Edmund Cooper

by Transit

  ‘I don’t want to be emancipated about anything,’ she replied firmly. ‘I can usually get what I want without resorting to equal votes.’

  Avery thought for a moment. ‘Then we’ll play it the hard way,’ he decided, ‘and see what happens. Meanwhile, let’s put our heads together and see if we can’t come up with a lead.’

  ‘They are probably listening,’ she warned.

  ‘I’m sure they are. I think it’s all part of the treatment —especially bringing us together.’

  For a while, they talked round the problem; but since they had so little to go on, there was precious litde that could be deduced. So far, neither of them had suffered physically—apart from being ‘anaesthetized’—and it seemed reasonable to assume that their captors did not intend to use more violence than was strictly necessary for whatever purpose they had in mind.

  But what that purpose was—well, that was the big question. In desperation, Avery and Barbara tried random suggestions. Bearing in mind how little they actually knew, it seemed as good a way as any of trying to hit on the truth.

  Barbara suggested plain, good, old-fashioned kidnapping. But Avery pointed out that conventional kidnappers did not usually ply their victims with intelligence tests. Besides, the resources of the prison seemed rather beyond either the ability or the imagination of the normally abnormal criminal mind. Added to which, the contents of both trunks indicated that they were in for quite a long stay—and not all of it would be spent in prison, evidently.

  The mad-scientist notion also was dismissed. Apart from any other considerations, it was too trite, too wildly implausible. However, Barbara wanted to stick to the idea of madness at least, because it seemed to be an essential ingredient of the whole operation; but Avery was not so sure.

  ‘So far the purpose and the technique are pretty well outside our terms of reference,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we can apply any conventional criteria.’

  ‘Stop talking like something that just crawled out of Cambridge,’ said Barbara drily. ‘All you mean is that we haven’t got a single clue.’

  ‘No, I mean just the opposite. I have a feeling that the clue lies in the incomprehensibility of the whole thing. It’s as if the mind or minds behind this business just don’t operate on our level. There’s an alien factor, an otherness about all that’s happened to us.’

  Suddenly, the typewriter woke up again. Please return to your separate accommodation.

  ‘Now for the fireworks,’ said Barbara. She sat down and typed back. No thank you. We just got married.

  The machine was not amused. It is necessary for you to answer further questions, it sent back primly. Your cooperation will be appreciated.

  Barbara was about to punch out a further message of defiance, but Avery said: ‘Let it play by itself. I think the general idea has got across.’

  Barbara sighed. ‘You’re the captain. But I like being childish. It improves my morale.’

  There was a few seconds of silence, during which they both gazed about them apprehensively as if retaliation might leap out at them from the walls or from the illuminated ceiling. But nothing happened, and they were left with a feeling of anticlimax.

  ‘It looks as if they’re thinking it over,’ suggested Avery. ‘Normally they seem to respond pretty quickly.’ ‘Maybe they haven’t had a case like this before.’ Barbara sounded more flippant than she felt.

  ‘Well, let’s try to forget about them for a bit, otherwise the waiting will get on our nerves.... Now where was I?’

  ‘Otherness—that’s where you were.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘otherness is the right word, I think.

  We don’t belong, the situation doesn’t belong—it’s unreal, somehow not properly human.’

  ‘Inhuman?’

  ‘Perhaps, but not in the ordinary sense. Non-human is better. For example, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we were using that thing,’ he gestured to the teletypewriter, ‘to communicate with a computer. And a not very flexible computer at that.’

  ‘I have an odd conviction that it wasn’t a computer that snatched me out of Hyde Park,’ objected Barbara.

  ‘Maybe, but ’ Avery got no further.

  At that moment the wall panel slid back. Instinctively, they both looked to see what the recess contained. Their attention was immediately drawn to one tiny object.

  It was a crystal, flawless and beautiful, brilliant and blinding. It was a crystal of pure light containing the mystery of absolute darkness.

  FIVE

  He was invisible. He was no more than a wisp of thought and feeling in the empty garden of creation. He was a rustle of wind through the alleyways of time, a moment of sadness in the long tremendous joy of unbeing. He was nothing and everything. He was alone.

  Yet not alone.

  Christine swam towards him through the stars. And the stars became the leaves of autumn, brown and gold, whipped to dancing on the crest of unheard music. And a whole lost world throbbed back into existence—a world that was young and green with living.

  Christine whispered: ‘Wherever you are, whatever you do, my dear one, I am part of it. For what is between us is above time and place and life and death.... There is a journey to be made, my darling. Make it. There is a dream to be dreamt, a faith to be kept, a challenge to be taken. Our love is part of the dream, the faith, the challenge. Make of it something new. Make it bright and glorious. Give it freedom.’

  He wanted to speak: but an invisible eye, a wisp of thought, a rustle of wind has no voice. He wanted to say: ‘Christine! Christine! You and you only. Nothing else. Not living or loving, not journeying or creating. But you and you only....’

  That is what he wanted to say; but there were no words. They would not form in the darkness. They would not pass through the black backcloth between desiring and knowing.

  Christine dissolved, and there was emptiness only.

