by James Blish
But what could you do with a ten-foot reptilian kangaroo? From where he stood in a discrete pillared alcove on the above-ground entrance floor, Aristide watched the early guests filtering in from the reception room to the formal cocktail party, one of his favorite anachronisms, and one which the countess seemed prepared to allow him to repeat year after year. It required very little apparatus, but the most absurd and sub-lethal concoctions, and even more absurd costumes on the part of both staff and guests. The nice rigidity of the costumes provided a pleasant contrast to the of the psyche which the drinks quickly induced.
Thus far, there were only the early comers: here, Senator Sharon, waggling her oversize eyebrows in wholesome cheeriness at the remaining guests, ostentatiously refusing drinks, secure in the knowledge that her good friend Aristide had provided for her below five strong young men no one of whom she had ever seen before; there, Prince William of East Orange, a young man whose curse was that he had no vices, and who came again and again to ride the serpentine in hopes of discovering one that he liked; and, nearby, Dr. Samuel P. Shovel, M. D., a jovial, red-cheeked, white-haired man who was the high priest of psichonetology, "the New Science of the Id," and a favorite of Aristide's, since he was easy to provide for—he was fundamentally nothing more complicated than a bottom-pincher.
Faulkner, the head butler, was approaching Aristide stiffly from the left. Ordinarily, Faulkner ran the countess' household like an oriental despot, but he was no longer in control while Aristide was on the premises.
"Shall I order in the embryos in wine?" Faulkner said.
"Don't be such a blind, stupid fool," Aristide said. He had learned his first English from sentimental 3-C 'casts, which gave his ordinary conversation decidedly odd overtones; he was well aware of it, and these days it was one of his principal weapons for driving his underlings, who could not tell when he said these things dispassionately from when he was really angry. "Go below, Faulkner. I'll call you when I need you—if I do."
Faulkner bowed slightly and vanished. Fuming mildly at the interruption, Aristide resumed his survey of the early comers. In addition to the regulars, there was, of course, the countess, who had posed him no special problems yet. Her gilded make-up was still unmussed and the mobiles in the little caves Stefano had contrived in her hair spun placidly or blinked their diamond eyes. Then there were the sponsors of the Lithian monster into Shelter society, Dr. Michelis and Dr. Meid; these two might present special problems, for he had been unable to find out enough about them to decide what personal tastes they might need to have catered to down below, despite the fact that they were key guests, second only to the impossible creature itself. There was an explosive potential here, Aristide knew with the certainty of fate, for that impossible creature was already more than an hour late, and the countess had let it be known to all the guests and to Aristide that the creature was to be the guest of honor; fully half of the party would be coming to see him.
There was no one else in the room at the moment but a UN man wearing a funny hat—a sort of crash helmet liberally provided with communications apparatus and other, unnamable devices, including bubble goggles which occasionally filmed over to become a miniature 3-V screen—and a Dr. Martin Agronski, whom Aristide could not place at all, and whom he regarded with the consequent intense suspicion he reserved for people whose weaknesses he could not even guess at. Agronski's face was as petulant as that of the Prince of East Orange, but he was a much older man, and it seemed unlikely that he was there for the same reasons. He had something to do with the guest of honor, which made Aristide all the more uneasy. Dr. Agronski seemed to know Dr. Michelis, but for an unaccountable reason shied away from him at every opportunity; he was spending most of his time at one of the most potent of Aristide's punches, with the glum determination of a non-drinker who believes that he can perfect his poise by poisoning his timidity. Perhaps a woman…?
Aristide crooked a finger. His assistant scuttled around the back of the hanging floral decorations with a practiced stoop, covering even the sound of his movements by a brief delay which allowed the serpentine to come into its station, and cocked his ear to Aristide's mouth under the squeal of the train's brakes.
