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

by Geoff St. Reynard

  Watkins paced the floor after he had eaten, waiting for the sleep gas, determined to combat it if he could. When the drowsiness came, he walked faster. It didn’t do any good. He knew he was sinking to the floor. Powerful stuff, he said to himself, very powerful st—

  * * * *

  Mrs. Full kept close to Calvin all through Sunday. They had been here since Thursday, all these men without women, and she knew there were men who had to have women frequently or they became vicious and could not be stopped by any thought of consequences. The Mexican seemed all right, but you never knew with a person from a Latin country.

  Another facet of the same problem was the fact that she and Calvin were supposed to be on their honeymoon. She faced it: she was frustrated. She wanted a honeymoon, no matter what sort of prison they were in. So after their first meal on Sunday, she asked Calvin to fix up a private apartment in their prison.

  With various materials, plastic blocks and the different sizes of slabs, and some screens of translucent fabric she had dug up in a corner, he made a walled-off compartment just large enough for two.

  Then one of the scientists looked in, saw what he was doing, and promptly knocked it down.

  Adam, who had been helping in the latter stages, squinted at the ceiling of the box. “You know, Mrs. Full, I think they can see us through that. If it’s opaque to us, it still might be transparent to them; like a mirror, I mean, I’ve seen them at home, mirror on one side, window from the other. That’d explain the light we get in here. And if they want to observe us all the time, then this private cell of yours would make ‘em mad.”

  “But it had no roof,” she objected.

  “That’s right.” He shook his head. “Another theory gone poof.”

  “I’ll build it again,” said Calvin stubbornly, and did so. This time the giants left it alone. He and Adam made a screen for the sand box too, and built a permanent grill on one side of the box.

  CHAPTER 8

  By Tuesday they were all in a state of anxiety and scarcely-contained rage. Their surveillance was casual, often non-existent, yet not once had they been able to block the wall of their prison or open the great door of the laboratory. Circumstances, chance, fate, whatever you wanted to call it, something had stopped them every time.

  There were three giants in the lab today. Sometimes there would be one of them, sometimes as many as five; but always there would be the one who had first removed them from the box, who seemed to be the head scientist, giving orders, bullying the others in the queer emotional way of these creatures. Today there were three. As usual, when they had let the humans out, the lab was clean and orderly. The sloppy scientists had very efficient janitors, thought Adam. By this time the place was a shambles.

  Out in the lab, there rose the honking sound of pain and anger—some of the noises they made, especially the commands, were recognizable now to the people—and a sharp slap. Then Mrs. Full hurried into the box, carrying a number of two-foot-square slabs under her arm.

  “What happened, ma’am?”

  “Hello, Adam. The criminal Watkins played a few bars of a real song on that device, and the brutes hit him.” She laid down the slabs. “Our harmonies enrage them, I think perhaps cause them actual pain. They held the sides of their heads where ears ought to be, and shook themselves and made those hideous noises.”

  “They hit me when I sang the other day,” said Adam, “remember?”

  “That’s right. Look here.” She sat down, pulled one of the thick slabs onto her lap. “I found these under a shelf out there. One of the creatures knocked them off and I picked them up. I wondered why they had been up there, when so many stacks of them just sit around on the floor.”

  “I never saw any like these, ma’am. They have that little ridge on the edge there, and the border of different colored stuff around ‘em.”

  “Watch what happens when I push the ridge upward, Adam. It’s like an automatic button.” She pressed it and the slab, at first gay orange, turned pale blue; on it appeared three lines of squiggly characters, like a cross between Arabic writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  “A magic slate,” said Adam. “That’s neat!”

  “You haven’t seen anything yet,” she told him, and pushed the ridge again. The writing disappeared, and out of the slab leered a bull gorilla, paws on chest, eyeing Adam with beady, ridge-browed malevolence. It took a second for sanity to convince him that it was only a picture: three-dimensional, on a two-dimensional sheet of plastic, but so real he half-expected the beast to charge out at him. “What about that?” she asked.

