An air lock? It certainly looked like one. If so, the trick with the escape mechanism might not have to be worked at all—if indeed the escape device existed.
Finding that he could raise his shoulders enough to rest on his elbows, he studied the wiring. The thickest of the cables emerged from the pilot's capsule; that should be the power line, ready to activate the whole business when the pilot hit the switch. If so, it could be shorted out—provided that there was still any juice in the batteries.
He managed to get the big nippers free of his belt, and dragged forward into a position where he could use them, with considerable straining. He closed their needlelike teeth around the cable and squeezed with all his might. The jaws closed slowly, and the cusps bit in.
There was a deep, surging hum, and all the pumps and motors began to whirr and throb. From back the way he had come, he heard a very muffled distant shout of astonishment.
He hooked the nippers back into his belt and inched forward, raising his back until he was almost curled into a ball. By careful, small movements, as though he were being born, he managed to somersault painfully in the cramped, curved space, and get his head and shoulders back under the tank again, face up this time. He had to trail the flashlight, so that his progress backwards through the utter darkness was as blind as a mole's; but he made it, at long last.
The tunnel, once he had tumbled out into it again, seemed miraculously spacious—almost like flying.
"The damn door opened right up, all by itself," Martinson was chattering. "Scared me green. What'd you do—say 'Open sesame' or something?"
"Yeah," McDonough said. He rescued his electrode net from the handtruck and went forward to the gaping air lock. The door had blocked most of the rest of the tunnel, but it was open wide enough.
It wasn't much of an air lock. As he had seen from inside, it was too short to hold a man; probably it had only been intended to moderate the pressure-drop between inside and outside, not prevent such a drop absolutely. Only the outer door had the proper bank-vault heaviness of a true air lock. The inner one, open, was now nothing but a narrow ring of serrated blades, machined to a Johannsen-block finish so fine that they were air-tight by virtue of molecular cohesion alone—a highly perfected iris diaphragm. McDonough wondered vaguely how the pinpoint hole in the centre of the diaphragm was plugged when the iris was fully closed, but his layman's knowledge of engineering failed him entirely there; he could come up with nothing better than a vision of the pilot plugging that hole with a wad of well-chewed bubblegum.
He sniffed the damp, cold, still air. Nothing. If the pilot had breathed anything alien to Earth-normal air, it had already dissipated without trace in the organ pipe of the tunnel. He flashed his light inside the cabin.
The instruments were smashed beyond hope, except for a few at the sides of the capsule. The pilot had smashed them—or rather, his environment had.
Before him in the light of the torch was a heavy, transparent tank of iridescent greenish brown fluid, with a small figure floating inside it. It had been the tank, which had broken free of its moorings, which had smashed up the rest of the compartment. The pilot was completely enclosed in what looked like an ordinary G-suit, inside the oil; flexible hoses connected to bottles on the ceiling fed him his atmosphere, whatever it was. The hoses hadn't broken, but something inside the G-suit had; a line of tiny bubbles was rising from somewhere near the pilot's neck.
He pressed the EEG electrode net against the tank and looked into the Walter goggles. The sheep with the kitten's faces were still there, somewhat changed in position; but almost all of the color had washed out of the scene. McDonough grunted involuntarily. There was now an atmosphere about the picture which hit him like a blow, a feeling of intense oppression, of intense distress—
"Marty," he said hoarsely. "Let's see if we can't cut into that tank from the bottom somehow." He backed down into the tunnel.
"Why? If he's got internal injuries—"
"The suit's been breached. It's filling with that oil from the bottom. If we don't drain the tank, he'll drown first."
"All right. Still think he's a man-from-Mars, Mac?"
"I don't know. It's too small to be a man, you can see that. And the memories aren't like human memories. That's all I know. Can we drill the tank some place?"
"Don't need to," Person's echo-distorted voice said from inside the air lock. The reflections of his flashlight shifted in the opening like ghosts. "I just found a drain petcock. Roll up your trouser cuffs, gents."