"Watch that one," Aristide said through motionless lips, pointing with the apex of one pelvic bone. "He will be drunk within the next half hour. Take him out before he falls down, but don't take him off the premises. She may ask for him later. Better put him in the recovery room and taper him off as soon as he begins to wobble."
The assistant nodded and pedaled away, bent double. Aristide was still talking to him in blunt, businesslike English; that was a good sign, as far as it went.
Aristide returned to watching the guests; their number was growing a little, but he was still most interested in assessing the countess' reaction to the absence of the guest of honor. For the moment Aristide himself was in no danger, though he could see that the countess' hints had begun to acquire a certain hardness. Thus far, however, she was directing them at the monster's sponsors, Dr. Michelis and Dr. Meid, and it was plain that they had no answer for these gambits. Dr. Michelis could only say over and over again, with a politeness which was becoming more and more formal as his patience visibly evaporated:
"Madame, I don't know when he's coming. I don't even know where he lives now. He promised to come. I'm not surprised that he's late, but I think he'll show up eventually." The countess turned away petulantly, swinging her hips. Here was the first danger point for Aristide. There was no other pressure that the countess could bring to bear upon the monster's sponsors, regardless of how ignorant they were of the actual situation in the countess' household. By some trick of heredity, Lucien le Comte des Bois-d'Averoigne, Procurator of Canarsie, had been shrewd enough to spend his money wisely: he gave ninety-eight per cent of it to his wife, and used the other two per cent to disappear with for most of the year. There were even rumors that he did scientific research, though nobody could say in what field; certainly it could not be psichonetology or ufonics, or the countess would have known about it, since both were currently fashionable. And without the count, the countess was socially a nullity supported only by money; if the Lithian creature failed to show up at all, there was nothing that the countess could do to his sponsors but fail to invite them to the next party—which she would probably fail to do anyhow. On the other hand, there was a great deal that she might do to Aristide. She could not fire him, of course—he had kept careful dossiers against that possibility—but she could make his professional life with her very difficult indeed.
He signaled his second-in-command.
"Give Senator Sharon the canape with the jolt in it as soon as there are ten more people on the floor," he directed crisply. "I don't like the way this is going. As soon as we have a minimum crowd, we'll have to get them rolling on the trains—Sharon's not the best Judas goat for the purpose, but she'll have to do. Take my advice, Cyril, or you will rue the day."
"Very good, Maestro," the assistant, whose name was not Cyril at all, said respectfully.
Michelis had hardly noticed the serpentine at the beginning, except as a novelty, but somehow or other it became noisier as the party grew older. It seemed to wind along the floor about every five minutes, but he soon realized that there were actually three such trains: the first one collected passengers up here; the second returned parties from the second level, to discharge wildly exhilarated recruiters among the cautiously formal newcomers on the first level; and the third train, usually almost empty this early in the party's course, brought glassy-eyed party-poopers from the sub-basement, who were removed efficiently by the countess' livery in a covered station stop well apart from the main entrance and well out of sight of new boarders for the nether levels. Then the whole cycle repeated itself.
Michelis had had every intention of staying off the serpentine entirely. He did not like the diplomatic service, especially now that it had nothing left to be diplomatic about, and anyhow he was far too dedicated to loneliness to
be comfortable even at small parties, let alone anything like this. After a while, however, he became bored with repeating that same apology for Egtverchi, and aware that the top level of the party was now so empty that his and Liu's presence there was keeping their hostess against her will.
When Liu finally noticed that the serpentine not only toured this level but went below, he lost his last excuse to stay off it; and the elevator took all the rest of the newcomers down, leaving behind only the servants and a few bewildered scientific attach?who probably were at the wrong party to begin with. He looked about for Agronski, whose presence had astonished him early, but the hollow-eyed geologist had disappeared.
Everyone on the train shouted with glee and mock terror as the steam elevator took it down to the second level in utter blackness and rusty-smelling humidity. Then the great doors rolled up sharply in their eyes, and the train surged out, making an abrupt turn along its banked rails. Its plowlike nose butted immediately through a set of swinging double doors, plunged its passengers into even deeper darkness, and stopped completely with a grinding shudder.
