Much to his bewilderment, this intensified their distress. Ysaye bubbled apologies. The others engaged in an agitated exchange that resulted in Zachary’s darting from the room through one of the camouflaged collapsing doors. He was gone for some time, and he returned, not with the food Darzek expected, but attired as the alluring, blond Miss X of the Universal Trans terminal.
“What would you like me to bring you?” he asked.
“I’d like a steak with french-fried potatoes and various other trimmings, lots of coffee, and blueberry pie à la mode. But my stomach has probably shrunk to the size of a golf ball, and it would kill me to see all that food, and smell it, and taste some of it, and not be able to eat it. Let’s start out with coffee and a couple of sandwiches. Any kind of sandwiches will do.”
Zachary departed, and the other aliens suddenly rediscovered their own appetites and broke out a set of their triangular utensils. Darzek declined a portion with a shake of his head, wondering if his food was equally distasteful to them. Zachary returned in a surprisingly short time with an enormous tray of a dozen kinds of individually wrapped sandwiches and six cartons of coffee, and Darzek ate slowly, savoring every delectable bite, sampling all of the sandwiches and finishing none.
While he ate, he listened to the aliens.
They were laughing.
The unpleasant hisses and buzzes of their language had unaccountably acquired musical overtones. There were quavers, lilting inflections, that he had never heard on the Moon. Every clipped, strident utterance vibrated with hilarity. They laughed at themselves, individually and collectively. They laughed at Darzek, at the tasteless fodder he was chewing with so much relish, at his perplexed reaction to their laughter. No condemned man suddenly granted a pardon ever found life so magnificently delightful.
Darzek reluctantly pushed the sandwiches aside. “I’ve mangled all of them beyond repair, but I can’t eat any of them,” he said sadly. “Never mind. Tomorrow is another day. If you have a refrigerator, stow them away and I’ll have another crack at them for breakfast.”
“Is there anything wrong with the sandwiches?” Xerxes asked, his voice consumed by laughter. “Do you wish for something else?”
“The trouble is with my stomach, and only time and a steady diet can correct that. What I would like now is some sleep. In a genuine bed. It seems ages since I had any, and I can’t remember my last really restful sleep.”
The laughter tapered off as unaccountably as it had begun. “We should talk,” Zachary said, “but there is no reason why you should not sleep first. We have much else that must be done.”
“I will show you the way,” Ysaye said. “Come.”
He rippled open a doorway, revealing a tunnel that slanted upwards. Another doorway, and Darzek followed him out into a quite ordinary basement. The squat furnace and its insulated hot-air pipes, and the one dimly burning electric bulb, were comforting monuments to a reality Darzek had almost forgotten. The basement windows were covered, but even in the feeble light of the one bulb Darzek could see that the place was conspicuously clean and quite empty.
Ysaye led him up the basement stairs to the first floor, then along a lighted hallway. The windows they passed were heavily curtained; the doors closed—but otherwise Darzek’s impression was of an altogether ordinary house.
They climbed to the second floor, and at the end of the hallway Ysaye opened a door and turned on the light. “This room should be quietest,” he said. “The bathroom is opposite. Can you find your way down to us again if you need anything?”
Darzek sniffed the air. The bedroom, like the rest of the house, was hot and stuffy, as though it had long been vacant and closed up. “I don’t know,” he said.
“You need only to go as far as the basement and call. I wish you a pleasant rest, Jan Darzek.”
“Thank you,” Darzek said.
The door closed, and Ysaye’s light footsteps receded.
Darzek went immediately to the window, raised the shade and opened it. Sounds drifted in from outside—passing autos, children being called in from their play. It was dusk, and he looked out onto a well-kept cement courtyard, set amid a quiet neighborhood of well-kept yards and cheerfully lighted brick houses. The spire of the Chrysler Building loomed conspicuously above the trees. After a moment’s reflection he knew almost precisely where he was.
He cautiously opened the bedroom door. The silence within the house was absolute. He tiptoed carefully along the hallway and down the stairs. He tried the front door.
It opened.
Gently he nudged it shut until the lock clicked. He went back to the second floor, and quietly investigated the other rooms there. All of the bedrooms were tastefully furnished. The beds were made up, the rooms ready for occupancy. The polished bureau tops were not even dusty. He hazarded a guess that none of this furniture had ever been used, and wondered if the aliens had a maid, a human maid, who came twice weekly and was delighted with the immaculately tidy habits of her employers.
He returned to his own room, turned off the light, and stripped the swathing cloth from his body. The bed was comfortable, he was more exhausted than he had ever thought possible, and yet for a long time he could not fall asleep.
He had, since he dove into the transmitter in Brussels, observed and been a party to many miracles, but these seemed trivial compared with the miracle he had just witnessed.
The aliens trusted him.
CHAPTER 22
A softly closing door awakened Darzek. He lay staring at the ceiling and listening to the reassuring street noises. Two women began a backyard argument somewhere nearby. The house was as restfully silent as it had been the night before.