But the oil didn't drain out of the ship. Evidently it went into storage somewhere inside the hull, to be pumped back into the pilot's cocoon when it was needed again.
It took a long time. The silence came flooding back into the tunnel.
"That oil-suspension trick is neat," Martinson whispered edgily. "Cushions him like a fish. He's got inertia still, but no mass—like a man in free fall."
McDonough fidgeted, but said nothing. He was trying to imagine what the multi-colored vision of the pilot could mean. Something about it was nagging at him. It was wrong. Why would a still-conscious and gravely injured pilot be solely preoccupied with remembering the fields of home? Why wasn't he trying to save himself instead—as ingeniously as he had tried to save the ship? He still had electrical power, and in that litter of smashed apparatus which he alone could recognize, there must surely be expedients which still awaited his trial. But he had already given up, as though he knew he was dying.
Or did he? The emotional aura suggested a knowledge of things desperately wrong, yet there was no real desperation, no frenzy, hardly any fear—almost as though the pilot did not know what death was, or, knowing it, was confident that it could not happen to him. The immensely powerful, dying mind inside the G-suit seemed curiously uncaring and passive, as though it awaited rescue with supreme confidence—so supreme that it could afford to drift, in an oil-suspended floating-dream of home, nostalgic and unhappy, but not really afraid.
And yet it was dying!
"Almost empty," Andy Person's quiet, garbled voice said into the tunnel.
Clenching his teeth, McDonough hitched himself into the air lock again and tried to tap the fading thoughts on a higher frequency. But there was simply nothing to hear or see, though with a brain so strong, there should have been, at as short a range as this. And it was peculiar, too, that the visual dream never changed. The flow of thoughts in a powerful human mind is bewilderingly rapid; it takes weeks of analysis by specialists before its essential pattern emerges. This mind, on the other hand, had been holding tenaciously to this one thought—complicated though it was—for a minimum of two hours. A truly sub-idiot performance—being broadcast with all the drive of a super genius.
Nothing in the cookbook provided McDonough with any precedent for it.
The suited figure was now slumped against the side of the empty tank, and the shapes inside the toposcope goggles suddenly began to be distorted with regular, wrenching blurs: pain waves. A test at the level of the theta waves confirmed it; the unknown brain was responding to the pain with terrible knots of rage, real blasts of it, so strong and uncontrolled that McDonough could not endure them for more than a second. His hand was shaking so hard that he could hardly tune back to the gamma level again.
"We should have left the oil there," he whispered. "We've moved him too much. The internal injuries are going to kill him in a few minutes."
"We couldn't let him drown, you said so yourself," Persons said practically. "Look, there's a seam on this tank that looks like a torsion seal. If we break it, it ought to open up like a tired clam. Then we can get him out of here."
As he spoke, the empty tank parted into two shell-like halves. The pilot lay slumped and twisted at the bottom, like a doll, his suit glistening in the light of the C.O.'s torch.
"Help me. By the shoulders, real easy. That's it; lift. Easy, now."
Numbly, McDonough helped. It was true that the oil would have drowned the fragile, pitiful figure, b
ut this was no help, either. The thing came up out of the cabin like a marionette with all its strings cut. Martinson cut the last of them: the flexible tubes which kept it connected to the ship. The three of them put it down, sprawling bonelessly.
… AND STILL THE DAZZLING SKY-BLUE SHEEP ARE GRAZING IN THE RED FIELD …
Just like that, McDonough saw it.
A coloring book!
That was what the scene was. That was why the colors were wrong, and the size referents. Of course the sheeplike animals did not look much like sheep, which the pilot could never have seen except in pictures. Of course the sheep's heads looked like the heads of kittens; everyone has seen kittens. Of course the brain was powerful out of all proportion to its survival drive and its knowledge of death; it was the brain of a genius, but a genius without experience. And of course, this way, the U.S.S.R. could get a rocket fighter to the United States on a one-way trip.
