The 53rd Golden Age of Science Fiction MEGAPACK; Geoff St. Reynard

by Geoff St. Reynard

  The blond man stooped and picked up a leather handbag from the straw. “This it?” She took it and rummaged inside before she said, “Thank you.”

  “I don’t like all this,” said the Negro boy. “Where are we? I got to get back to my job. Where’s the door?”

  * * * *

  “Come on,” said the man with the briefcase shortly, “let’s get out of here and find out what’s what.” He was going along the wall, pushing and rapping it. “How did they cop us, that’s what I’d like to know. All I remember is hitting the bottom of that big dip, and then I was waking up in here.” He stopped, then said sharply, “I hear something moving. My God! It sounds as big as an elephant.”

  Then the wall began to glide noiselessly and smoothly to the left, and he scuttled back to the knot of them, looking over his shoulder.

  The entire wall slid sideways and vanished, leaving an open end to the room through which Summersby could see a number of large structures that seemed to be machinery, painted various colors. There was no sign of movement. He wondered, in a quiet, detached way, what sort of people might be out there.

  “It sounded big,” said the blond man again, and looked up at Summersby.

  “I am six feet five,” said Summersby bleakly. “Whoever it is will have to go some to top me.”

  * * * *

  An unknown thing moved beyond the room with a brief shuffling sound and then a hand came in through the open end. It was on an arm with a wrist the thickness of Summersby’s biceps, an arm two yards long with no indication that it might not be even longer. The hand itself was a foot and a half broad, with a prehensile thumb at either side. Summersby did not notice how many fingers it had. The backs of the fingers and the whole great arm were covered with a thick gray-black thatch of coarse hair, and the naked palm was gun-metal gray. Between one thumb and finger it held a long green rod that was tipped by an ivory-colored ball.

  There was no sign of anyone looking in, only the incredible arm and hand.

  The others cried out and drew together. Summersby stood still, watching the hand. It poked the stick forward in short jabs, once just missing his head. Then it made a wide sweep and the stick collided with the fat Mexican. He squealed, and at once the hand shot forward, exposing still more of the thick arm, and prodded him away from the group. He skipped toward a far corner, but the stick had him now and was tapping him relentlessly toward the open end.

  “Amigos!” he yelled, his voice full of anguish. “Por favor, save me!”

  “Go along with it peaceably,” advised the Negro youth frightenedly. “Don’t get it annoyed.” He was shaking and his glasses kept sliding down his sweaty nose so that he had to push them up continually.

  “What is it?” the woman was asking, over and over.

  The Mexican was driven to the edge of the room. The place beyond seemed to be much larger than their prison. He waved his hands despairingly.

  “Now, quick, you have only a momentito to save me! Don’t stand there!”

  The stick touched him and he jumped as if he had been shocked. The wall began to slide into place again.

  “Let’s rush it,” said the man with the briefcase suddenly.

  “Why?” asked Summersby. The wall closed and they were alone, staring at one another.

  * * * *

  “There wasn’t anything we could do,” the Negro said. “It happened too quick. But if it comes in again we better fight it.” He looked around, plainly expecting to be contradicted. “We can’t get split up like this.”

  “Possibly one of us can suggest something,” said the husband. He was a sober-looking man of about twenty-eight or thirty, with a face veneered by stubborn patience. “We should make a real try at escape.”

  “We know where the door is, at least,” said the blond man. He went to the sliding wall and threw his weight obliquely against it. “Give me a hand here, will you, big fellow?”

  “You won’t move it that way,” said Summersby. He sat down on the automobile tire, which seemed to have been chewed on by some large animal. “It’s probably electrically operated.”

  “We can try, can’t we?”

  Summersby did not answer. In one corner, six feet off the floor, was a thing he had not noticed before, a network of silver strands like an enormous spider’s web or a cat’s cradle. He stared at it, but after the first moment he did not actually see it. He was thinking of the forest, and wishing dully that he might have died there.

  The woman spoke sharply, intruding on his detachment; he hoped someone would sit on her. “Will you please do something, Calvin! We must get out of this place.”