  But the emptiness filled with the great green eye of a planet. It stared at him. It stared like a woman who knows she is fair. It stared like an animal waiting to conquer or be tamed.

  ‘This,’ said the voice, ‘is home. This is the garden. This is the world where you will live and grow and understand. This is where you will discover enough but not too much. This is where life is. It is yours.’

  He had heard the voice before. He had heard the words before. But he did not understand the message.

  He was afraid. Afraid because he did not understand. Afraid because he knew there was too much and too little to understand. Afraid because he was alone, and the loneliness was deeper than pain----

  Avery woke. There was sweat on his forehead.

  He was lying neatly—too neatly—on the bed, arms by his side, like a patient coming out of anaesthetic. He remembered the last time, and sat up slowly. The throbbing in his head was not too bad.

  He looked round. Barbara had disappeared, the wall had returned and he was once more in solitary confinement. He smiled weakly, thinking of the thoughts that Barbara would be thinking, the words she would doubtless be arranging in attractively unladylike profanities.

  The panel was still open, but there was no crystal in the recess. Only a single sheet of paper. And a pencil.

  ‘So much for passive resistance,’ thought Avery. He ought to have realized that the crystal would be used. It was just too easy.

  He took the pencil and paper to his table, sat down and looked at the questions. No intelligence test this time. Something rather more personal. Fortunately, it was mostly yes-or-no stuff. And there wasn’t much of it.

  Do you believe in God, as a person whose ethic may be interpreted by men? He wrote: No.

  Do you believe that the end justifies the means? He wrote: Sometimes it does: sometimes it doesn’t.

  Do you desire immortality? He wrote: No.

  Do you think you are courageous, more than normally courageous or a coward? He wrote: A coward.

  Does your present situation cause stress? He wrote: Don’t be stupid.
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  Would you be willing to die for an ideal? He wrote: I don’t know.

  Do you think that men are superior to animals? He wrote: Only in some things.

  Are you sexually potent? He wrote: I believe so.

  What do you fear most? He wrote: Insanity.

  Do you think that warfare can be justified? He wrote:

  Sometimes.

  Have you ever committed murder? That, thought Avery, was a peach of a question. He wrote: I don’t think so.

  Have you ever killed anyone? The imagined faces of three nameless airmen loomed sharply and briefly in his consciousness. He wrote: Yes.

  Whom, if anyone, do you love? Feeling like a traitor, Avery wrote: Myself.

  That was the lot. He glanced through his answers, then returned the paper to the recess. Presently the panel closed.

  He went to the inscrutable typewriter and tapped out: Now will you move that blasted wall again?

  Back came the answer: Very soon. Please be patient.

  Avery lit a cigarette and began to pace up and down. The situation was getting more and more fantastic. The most annoying thing seemed to be that he was completely robbed of initiative. They were having it all their own way; and that he resented bitterly.

  Back once more to the question of who they were: answer—there was no answer.... But there had to be! And Avery was acutely aware of the mental barrier separating rational thought from irrational conviction. To hell with rational thought, he told himself irritably. Rational thought was no good for a situation like this. Only the irrational would do—and probably even that wasn’t good enough.

  Out with it then! Out with the bloody stupid conviction that has been building up at the back of your mind like water behind a dam.

  Avery took a deep breath and said it aloud. ‘They’re not human beings at all. They are bloody bug-eyed monsters.’

  The words exploded in the quietness of the room, seemed to echo thunderously from the metal walls.

  And at that moment, as if at a signal, the wall that had separated him from Barbara disappeared. Only this time it was not Barbara on the other side. It was someone else.

  A girl. Brown hair, wide frightened eyes, body subtly mature, face round and young.

  ‘Where’s Barbara? Who are you?’ snapped Avery. His voice sounded harsh. He didn’t mean it to be, but it was.

  ‘I’m Mary Durward.... I—I.... How did you get there?’ She was clearly very frightened.

  Avery remembered that he was unwashed, unshaved. He smiled. He must be looking rather sordid, like something sinister out of a B feature. Hell, this was a B feature. ‘There was a girl called Barbara Miles in the cell next to mine,’ he explained. ‘At least, I thought there was. You can’t be sure of any damn thing in this place.

  ... My name is Richard Avery, by the way.’

  She brightened a little when she saw that he was not as fierce as he had looked. ‘The same thing has happened to me. The man next door was called Tom Sutton. They— they let us talk together. Then there were some more questions to answer, and we were separated again.’

  Avery thought for a moment. ‘Let’s try to piece a bit more of the jigsaw together. Where did they collect you —Kensington Gardens or Hyde Park?’

  She looked startled. ‘Kensington Gardens. How did you know?’

  ‘I’ve made a study of the habits of Abducted Persons,’ he said drily. ‘There was an attractive little crystal, I suppose.’

  ‘I thought it was somebody’s brooch,’ she admitted. ‘And I ’

  ‘And you bent down to pick it up. The next thing you know, you’re in the nut-house. Right?’

  She smiled. There was something very pleasing about her smile. Suddenly, Avery was intensely sorry for her. She didn’t look anywhere near as tough or resilient as Barbara. She only looked about eighteen. And lost. Very lost.

