by James Blish
“He draws the moral,” she said.
“Possibly,” said the silver man. “We’ll let it go for now, anyhow. It’s time for the next subject. You can get up now.”
This last sentence seemed to be addressed to Carl. He stiffened for a moment, half expecting either the metal people or the room—or perhaps himself—to vanish, but since nothing at all changed, he slid cautiously to his feet.
Looking down at the feet, and on upward from there as far as he could without seeming vain about it, he discovered that he was wearing the same scuffed sneakers and soiled slacks he had been wearing when he had gone cycling with the Hobbit crowd, except that both the clothing and his own self under it had been given a thorough bath. He was offended by the discovery, but at the moment not very much. Did it mean that there really had been no events between that expedition to Telegraph Hill, and this nightmare?
“Am I on the ship?” he said. It was a difficult sentence to get out.
“Of course,” said the silver man.
“But I never got to join the official party—or I don’t think …”
“Nobody will come aboard with the official party, Jack. We selected the few we wanted from among the cats your people designated. The rest will cool their heels.”
“Then what am I—”
“Too many answers,” Lavelle said.
“Never mind,” said the silver man. “It won’t matter for long, chicklet. Come along, Mr …. Wade? … yes; we’ll interview you later, and answer some of your questionsthen, if we feel up to it. Lavelle, stay here and set up for the next live one. And Mr. Wade, one other thing: Should you feel ambitious, just bear in mind …”
The metal-skinned people changed places, silently, instantly, without the slightest preparation, without the slightest follow-through.
“ … That we’re a little faster on the draw than you are,” Brand finished from his new position, evenly, but his voice striking Carl’s other ear like a final insult. “We need no other weapons. Dig me?”
“Yulp,” Carl said. As a final word, it was not much better than his first.
The sheathed man led him out the oval door.
II
Numb as he had thought he was by now to everything but his own alarm, Carl was surprised to be surprised by the spaciousness of what they had called “the cages.” His section of them reminded him more of an executive suite, or his imaginings of one—a large single bedroom, a wardrobe, a bathroom, and a sort of office containing a desk with a small TV screen and a headset like a cross between a hair-dryer and a set of noise-mufflers.
He had been marched to this in total silence by the silver man, through a long corridor where they had passed several others of the metal people, all of whom had passed them by wordlessly and with their eyes as blanked out as Little Orphan Annie’s. Once they had arrived at the cage, however, Brand had turned affable, showing him the facilities, even including a stock of clean clothes, and seating him at last at the desk.
“I’ll talk to you further when there’s more time,” the silver man said. “At the moment we’re still recruiting. If you want food, you can call for it through that phone. I hope you know that you can’t get away. If you cut out of the cage, there’d be no place where you could wind up.”
Brand reached forward to the desk and touched something. Under Carl’s feet, a circular area about the size of a snow slider turned transparent, and Carl found himself looking down at the Bay area through nothing but ten miles or more of thin air. Even moderate heights had always made him sick; he clutched at the edge of the desk and was just about to lose his option when the floor turned solid again.
“I wanted you to see,” Brand said, “that you really are aboard our ship. By the way, if you’d like to look through there again, the button for it is right here.”
“Thanks,” Carl said, calling up one of his suavest witticisms, “but no thanks.”
“Suit yourself. Is there anything else you’d like, until we meet again?”
“Well … you said you were bringing more, uh, Earth people up here. If you could bring my wife I would … ?”
The answer to this was of only academic interest to Carl. He had been separated from Bea for more than a year, ever since the explosion about college; and on the whole it had been painless, since they had been civilized enough to have been married in the first place only at common law and that a little bit by accident. But it would have been nice to have had someone he knew up here, if only somebody with a reasonably pink skin.
The silver man said: “Sorry. None of the other males we expect to bring aboard will know you, or each other. We find it better to follow the same rule with females, so we won’t have any seizures of possessiveness.”
He got up and moved toward the door, which was usual shape for doors, not oval like the last one. He still seemed relatively gracious, but at the door he turned and added:
“We want you to understand from the outset that up here, you own nobody—and nobody owns you but us.” And with that, in a final silent nonexplosion of arrogance, he flicked into nothingness, leaving Carl staring with glazed eyes at the unbroached door.
Of course no warning could have prevented Carl, or anyone else above the mental level of a nematode, from trying to think about escape; and Carl, because he had been selected as the one lay volunteer to visit the spaceship possibly because he had thought about spaceships now and then or read about them, thought he ought to be able to work out some sort of plan—if only he could stop jittering for a few minutes. In order to compose his mind, he got undressed and into the provided pajamas—the first time he had worn such an outfit in ten years—and ordered the ship (through the desk phone) to send him a bottle of muscatel, which arrived promptly out of a well in the center of the desk. To test the ship’s good will, he ordered five other kinds of drink, and got them all, some of which he emptied with conscious self-mastery down the toilet.
