Are You There and Other Stories by Jack Skillingstead Read Free Book Online Page B

perform body waste removal. A device sucks out the data. It’s fairly brutal.
    I recouped in the medical wing for several days. I had my pills and a guarantee of more, all I would require. I had put in the maximum Tank time and could not return without suffering serious and permanent brain damage.
    My marathon Tank session had yielded zip in terms of the Project’s primary goal. The fourth planet was dead.
    Now I would have money and freedom and a future, if I wanted one. I spent my hours reading, thinking about warm climates. Kim Pham rapped on my memory, but I wouldn’t open the door.
    A week after my retrieval, I insisted on being released from the medical wing, and nobody put up an argument. I’d served my purpose. Orley caught up to me as I was leaving the building. I was hobbling on my weak legs, carrying my belongings in a shoulder bag. Orley picked up my hand and shook it.
    “Good luck to you,” he said. “What’s first on the agenda, a little ‘Eye candy’?”
    I wasn’t strong enough to belt him. He looked morose and tired, which is approximately the way I felt myself. When I didn’t reply he went on:
    “Cruising a little close to home last time, weren’t you? That Pham woman was persistent. She came around every day for two weeks straight. Nice-looking, but older than the others. I guess you would get tired of the young ones after a while.”
    The smirk is what did it. I found some ambition and threw a descent punch that bloodied his nose.
    A cab picked me up at the gate. On impulse, I switched intended destinations. Instead of the airport, I provided sketchy directions, and we managed to find Kim’s house without too much difficulty.
    The house had an abandoned look, or at least I thought so. A mood can color things, though, and my mood was gloomy. The desperation of the Tau Boo Project had rubbed off on me. There was no life on the fourth planet, no life on any of the planets that had thus far been explored by our human Eyes. When the receiver craft were launched decades previously, it was with a sense of great purpose and hope. But so far, the known universe had not proved too lively, which only made our own Earth feel isolated, lonely—doomed even.
    The windows of Kim’s house were all black. I knocked, waited, knocked again. I knew where she hid the spare key, on a hook under the back porch.
    The house was silent. Every surface was filmed with dust. I drifted through the hollow rooms like a ghost.
    Gone.
    I pictured all the ways, all the ugly ways she might have departed this world. Of course, there was no evidence that she had done anything of the sort. An empty house did not necessarily add up to a terminated life. Probably I was giving myself too much credit. But the gloom was upon me. I could see the white scars on her wrists.
    I sat on the carpeted floor of the master bedroom, still weak from the Tank. Hunger gnawed at me, but I didn’t care. I let time unravel around the tightening in my chest, and, as darkness fell, I dialed the walls and ceiling clear, and lay on my back, and let exhausted sleep take me.
    Lack of nourishment inhibits the efficacy of the pill. In the morning, I opened my eyes to dark pre-dawn and a point of reference that was rapidly growing muddy. The pills were in my bag, but my interest in digging them out was not very great. Why not let it all go? Become the fiber in the rug, the glass, the pulse of blood in my own veins. Why not?
    I lay still and began to lose myself. I watched the dark blue sky pale toward dawn. At some point, the blue attained a familiar shade. Kim cradling her dead dog, the fierceness of her eyes. I can manage .
    A sharp bubble of emotion formed in my throat, and I couldn’t swallow it down. So I rolled over. Because maybe I could manage it, too. Maybe. I reached for my bag, my mind growing rapidly diffuse. The interesting articulation of my finger joints distracted me: Bone sleeved within soft flesh, blood circulating, finger pads palpating