by Paul Corey
He sidled through splitting walls carefully protecting his burden. Once inside my room, he bowed slightly, buzzed once and placed the tray in front of me.
With his right hand he whipped the cloth off the tray and draped it over his left arm. Then with a proud gesture he lifted the cover from a hot dish for my approval.
“Thank you,” I said.
I found it hard to realise that he had no eyes. He had behaved in no way differently from an Earth waiter. I was sorry I had to speak to him in Terranese. On an impulse I buzzed at him.
The results were appalling. He dropped the dish lid. With an “eeeeek” sound, he fled, and the walls ahead of him could hardly split fast enough to let him through.
I stared after him in utter amazement.
Hunger and the smell of food took my mind from the vanished waiter. I turned my sun-torch so that I could see better what I had been served. It looked good, like a ragout.
A single eating tool lay by the dish. It was shaped something like a spoon, but flatter and with a prong. The design came close to combining in one piece the spoon, fork, knife tools we use on Earth.
I tasted the food. It was delicious. The meat reminded me of Terran veal with a sauce perfectly seasoned.
Darkness outside had beaten back my light to the inner walls of the Annex. Suddenly Ello split into my room out of breath from hurry.
“What happened? What did he do? Lal—I mean, the waiter. He said he put the food on the table and you called him the son of an unmarried mother.”
“Great Galaxy!” I wanted to laugh but thought better of it. “I’m terribly embarrassed,” I said. “I’ve apparently made an unpardonable blunder without knowing it. I’ve heard you people buzzing to each other today. So, when he served the dinner—and very well, too—I thanked him in my own language. Then I thought I’d buzz at him. I guess I’d better watch my buzzing.”
She laughed with complete abandon then. It was so Earthy, so wonderful to hear. In the shadows where she stood I couldn’t see her unsighted face. It took no imagination at all to feel that she was Earth human. She could even be Karen.
My hand went out impulsively to touch her. But I drew it back quickly. No more faux pas.
“Please apologise to your servant for me,” I said. “Believe me, I had no intention of discrediting his birth.”
“I’ll explain.” She had a hard time holding down spasms of mirth. “You were right about him though. He was left on a doorstep.” She chewed the edge of her hand to control her laughter and turned to leave. “Enjoy your food.”
“Thank you,” I said. “On earth, I always prefer company when I eat.”
I heard her take a sharp little in-breath.
“Grendans never let animals eat with them.” She was serious now. Her words stung. Then her voice became suddenly soft. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Perhaps after the tests tomorrow.”
Abruptly she was gone into the darkness beyond the narrow circle of light from my sun-torch.
I returned to my meal thoughtfully. I ate with a good appetite. The dessert, a kind of honey custard, was excellent. I leaned back on my couch satisfied.
Tomorrow, the tests. With sight, I had nothing to worry about.
My thoughts came back to the tender meat in the ragout. Veal? After all, they did have cattle here.
On Earth we eat meat of lower animals. On Grenda I am considered an animal, therefore of a lower order.
The thought was unsettling. Might they consider eating me because I fit their category of animals? It would only be like eating one of the primates on Earth. In some tropical countries, I’ve been told, roast monkey is considered a great delicacy.
For a moment I thought I was going to lose my dinner. I grabbed my torch and headed for the bathroom. Then I remembered being surrounded by transparent walls.
My gorge settled. I felt that the darkness around me was filled with prying eyes, staring, smirking, watching. I swung my torch beam in a half circle. It got some penetration, some reflected glare, but all the night outside was empty.
What a fool I was! The Grendans were as blind as bats. Blind as bats? That was something to conjure with.
I switched off the torch and urinated into the stool. I knew I was aimed right because of the sound of water into water.
With the light out, I suddenly realised that the walls around me had taken on a pinkish glow. I reached out until my fingers made contact with a surface. It felt radiantly warm. My body temperature was normal and comfortable.
Evidently, with their natural heat source gone—with sundown—the walls here took on the job of producing warmth. That was a lot simpler than we did it on Earth.
I returned to my couch. I stretched out to think about this thing. In a matter of minutes I was sound asleep.
TWELVE
The bright light of morning, pouring through the transparent walls, awakened me. I felt completely refreshed. Well, I must feel fit, I told myself. After all, this is the day.
No mention had been made of a starting time for the tests. All right, they could say when, I would be ready.
I went to the bathroom. The see-through walls still bothered me. All around I could see Grendans beginning their day’s work in other parts of the Annex, in the Science Building and other buildings. Groups of students went past outside. I sat on the toilet but felt inhibited. I could certainly do with a little privacy right now, I thought.
If invasion of privacy was the thing these people held against eyes, it would seem to me far simpler to put opaque walls around to get this privacy than to segregate sight. And a lot fairer too.
I brushed my teeth and gargled.
Of course there was no mirror here. However, I found that by holding one hand behind the transparent covering of the medicine cabinet, I could get enough reflection to shave by and comb my hair.