  “Where are we, anyway?” asked the Negro boy, who looked about nineteen, a tall, well-built youth with beautiful hands. “How’d they get us here? And what was that thing that took the Mex?”

  “It doesn’t matter where we are,” snapped the woman.

  “Yes, it does, ma’am,” said the youth. “We got to know how they brought us here before we can escape.”

  “The hell we do,” said the blond man. “We can’t guess our location until we get out. I think you’re right about the door,” he told Summersby. “There isn’t any lock to it you could reach from inside. The mechanism for sliding and locking must be inside the wall itself. Nothing short of a torch will get through to it.” He came over to Summersby. “We’ll have to gimmick it next time it opens.”

  “With what?” asked the woman’s husband.

  “Something small, so it won’t be noticed.”

  “Your briefcase?” suggested the husband, who had a hard New England twang.

  “No, chum,” said the blond man, “not my briefcase.”

  “Hey, look,” said the Negro. “What happened, anyway? I remember the coaster hitting the dip and then nothing, no wind or motion, until I woke up here. And it’s two days later.”

  “I lost consciousness at the same place,” said the New Englander.

  “Something was done to knock us out,” said the blond man. “Then we must have been taken off the cars at the end of the ride, and brought here.” He rubbed his chin, which was stubbled with almost invisible whiskers. “That’s impossible, on the face of it,” he went on, “but it must be the truth.” He grinned; it was the first time Summersby had seen any of them smile. “Unless I’m in a hatch,” he said.

  “Are we in South America? Or Africa?” asked the Negro.

  “Why?”

  “That hand!”

  “Yeah,” said the blond man, “that never grew on anything American.” The colored boy looked at him, ready to take offence. “Could it be a freak gorilla?”

  “That size and with two thumbs?” asked the boy. “And what would it be doing roaming around loose?”

  “Could it be a machine?” asked the husband. “A robot?” His wife screamed, and Summersby got up and went over to the door, getting as far as possible from them. His stomach was a hard ball of hunger, and he wished he were a thousand miles away. Anywhere.

  “That hand was alive,” said the Negro. “I never saw anything like it in biology, but I’d sure love to dissect it. Did you see those two thumbs? I don’t know any animal that has two thumbs.”

  “Would you come over, sir?” called the New Englander. Summersby realized he was talking to him. “We must plan a course of action.” Reluctantly Summersby joined them. “My name is Calvin Full, sir, and this is Mrs. Full.”

  Summersby took his hand; it was dry and had a preciseness about its grip that irritated him. “John Summersby.”

  “I’m a milk inspector. My wife and I were on our honeymoon,” said Full. “I work through the southern portions of Vermont; that’s in the New York milk shed, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m a forest ranger,” said Summersby. Retired, he thought bitterly, pensioned off to die with a rotten heart. They couldn’t even let a man die on the job, in the woods.

  “My work,” said Calvin Full, “consists of watching for unsanitary and unsterile practices, making tuberculin
tests, and so forth. I’m afraid I’m not much good at this sort of emergency.”

  His wife, who had been looking as if she would scream again, turned to him. Her almost-pretty face, cleared of fright, was swept by pride. “You’re as brave as the next man, Calvin, and as clever. You’ll get us home.”

  “I hope so, dear. But Mr. Summersby must be a great deal more used to problems of this sort.”

  They all gaped up at him expectantly. Because of his size, of course; he was the big born leader! “Sir” in trouble, “High-pockets” when things were clear again. The hell with them. He kept his mouth shut.

  The blond man said, “I’m Tom Watkins.”

  “Adam Pierce,” said the Negro.

  “What do you do, Adam?”

  The boy pushed his glasses up on his nose again, frowning. “I go to C.C.N.Y. Summers, I’m the Wild Man from Zululand in the sideshow, and I shill for the coaster when I’m not on duty. It helps out my family some, for me to be making money in the summers.”

  “Are you taking subjects that might help us?” asked Full.

