On the screen, a man in a checkered red jacket was paddling a canoe down a river. Her attention was not on it: she was looking at the people who sat in the darkness in couples and small groups far removed from each other—another illustration of the paradox, for she was aware that this was customary behavior even when there was no threat of infection. That was fascinating, and so was the almost uncontrollable emotion she was feeling as she sat down behind two men, one of whom had his arm around the other.
The woman knew that she was infected, although she mistakenly believed her illness was bacterial in nature; from the first moment, her concern had been that she should not pass on the infection to her husband. She believed she was going to die without seeing him again, and this was the cause of the sorrow that made her whole body tremble, an emotion as pure and intense as any she had so far experienced; and yet—another paradox—it did not occur to her to gratify her wish by staying with him for the time she had left. She had not encountered this particular response before, and it struck her as beautiful as well as mysterious.
She was able to follow the plot of the movie, more or less, since her eyes remained fixed on the screen although unfocused and blurred by warm moisture: the man in the checkered shirt, who had now abandoned his canoe and was walking through the forest, was escaping from pursuers in red uniforms, “the Mounties,” evidently law-enforcement officers; it was not clear what crime he was suspected of, or whether or not he was guilty. There was an encounter with some Indians and a beautiful blond girl; the man in the checkered shirt rode with them in their vehicle until some tension developed between him and their leader; then there was a fight, and the checkered-shirt man defeated all the Indians by striking them with his hands and feet, and rode away in the vehicle with the girl.
Then, by a transition she could not follow, the man and the girl were seated at a camp fire in the wilderness. Presently they got into a tent and appeared to perform a reproductive act. By the expression on the girl’s face, which was shown highly enlarged, she was able to determine that the actress was attempting to counterfeit sexual emotion. It was surprising, she thought, that in the interest of realism as well as for the intense pleasure it gave the participants, the actor and actress had not engaged in a genuine act of copulation. Possibly, by convention, the act was performed only in private, in which case it was curious that it should be even simulated in public; or, perhaps, different circumstances were required.
After the film ended, with the man and the girl driving down a dusty road toward an incandescent sunset, the theater lights came up and the audience filed out. She went with them, thinking that she must find another place that offered concealment as well as the company of other people. She was feeling a dull disappointment that she had not collapsed in the theater. It would have been easy to grant her wish, but the situation was so novel that she was unwilling to leave her host until she saw how it would turn out.
In the corridor, she started when she heard a voice from the loudspeakers: “Paging Mrs. Malcolm Claiborne. Please come to the nearest courtesy phone. Paging Mrs. Malcolm Claiborne.”
She was thinking how frantic Malcolm must be, of his relief if he found her. She went into a women’s room and sat for a long time in a booth. “Honey, is anything the matter?” said a large woman with brass-colored hair as she came out.
“No, I’m okay. Thanks.” She made herself smile.
She went into a coffee shop and ordered a sandwich, which she did not eat. She was thinking that it must happen soon now. It would be most interesting, the observer thought, to see what she did when night came.
20
It was very late, and the crowds in the corridors were thinning out. As she walked past the lighted windows of the shops in the mall, she heard a voice from a distant loudspeaker.
“. . . since early this morning. When last seen, she was wearing a pale yellow skirt and blouse.” In a television screen at the end of the lobby, she caught a glimpse of a photograph, a woman squinting into the camera. She recognized it as a photograph Malcolm carried; it seemed no more herself than any stranger’s face.
She was thinking now with leaden disappointment that the thing was not going to leave her. She must find someplace to hide, to sleep.
What did people do who had nowhere to go? There were the lounges, but a sleeping person would be conspicuous there; probably a steward would come to wake her up. Thinking of night and air, she got into the next elevator she came to and rode up to the Sports Deck. No one was in the lobby. She opened the weather door and stepped out onto the deserted tennis area. The moon and stars were brilliant in a Prussian blue sky. She crossed to the barrier and looked up. Out there, perhaps, was the star she had come from, uncounted millennia ago. It was possible, she thought, that between her sleeping and waking the whole vast wheel of the galaxy had made a quarter-turn in its silent revolution. How many of her siblings had survived she could not know; probably none, unless the universe was richer than they had imagined. She herself had had the greatest possible luck: she had wakened among an intelligent, technically skilled, and highly sensitive race whose culture and psychology were a puzzle that could occupy her happily for centuries.
There were many things she did not yet understand. She knew that she was aboard a floating construction adrift, for reasons incomprehensible to her, on an enormous ocean of water, but she also knew that human beings were a landdwelling race, with many great cities on the continents and islands of this world, and that Sea Venture was intended to land at a place called Guam, and then at another place called Manila, which she visualized as sunny and green.
She turned, and saw someone coming toward her along the deck: it was a man, young, with a silly soft cap on his head. His hands were in his pockets. As he came nearer, she saw that he had a weak pale face.
“Good evening,” he said, touching the visor of his cap. He was dressed in dungarees, much faded and patched, in the style of a generation ago; there was a flowered scarf at his neck. He looked anything but dangerous; he was about to pass on, but she said, “Can you tell me what time it is?”
He stopped and looked at his ring watch. “It’s three-fourteen. Pretty late. Can’t sleep, huh?”
“No. That is—I have a problem.”
He came a step closer. “What’s the problem?”
She tried to smile. “No place to sleep. I—had a quarrel with my husband.”
“Oh.” He peered at her face. “Aren’t you—I saw the squib on the p.a.—Mrs. Claiborne?”
“Yes. Please don’t tell you saw me.”
“Okay, but your husband—won’t he be pretty worried?”
“I can’t go back there. Tomorrow, maybe, when he’s had time to cool down ...”
“Would he hurt you?” His face had turned anxious and sympathetic.
“He might.”
“Well, look—” In the dim light she could see him flushing with embarrassment. “If you wouldn’t mind—you could sleep in my room if you want. I mean, I stay up all night sometimes.”
“That’s very generous of you, Mr.—”
“Norm Yeager.” He put out his hand awkwardly, and she took it. He pulled it away again a moment later, as if she had burned him. That was interesting; he seemed to be thinking of copulatory behavior and yet not to desire it.
“Well, then, if it’s okay?”
“I am awfully sleepy.”
His room was on the Promenade Deck near the bow. When he opened the door for her, the lights came on and music began to play. “I’ll turn that off,” he said hastily.