Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [133]
He found himself driving around Washington, D.C. It was like the night he lost his apartment; again he wasn’t sure what to do. He drove aimlessly, and without deciding anything, found himself back on the streets west of Rock Creek Park.
His nose and the area behind it were still numb, as if shot with Novocain. He had to breathe through his mouth. The world tasted like blood. Things out the windshield were slightly fogged, slightly distant, as if at the wrong end of a telescope.
He wasn’t sure what to do. He could think of any number of options, but none of them seemed quite right. Go back to his tree? Drive to the NSF basement? Try to find a room? Return to the ER?
He had no feeling for which course to pursue. Like the area behind his nose, his sense of inclination was numb.
It occurred to him that he might have been hit hard enough to damage his thinking. He clutched the steering wheel as his pulse rose.
His heartbeat slowed to something more normal. Do anything. Just do anything. Do the easiest thing. Do the most adaptive thing.
He sat there until he got too cold. To stay warm on a night like this one he would have to either drive with the heater on, or walk vigorously, or lie in the sleeping bag in the back of the van, or climb his tree and get in the even heavier sleeping bag there. Well, he could do any of those, so. . . .
More time had passed. Too cold to stay still any longer, he threw open the driver’s door and climbed out.
Instant shock of frigid air. Reach back in and put on windpants, gaiters, ski gloves. Snowshoes and ski poles under one arm. Off into the night.
No one out on nights like these. At the park’s edge he stepped into his snowshoes, tightened the straps. Crunch crunch over hard snow, then sinking in; he would have posted through if he had been in boots. So the snowshoes had been a good idea. Note to self: when in doubt, just do it. Try something and observe the results. Good-enough decision algorithm. Most often the first choice, made by the unconscious mind, would be best anyway. Tests had shown this.
Out and about, under the stars. The north wind was more obvious in the Rock Creek watershed, gusting down the big funnel and cracking frozen branches here and there. Snaps like gunshots amidst the usual roar of the gale.
No one was out. No fires; no black figures in the distance against the snow; no animals. He poled over the snow as if he were the last man on Earth. Left behind on some forest planet that everyone else had abandoned. Like a dream. When the dream becomes so strange that you know you’re going to wake up, but then you discover that you’re already awake—what then?
Then you know you’re alive. You find yourself on the cold hill’s side.
Back at site 21. He had come right back to the spot where he had gotten hurt, maybe it wasn’t wise. He circled it from above for a while, checking to be certain it was empty. No one out. What if you had a world and then one night you came home to it and it was gone? This sometimes happened to people.
He clattered down to the picnic tables, sat on one, unbuckled his snowshoes. He looked around. Sleepy Hollow was empty, a very unappetizing snowy trench with black mud sidewalls, the sorry little shelters all knocked apart. Tables bare. The fire out. Ashes and charcoal, all dusted with snow.
Strange to see.
So . . . He had run in from the direction of the zoo. Knocked one of the assailants down; funny how that skinny face and moustache had fooled him, taken him back to an earlier trauma; but only for a second. Facial recognition was another quick and powerful unconscious ability.
So. He had to have been about . . . about here when he was struck.
He stood on the spot. It did not seem to be true that the memory held nothing after such impacts; he actually recalled a lot of it. The moment of recognition; then something swinging in from his left. A quick blur. Baseball