Then he thought—jungling a luxurious bourbon-and-ginger abstractedly; the sound of ice was peculiarly comforting—why the hell had the Pentagon people picked him as the “lay volunteer,” out of so many? The alien ship had asked for a sampling of human beings to go back to its far star, and of these, it had wanted one to be a man of no specialties whatsoever—or no specialties that the ship had been willing to specify. The Pentagon had picked its own sampling of experts, who probably had been ordered to “volunteer”; but the “lay volunteer” had been another matter.
Like everyone else, Carl had been sure the Pentagon would want the “lay volunteer” actually to be a master spy among all possible master spies, not a James Bond but a Leamas type, a man who could pass for anything; but it hadn’t worked that way. Instead, the Pentagon had approved Carl, one slightly beat and more than slightly broke drop-out, who believed in magic and the possibility of spaceships, but—let us face it, monsters and gentlemen—didn’t seem to be of much interest either to alien or to human otherwise.
Why, for instance, hadn’t the “lay volunteer” the aliens wanted turned out to be a Bircher, a Black Muslim, a Communist, or a Rotarian—in short, some kind of fanatic who purported to deal with the real world—instead of a young man who was fanatic only about imaginary creatures called hobbits? Even an ordinary science-fiction fan would have been better; why was a sword-and-sorcery addict required to try to figure his way out of a classical spaceship clink?
Gradually, he began to feel—with pain, and only along the edges—that there was an answer to that. He got upand began to pace, which took him into the bedroom. Once there, he sat down nervously on the bed.
At once, the lights went out. Wondering if he had inadvertently sat on a trigger, he stood up again; but the darkness persisted.
Were the metal people reading his mind again—and trying to suppress any further thinking? It might well work. He was tired, and he’d been out of practice at thinking anyhow. Well, he could lay down and pretend to be asleep. Maybe that would—
T
he lights went on.
Though he was dead sure that he hadn’t fallen asleep, he knew that he was rested. He remembered that when he had looked down the sinkhole under the desk, lights had been coming on around the Bay. Gritting his teeth and swallowing to keep down the anticipated nausea, he went out to the desk and touched the button.
One glance was enough, luckily. It was high morning on Earth. A night had passed.
And what was the thought he had lost? He couldn’t remember. The ship had finessed him—as easily as turning a switch.
III
He ordered breakfast; the ship delivered it. The bottles and glasses, he noticed, had been taken away. As an insulting aftermath, the ship also ran him another bath without his having ordered it. He took it since he saw nothing to be gained by going dirty up here; it would be as unimpressive as carrying a poster around that sink hole. No razor was provided; evidently the ship didn’t object to his beard.
He then went after a cigarette, couldn’t find any, and finally settled for a slow burn, which was easy enough to muster from all his deprivations, but somehow wasn’t assatisfying as usual. I’ll show them, he thought; but show them what? They looked invulnerable—and besides, he had no idea what they wanted him for; all the official clues had been snatched away, and no substitutes provided.
How about making a play for Lavelle? But how to get to her? Carl knew nothing about these people’s sexual taboos; they might just not give a damn, like most Earth people on a cruise. And besides, the girl seemed pretty formidable. But lush; it would be fun to break her down.
His stomach twinged and he got up to pace. The trouble was that he had nothing to impress Lavelle with but his build, which really wasn’t any better than Brand’s. His encyclopedic knowledge of the habits of hobbits wasn’t going to crush any buttercups around here, and he doubted that being able to sing “Fallout Blues” in two separate keys would, either. Damnit, they’d left him nothing to work with! It was unfair.
Abruptly remembering last night’s drinks, he stopped at the desk and tried asking for cigarettes. They materialized instantly. Well, at least the aliens weren’t puritans—that was hopeful. Except that he didn’t want a complaisant Lavelle; that wouldn’t show anybody anything, least of all himself. There was no particular kick in swingers.
But if they gave him drinks and butts, they might just let him roam about, too. Maybe there was somebody else here that he could use, or some other prisoner who could give him clues. For some reason the thought of leaving the cage sparked a brief panic, but he smothered it by thinking of the ship as a sort of convention hotel, and tried the door.
It opened as readily as the entrance to a closet. He paused on the threshold and listened, but there was absolutely no sound except the half-expected hum of machinery. Now the question was, supposing the opening of the door had been an accident, and he was notsupposed to be prowling around the ship? But that was their worry, not his; they had no right to expect him to obey their rules. Besides, as Buck Rogers used to say under similar circumstances, there was only one way to find out.
There was no choice of direction, since the corridor’s ends were both unknown. Moving almost soundlessly—one real advantage of tennis shoes—he padded past a succession of cage doors exactly like his own, all closed and with no clues for guessing who or what lay behind them. Soon, however, he became aware that the corridor curved gently to the right; and just after the curve passed the blind point, he found himself on the rim of a park.
Startled, he shrank back, then crept forward still more cautiously. The space down the ramp ahead was actually a long domed hall or auditorium, oval in shape, perhaps five city blocks in length and two across at the widest point, which was where the opening off the corridor debouched. It seemed to be about ten stories high at the peak, floored with grass and shrubbery, and rimmed with small identical patios—one of which, he realized with a dreamlike lack of surprise, must back up against his own cage. It all reminded him unpleasantly of one of those enlightened zoos in which the animals are allowed to roam in spurious freedom in a moated “ecological setting.”