From out of the darkness came a barrage of shrieking, hysterical feminine laughter and the shouting of men's voices.
"Oh, I can't stand!"
"Henry, is that you?"
"Leggo of me, you bitch."
"I'm so dizzy!"
"Look out, the damn thing's speeding up again!"
"Get off my foot, you bastard."
"Hey, you're not my husband."
"Ugh. Lady, I couldn't care less."
"Woman's gone too far this—"
Then they were drowned out by a siren so prolonged and deafening that Michelis' ears rang frighteningly even after the sound had risen past the upper limits of audibility. Then there was the groan of machinery, a dim violet glow—
The serpentine was turning over and over in midspace, supported by nothing. Many-colored stars, none of them very bright, whirled past, rising on one side and sweeping over and then under the train with a period of only ten seconds from one "horizon" to the other. The shouts and the laughter were heard again, accompanied by a frantic scrabbling sound—and there came the siren again, first as a pressure, then as a thin singing which seemed to be inside the skull, and then as a prolonged sickening slide toward the infrabass.
Liu clutched frantically at Michelis' arm, but he could do nothing but cling to his seat. Every cell in Ms brain was flaring with alarm, but he was paralyzed and sick with giddiness—
Lights.
The world stabilized instantly. The serpentine sat smugly on its tracks, which were supported by cantilever braces; it had never moved. At the bottom of a gigantic barrel, disheveled guests looked up at the nearly blinded passengers of the train and howled with savage mockery. The "stars" had been spots of fluorescent paint, brought to life by hidden ultraviolet lamps. The illusion of spinning in midspace had been made more real by the siren, which had disturbed their vestibular apparatus, the inner ear which maintains the sense of balance.
"All out!" a rough male voice shouted. Michelis looked down cautiously; he was still a little dizzy. The shouter was a man in rumpled black evening clothes and fire-red hair; his huge shoulders had burst one seam of his jacket. "You get the next train. That's the rules." Michelis thought of refusing, and changed his mind. Being tumbled in the barrel was probably less likely to produce serious wounds than would fighting with two people who had already "earned"' their passage out in his and Liu's seats. There were rules of conduct for everything. A gang ladder protruded up at them; when their turn came, he helped Liu down it.
"Try not to fight it," he told her in a low voice. "When it starts to revolve, slide if you can, roll if you can't. Got a pyrostyle? All right, here's mine—jab if anybody stays too close, but don't worry about the drum—it looks thoroughly waxed."
It was; but Liu was frightened and Michelis in a murderously ugly mood by the time the next train came through and took them out; he was glad that he had not decided to argue with his predecessors in the barrel. Anybody who had tried the same thing with him might well have been killed. The fact that he was drenched with perfume as the serpentine passed through the next cell did not exactly improve his temper, but at least the cell did not require anyone's participation. It was a sizable and beautiful garden made of blown glass in every possible color, in which live Javanese models were posed in dioramas of discovered lust; the situations depicted were melodramatic in the extreme but, except for their almost imperceptible breathing, the models did not move a muscle; they were almost as motionless as the glass foliage. To Michelis' surprise—for outside the sciences he had almost no aesthetic sense—Liu regarded these lascivious, immobile scenes with a kind of withdrawn, grave approval.
"It's an art, to suggest a dance without moving," she murmured suddenly, as though she had sensed his uneasiness. "Difficult with the brush, far more difficult with the body. I think I know the man who designed this; there couldn't be but one."
He stared at her as though he had never seen her before, and by the pure current of jealousy that shot through him he knew for the first time that he loved her. "Who?" he said hoarsely.
