by Jerry
How do I know? That boy playing catch in the back yard of the Gruener home was the same boy I saw the first time, exactly. But the other boy, who was playing catch with him; I didn’t see him the first time, because he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere; he didn’t exist. But he does now, and I know who he is; there’s no mistaking the resemblance. He’s the first boy’s brother. They’re alike as twins, though not the same height; the second boy is younger, by a year or so, I’d say. They’re nice kids; I’m certain of that. And I’m certain that if old Mr. Gruener could see them, he’d be happy and proud of his grandchildren—both of them.
No one really believes me, and I can’t blame them, I guess. Some people even think my story is a psychopathic excuse for failure; time is moving on and there’s still an “Assistant” in front of my title. I wish I could say that Ted Haymes is grateful for that, and, while I doubt it, maybe he is. All morning, the day after I’d told him about Gruener’s ghost, he’d amuse the whole office every chance he got by staring fatuously past my shoulder in horror as though he’d suddenly seen a ghost. With Ted, that kind of juvenile joke would ordinarily continue for weeks; but after I steered him off his sampling plan that afternoon, and explained why I had, he never pulled his joke again.
I doubt that it was from gratitude, but I do think he got a glimpse of the truth of what happened to me and was a little scared, for the same reason I was. And maybe from now on he’ll be a little different sort of person, too; I really can’t say.
But I’m grateful to Gruener, anyway. There in my living room he and I once stood at a crossroads together; and the decision I reached sent him in the direction, finally, that his whole life had led up to; he could not escape it. But when I understood what had happened, I took the other road, while I still had the chance. So I’m grateful to Harris Gruener and sorry for him, too. There is a tide, all right, but whether a man should take it or not depends on where he wants to go.
THE MOEBIUS ROOM
Robert Donald Locke
It was more than a vicious circle—it was a vicious square
THE prisoner awoke beneath a glaring white bulb. He was immediately relieved to discover he was alone. The room, simply furnished and minus doors or windows, had blue walls that were bare except for a photograph—in medaled uniform—of the country’s leader. For furniture, there was the army cot on which the prisoner lay, a lavatory, and a writing desk with chair in the center.
Sitting up, the prisoner examined his clothing. At some time his captors had stripped him of his dingy blue serge business suit and provided him with gray denim and felt sandals. A search through his pockets produced cigarettes, a lighter and a stubby yellow pencil.
His chest began to ache and he stood up to exercise. The air, fresh and fairly cool, filled his lungs. He wondered if he had been drugged yet and recalled with a shudder what he had heard about the pharmacoepia of interrogation. After the sweat came, he buried his face in the lavatory’s nozzle spray.
Revived, the man studied his prison further. In one corner a trapdoor opened through the ceiling. He walked over and looked up; but, he could see nothing.
Shrugging, he sat down at the writing desk and laid a sheet of paper before him. Taking out the yellow pencil, he tried to review the day’s events. What had happened? Where was he? Before his eyes there flowed a series of esoteric symbols, born from the nervous scribblings of his hand—but they were not recognizable in full.
He had been a mathematician, then.
But of what nationality? He found he had no recollection of his capture, or how he had been brought to this room. He was not even able to visualize his captors’ appearance. In that case, narcotics had been used on him; possibly, several. Lethene, to destroy the details of his imprisonment; and probably race-folia, to injure his will to resist.
Then, his eye happened to meet the photograph of the nation’s leader. A memory was rewakened that racked his body with shudders. He trembled in ague. There would be an interrogation. He ceased writing, aware now there would be no further clues buried in the engrams of his fingers. . . .
A CLANGING metallic sound behind him startled his nerves at that moment, so the prisoner’s body froze in fear. As the hackles rose, he knew instantly that his control of cortical-thalamic responses had been severely damaged. His animal-like reaction to the unknown noise told him he could no longer rely upon his mind to ignore any pain reported by his nerve ends. Interrogation, if it came, would now be an ordeal out of the Middle Ages. Summoning all the willpower that remained in his spent nervous system, the prisoner forced his head to turn: he saw that the room was unchanged. Still empty.