As he looked down into the park, there was a long sourceless sigh like a whisper of metal leaves, and doors opened at the back of each patio. Slowly, people began to come out—pink people, not metal ones. He felt a brief mixture of resentment and chagrin; had he stayed in his own cage, he would have been admitted to the park automatically now, without having had to undergo the jumpy and useless prowl down the companionway.
Anyway, he had found fellow prisoners, just as he had hoped; and it would be safer down there than up here. He loped eagerly downhill.
The ramp he was following ran between two patios. One of them was occupied by a girl, seated upon a perfectly ordinary camp chair and reading. He swerved, braking.
“Well, hi there!” he called to her.
She looked up, smiling politely but not at all as pleased to see another inmate as he could have hoped. She was small, neat and smoky, with high cheekbones and black hair—perhaps a Latin Indian, but without the shyness he usually counted upon with such types.
“Hello,” she said. “What have they got you in for?”
That he understood; it was a standard jailhouse question.
“I’m supposed to be the resident fantasy fan,” he said, in an unusual access of humility. “Or that’s my best guess. My name’s Carl Wade. Are you an expert?”
“I’m Jeanette Hilbert. I’m a meteorologist. But as a reason for my being here, it’s obviously a fake—this place has about as much weather as a Zeppelin hangar. Apparently it’s the same story with all of us.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Two weeks, I think. I wouldn’t swear to it.”
“So long? I was snatched only last night.”
“Don’t count on it,” Jeanette said. “Time is funny here. These metal people seem to jump all around in it—or else they can mess with your memory at will.”
Carl remembered the change in the clock face, back when Brand and Lavelle had been showing off their powers for him. It hadn’t occurred to him that time rather than space might have been involved, despite that clue. He wished he had read more Hubbard—something about transfer of theta from one MEST entity to another—no, he couldn’t recapture the concept, which he had never found very illuminating anyhow. Korzybski? Madame Blavatsky? The hell with it. He said:
“How’d you come on board?”
“Suddenly. I was taken right out of my apartment, a day after NASA volunteered me. Woke up in an EEG lab here, having my brainprints taken.”
“So did I. Hm-m-m. Any fuzzy period between?”
“No, but that doesn’t prove anything.” She looked him over, slowly and deliberately. It was not an especially approving glance. “Is that what fantasy fans usually wear?”
He was abruptly glad that his levis and shirt were at least clean, no matter how willy-nilly. “Work clothes,” he explained.
“Oh. What kind of work?”
“Photography,” he said, masking a split-second’s groping with his most winning smile. It was, he knew, a workable alias; most girls dream of posing. “But they didn’t bring my cameras and stuff along with me, so I guess I’m as useless as you are, really.”
“Oh,” she said, getting up, “I’m not sure I’m so useless. I didn’t bring my barometer, but I still have my head.”
Dropping her book on the chair, she swung away and went back into her cage, moving inside her simple dress as flexibly as a reed.
“Hey, Jeanette … I didn’t mean … just a …”
Her voice came back: “They close the doors again afteran hour.” Then, as if in mockery, her own door closed behind her, independently.
For want of anything else to do, he stepped into the patio and picked up the book. It was called “Experimental Design,” by one Sir Ronald Fisher, and the first sentence that he hit read: “In fact, the statement can be made that the probability that t
he unknown mean of the population is less than a particular limit, is exactly P, namely Pr (u < x+ts) = P for all values of P, where t is known (and has been tabulated as a function of P and N).” He dropped the thin volume hastily. He had been wondering vaguely whether Jeanette had brought the book with her or the ship had supplied it, but suddenly he couldn’t care less. It began to look as though all the chicks he encountered on this ship had been born to put him down.
Disappointed at his own indifference, he remembered her warning, and looked quickly back at the top of the gangway down which he had come. It was already closed. Suppose he was cut off? There were people down there in the park that he still wanted to talk to—but obviously not now. He raced along the esplanade.
He identified his own cage almost entirely by intuition; and it seemed that he was scarcely in it five minutes before the door to the patio slid shut. Now he had something else to think about, and he was afraid to try it, not only because it was painful, but because despite Jeanette’s theories about time and memory, he still thought it very likely that Lavelle and her consort could read his mind. Experience, after all, supported all three theories indifferently, thus far.
But what about the other door? Increasingly it seemed to him that he hadn’t been intended to go through it. He had been told that he couldn’t get out of his cage; and one hour’s access to the park was nothing more than admission to a larger cage, not any sort of permission to roam. The unlocked outer door had to have been an accident. And if so, and if it were still open, there should still be all sorts of uses he might make of it—
He froze, waiting to be jumped into the next day by the mind readers. Nothing happened. Perhaps they could read his mind, but weren’t doing it at the moment. They couldn’t be reading everybody’s mind every minute of theday; they were alien and powerful, but also very obviously human in many important ways. All right. Try the outer door again. There was really nothing in the world that he wanted to do less, but the situation was beginning to make him mad, and rage was the only substitute he had for courage.