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

by Geoff St. Reynard

  “We can make a fire,” said Calvin. Watkins was a little surprised that it was Cal who made the suggestion first, but the Vermont man added, “I’ve made enough campfires to know something about it.”

  “Mr. Full is an enthusiastic hunter,” said his wife.

  “A fire of what?” asked Villa, managing to look starved, helpless, and wistful, all at once.

  Summersby said, “There are plates of plastic over there, and plenty of short rods. I don’t know what these beasts use them for, but if they’re fireproof, we can construct a grill with them.” He went without further talk to a stack of the multicolored slabs and dowels, which lay beside a neat array of what looked like conduit pipes, electromagnets, and coiled cable. He picked up an armload. One of the giants put a hand down before him. He pushed it aside and strode back to the group. Gutty, thought Watkins, or just hungry? Or is it his sense of kismet?

  “I’ll cut some kindling from the trees in our room,” said Calvin. “Who has a knife?”

  Summersby handed him a large pocket knife, and set about making a grill over two of the plastic slabs. It was a workmanlike job when he had finished. He held his lighter under one of the rods, which was apparently impervious to fire. He nodded to himself. Looks more human, thought Watkins, than he has yet.

  Villa was plucking one of the chickens, humming to himself. Mrs. Full was working on another, Adam on the third. Watkins felt useless, and sat down, running his fingers along the smooth side of his briefcase.

  Cal made a heap of chips and pieces of wood and bark under the grill. Summersby lit it. The giants, who were grouped around them at a few yards’ distance, mumbled among themselves as the shavings took flame. The plucked and drawn fowls were laid on the grill. Watkins’ mouth began to water.

  “Now if we only had some coffee,” he said to Adam. “One lousy pot of greasy-spoon coffee!”

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 6

  “I have seen you,” said Villa to Adam, who was gnawing on a drumstick. “You wear the wig and a bone in the nose, and a tigerskin around you.”

  “Sure,” said Adam. “I’m the Wild Man from Zululand. It’s one job where my color’s an advantage.”

  “A fine job!” said Villa. “You should have come down to my stand. The best chili in New York.”

  “I had a bowl there last week. Without my make-up, I mean.”

  “I will give you a bowl free when we go home. With tacos,” added Villa generously.

  “It’s good stuff,” said the boy.

  Calvin Full wiped his fingers and his lips on a handkerchief. He looked about at the hall, through which the giants had now scattered; some of them were tinkering with the machines, others were simply loitering, as if bored by the whole matter of scientific research. They had lost their early wariness of the humans, and did not carry the green goads, but kept them tucked into holsters at the back of their swishing skirts.

  One of them removed the blond man, Watkins, and set him to doing something with a pipe-and-block apparatus. The processes they went through with their strange mechanical and electrical gadgets, the end results they achieved, were a mystery to Calvin. And as the afternoon wore on, their conduct as a whole became even more mysterious. It was, from human standards, totally irrational. One would begin a test, analysis, or whatever it might be; he would follow it through its devious windings to its ambiguous result, or to no result, and suddenly leave it to begin something else, or come to watch the humans perform.

  * * * *

  The longer he observed their conduct, the more worried he became. Finally, after a good bit of hiding and spying, he found out something which he had been trying to figure for hours; and then it seemed time for him to talk to someone about their escape.

  The blond man had been peering into his briefcase. He zipped it shut quickly as Calvin approached, with a kind of guilty movement. What does he have in there? Calvin wondered.

  “Mr. Watkins,” he said, rubbing his chin and wishing he had a razor, “did you ever see a scientist, or laboratory assistant, skip from one thing to another as these creatures do?”

  “I never did.”

  “Nor did I. They don’t take care of their equipment, either; several times one or another has kicked down a neat pile of gear, and once I distinctly heard something break.”

  “It might be junked machinery,” suggested Watkins.

  “I doubt it.”

  One of the giants made a raucous noise—Brangg!