  “I major in English. I’m going to teach it when I graduate. Then I take psych, biology, the usual courses.”

  “Hmm,” said Watkins, looking at the end of the room through which the Mexican had been taken. “Psych and biology. Could be some use here.”

  “What we need is a locksmith,” said Summersby. He felt himself unwillingly drawn into the group, sharing their problems that were not his, and it angered him. He fished out a bent pack of cigarettes, lit one and was about to put the rest away.

  “Nothing but a torch would help. I know a little about locks myself.” Watkins grinned genially. “I’m out of smokes,” he said, and Summersby gave him the pack. He took one and passed it to Full, who declined. Adam took one. The boy reached up and pushed at his glasses again; a look of irritation appeared on his face. “Say,” he muttered, “is this room a little wobbly, or is it my eyes?”

  “Wobbly?”

  “Wavy. See how those tree trunks are blurred?”

  “You need your glasses changed, Adam,” said Watkins.

  “No, sir.” Adam took them off and started to polish them on a handkerchief; then his brown eyes opened wide. “I can see!” he said. The others stared at him. “My astigmatism’s gone! My glasses make everything blur, but I can see plain as noon without ‘em. Look, I’ve had astigmatism since I was a kid!”

  “What happened?” asked the woman, addressing her husband. “How could that be, Calvin?”

  “Don’t know, dear.”

  “My headache is gone,” she said. “I never realized it till this boy mentioned his eyes.”

  “Mrs. Full has suffered from an almost constant headache for years,” said Calvin, and sniffed twice. “My post-nasal drip is missing, too. Do you suppose my sinus trouble is cleared up?”

  “That’s what must have been happening those two days we were out,” said Watkins, knocking ash from his cigarette. “We were put through a hospital or something. I feel good, even if I’m damned hungry.”

  Summersby looked from one to another, detesting them; against his will, against sanity and decency that fought for recognition, he detested them. He had a heart for which there was no help, a heart no two-day period of miraculous cures could touch. Their puny ailments had been relieved, but he was still at the slow, listless task of dying.

  “Listen,” said Watkins jubilantly, “whoever or whatever brought us here, it’s a cinch they don’t mean to harm us. They wouldn’t mend us if they were going to hurt us, would they?”

  “In two days,” said Adam, nodding hard. “Two days! How could they do it?”

  There was an air of near-gaiety about them that repelled Summersby. In a desperate rebellion against these boons handed out to everyone but himself, he tried to hurt them. “What do you do to a duck before you cook it? Clean it. Think that over.”

  Adam Pierce looked at him levelly. “No, sir. If that duck has sinus trouble or bad eyes, you don’t have to fix that up before you eat it. No, sir.”

  “What about the Mexican?” Summersby asked. “What’s happened to him?”

  Then the wall slid open again and they all started forward; Summersby looked after them bitterly, feeling the resentment drain out and leave only the old hopelessness, the apathetic disregard of everything but death.

  CHAPTER 2

  Porfirio Villa had known from the first that this adventure of his was a mistake. His wife had told him to stay off the roller coaster, but he had sneered. What could happen? The people always got off again, laughing and wiping their brows. He had the bad burn on his left hand, caused by an accidental smacking of the steam table in a rage at his fool of a helper;—that idiot who now had had charge of the stand for two days! lodo feo!—and so, enforced to a vacation, he must step into the cars and go crawling up that terrible incline, giggling nervously, and then rush madly down the other side. Dreaming is better than doing; he should have stayed in his chili stand and dreamed of the ride.

  Por Dios! What a terror the rising, what a discomfort the drop, what a fearful thing the disappearance of the park and the awakening in this place ... this place a man could not believe in, though he stood upon its floor and gazed round-eyed, with sweating lips and shaking hands, upon its size, its devices for unknown purposes, its impossible inhabitant!

  The thing was twelve feet tall. Was it a machine? He had seen machines in the revistas and the cinema, looking much like this one, a clumsy copy of a man moving, speaking, tearing people to pieces. There was also King Kong, who resembled this thing.