  ‘Do you know what it’s all about?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘No. I’m afraid I don’t know anything at all—except that it seems to be a real situation. At first I thought it was all in my overwrought little mind.... May I step into your parlour, said the spider to the fly.’

  She smiled again. Avery offered her a cigarette and took one himself. They sat down together on the edge of her bed like—as he thought—a couple of stranded tourists waiting for a train that they knew will never arrive.

  ‘Let’s start at the beginning,’ he said, ‘and see if we can’t find some common denominator. Where do you j live, how old are you, what do you do?’ 1

  ‘Lancaster Gate,’ she answered. ‘Twenty three, secretary.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you live with anyone?’

  She shook her head. ‘Solitary bed-sitter.’

  ‘What about the man next door—I mean the man that was in the next cell to you?’

  ‘Tom Sutton. He was picked up in Kensington Gardens, too. He’s a public relations type. Quite nice, but still ’

  ‘Still a type?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m being unfair.... He seems to think the whole thing could be some weird kind of publicity gimmick.’

  Avery shrugged. ‘Tell me that long enough, and I’ll believe it myself Do you know if he is married?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.’

  ‘Barbara doesn’t have the married look, either,’ said Avery. ‘Anyway, let’s make assumptions just for the hell of it. Now what have we got so far? One TV actress, one secretary, one P.R. man and one teacher—that’s me, by the way—all blessedly single and with dangerous tendencies to stroll in the park and spot magic crystals.... It’s not really very statistical.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If it was just random selection, somebody ought to have been married.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know. Maybe Barbara or Tom is.’

  ‘Would that make any difference?’

  ‘It might. I’m just grasping at straws A personal question: are you in love with anybody?’

  She shook her head emphatically. ‘I was once.’

  ‘So was I. Still am, I suppose, but she’s dead.... I don’t think Barbara is in love particularly. What about this Tom Sutton?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then make an intelligent guess.’

  ‘I should say not, but I don’t really know.’

  ‘That will have to do. Anyway, it fits a theory.’ He laughed. ‘I don’t mind twisting the odd facts to fit a theory.’

  ‘What is the theory?’

  Avery was silent for a moment or two. Then he said: ‘Well, I’ll stick my neck out. I don’t think it happened by accident. I think we were all chosen. If my theory fits, we were chosen because we didn’t have any strong emotional ties. Now why were we chosen? Answer: to undergo some sort of test. So far, they—whoever they might be—have taken pretty good care of us, but they have also been finding out a devil of a lot about us: the way we think, how bright we are, what our emotional attitudes are. Now comes the gilt-edged question: who or what are they? And inevitably we get the bumper fun book answer: they are not human. They are not human because they didn’t use what may be loosely called human techniques to set up this little experiment. That thing,’ he gestured towards Mary’s teletypewriter, ‘is the sort of mechanism that would be used by some nonhuman being to establish contact without giving us all fits. And while this cell itself could probably be very easily constructed by present-day technology, its not the sort of thing that would be Now, how does all that sound?’

  Mary shivered. ‘It sounds horrible—and plausible.’

  ‘I bet you’ve got quite a stack of supplies in that trunk under your bed, haven’t you?’

  She nodded.

  He smiled grimly. ‘There’s every sign that it’s going to be quite a long experiment—phase two to be conducted elsewhere.’

  Mary offered no comment. Avery was about to develop his ideas further when he became aware of a faint scraping sound.

  ‘Look at the floor!’ he comma
nded urgently, and did so himself.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked, bewildered.

  ‘I just heard the panel open—your panel, I think. Maybe there’s a crystal in the recess. That’s how Barbara and I were caught last time. We ignored instructions and got knocked cold.’

  ‘We’re going to have to look up sooner or later. We can’t stay like this. Besides, we haven’t done anything wrong, have we?’

  ‘Who the devil knows what’s right or wrong in this place?’ he demanded irritably. ‘Wait a minute. Only one of us will look—and I’ve just elected myself on a seniority basis. If I keel over, don’t do anything. Keep your gaze well away from the hatch. We’ll make them think of something else. All right? I’m going to look now.’

  There was a pause, then Avery said disgustedly: ‘Serves me right. You can relax, Mary. It’s coffee for two.’

  She looked up and giggled. ‘I forgot to tell you. I ordered coffee just before the wall slid back.’

  ‘For two?’

  ‘No. I didn’t think there would be company.’

  ‘Then we must have an intelligent waitress,’ he said drily.

  The coffee relaxed them, transforming the tension into an almost social atmosphere. They smoked a couple of cigarettes and, for the time being, Avery decided not to develop his bug-eyed monster theory any further. Mary Durward looked very much like a girl in need of some reassurance. The trouble was he didn’t know what kind of reassurance it was possible to give.

  Playing it safe he decided to concentrate on finding out a bit more about her personal background. Apart from the fact that he was naturally interested in her, it was just possible that she might provide information that would be of use in building up theories—even though it was highly probable that any theories built up on the present fund of evidence would eventually collapse like a house of cards.

  But conversation for its own sake was something. In fact, it was a hell of a lot—the kind of therapy they could both use in liberal doses.