The helmet fell off the body, and rolled off into the gutter which carried away the water condensing on the wall of the tunnel. Martinson gasped, and then began to swear in a low, grinding monotone. Andy Persons said nothing, but his light, as he played it on the pilot's head, shook with fury.
McDonough, his fantasy of spaceships exploded, went back to the handtruck and kicked his tomb-tapping apparatus into small shards and bent pieces. His whole heart was a fuming cauldron of pity and grief. He would never knock upon another tomb again.
The blonde head on the floor of the tunnel, dreaming its waning dream of a colored paper field, was that of a little girl, barely eight years old.
The End
Originally published in Astounding Science Fiction, July 1956. Copyright renewed, 1984.
Bernie the Faust
William Tenn
That's what Ricardo calls me. I don't know what I am.
Here I am, I'm sitting in my little nine-by-six office. I'm reading notices of government surplus sales. I'm trying to decide where lies a possible buck and where lies nothing but more headaches.
So the office door opens. This little guy with a dirty face, wearing a very dirty, very wrinkled Palm Beach suit, he walks into my office, and he coughs a bit and he says:
"Would you be interested in buying a twenty for a five?"
That was it. I mean, that's all I had to go on.
I looked him over and I said, "Wha-at?"
He shuffled his feet and coughed some more. "A twenty," he mumbled. "A twenty for a five."
I made him drop his eyes and stare at his shoes. They were lousy, cracked shoes, lousy and dirty like the rest of him. Every once in a while, his left shoulder hitched up in a kind of tic. "I give you twenty," he explained to his shoes, "and I buy a five from you with it. I wind up with five, you wind up with twenty."
"How did you get into the building?"
"I just came in," he said, a little mixed up.
"You just came in," I put a nasty, mimicking note in my voice. "Now you just go right back downstairs and come the hell out. There's a sign in the lobby—NO BEGGARS ALLOWED."
"I'm not begging." He tugged at the bottom of his jacket. It was like a guy trying to straighten out his slept-in pajamas. "I want to sell you something. A twenty for a five. I give you …"
"You want me to call a cop?"
He looked very scared. "No. Why should you call a cop? I haven't done anything to make you call a cop!"
"I'll call a cop in just a second. I'm giving you fair warning. I just phone down to the lobby and they'll have a cop up here fast. They don't want beggars in this building. This is a building for business."
He rubbed his hand against his face, taking a little dirt off, then he rubbed the hand against the lapel of his jacket and left the dirt there. "No deal?" he asked. "A twenty for a five? You buy and sell things. What's the matter with my deal?"
I picked up the phone.
"All right," he said, holding up the streaky palm of his hand. "I'll go. I'll go."
"You better. And shut the door behind you."
"Just in case you change your mind." He reached into his dirty, wrinkled pants pocket and pulled out a card. "You can get in touch with me here. Almost any time during the day."
"Blow," I told him.
He reached over, dropped the card on my desk, on top of all the surplus notices, coughed once or twice, looked at me to see if maybe I was biting. No? No. He trudged out.
I picked the card up between the nails of my thumb and forefinger and started to drop it into the wastebasket.
Then I stopped. A card. It was just so damned out of the ordinary—a slob like that with a card. A card, yet.
For that matter, the whole play was out of the ordinary. I began to be a little sorry I hadn't let him run through the whole thing. Listening to a panhandler isn't going to kill me. After all, what was he trying to do but give me an off-beat sales pitch? I can always use an off-beat sales pitch. I work out of a small office, I buy and sell, but half my stock is good ideas. I'll use ideas, even from a bum.
The card was clean and white, except where the smudge from his fingers made a brown blot. Written across it in a kind of ornate handwriting were the words Mr. Ogo Eksar. Under that was the name and the telephone number of a hotel in the Times Square area, not far from my office. I knew that hotel: not expensive, but not a fleabag either—somewhere just under the middle line.
There was a room number in one corner of the card. I stared at it and I felt kind of funny. I really didn't know.
Although come to think of it, why couldn't a panhandler be registered at a hotel? "Don't be a snob, Bernie," I told myself.