Just as I finished, I saw Lal coming through the walls with my breakfast. He repeated the routine of placing the tray on the table with an even greater flourish than he had last night. Obviously, he didn’t hold my inadvertent insult against me for he was smiling.
“Good morning, Lal.”
As long as I didn’t know buzz talk, I figured I had better not try it at the moment and take a chance of disturbing or insulting this rather nice fellow again.
“Good morning, Doctor Stone. Did you sleep well, sir?”
His use of Terranese startled me. Someone must have coached him during the night. If he was going to use my language, I thought, why shouldn’t I make another try at his? I buzzed back at him.
He didn’t fall apart this time. He just laughed.
“You can’t mean that, sir.”
“What did I say to you?”
“You said, sir—‘no woman will go to bed with you’.”
“I said that?”
“Quite right, sir. But you are quite wrong, sir. Many women go to bed with me. Will that be all, sir?”
“Yes, Lal. Thank you.”
“Thank you, sir.” He bowed and left.
I was hungry. Beneath the cover of the main dish on my tray I saw a stack of what looked very much like Earth pancakes. Ringed around the cakes were cubes of highly spiced but tender meat.
It was a good breakfast. The cuisine on this planet was good. I did not permit myself to indulge in thoughts about eating animals. Instead, I considered my two conversations with Lal.
My first notion was that this buzz talk was a sort of inkblot thing. The other person interpreted it according to the run of his own mind. With that thought came another which upset me. Suppose it was the other way around. Suppose I had been buzzing out of my unconscious. In other words, what I had buzzed had been an expression of my unconscious preoccupations.
When Lal came to clear away, I said, “How did you learn my language so quickly?”
“I went to bed with a primary instructor, sir.”
That had several implications. Male, female, or some no-educator, a device for teaching like we have on E
arth.
While I considered this, he waited patiently, then said, “May I remove your tray, sir?”
In reply, I gave him a short buzz.
He chuckled. “Thank you, sir.”
“Well, what did I say this time, Lal?”
“You said, ‘shove it’, sir.”
He swept up the tray and split out.
That left my thinking right back where it had started. Either his reception was on a scatological level, or my delivery was on such a level.
I stretched out on the couch and closed my eyes to ponder this. Before I could stop it, an image of Ello came into my mind. For a moment she had beautiful blue eyes like Karen’s. But they disappeared and all I saw was her slender, graceful figure. To destroy this unsettling image of her I resolutely opened my eyes again. Lal stood in the room with a jumble of transparent objects in his arms.
“Your exercise, sir. These will have to serve in place of a long walk in the woods, sir.”
He began assembling a set of bars, rings and hanging cords. It took him a little time and I watched while he tested them out, doing several flips and swings, ending with a dozen very precise chinnings.
A little out of breath, he said, “There you are, sir. Have a good work-out.”
I gave him a good buzz.
“Thank you, sir. You are very perceptive, sir.”
“What did I say, Lal?”
“You said, sir—‘you have very pleasing hips’. I think so myself, sir.”
The wall didn’t split so wide this time and he wriggled through with a swish.
Mother of the Milky Way! What was happening to me?
I sprang off the couch and rushed to the exercise bars. Every conceivable twist, turn, flip, pull, roll and chin I performed until I was dripping sweat. Finally, out of breath, exhausted, I leaned against one of the uprights.
With my eyes closed, I let my mind go empty while I caught my breath. Into that mental void came the words distinctly, “You incestuous old goat”. I glared around through the walls at the calmly busy Grendans. The words had been in my own thoughts. No one had spoken them.
Then I flung off my clothes and ran into the shower. The needle-sharp icy jets took my breath away and left me gasping. I tortured myself with all it had to give and came out dripping, glowing and tinglingly alive.
I had been so intent upon what I was doing that the transparent walls were forgotten. As I stood beneath the dryer a Grendan walked down the corridor past my room. He was middle-aged looking, a little on the paunchy side. Quite casually he faced toward me and smiled. I grabbed my shorts and held them in front of me.
Talk about invading privacy, I thought, boiling up. All right, so he can’t see. He just knows and understands. Isn’t that bad enough? He doesn’t need to see and believe.
My indignation evaporated quickly. Why get into a flap? Old paunchy didn’t see a thing.
I dressed carefully, shifting my thinking back to tests. How soon were they going to start? I looked out through the Annex rooms, and into the Science Building. Grendan students and instructors seemed to be going about their daily duties as usual. I thought I descried the area of the lab but I couldn’t see anyone in it.
To get ready for the tests I decided to give myself a few blank moments. Just clean everything out of my mind and have it ready to come up with answers.
Making my mind a blank was no problem. But keeping it that way was. Instantly, up jumped Talcott Jones. He accused me of sending him to Mars simply because he wanted to marry my daughter.
The thought hit hard, but I fought back. It was preposterous to blame me. He was a low-score, a moron. He had threatened our basic way-of-life—Tests.