No, not quite so empty! An aluminum ladder had been lowered from the trapdoor.
An invitation to leave? Or, to join his captors? His occidental mind, fashioned by centuries of Aristotelian-framed thinking, could not penetrate the oriental subtlety in offering either choice. He struggled with the instinct to remain where he was; in the end, it was the monotony of his present windowless confinement that led him to seek escape from its oppression.
The prisoner grasped the ladder’s rung at the level of his eyes and commenced to climb. His weight tired his arm muscles. Just as his head thrust through the roof opening, he experienced momentary vertigo. The pit of his stomach was gripped by nausea. Mounting higher, he now saw that he was in a room similar to the one he had just left.
He continued on the ladder, until he was fully in the room. As he stepped off the top rung, a movement of shadow above him caught his eyes. Glancing towards the ceiling, he saw a man’s sandaled foot disappear through a second trapdoor. Some person had just left the cell into which he had risen.
The new room was furnished identically to the former one. On the wall above the coat hung another photograph of the leader. A sheet of paper lay on the writing desk, possibly a message from the individual who had just departed. He walked over, inspected it; suddenly, his brain reeled. The writing was his own—the mathematical symbols more familiar now, though still unclear. He had escaped to nowhere. These were his original quarters!
All semblance of neuron control vanished. His heartbeat triphammered like a hot Geiger counter. Assailed by extreme panic for the first time since he awoke, he only knew he had to get away from these four deadly walls. He rushed to the aluminum ladder, scurried farther up the rungs. Again, vertigo smothered him.
He saw that he had thrust his head and shoulders into still another identical room. Just above him on a ladder, three or four feet past reach, stood the trunk and legs of a man of his own thin build. He raised his knee and the figure above him did likewise.
Now the prisoner wanted to scream as claustrophobia dug deadly fingers into his skin. He raised himself entirely into the room, the figure above him disappearing. He rushed to the table, took out a cigarette, broke it in half and laid it there; then, he scrambled to the metal ladder and climbed as speedily as his nervous condition permitted.
The past events were repeated. He found himself in a prison exactly like his last. Only now the broken cigarette relieved the scheme.
Still unconvinced, he climbed and climbed again, moving through a Jack and the Beanstalk nightmare. Each time, he re-entered the cell he had just left. Finally, sheer exhaustion halted him.
He sat down at the desk, commenced to write:
“I, a prisoner of unknown forces, do hereby make this plea for mercy and relief from unnatural confinement. If I am already under sentence, I demand it be carried out with full regard for the humanity of the prisoner. I have committed no crime other than to work for the good of mankind. . . .”
HE HAD intended to say more, but he was interrupted by a barked command behind him: “Attention!”
The prisoner dropped his pencil, stood up and turned around. He saw a tall blond man in a dark green military uniform of a nationality he did not recognize. By his bearing, close-cropped hair and corded shoulder insignia, the newcomer appeared to be an officer.
“You are Prisoner M, on the records,” the
blond man said. “You’ve had time to look your cell over?”
“Yes.”
“Then, you’ve discovered there is no possibility of escape.”
“What do you intend to do with me?” M asked.
“You are to be interrogated shortly,” the officer answered. “You were arrested yesterday in the forbidden area past the Pae-Khoi Mountains. Our police took you to Kara, where you were transferred to this prison on Nova Zembla.”
The lethene effect seemed to be wearing off. Now, M recalled that perilous threading of the barbed-wire after he’d rowed the skiff across the Yara river. Under the very nose of needle-gun forts, he’d made his way past six deadly hummocks to meet his contact near the largest cracking plant. There, huddled with the dissident scientist who dared to trade secrets of the Pan-Eurasian Combine for money and a promise of security when democracy triumphed, he had memorized formula after formula that would be invaluable to Washington.