  If it was not alive, it moved very creditably. The gray-furred legs were long and thin, placed on the sides of the body at the waist; the arms, much thicker than the legs, swung very low, and must be fully eight feet long. It was backing from him slowly, holding out one hand—six fingers and two thumbs, demonio!—with the green stick. That stick stung like a bee when it touched you.

  The monster was already a good distance away. Porfirio cast his eyes slyly to one side, the other. There was a complication of machinery so great that even a teacher of mechanics would be dismayed.

  There! A hole between two pink walls. He glanced once at the thing, standing now with its impossible face turned down to him, and then he ran for the hole.

  It was after him with a short cry, but he reached the hole and scuttled through. Four paths faced him. What a time for decisions! He took the left-hand path, went round several turns, came to two more openings. The pink walls were smooth and featureless, well over his head so that he could not tell where he was. He ran like the mouse in the game next to his chili stand, the game in which suckers bet on which escape—the red, green, blue or white—the mouse would choose. Paths opened and Porfirio plunged on, losing his sense of direction, becoming more terrified as he went. His famished guts dragged him down, made him a weak frightened mouse indeed.

  He panted past two doorways and abruptly, like the flashing of a pigeon’s wing, the greenstick shot down before him, held in that monstrous gray hand!

  The stick appeared and disappeared, herding him, chivvying him from place to place, all places looking alike, till finally the great room lay again before his eyes. Whimpering, he stepped out of the pink maze and leaned against the wall, his chest and belly heaving. He was done. Let it murder him. A man could not run forever.

  The brute stood over him. Cautiously it brought its face down to peer. Its eyes were set in deep pits, there was a hole between them, and far below in the watermelon-shaped head, a mouth like a man’s with lips the color of rust on iron.

  Panting, he gazed at it, then flung up one arm in a futile blow that fell short by two feet. The thing was angering him. Let it watch out for itself!

  A hand, unnoticed, had crept round behind him and now took him by the back of the shirt, belt, and trousers, and lifted him off the floor. He regretted the useless punch. Now he would be dead.

  The monster inspected him, prodding aside his bedraggled collar poi
nts and digging gently at his belly with the rod, which did not sting him this time. It made a sound from its mouth like the last weak bellow of a dying toro—“Mmwaa gnaa!” then set him down once more with a thump that jolted his teeth, nearly fractured his ankles.

  Maria y José, but it moved as fast as a lizard’s tongue! Escape was beyond hope.

  It backed away from him, stood by a huge box and gestured with the green stick. It wanted him to come. He walked toward it. The box was enormous, oblong, like a huge shoe box. Only when he had come to it did he realize it was the room in which he had awakened earlier.

  In this hall it was lost. Untouched by the monster, he looked at the hall with seeing eyes for the first time. It had yellow walls and a gray roof, like the box. He clapped a hand to his head. Like a theater without seats! Over ten varas high, thirty broad and forty long: or he should say, being a man of the States now for many years, roughly thirty feet by seventy-five by a hundred. Scattered here and there in staggering confusion were the machines, the gadgets, the unknown things. All colors he had ever seen were there. It was gaudy as the amusement park, but slicker and more fresh-looking.

  The creature laid a hand on the box, and the wall began to slide open. He looked up, and it gestured, telling him as plainly as words to go in. He was to enter again. It seemed as happy a thing to him as the breaking of a Christmas piñata.

  He braced himself now. He had emerged, while they had cowered behind, refusing him aid. Worms that they were, he would show them the bearing of a hero, one who had braved mysterious dangers while all others trembled. He sucked in his belly, threw forward his chest, placed his fists carefully on his hips and strutted into the strawed room, turning his head proudly from side to side. He heard the wall close behind him.

  The worms came crowding to him.

  “What is it? What happened?”

  Porfirio Villa, adventurer, laughed. The relief that washed through him was making him shake, his empty stomach still heaved after the panic, but from somewhere in his soul he dredged up the casual laugh. “Very little happened,” he said. “Truly very little of interest.”