Duplex Read Online Free Page B

been a famous scientist, Mrs. Andersen a housewife, Cindy and Carol their two lovely daughters. Eventually a third child joined the family. They called him Downie because of the extreme softness of his hair; for some reason his lanugo never fell out, leaving him covered with a beautiful coat of soft, grayish hair. Downie was a large, plump boy, sweet and tender like Mrs. Andersen had been, but he could do nothing for himself, which turned out to be a problem the Andersens didn’t know how to handle. At some point they must have moved him next door into number 39, though Mary couldn’t figure out how he’d managed to get into number 37 without her seeing.
    “Mary,” Downie said. “You’re as pretty as Cindy said.”
    “Cindy said I was pretty?”
    In his lap she could see a bundle of pink fabric that she thought might be the prom dress.
    Above her head the robots were going wild. Even though whatever was sitting beside her on the sofa had done nothing to hurt her they knew that if it wanted to it could crack her in two, suck out the meat and throw away the rest, like a person eating a lobster.
    “Mary,” Downie said. “I can’t give this to you until we get a few things straight. No no no! Don’t look at me. You can look at me later. Look over there!”
    A very old television, one of the ones with a small oval screen in a large wooden box, had come on across the room, but before it did Mary had caught a glimpse of a pair of large sad blue eyes, their blueness swimming around in a wide, open face. There wasn’t much to see in the way of programming, mostly a few ancient reruns. “Good work,” said a man wearing a white cowboy hat and a white shirt laced up the front like a shoe. This was Sky King and he was commending his niece for handing over to him the stolen ruby she had just found tied to a carrier pigeon’s leg. The actor who played the part would die in a car crash on his way to watch the launch of the space shuttle Challenger, later sparing him the sight of what became, for its day, a tragedy of epic proportion.
    “Mary Mary Mary!”
    Mary continued to stare at the TV but nodded her head to let Downie know she was listening.
    “We’re pinning all our hopes on you,” Downie said.
    “On me?”
    “You’ve got a big job ahead,” Downie said. “You know that, don’t you?”
    “A big job?”
    The room had grown so still Mary could hear only the sound of something inside herself quietly pounding. The volume on the TV was turned all the way down and the robots were lying on the rug in the light cast by the TV screen, glinting like spilled pocket change.
    “A lot of time is going to go by, or at least that’s what it’s going to seem like to you, and the timing is going to have to be just right. More than just right. It’s going to have to be perfect. Everything hinges on its being perfect, like the hinge on a door. If the hinge doesn’t work perfectly the door is useless. Plus you’re not going to get much in the way of advance warning, and by the time you get it you’re going to have forgotten we ever had this conversation. You’re going to have forgotten a lot of things, including what’s at stake. The most important thing to remember is that a duplex’s properties are stretchable but they aren’t infinite. One minute the opening will be right there in front of you, and the next minute you won’t even know where it went. I don’t have to tell you that, do I? You live in one yourself. You’ve heard the way Miss Vicks drops things, the way she bangs the drawers and doors and windows. You’ve had the contact dreams.”
    “I’m not sure,” Mary said, thinking. It was true that sometimes while she slept all she saw were great shimmering panels of numbers, as sharply bright and beyond reckon as stars in the sky. Other times she felt something lowering itself into her. It would start pumping and it would be like water entering water through a hose, turning her sleek like a seal and