He turned over lazily, made himself comfortable again, and then lay gazing incredulously at the clothing that had been draped over the room’s two chairs. His clothing. The suit was his, as were the socks and necktie, and it seemed only logical that the shirt, underwear, shoes, and handkerchief had likewise been lifted from his wardrobe. He wondered by what sleight of hand they had entered his apartment, and got the answer when he sat up and saw on the bureau the personal possessions he had abandoned on the Moon, including his keys. The alien garment strips had disappeared.
There was also a tray packed with sandwiches and cartons of coffee.
The coffee was hot; the sandwiches as various as the night before. He managed to eat three, with three cartons of coffee, and then he dressed himself slowly and spent some time contemplating the strangely pale, bewhiskered face that stared back at him from the bureau mirror. His burns had healed without scars, but it would be a long time before he could comb his hair properly.
“Might as well get a brush haircut and have done with it,” he told himself resignedly. “But it’ll have to grow some before it’s even long enough for that!”
The beard he could do without, and would as soon as he got his hands on a razor. Otherwise, except for his hair, he had come out of his experience in surprisingly good shape.
He knotted his tie, and went downstairs to join the aliens.
He first searched for the collapsing door in the basement wall, and could not find it. Feeling slightly foolish, he backed off and called. A moment later the door rippled open, and Darzek stepped through.
“Good morning,” he said. “Or good afternoon. Did I sleep until the next day or the day after that? I feel as if—”
He broke off confusedly. It was a male alien who stood before him, an alien of smaller stature, but it was not Xerxes, nor Ysaye, nor Zachary. Darzek stared blankly. “Who are you?” he demanded.
The alien did not reply. He led Darzek down the tunnel to the underground room, and with a sleight-of-hand gesture produced another doorway. Darzek stepped through, and it closed behind him.
In this room, a diminutive replica of the other, a female alien was seated on the floor. A desklike contrivance stood in front of her, and across its surface flickers of light darted in incomprehensible patterns. Beside her stood a solidly human chair t
hat looked, in those glowing surroundings, like a crude relic of some long-forgotten primitive civilization. Over the chair a silver space suit was draped.
The moving lights faded, and the alien rose to greet him. “Mr. Darzek,” she said. “Mr. Jan Darzek.” It was not a question.
Darzek began a polite bow, and halted it to accept the hand she extended to him.
“I don’t believe we’ve met before,” he said.
She was enormous, like Alice and Gwendolyn, but she appeared to be infinitely older. Her face was a mass of sagging wrinkles. The delicate blue tint had faded from her skin, but there were disfiguring blotches, like large bruises. The webbing of the fingers, which had been delicately transparent with the younger aliens, had a loathsome appearance of dark, decaying flesh.
As he looked at her she said with a smile—and the smile was in her voice— “I do not think you find us beautiful, Mr. Jan Darzek.”
Darzek said slowly, “I find you strange. I think only a very rash man would attempt to evaluate the aesthetic attributes of something totally beyond his experience. No doubt your people could use our beauty queens in your chambers of horror, if you have such a thing.”
She gazed at him steadily without answering. Her eyes, like Alice’s, were without color and faintly luminous. Then she turned, and removed the space suit from the chair. “Please sit here,” she said. “I thought you would be more comfortable if you had one of your chairs to use. Our talk may be a long one.”
Darzek seated himself. She laid the suit aside, and sat down on the floor facing him.
“You have an excellent command of English,” Darzek said. “So do the others—Xerxes, Ysaye, and Zachary, that is—and they speak other languages like natives. Is it an innate ability?”
“Ability and training. We are chosen for that ability, and we are trained meticulously. Long ago, when Moon bases and matter transmitters were at most subjects of speculative thought among your people, I served my apprenticeship on this planet. Its rustic depravity and senseless wars made it an excellent training ground. Afterwards I returned and wrote its present classification.”
“Then you’re the one who plastered the NO TRESPASSING signs around this Solar System.”
“Listen.” She leaned forward, and there was no mistaking her earnestness. “Your planet has long been used by us for training purposes. Its scientific development has accelerated in the past century, but that was only as we anticipated. The matter transmitter was several centuries in your future. Suddenly, through some freakish accident, its principles were discovered. It could not have happened at a worse time. Our Group here consisted of a newly arrived Group Leader on her first assignment, an apprentice technician, one apprentice observer, and two observers who are permanently assigned here because they have never demonstrated sufficient ability to attain rank. The Group should have requested a consultation, but it thought it could handle the situation. It thought it was handling it. It will receive a severe reprimand.”
“In my estimation,” Darzek said, “you should receive the reprimand.”
“I? Why do you say that?”
“You underestimated the inhabitants of this planet, and sent an inadequate force to deal with them.”
“So you defend the Group,” she said. “You actually defend it. I did not think it possible, but they were right. You do consider them your friends. Such a thing has never happened before.”
“Are you so incapable of friendship yourself that it surprises you to find it in others?”
She did not answer at once, but whether she was offended or only nonplused he could not decide. Then she spoke with oracular deliberation. “The Group will receive a reprimand, not because it failed to handle the situation here, but because it attempted to handle it. It should have taken into consideration the crudeness of your transmitting device, and done nothing.”
