Heck, Bub, there just ain't no wrong way.

''You know, for just a minute there you reminded me of this girl I used to know, in California. I just had to stop and talk to you, see if you were anything at all like her."

"Ha, I bet I'm not. You can't tell what people are going to be like, not from how they look."

"You're really better looking than she was."

"Ha, that poor girl."

When they came to a bench she agreed, after brief and formal protest, to stop and sit down and talk for a minute. He told her his name. Her name was Wanda Bartkowski, and she was sharing an apartment with two other girls in a five-year-old development in an unincorporated area not far outside of Wheatfield Park. Her parents and one brother still lived where Wanda had grown up, in Cicero, well to the east.

"I live right over there," he said, pointing casually. "The one right on top of the hill."

The second-floor windows, open, were dark as empty eyesockets against the white stucco but he supposed that no one except him, looking at the place, was likely to be reminded of a skull. My G.o.d, my G.o.d, he thought, how is it possible that I just sit here talking calmly?

"So, do I still remind you of that girl?" Wanda asked suddenly, breaking the short silence that had fallen.

He tried to remember how he had decided that girl was supposed to look. "As I said, you're better looking. Nicer to talk to. You're taller ..." What else? "Actually I can't remember her that well. Not any more."

"I ought to be getting back." But she didn't get up from the bench right away. She had a lot that she wanted to talk about with someone, and now that the process had started with mention of her Cicero home, it wasn't all that easy to stop.

While she talked, Dan kept waiting for some kind of opportunity to present his housekeeping proposition, but no good chance seemed to come along. So he just sat there looking at Wanda steadily and listening to her, giving his full attention to her every change of expression and her every word. It was one tactic that practically always worked with women, as he recalled. Whatever you wanted them to do.

What she wanted to do right now was talk about her life. For many years both her parents had held steady jobs, but now because of layoffs and health problems the family was in some economic trouble. Dan heard few details about that, but it was ominously in the background of all the rest. Wanda had dropped out of high school once, but then her parents had prevailed upon her to go back and finish. That was four years ago now.

Then she had been either a singer in some kind of rock group, or some kind of camp- follower of it; that too was a little vague, but at one period she had been engaged to one of the musicians. It had never worked out.

Anyway it was all true what they said about the dope and the pot parties that went on among musicians; at least Wanda wanted Dan to believe that it was true, and that because it was, all that chapter of her life was now behind her.

''My parents said this was a n.i.g.g.e.r job, before I took it. But I wanted anything so I could move out of the house. I work with the blacks now and they're not so bad. There'd be more of them working here, but how can they get out from the city every day? Can't afford those commuter trains. It's not the black girls make it h.e.l.l, it's the G.o.ddam patients who s.h.i.t all over themselves, G.o.ddam them." She looked sharply at her charge in his wheelchair, but then relaxed again; it seemed plain that all the lines were down in that direction.

''You work nights somewhere?'' she asked Dan, and then giggled briefly. "No, I guess you probably work in an office. Or you're a salesman."

"In an office, usually. I'm in engineering, in a desk-job kind of way. Just taking a few days off right now. A little personal trouble that I'm getting straightened out."

"You mean something to do with your wife?"

Right to the bullseye, hey? He had just one bad moment, and then found he could sail on in good shape. "Wife?" he smiled. "No wife any more. She's up and left, at my request. I'm selling the place as soon as I can get a buyer. Getting out of here and heading for California." He really didn't know why he kept bringing California into it.

Just that for so many people the name seemed to hold the promise of some kind of heavenly glory.

"That's where your other girl friend was."

"I don't suppose she's there anymore. Say, what time do you get off work, Wanda?"

Still keeping his steadily interested gaze upon her face. She put on a slightly haughty look and looked off into the bloomless lilacs. She wasn't going to answer that question for a stranger. Not the first time he asked it, anyway When he parted with her, later, at the door of the nursing home, she left him with a small wave and a shy and suddenly attractive smile.

ELEVEN.

"It's really very good of you to do all this," said Nancy, peering out of the right front window of Dr. Baer's Toronado, squinting into the declining sun to look for the house numbers on the suburban street. This was not as expensive a neighborhood as the one she and Dan had selected in Wheatfield Park; this was another suburb, farther west and south, and ran to old frame ranches, getting senile at the age of twenty or thirty and decaying respectably together.