And tests were incontrovertible. They told who were geniuses and who were mentally deficient. Creativity? Bosh! Tests would discover a creator if he existed.
Argue as I would in my mind, the hard thought stayed. I simply did not want Jones to marry Karen. I was not going to let her marry him, or any other man.
The implications of such thoughts were clear and many. But I refused to admit them. Impossible. I couldn’t be like that.
My mind was anything but blank when Doctor Rhoa came into the room.
THIRTEEN
It seemed to me that Rhoa’s expression was congenial.
He crossed the room and patted me on the head.
“Have you been treated properly?”
I resented his “nice doggy” manner.
“No complaints,” I said.
He waved an arm exploringly around the room. “They have provided you with exercise bars. Good. Good. A fit body means a fit mind. Do you agree, Doctor Stone?”
“Quite.”
“Our philosophies meet on that ground then.”
“Do the animals on your planet agree, Doctor Rhoa?”
He thought about that. “My daughter had been arguing that we are making a mistake in assuming that you are of a lower order simply because you have eyes.” He shrugged. “I’m willing to leave it to the tests.”
“Shall we begin then?” I said.
He split the wall and we went out. When we hit the connecting walk with the Science Building I looked ahead to the lab. Ello was there already. She was talking to Mun and Zinzer.
Movement of Grendans in intervening rooms made things none too clear. But Ello was clear in my mind. How beautiful she would be with eyes. On Earth, I recalled, women paint on eyebrows, stick on false eyelashes, rub on eye shadow. Suppose Ello had false eyes painted on her face. I could almost see her that way. She would be lovely.
A new thought struck me. Was I falling in love with this sightless Grendan? That was what was in my mind when we split into the lab.
Doctor Mun bowed slightly. In his small, shy way he seemed friendly enough.
Zinzer ignored me. I felt sure that he had me unquestionably tabbed as an animal and that he intended to make this distinction, with all the implications his planet gave it, stick.
Ello held out her hand. “Good morning, Doctor Stone.”
I squeezed it gently. “Good morning, beautiful.” I looked down into her face. I could almost see eyes, gorgeous eyes, right where they should be.
“Let’s get going,” said Zinzer.
“To begin,” said Doctor Rhoa, “we will test for primary mental abilities.”
That sounded as if it came right out of my own file of standard procedures.
“Ready,” I said.
“First will be Space. The ability to comprehend substance accurately.” Rhoa gestured towards the faint outlines of a table and chair. “Sit down, Doctor Stone. Make yourself comfortable and we will begin.”
It was a comfortable chair and the table was of proper height. I felt in fine shape, confident, alert. After all, I had eyes.
Rhoa buzzed something and Ello placed seven flat, rectangular shaped objects in front of me. With a quick pass of her hand, she selected one and set it aside.
“This is the control,” she said. Then she lined up the others, six of them. “The test is for you to determine which of these are like the control.”
It took only a glance to see that those objects were exactly alike—same size, same colour, same texture.
Ello had stepped back with the other. I looked around indignantly. I assured myself that this trick wasn’t her fault. But that wasn’t going to keep me from registering a protest.
“Trickery may be a part of tests on your planet,” I said.
“But we don’t resort to anything like that where I come from. Those objects are exactly alike.”
“No trickery here,” said Doctor Rhoa. “Take your time. There is a distinct difference in those pieces.”
I felt that Ello’s face expressed sympathy. Reassured, I returned to studying the blocks. My testers stood behind me or I would have tried an old psychological ruse. One used by horses and dogs on Earth when they demonstrate to an audience how they can spell words and add numbers, I would have moved my hand towards one of the pieces and watche
d their reaction. I knew that with their built-in radar system they would know my movements. They would show some sign when my fingers approached the right object.
But dammit, I couldn’t watch them and the pieces at the same time.
The harder I concentrated, without an inkling of the solution, the madder I got.
“This is reprehensible and unscientific,” I said. “You people have made up your minds that I am what you choose to call an animal. To you, all animals are lower than you are. You’ve rigged this test to make me come out lower in the intellectual scale than you are.”
Zinzer grunted as if my outburst was exactly what he had expected.
“You are quite wrong,” said Doctor Rhoa. “Such a reaction indicates symptoms of paranoia.” He buzzed with the others. “Now this is a practice we never follow when we give our subjects this test. I will tell you that two of those six pieces are like the control and four are unlike.”
I took a deep breath and let it out. I tell you, there was not the slightest evidence of difference. The only thing I could do was to make a random choice and play probabilities. With great deliberation I drew two pieces from the six.
I heard Ello sigh and knew I was at least partly right. Mun exhaled noticeably. “One correct.”
“Will you show me the difference, please?” I said stiffly.
“Show?” That was Zinzer’s voice. “Another of those meaningless animal words.”
Ello came quickly around the table and rearranged the blocks: one, the control, two, as the two like it, and the four that were different. She made her selection after one pass of her fingers over the surface.
“The control,” she explained, “has a line across the width of it in the centre. The four that are unlike have the line running lengthwise.”