Washington! Another chord sounded. He remembered talking to a grey-haired man in an H-bomb shelter on the Potomac months previous—perhaps it had been years previous. Yet the name eluded him, and with it his own name. Yet, that man had been his chief, he felt, for he recalled well the details of his assignment and the grey-haired man had said, “You will be the third we’ve sent in. The fuel for the warheads is guarded as closely as their leader’s life—or as—well we’ve heard rumors of even stranger weapons.”
Then the image faded in M’s mind, leaving him only the remembrance of whistles blowing as he stumbled through the marshy tundra and the sudden appearance of a hundred angry, shouting uniformed figures.
“As a spy, you will be treated as a spy,” the officer was now saying. He reached inside his blouse, brought out a small vial of tablets which he handed the prisoner. “This will be your ration for the day. The tablets contain a full complement of calories and vitamins.”
M stood up, but even his full height did not reach as high as the officer’s chin. He said, “What are you? Are you human?”
The officer smiled indulgently. “That’s for you to ponder.” His handsome face tightened. “There, take your pills. We can’t wait all day for you.”
The uniformed man strolled about the room. He studied the document on which the prisoner had been working, stroked his clean-shaven chin and crumpled the paper, stowing it in a pocket.
“You won’t need this,” he said.
The prisoner felt hope slide from his grasp. He looked at the vial of pills in his hand, feeling stupid and lethargic. So this was to be the condemned man’s meal—or his glass of hemlock. He extracted two tablets and swallowed them, washing them down with a glass of water from the lavatory.
He looked around and saw that the officer had somehow disappeared while he was engaged. He puzzled over the mystery for awhile, then sat down on the edge of his cot to wait. The chemical action of the tablets swelled in his stomach and he felt comfortable, the brief hunger for food eased.
The next two hours passed slowly. The aluminum ladder still remained suspended from the trapdoor in the ceiling, but M. made no further effort to use it. He felt no desire for the further agony of climbing endlessly, particularly since he anticipated greater trials in the interrogation that was to come.
MORE and more isolated segments from his past bubbled up in his memory. For almost a moment, he had his name. That he was a mathematician he was certain. He recalled the symbols he had first written upon awakening and now they seemed to spell a message for him. He gritted his teeth in an effort at recall. They were . . . they were equations for simple two-dimensional manifolds. The term came readily to his tongue, but as yet it still lacked meaning. And now names came in a flood: Riemann, Moebius, Klein.
He heard the sound of boots scraping against metal. Uniformed legs appeared at the ceiling and descended the ladder. It was the same officer returning, although he had changed to an immaculate white dress uniform with interwoven gold shoulder loops.
There had to be an explanation how the other was able to enter and leave at will, but M’s fogged brain was unable to grasp it.
The officer said: “Arise.”
M stood up; he felt his tongue grow thick in his mouth. “What am I accused of?”
“You were found inside the lines,” the officer said, with a slight trace of ennui. “That alone warrants your execution.”
“But, there are so many different forbidden areas these days,” M protested. “How was I to know?”
“That doesn’t matter. You must be interrogated because of what you have done.”
“This wouldn’t happen in my country,” said M.
“So much the worse for your kind of politics. Here, we are more civilized. The state must protect itself against the arrogance and arbitrariness of the individual. The individual does not matter.”
“Then, tell me at least what crime I have committed.”
“It is we who define the nature of crime,” the officer said, growing impatient with his prisoner. “As you must certainly know, no type of individual activity can be tolerated in the closed state.”
He raised a white-gloved hand in the direction of the leader’s portrait. “We are all units in his organization. We exist only at his pleasure. You people of the backward nations are somehow stupidly unable to understand that. We accept it.”
The officer reached inside his blouse and brought out a leather apron which contained a variety of sharp tools in individual pockets. He tied the apron around his waist, then hooked a portable battery to his belt. His face was impassive as his agile fingers withdrew two of the tools, long delicate scalpels, from the left flap.
“I start at the right of your body and work gradually to the center,” he explained. “Beautiful tools, aren’t they?”
“You?” said the prisoner, his horror augmented. “What is your meaning?”