"Now stop thanking me, you said it enough times already." Baer had put on his gla.s.ses to look for the numbers on his side as they slowly cruised along. The two of them had taken off early from work, Nancy leaving her own car in the Museum's lot, Baer growling: "Girl's getting married, people should expect her to take a lot of time off.

Highest priority should be perpetuation of the species."

After hearing Nancy's whole story through a second time in his office, Baer had sat there drumming his fingers on his desk for a good minute and a half, his attention seemingly turned inward in utterly patient contemplation. "Nancy," he said then, "you realize that all these things you're telling me as facts, they just don't fit together as facts, in any one good explanation?"

She nodded almost meekly.

"Not even one good bad one, if you know what I mean. Not even any of the really tragic explanations of your mystery - Dan's got a brain tumor, Dan's plotting against you - forgive me - none of these will fit all of what you present to me as facts."

"You mean if Dan is crazy, or lying to me, 6r whatever, still doesn't explain why / had the hallucinations too."

"That's right."

"But there is one logical explanation, Dr. Baer. I don't say scientific."

"What is it?"

''That there may be something about that place, that house, that land, which brings this kind of experience on in people. At least in some people, sometimes. Buried chemicals. Maybe some kind of hallucinogenic gas, leaking up from underground."

He shook his head at that theory. But his finger-drumming started, very slowly, once again. ''All right. Let us examine this hypothesis as logically as we can. Who owned the house before you did?"

"Should be right about here, Nancy, if we got the address right."

"There it is."

It was another modest frame ranch lost amid its peers, sided with green asbestos shingles, its white wood trim needing paint. Baer parked in front.

A thin, fortyish woman, whose half-tended graying brown hair made her look a decade older, came to the door in answer to Baer's b.u.t.tonpush. Her eyes fastened at once on Nancy, who spoke first: "Mrs. Stanton?"

Dan, having finished nearly a full day completely free of direct physical control, was surprised shortly after his modest Thursday dinner to feel control suddenly clamped down. His voice was left free, and as the master marched him toward the bas.e.m.e.nt door, he questioned it: "What's up now: Something wrong?"

There being no pencil or paper within reach, it was perhaps not surprising that he got no answer. Down into the bas.e.m.e.nt they went, through the tunnel and the heavy, click- sighing door, and down the surreal stair of slightly oily rods in the dry air.

The gimbaled table loomed before him at the bottom, the green lamps glowing on it brightly. Dan believed suddenly that the controller had suddenly changed its plans. Here I go, he thought, into my own gla.s.s case, and then we're off into s.p.a.ce. There was something faintly tempting in the idea, the prospect of not having to struggle any more. .

But Dan's own body was not intended for the table, not just yet anyway, no more than Clareson had ended there. Dan's controlled hands now opened the cabinet in which the crab-machine reposed, and moved knowledgeably to lower it from its standing position so mat all six legs were on the deck and bore its weight. It was at least as heavy as a man.

Now his eyes were made to watch it critically as mechanical life came back to the crab, limb by cabled limb, and it quivered and stomped its ball-like feet and turned itself around. There was even a buzzing voice, produced somewhere inside the crab, that ran through what might have been a test-pattern of alien syllables. And Dan, his usefulness down here evidently over for the present, was turned around and started up the tilted stair.

Mrs. Stanton's sister and her brother-in-law, with whom she was still living, left her alone with her visitors in the living room as soon as a round of introductions had been completed. A couple of bats and a softball waited in a comer of the somewhat crowded room, but the children who had once intruded on Mrs. Follett's flowers were not in evidence at the moment.

"Miss Hermanek, what can I do for you?"

"I wanted to talk to you about the house, Mrs. Stanton."

The thin woman on the sofa showed no surprise, almost a sort of subdued eagerness.

"What's happened?"

''I - I don't know that anything has. That is, I hardly know how to ask you about this, but ..." Nancy's voice trailed off for the moment.

The woman on the sofa was slowly drawing up into a kind of stiff defensive posture, her arms folded. "You bought the house and the deal is closed. I have no responsibility in the matter." She glanced sharply at Baer. ''Excuse me, sir, I didn't really catch your name. Are you Miss Hermanek's lawyer?"