“It works,” Darzek said.
“Barely. It is of a wholly unique design, and it is self-limiting. It does not point to further discoveries, it prevents them. It is so clumsy in its operation that Alice—” Again the smile was in her voice. “I would very much like to know the sources for those names, but our time is limited. Alice was almost unable to use it. That fact should have been determined at the beginning.”
“Ah! Those three steps to space travel. Then you think our transmitter is so crude that we’re stranded on the first step.”
“Your transmitter is so crude that you cannot be said to have taken the first step.”
“Then—you won’t smash Universal Trans?”
“What has happened makes it mandatory that we review your planet’s classification. That is why I am here. Specifically, I have come to obtain your recommendations on this subject.”
Darzek stared. “You want my recommendations?”
“You have taken an oath, Jan Darzek. You may not have been aware of the full implications of that act. The oath made you one of us—and among us, all who have been associated with a problem have an equal right to state opinions and make recommendations. Yours will be considered quite as carefully as mine. You know the transmitter’s potential for space travel. It is true that your present transmitter does not have that potential, but if your scientists merely grasped the idea of such a potential, of the transmitter that works without a receiver and the transmitter that transmits itself, it is possible that they would concentrate on the problem and solve it. May I have your opinion on that, please.”
“They’d solve it,” Darzek conceded. “Sooner or later. I think too that you may be underestimating our scientists. The invention of the transmitter may not have been the accident you assume it was.”
“Have you a recommendation?”
“Certainly. You admit yourself that there’s no danger in our present transmitter. It represents a tremendous human achievement, and I see no justification whatsoever in your depriving us of it merely because at some future time it might become dangerous to you. Leave it alone. Leave us alone. And if you insist upon hindering us, we are at least entitled to a just compensation, to an equal measure of help.”
“Your recommendation has been noted and will be considered. Have you anything further to say?”
“Yes,” Darzek said. “I think you’re wrong about the darkness—about our darkness. We have saints and sinners, moral people and immoral people, men with admirable ethics and men with no ethics at all, and every shade of difference in between. It seems to me that you’re attempting to measure us according to a scale of values where everything is either black or white—or good or evil. I don’t know myself if man is ready for amicable relations with alien peoples, but I’m positive that he isn’t hopeless. If man is really as depraved as you say he is, then your people are far worse. With your tremendous technology you could banish hunger and want from Earth. You could make the deserts and wastelands bloom, and strengthen the weak and contain the oppressive. Instead of building, you destroy. Instead of helping man to his natural destiny, you thwart him. A moral person who finds a fellow creature lying in the gutter doesn’t try to keep him there. He helps him out. My recommendation is that you take a long, careful look at your own color of darkness.”
“It has been noted and will be considered. There remains one singular problem. What shall we do with the human, Jan Darzek?”
Darzek gestured indifferently. “That’s certainly a minor problem.”
“We do not consider it so.”
“I suppose you refer to erasing my memory. Some of the things that happened I might have looked back on with pleasure in my old age, but I’m sure that I shall have other memories that will serve the purpose. It would be nice to be able to remember the way the Earth looked from the Moon. I had other things on my mind at the time, and I only glanced at it, but it would be nice to remember. Most of all I hate to part with the memories of Ysaye, and Alice, and the others. They taught me something about myself that I’ll probably never learn again.”
“Is there anything else?”
&nb
sp; “Why ask? You couldn’t leave me part of a memory. I’d go nuts trying to fasten it onto something, or figure out where I got it.”
“No decision has been reached with regard to the classification of your planet and your people, but it has been decided that Jan Darzek shall have his own free choice in the matter of his memory.”
“You mean—you’ll let me keep it all?”
“If that is your choice. All, or any part of it.”
“Then I’d better not say anything else. Bring out your eraser—I don’t want a choice. If I were to choose I’d have to accept the responsibility for what followed, and there may be issues at stake that I couldn’t even comprehend.”
“You are an awesome individual, Jan Darzek.” She got to her feet and held the space suit in front of him. “Do you recognize it?”
“It’s a suit like those my people use on the Moon. It’s—” his eyes fell on the dangling air hose “—why, it’s the one I stole!”
“The one you stole, and used to memorable effect. Listen, Jan Darzek. There is a distant planet—more distant, perhaps, than I could make you understand in the time that I have. On that planet is a structure whose nature would be difficult to explain to you, though you would probably call it a museum. It is no mere repository of curiosities as are such museums of yours that I have seen. It, and its contents, are venerated beyond the values your language is able to express. This suit shall be displayed there, and not among the least significant of the treasures that building contains. As long as our civilization lasts—and that should be long indeed, for it is yet vigorous and expanding, and not even the gloomiest of our prognosticators professes to see an end to it—the peoples of the galaxy shall gaze upon this suit, and read of the epic of Jan Darzek, and marvel. In distant centuries perhaps even your own people will be among them. Does it please you to have attained so brilliant a measure of immortality? There are many of my people who would willingly endure much in order to achieve far less.”
All the Colors of Darkness Page 19