  He hit his thigh with a fist. It was a photograph, he imagined, but made by an illusory process so far ahead of anything humanity could produce that it seemed he might glimpse whatever was behind the gorilla if he put his eyes down to the side of the slate. “Gosh!” he said, feeling it a little naïve but afraid to swear in front of her. “Isn’t that something!”

  “It’s a book,” she said, “an album of photographs. Look here.”

  The next picture was an equally miraculous one of half a dozen monkeys sitting on a tree trunk. Adam looked at it, then at the farthest trunk in their box of a room. Undeniably it was the same one.

  Under the picture was a line of squiggles that probably spelled out the scientists’ equivalent of “monkeys.”

  “They were here, in this place,” said Adam. “The giants must have experimented on them too.” He turned his eyes up to the woman and saw that she was white and drawn. “What happened to them?” he asked. “There aren’t any monkeys here now.”

  “Exactly,” she said. She put on the next picture, and after a moment the next.

  Dogs greeted his eyes, so real he could almost hear them pant; a cow gazed stolidly at him; a cheetah sat on a mound of straw with clown’s head cocked inquisitively; two cockatoos perched in rigid still life on the silver rod of the prison box.

  “What happened to them?” he asked again.

  “The experiments ended,” she said.

  Then there flashed out a thing like a blue sponge with legs, a thing which sat in the cat’s-cradle they had speculated so much about. From its center two ruby eyes blazed with three-dimensional fire. That never came from Earth! Mars or Venus could have produced it, maybe, or a planet so far from Earth that it bore no name. He said as much, his voice quavering.

  She stared at him. Moistening her lips, she said, “If that was here, in this box, then where are we?”

  He shook his head. He could not even guess. “What’s next?”

  The last picture in the slate was a group portrait of himself, the Fulls, Summersby, Watkins, and Porfirio Villa.

  When was that taken? They were sitting in a circle on the straw, eating something. Peering closely, he thought it must be the vegetables, for there was a small heap of round things next to Calvin Full which were probably buckeyes. Sunday night, then.

  “They must have taken it through the food panel,” he said. “Are there any more pictures?”

  “That’s all. I don’t know what’s in the other ones yet.”

  Calvin came in. She handed him the first “book” and showed him how to operate it. He flipped through it and when he came to the monstrosity in the web his eyes widened. “What is it?” he asked, in the hard twang of his region.

  “A guinea pig, like all the others including us,” his wife said.

  “The tree trunks are explained now,” said Adam, half to himself. “The sand box, too. That isn’t a very scientific-looking treatise, but I guess it’s more of a memento, a record of us all.” He raised his brows in a facial shrug. “Us and the monkeys,” he said. “Gosh!”

  * * * *

  She took the next big slate on her lap. It was lavender. The first few pages to appear were covered with the curious writing, very large and only a few words to a page. Then came pictures of many things, not photographs but drawings and paintings in vivid color, and the things could in no way be linked to science. There were portraits of the tall creatur
es themselves, in various settings, some in labs like this one, some outdoors in a landscape that was predominantly scarlet and green; there were group scenes in which they ate odd-looking foods and walked down blue pathways and examined strange pets and familiar animals. Under each picture was a short grouping of squiggles, marks, scribbles, etc.

  “Can that be a science book?” asked Cal, leaning over his wife’s shoulder. The beings were pictured as simply as possible, in no minute detail whatever, and their activities were of the dullest and most prosaic sort.

  This pattern was followed through page after page—a picture (some of them were of things so alien they could not be placed by either the Fulls or himself), a single character, then a short word and another, long or short as the case might be. After a dozen of them had flashed on and off Adam noticed that the large character was always repeated at the beginning of the last word.