"Dr. Baer. I am not her lawyer." He cleared his throat with a profundo rumble.

''Actually I don't know what this would have to do with lawyers, Mrs. Stanton. I'm an archaeologist, interested in that mound the house is built on. There were just a few questions I wanted to ask you, if I may, in the interest of science.''

"Science?" Mrs. Stanton blinked.

"Yes. For example, during the period that you lived there, did you notice anything unusual about the house?"

"Unusual." The thin woman seemed to be grimly marveling at the word.

"Yes, uh, for example, did you notice any unusual settling of the house? Any sort of movement of its foundations? Strange smells in the bas.e.m.e.nt. . . anything like that?"

Mrs. Stanton had closed her eyes, and Baer and Nancy had a chance to exchange glances. Then they looked back at her intently. She was shaking her head a little, side-to- side.

''I don't know anything about the foundations of the house,'' Mrs. Stanton said. ''All I know is that Richard was a well man when we moved into that house, and for about eighteen months thereafter, and six months after that he was dead by his own hand.''

She opened her eyes and stared at Nancy again. "For us it was a bad place. When you said you wanted to talk to me I thought that perhaps you people were having some kind of trouble too."

Baer put in: "May I ask, who owned the house before you did, Mrs. Stanton?"

''A family named Lind.'' Mrs. Stanton had no need to stop and think. "They lived there twenty-six years, and thought there was nothing wrong with the place, or so they claimed. Then the house was vacant for a short time before we bought it from them.

After my husband died, I went and spoke to them as you are speaking to me now." Her eyes still picked at Nancy, and were now getting merciless about it. "There is something wrong now, isn't there?"

"Nothing you have to worry about, Mrs. Stanton," said Baer. "But before we get into that, may I ask how you first came to connect your husband's problems, that led to his death, with the house?"

The woman sighed. She thought about it, rubbing her bare arms as if they were cold, here in the cricket-chirping warmth of summer evening. "Well, I don't care if people think my ideas are foolish or not. I just don't care, not any more.'' She looked at both of them briefly, then off into s.p.a.ce again. "My husband went violently insane before he shot himself, as I suppose the neighbors there may have told you. And I came to think the house was bad because it figured so prominently in the terrible dreams he had, when he first got sick."

When he and Nancy walked out again into the dimming evening, some fifteen minutes later, Baer roused himself from a preoccupied state to ask her whether she wanted to try phoning Dan.

"I feel like dashing over there, but I did tell him I'd stay away for a few days. Yes, I want to call him. Let's get to a public phone."

They found a booth in a shopping-center drugstore, and pooled their change on the little metal shelf below the phone.

Dan's voice answered on the fourth ring. "h.e.l.lo."

"It's me again, Danny. How are things going?"

"Nancy, how are you love? Things are going fine." And Baer, listening, felt the beginning of a frown displace his eyegla.s.ses, even as his newly acquired half-belief in Nancy's theory was tilted also. The voice coming from the receiver sounded like nothing wrong at all. It traded ba.n.a.lities back and forth with Nancy, who nevertheless remained tense throughout the short conversation.

After she had hung up, Nancy was silent until she got back into the car with Baer.

"I'm not going over there," she announced then, as if her companion had not heard it all with his own ears. ''He says the children are all right. Also he broke off the tentative date that I thought we had for tomorrow night. Just wants me to bring the diary back the next time I come; whenever that's supposed to be - Sat.u.r.day, I guess."

"Now suddenly he's interested in the diary." Baer had not yet started the car.

Nancy nodded.

Baer scratched his head, not knowing what to think. Shortly he said: "I'm going to take you home, but first let's get something to eat. Then tomorrow you arid I will see this through to some conclusion."

"I'm really not hungry. Thanks anyway."

The engine broke into a thrum. "I know a place where you'll find something on the menu that will appeal. And we can talk. We have some talking yet to be done tonight."

They rode in silence for a while, out of the residential streets to a highway lined with electric signs. Then Baer asked: "What did you think of her story?"

"I was about to ask you the same question. It's practically my story too.''

"Not so. Your man is still very much alive. But Stanton's having what sounds like the same dreams as Dan, and smelling strange odors too ... I can't believe it's just coincidence."

"Then what?"