A twenty for a five, he'd offered. Man, I'd love to have seen his face if I'd said: Okay, give me the twenty, you take the five, and now get the hell out of here.
The government surplus notices caught my eye. I flipped the card into the wastebasket and tried to go back to business.
Twenty for five. What kind of panhandling pitch would follow it? I couldn't get it out of my mind!
There was only one thing to do. Ask somebody about it. Ricardo? A big college professor, after all. One of my best contacts.
He'd thrown a lot my way—a tip on the college building program that was worth a painless fifteen hundred, an office equipment disposal from the United Nations, stuff like that. And any time I had any questions that needed a college education, he was on tap. All for the couple, three hundred, he got out of me in commissions.
I looked at my watch. Ricardo would be in his office now, marking papers or whatever it is he does there. I dialed his number.
"Ogo Eksar?" he repeated after me. "Sounds like a Finnish name. Or maybe Estonian. From the eastern Baltic, I'd say."
"Forget that part," I said. "This is all I care about." And I told him about the twenty-for-five offer.
He laughed. "That thing again!"
"Some old hustle that the Greeks pulled on the Egyptians?"
"No. Something the Americans pulled. And not a con game. During the depression, a New York newspaper sent a reporter around the city with a twenty-dollar bill which he offered to sell for exactly one dollar. There were no takers. The point being, that even with people out of work and on the verge of starvation, they were so intent on not being suckers that they turned down an easy profit of nineteen hundred percent."
"Twenty for one? This was twenty for five."
"Oh, well, you know, Bernie, inflation," he said, laughing again. "And these days it's more likely to be a television show."
"Television? You should have seen the way the guy was dressed!"
"Just an extra, logical touch to make people refuse to take the offer seriously. University research people operate much the same way. A few years back, a group of sociologists began an investigation of the public's reaction to sidewalk solicitors in charity drives. You know, those people who jingle little boxes on street corners: Help the Two-Headed Children, Relief for Flood-Ravaged Atlantis? Well, they dressed up some of their students …"
"You think he was on the level, t
hen, this guy?"
"I think there is a good chance that he was. I don't see why he would have left his card with you, though."
"That I can figure—now. If it's a TV stunt, there must be a lot of other angles wrapped up in it. A giveaway show with cars, refrigerators, a castle in Scotland, all kinds of loot."
"A giveaway show? Well, yes—it could be."
I hung up, took a deep breath, and called Eksar's hotel. He was registered there all right. And he'd just come in.
I went downstairs fast and took a cab. Who knew what other connections he'd made by now?
Going up in the elevator, I kept wondering. How did I go from the twenty-dollar bill to the real big stuff, the TV giveaway stuff, without letting Eksar know that I was on to what it was all about? Well, maybe I'd be lucky. Maybe he'd give me an opening.
I knocked on the door. When he said, "Come in," I came in. But for a second or two I couldn't see a thing.
It was a little room, like all the rooms in that hotel, little and smelly and stuffy. But he didn't have the lights on, any electric lights. The window shade was pulled all the way down.
When my eyes got used to the dark, I was able to pick out this Ogo Eksar character. He was sitting on the bed, on the side nearest me. He was still wearing that crazy rumpled Palm Beach suit.
And you know what? He was watching a program on a funny little portable TV set that he had on the bureau. Color TV. Only it wasn't working right. There were no faces, no pictures, nothing but colors chasing around. A big blob of red, a big blob of orange, and a wiggly border of blue and green and black. A voice was talking from it, but all the words were fouled up. "Wah-wah, de-wah, de-wah."
Just as I came in, he turned it off. "Times Square is a bad neighborhood for TV," I told him. "Too much interference."
"Yes," he said. "Too much interference." He closed up the set and put it away. I wished I'd seen it when it was working right.
Funny thing, you know? I would have expected a smell of liquor in the room, I would have expected to see a couple of empties in the tin trash basket near the bureau. Not a sign.
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