  When he realized what it meant, the whole business clicked into focus. The whole damned deal, the lab and the scientists and the experiments and the meaning of the four magic slates, and everything. There was no particular reason why this last slate should have done it, for it was no more suggestive than many other things that he had seen; it was simply the last piece of evidence, the final push that sent him headlong into terrible knowledge.

  Carefully, desperately, he went over it all in his mind, while the Fulls spoke in low tones.

  God, he thought, oh, God! He was shivering now. He was more terrified than he had ever been before. His tongue felt thick.

  The punishments, the high stool and the arbitrary cuffs and swats; the gadgets, the mazes, the puzzles; were they all a part of the conditioning to neurosis of a scientific experiment? They were not.

  * * * *

  Adam had found an answer, the only possible answer. The fourth slate had given it to him, although a hundred hints of it had shown up every day. His psych teacher would be ashamed of him for muddling along so many days, believing in a theory that was so plainly impossible.

  He addressed Mrs. Full. She was a little sharper than her husband, and this was more in her line, too. He had to make her discover the same answer. He had to know it was right. And then he had to get out of that place in a hell of a hurry.

  “Ma’am, you know what this is?”

  “No, Adam.”

  “Look here. See this big letter, repeated at the first of this word?”

  “Yes.”

  He flipped a few “pages” past. “It’s the same with all of them, you see? And the middle word is always the same—four curly letters. You know what that middle word is?”

  “No, Adam.”

  “It’s ‘stands for’ or ‘means.’” He stared at her. “Get it?”

  She thought an instant. “Of course. Adam, that’s very clever of you.” She wasn’t scared yet. She hadn’t seen the implication.

  “‘Stands for’?” Calvin repeated.

  “A stands for Apple,” explained Mrs. Full. “Or A stands for Airship, or whatever it might be. It’s an alphabet book, dear.”

  She still hadn’t caught it. “Remember when Mr. Full built the cubbyhole here,” Adam said, “and the giant knocked it down? Why was he angry?”

  “I suppose they want to observe us without any hindrance.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said with conviction. “That was simple frustration. They want to see everything, whether it’s interesting to them or not. They aren’t scientifically disappointed if they can’t, they’re just frustrated. Think of the punishment we get, slaps, the dunce stool.”

  “As though we were children,” she said.

  “Exactly. Now, here are these books. An alphabet book, and these others. What age would you figure them for? You taught kindergarten, you said. This is something I wouldn’t know.”

  “I’d say they’re for fairly bright children about five or six years old.”

  “Or for us,” said her husband, “when they start to teach us their language.”

  “They are children’s books, though, with short sentences and the gaudy pictures our own children love.” Mrs. Full stared at Adam. Her brown eyes widened. “Adam,” she said, “you’ve guessed something.”

  “You guess it too,” he pleaded. She had to corroborate his own idea. “Think of all the things about them we haven’t been able to make out.”

  “Nursery books....” she said slowly. “Instability to the point of insanity, if you found it in adult humans. Sloppiness and inefficiency, when these machines point to a high degree of neatness of mind. Wandering attention, inability to concentrate for long periods. Positive tantrums over nothing. Cruelty and affection mixed without rhyme or reason.” She took him by the arm, her fingers strong with fear and urgency. “Tell me, Adam.”

  * * * *

  His breath hissed. He was filled with panic. Where there had been only anxiety for his own life and his world, there was now a fearful knowledge that he could scarcely bear without shrieking. She had it too, but she didn’t dare say it. It was a horrible thing.

  “These machines,” he said, “aren’t scientific testers at all.”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re toys.”

  “Yes?”

  “We aren’t guinea pigs. We’re—we’re pets. They’ve had other animals, from Earth and from God knows where, and now they have people.”

  “Yes. Go on, say it.” She thrust her face fiercely up to his.

  “Those twelve-foot ‘scientists’ are kids,” he said. Then he stopped and deliberately got his cracking voice under control. She was just as frightened as he was but she wasn’t yelling. “It’s the only answer. Everything fits it. They’re about five years old.”