"Oh, Tsien Hi, of course. The last classicist. I thought he was dead, but this isn't a copy—"
The serpentine slowed before the exit doors long enough for two models, looking obscenely alive in very modest movement, to hand them each a fan covered with brushed drawings in ink. A single glance was enough to make Michelis thrust his fan in his pocket, unwilling to acknowledge ownership of it by so definite a gesture as throwing it away; but Liu pointed mutely to an ideogram and folded hers with reverence. "Yes," she said. "It is he; these are the original sketches. I never thought I'd own one—"
The train lurched forward suddenly. The garden vanished, and they were plunged into a vague, colored chaos of meaningless emotions. There was nothing to see or hear or feel, yet Michelis was shaken to his soul, and then shaken again, and again. He cried out, and dimly heard others crying. He fought for control of himself, but it eluded him, and… no, he had it now, or almost had it… If he could only think for an instant—
For an instant, he managed it, and saw what was happening. The new cell was a long corridor, divided by invisible currents of moving air into fifteen sub-cells. Inside each sub-cell was a colored smoke, and in each smoke was some gas which went instantly home to the hypothalamus. Michelis recognized some of them: they were crude hallucinogenic compounds which had been developed during the heyday of tranquilizer research in the mid-twentieth century. Under the waves of fright, religious exaltation, berserker bravery, lust for power, and less namable emotions which each induced, he felt a mounting intellectual anger at such irresponsible wholesale tampering with the pharmacology of the mind for the sake of a momentary "experience"; but he knew that this kind of jolt—breathing was anything but uncommon in the Shelter state. The smokes had the reputation of being non-addicting, which for the most part they were—but they were certainly habit-forming, which is quite a different thing, and not necessarily less dangerous.
A hazy, formless curtain of pink at the far end of the corridor proved to be a pure free-serotonin antagonist in high concentration, a true ataraxic which washed his mind free of every emotion but contentment with everything in all the wide universe. What must be, must be… it is all for the best… there is peace in everything—
In this state of uncritical yea-saying, the passengers on the serpentine were run through an assembly line of elaborate and bestial practical jokes. It ended with a 3-V tape recreation of Belsen, in which the scenarist had cunningly made it appear that the people on the serpentine would be next into the ovens. As the furnace door closed behind them there was a blast of mind-cleansing oxygen; staggering with horror at what they had been about to accept with joy, the passengers were helped off the train to join a guffawing audience of previous victims. Michelis' only impulse was to escape—above all he did not want to stay to laugh at the next load of passengers in shock—but he wa
s too exhausted to get beyond the nearest bench in the amphitheater, and Liu could hardly walk even that far. They were forced to sit there in the press until they had made a better recovery.
It was fortunate that they did. While they were nursing their drinks Michelis, had been deeply suspicious of the warm amber cups, but their contents had proved to be nothing but honest and welcome brandy—the next train was greeted with a roar of delight and a unanimous surge of the crowd to its feet.
Egtverchi had arrived.
There was a real mob now in the cocktail lounge above ground, but Aristide was far from happy; he had already cut off quite a few heads down below on the catering staff. He had somewhere inside him a very delicate sense which told him when a party was going sour, and that sense had put up the red alarms long before this. The arrival of the guest of honor in particular had been an enormous fiasco. The countess had not been on hand, the creature's sponsors had not been there, none of the really important guests who had been invited specifically to see the guest of honor had been there, and the guest himself had betrayed Aristide into showing, before all the staff, that he was frightened out of his wits. He was bitterly ashamed of his fright, but the fact was now beyond undoing. He had been told to anticipate a monster, but not such a monster as this—a creature well more than ten feet high, a reptile which walked more like a man than like a kangaroo, with vast grinning jaws, wattles which changed color every few moments, small clawlike hands which looked as though they could pluck one like a chicken, a balancing tail which kept sweeping trays off tables, and above all a braying laugh and an enormous tenor voice which spoke English with a perfection so cold and carefully calculated as to make Aristide feel like a thumb-fingered leather-skinned Sicilian who had just landed.