  “And how irritable they are, in addition to their capriciousness and sloppiness! I can’t imagine a race of emotional misfits producing equipment of such complexity. Their science is beyond ours in many ways, yet look at this place.” He made a broad gesture. “When we were let out this morning, it was clean and well ordered. I’ve inspected dairies that were far dirtier. Now it’s a hodge-podge of scattered materials, upset stacks of gear, tipped-over instruments. What sort of mind can bear such confusion?”

  Watkins smiled. “The minds that conceived—well, that vertical maze, for instance—must be orderly after a fashion, even though it isn’t the human fashion.”

  “This is far from what I wanted to say, though. Have you been noticing the door?”

  “There isn’t much to notice. It’s a sliding panel like our wall.”

  “When one of the creatures leaves, he passes his right hand across what is evidently an electric eye beam, as nearly as I can place it about ten or eleven feet off the floor. That opens the door.”

  “Good going, Cal!” said Watkins. “I hadn’t seen ‘em do it.”

  “Our try for escape should be made as soon as possible,” went on Calvin in a low voice. “As we’ve talked about, the object of these tests and experiments may be to infect us with neuroses—” Watkins grinned again—“I know my phrasing isn’t right,” said Calvin stiffly, “but I never looked into such matters. There’s also Summersby’s suggestion about the fate of guinea pigs. So I think we’d better try to get out right away.”

  “With five of them here?”

  “If we have any luck, we may find an opportunity, yes. Occasionally they get absorbed in something, and that door makes no noise.”

  Watkins looked at his briefcase uncertainly. “Okay,” he said finally. “May as well try it. Though God knows where we are when we do get out of the lab.”

  Calvin congratulated himself on his choice of an ally. “Good man,” he said.

  In the next hour they managed to build a crude platform beside the door, of various boxlike things, nondescript plastic blocks and impedimenta. The giants didn’t even look at them. They were, indeed, a strange race. Now the platform was high enough so that Calvin felt he could reach the opening ray.

  Summersby wandered over. “What are you doing?” he asked, seeming to force out the question from politeness, not curiosity.

  “We’re going to make a break, High-pockets,” said Watkins. “Want to help?”

  “They won’t let you,” said the big man.

  “We can try, can’t we?” asked Watkins hotly.

  “It’s your neck.”

  “Listen, you may be the size of a water buffalo, but if Cal and Adam and I piled on you, you’d go down all right. Why don’t you cooperate?”

  Summersby stared at him a moment and Calvin thought he was going to say something, something that would be important; but he shrugged and went across the hall and into the prison box.

  “What’s eating that big bastard, anyway?” said Watkins.

  Calvin believed he knew, but it was not his secret; it was Summersby’s. He said nothing.

  “Watch it,” said Watkins. “They’re coming.” The two men scurried behind their rampart. The five giants marched, flat-footed, down the hall, their thick arms swinging. The door opened and all of them went out. It closed behind them.

  “How about that!” said Watkins exultantly, a grin on his face.

  “I’ll get Mrs. Full and the others,” said Calvin. He felt a tingle of rising excitement. “Get up
there and be ready to open it. We’ll give them five minutes and then make our break.”

  “Right.” Watkins was already clambering up the boxes and blocks.

  Calvin almost ran to his wife. She was standing in front of the color organ. “Dear,” he said, and halted.

  “Yes, what is it, Calvin?”

  “I don’t know. I was going to say—”

  A sluggishness was pervading his body, a terrible lassitude crept through his brain. What was it? What was happening?

  “I was going to—”

  He caught her as she slumped, but could not hold up her weight, and sank to the floor beside her. His eyes blinked a couple of times. Then knowledge and sensation vanished together.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  Tom Watkins awoke slowly. He had a cramp in one arm from sleeping on it, but otherwise he was conscious of a comfortable, healthy feeling, which told him he’d slept well and long. He stretched and brushed a few pieces of straw from his face.

  Straw?

  He suddenly remembered sitting down on their platform, very sleepy and worried because of the abruptness of it.