  Calvin Full frowned. “If that’s true, we’re in trouble.”

  “You’re damn right we’re in trouble!” said Adam. “A kid doesn’t take care of a pet like a scientist takes care of a guinea pig or a white rat. If it annoys him, he’s liable to pick it up and throw it at a wall! I might get my head torn off for singing, or you could be dismembered for making a mistake with one of those toys.”

  “Some children tear the wings off butterflies,” said Mrs. Full. She stood up. “I’ll go and tell the others,” she said firmly. “It doesn’t seem to me that we have much time left.”

  “If we start to bore them—” began Adam, and shut up.

  She went out. In about five minutes everyone had come into the box but Watkins, who was playing the color organ. They discussed the discovery in low voices, as though the alien children might be listening; Villa and Summersby examined the slates. After a while Watkins was pushed in, looking rather worn and frayed. Adam was standing in the far corner under the silver web. He saw the wall start to slide shut, remembered his dowel, and tried to see if it was still in place at the bottom of the wall.

  He couldn’t see it. Maybe it blended with the color behind it, or maybe somebody had accidentally kicked it out of place.

  The wall slid shut.

  CHAPTER 9

  Summersby was losing the sense of being apart, of having no problems no matter what happened. These people had drawn him into their trouble against his will; the situation was so bad that he could no longer tell himself he didn’t give a damn. So he had a bad heart! He couldn’t turn his back on these poor devils because of that. It was stupid and selfish. He felt sorry for them. He was uncomfortable with them, as he always was with standard-sized people, and he would still repel any attempt on their part to get close to him; but he was a little chastened by what he had been through. He recognized that.

  It was all very well to say he didn’t care where he died, but it would be a hell of a lot more dignified to accomplish it as a free man, rather than as a harried rabbit. Even if he were killed trying to escape, it would be endurable. But if his heart gave out while he was, say, trundling up and down the nursery in that ridiculous little auto thing, he knew his last breath would be a bitter one.

  Adam had just said, “I laid a rod across the sill there.” Summersby walked
to the wall, which appeared to be closed as usual. Just as he came to it, he caught the sheen of metal in a thin line up the corner, and knew that he was seeing part of one of the machines in the nursery. The dowel had held the door.

  Something moved outside; he could hear the dull slap of immense flat feet. They were going to be fed. He strolled away from the corner, saying quietly, “It worked, Adam. Don’t check it now, though.”

  The small panel opened and one of the garishly hued platters was put in, loaded with a wriggling, seething mass of grubs and half-dead locusts.

  “Supper?” cried Villa. “This is supper? Do they think we are a lot of African natives?”

  “Well,” said Adam, “I guess they were fooled by me.” It was the first time he had made any sort of joke about his color. Possibly, thought Summersby, he’s becoming one of the group, as I am. God knows the kid has as much reason to be bitter about people as I have; or more reason. It’s put him on the defensive.

  Summersby felt more chastened than ever.

  No one cared to sample the insects. They walked away from the platter and hoped aloud that their captors would see the refusal and give them something else, but nothing was pushed in. After a quarter of an hour Watkins said, “Think it’s safe to have a try at the door?”

  “No,” said Summersby.

  Watkins jumped to his feet. “Listen, I’ve had all I can stomach of you!” he yelled. “If you don’t want to help, okay, but keep your nose—”

  “I was going to say that they’ll be pumping in the sleep gas pretty soon, and we don’t know whether they do it from outside the nursery or outside this box.”

  “That’s right,” said Calvin Full.

  Watkins eyed him a moment. “I’m sorry, Summersby,” he said then. “I shot off my mouth too quick.”

  “They filled the nursery with it once,” went on Summersby, “but it seems logical to think they could also let it into this room alone. Maybe it works on them, maybe not; if it does, then they wouldn’t flood the nursery with it every night, because the adults have to come in and clean the place up.”