“Isn’t it clear? I am also to be the interrogator. It seems I’m always being assigned to it. Oh, well, I hope you will be reasonable.”
“For the love of God!” cried M.
“You forget you have crossed the border. I see that you don’t intend to be reasonable. Screaming for mercy will do you no good. There is no escape. Don’t you know you’re in a Moebius room, prisoner?”
“A Moebius—?”
“Of the highest order. Are you a scientist?”
“Of sorts,” said the prisoner, relieved at any opportunity to delay the proposed interrogation.
HIS interrogator looked smug—satisfied. “Then, you know how a Moebius sheet, a rectangular strip of paper whose ends are joined after an 180-degree twist, forms a unilateral surface. Our topological technicians have succeeded in applying the mathematics of analysis situs to the construction of unilateral solids. This room, for example, has null connectivity to the outside universe so long as it remains in its present state of distortion. In other words, it has no outside surface. Every surface is an inside surface. No matter how often you try to leave this room, you only re-enter it.”
The officer sighed: “You see, it is very much like your western ideological conception of hell. We meant it to be that way. It is well known that in hell, there is no exit.”
“Abandon ye all hope who—” the prisoner started to quote.
“Precisely,” said the officer. “You see now, you should never have crossed the Kara. You should never have been interested in our fuel plants. Yet, you are fortunate. There are worse interrogators. I fancy I’m quite gentle. But, you are delaying me. I must get on.”
M eyed the two instruments in the officer’s hands with intense terror. The tiny elaborately designed barbs along the blades of the scalpels were too obviously intended for—
“You will help yourself by talking early,” the officer warned sharply. “We want to know your accomplices, your codes. Remember, there is a limit to the skill with which these instruments may be employed—or doesn’t the thought of mutilation frighten you?”
“You’re going to use these on me?”
&
nbsp; “But. of course.”
“Here? Alone? Suppose I resist?” The officer frowned: “You’re not supposed to resist. According to our laws, we have every right to interrogate you. Are you insane? How is it that you, an individual, presume to question this right. How dare you rebel against it?” Spitting out angry words, the officer pressed forward with the tool braced in his right and supported by the might of his shoulder. M withstood it for several seconds; then, a hideous scream burst from his tendon-tightened throat. Although nothing bound his body to the spot, he was paralyzed where he stood.
Suddenly a drop of blood spurted out, spattering just above the knee on the white cloth of the officer’s trouser leg. The interrogator noticed and stopped his work to sw’ear abusively.
“You clumsy hemophilic fool,” he said. “So this is the kind of peasant they give me to question. Oh, you soft helpless animal. You scum, you.”
He produced a handkerchief and wiped the spot away, but a pink stain remained on the cloth.
“Now, remove your shirt,” he said. “We will work on nerves of the pectoral muscles.”
“What?” begged M.
“I said, remove your shirt!”
M felt a great tremor seize him; suddenly, his muscles were free. He leaped away from his tormentor and looked about for escape. With shock, he realized he had forgotten the absence of doors and windows. He rushed to the ladder and mounted the rungs.
When his head emerged above the trapdoor’s level, the same interrogator waited for him in the room above. The man had not left his chair.
“You might as well co-operate,” he said.
The prisoner was goaded to fury by the intolerable quality of his situation. He dropped back down the ladder and rushed at his persecutor. The officer gave away to alarm for the first time. He backed off in sudden confusion and cried: “You fool! You stubborn fool!” His arms were held up to ward off the rebellious attack.
BUT the very speed of the prisoner’s forward movement enabled him to bowl the officer off his feet. As the interrogator tumbled backwards, the twin scalpels fell from his fingers. M landed on top of him and his right hand searched along the floor until it contacted an instrument. When his hand grasped the cold metal, he felt a wave of revulsion that sickened his entire body. He lifted the tool high and plunged it into the officer’s chest, ripping through the cloth and penetrating flesh. A mottled stain appeared and spread on the white blouse as saliva simultaneously spurted from the interrogator’s whitening lips.