  He sat up. Summersby had just stood, yawning. “Did you carry me in here?” he asked the big man.

  “I was going to ask you that.”

  “Christ! What happened?” He was wholly awake now. “Did you drop off out in the lab?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So’d I,” said Adam. He was sitting next to the Mexican, whom he now pushed gently. “You okay, Porfirio?”

  Villa erupted with a grunt. The Fulls were looking at each other owlishly.

  And then it hit him. Watkins twisted, cased the floor, and saw nothing but straw and fountain and tree trunks. He was literally staggered, and nearly lost his balance.

  His briefcase was gone!

  He stared about wildly, panic lifting in him like a swift debilitating disease. Then he took four fast steps and grabbed Summersby by the coat. It was queer, but he didn’t even think of anyone else having taken it. Summersby towered over him, but he could be brought down.

  “Okay, you skyscraper,” said Watkins, “where’d you put it?”

  “Put what?”

  “My case! Where is it?”

  “I never touched your damned case.”

  Well, Watkins could smell honesty, and here it was. That startled amazement was genuine. He glared at Adam Pierce, Villa, the Fulls. Not that last pair, surely! As rock-ribbed and staunchly honest as their New England coasts, and about as imaginative. Not the colored boy, either, a good kid; and he didn’t think it was Villa.

  “We must have been carried in here by the scientists,” said Adam rationally. “Maybe they left it outside.”

  That was logical. But he’d had a death-grip on the handle when he fell asleep, just as he always did. He looked at them all again. He went from wall to wall, kicking the straw. Then he scowled at the sand box, the only place a thing that size could be stashed away. He was suddenly on his knees, tossing sand left and right.

  Avoiding certain places, he checked the pile. Nothing! Not a scrap of leather or a piece of green paper!

  “If you are through,” said Villa heavily, “I wish to use the box.”

  “Go ahead, Viva.” Watkins walked across the room, groping for a cigarette, then remembering he had none left. “What happened out there?” he asked loudly. “Were we doped? Something in the chickens?”

  “We were awake for a long time after we ate,” said Adam. “Not even these people could make a drug act on six of us in the same minute, after that long; too many differences in metabolism. If that’s the word I want.”

  “They weren’t even in the room when we dropped off,” said Mrs. Full.

  * * * *

  That was a tip-off. Watkins momentarily forgot his great loss. “They left, and in a minute, we were asleep. They must have pumped some sort of gas into the lab. Sleep gas.”

  “Is there such a thing?” asked Cal. “An anesthetic vapor that would permeate such a large place so quickly?”

  “Is there such a thing as a four dimensional maze?” asked Adam shortly.

  Watkins grinned. He wasn’t the only one who needed his morning coffee.

  Then he thought of his briefcase again. He tried to push the moving wall to one side; no go. He got mad again. “It’s no good to them,” he said. “What do they want with it?”

  “It couldn’t have been so important that—” began Full.

  “Important?” Watkins was yelling now, and although he disliked raising his voice and making scenes, he did it now, with furious pleasure. “Cal, you never saw anything more important in your life than that case, and I don’t care how many blue-ribboned cows you’ve gaped at!”

  “What was in it?” asked Villa.

  “Money, goddammit, money!” It didn’t matter if his secret came out now. In this insane place, God knew where, the cautious habits of half a lifetime slid away. “The best haul I’d made this year. The contents of the safe of Roscoe & Bates, that’s what was in it! Better than twenty-two thousand in good, green cash!”

  “The contents of a safe?” Calvin Full frowned. “You mean you were a messenger, taking it somewhere, and got on that roller coaster with—”

  Adam Pierce laughed abruptly. “No, he wasn’t a messenger,” he said. “He wasn’t any messenger. He’s a safe-cracker. Mr. Watkins, what good do you think it’d do you in here?”

  “We’ll get back.”

  “You’re a safe-cracker?” asked Mrs. Full, her pale face lengthening with horror, disgust, and fear. “A criminal?”

  “In a manner of speaking, ma’am,” said Tom Watkins, “I am.”

  “I’ll be hanged,” said Summersby. “And you accused me of stealing your loot. I ought to butter you all over the wall.”

  “You try it, you overgrown galoot. I didn’t do a hitch in the Philippines for nothing.” Watkins smoothed back his hair, which was dangling into his eyes. “Sure, I’m a safe man. Don’t worry, Mrs. Full, that doesn’t mean I’m a thug.” She looked scared.

  “That’s right,” said Adam, still chuckling. “This boy’s the aristocracy of crime. You don’t have to worry about your purse. He only plays around with big stuff.”

  Tom flipped him a grin. “I’ll bet you even know why I was on the coaster.”

  “Sure. You were hiding out.”

  “That’s it. If I kept out of sight till dark I was okay. They were out for me, because my touch is known; but who’d think of checking an amusement park?” He turned as Cal made a noise in his throat. The Vermonter was a study in outraged sensibilities.

  “You—you swine,” he said, a typical Victorian hero facing the mustache-twisting villain. “You stole that money—”

  “My morals and your morals, Cal,” said Watkins as genially as he could, “are probably divergent, but it doesn’t make a whale of a difference now, does it?”

  Full turned to his wife and began to mutter to her.

  Villa said, “I don’t like crooks, I run a respectable stand and I am an honest man,” and scratching his hand where the healed burn was, he turned away likewise. Summersby was sitting on the tire, and only Adam looked sympathetic. The boy wasn’t crooked, that was plain, but Watkins had the glamor that a big-time thief has for the young, the fake aura of Robin-Hoodism.

  He shook his head. He’d had to spill it. For a while they’d trusted him and now he was a pariah.

  The food panel opened and something plumped in. Watkins glanced at his chronograph. Ten o’clock Saturday. He went over to the food.

  It was a big, glossy chocolate-brown vulture with a blue head.

  “Well,” said Adam. “Well, now, I don’t know.”

  “They pulled a boner this time,” said Watkins. “Unless it’s part of the conditioning.”

  Villa picked it up. “It weighs many pounds. It’s warm, just killed. I don’t want any of it.” He dropped it on the straw. “With my spices, perhaps; but not cooked on that grill, without sau
ce and spice. Aargh!”

  Watkins thought, Amen to that. He rubbed the sandy bristles on his chin. No razor or soap here. It dawned on him that he was thirsty, and he went to the fountain. As it always did when he bent over to drink, the curious web of silver strands in the corner caught his eye. There were so many puzzles about this damned lab that he despaired of ever solving all of them.

  After fifteen minutes, the wall opened. They went out, Villa carrying the vulture. He flung it at the feet of the chief scientist, who was there with two associates.

  “No!” he bellowed up at it. “We do not eat this!” He articulated slowly, clearly, as though to a foreigner with a slim knowledge of English. It picked up the great bird and regarded it closely, then without warning threw it at one of the other giants.

  The vulture caught it on the side of the head and knocked it off balance; falling to its knees, it bleated out an angry sound and dived for the boss’ legs. They went down together in a gargantuan scrimmage that made the humans dance backward to avoid being smashed by the thick swinging arms.

  Tom Watkins walked off, unimpeded, to look for his briefcase. It was nowhere in the lab. He cursed bitterly. Twenty-two grand, up the spout.

  The head scientist, having chastised the other, left the room; Watkins had a glimpse of another fully as large, with something like a big table therein. Shortly the creature returned, carrying in one arm a load of wood chips, and in the other a bulgy, leathery thing that turned out to be a partially stunned octopus, still dripping the waters of an unknown ocean.

  They killed it, rebuilt their grill (larger this time), and cut up the octopus and cooked and ate it. It wasn’t as bad as Watkins had feared.

  After a dragging day, they were locked into their box—no one had a chance to gimmick the wall, for the giant were watching them closely—and shortly afterward a load of raw vegetables was dumped in.