by Damon Knight
Youngsters were strolling on the shadowed campus lawns, oblivious as he went past them. Naismith called first at the Registrar’s office. “Dolly,” he said to the brown-haired woman at the desk, “can you tell me something about a freshman named Lall—Samarantha Lall?”
The assistant registrar looked up, startled. “Oh—Professor Naismith.” She hesitated. “But, Professor, aren’t you suspended? Professor Orvile said—” She stopped, embarrassed.
“It was all a terrible mistake, Dolly,” Naismith told her in a confidential tone. “I had nothing to do with Ramsdell’s death. They asked me a few questions and then released me.
You can call up the police and verify that, if you like.”
“Oh, no,” she said, still looking doubtful. “Well, I’m sure it’s all right then. What was the name?”
“Samarantha Lall.”
The woman turned to her files. “Yes, here we are. Just a minute, I’ll give you a stat of her card.” She dropped the oblong of plastic into a copying machine, handed the duplicate to Naismith.
Naismith examined the card. “I see Thurmond has her in freshman English this morning.”
The woman glanced at the wall clock. “Better hurry if you want to catch her there, Professor.- That class is just letting out.”
Naismith thanked her hastily and left. He knew she would notify Orvile and there would be trouble—perhaps an expulsion. But he had no time for that now.
He saw her among a group of students scattering out of the main entrance of the Humanities Building. She stood composed and erect, in a dark blouse of figured silk and a short white skirt, with her books and equipment in her arms, waiting for him while he walked toward her.
Now that he observed her closely, she was an unusual-looking girl. Her skin was a dull tan, without gloss, even her prominent cheekbones. Her hair was black and dull. Her rather heavy features remained expressionless as he approached, but her long, amber eyes regarded him with veiled amusement.
“Yes, Professor?” she said in her thin voice.
“Miss Lall.” He was fighting to control a sudden anger that made his hands tremble.
“Yes?” she repeated.
“What is a Zug?”
They stared at each other for a moment in silence. “So you still don’t remember?” she said. “A Zug—” she pronounced the word with an intonation of hatred and disgust—“is a mutated ortholidan.”
“That means nothing to me.”
“An ortholidan is a monster. Some grow thirty feet long.
They are flesh-eaters, very fierce, and the mutated ones are also very intelligent.”
“What species do they belong to? Where are they found?”
“They belong to no Terrestrial species. As to where they are found—” She hesitated. “I can’t tell you that yet.”
“Why not?”
“You aren’t ready. We thought you were, but we were mistaken.”
“Ready for what? What do you want of me?”
She said slowly, “I’m going to be frank. We want you to kill a Zug. The Zug is in a certain place, very hard to get to. When you are ready, we’ll take you there, then when you have killed it, we will reward you liberally.” She smiled, showing small, separated white teeth.
Oddly repelled, Naismith said, “Then all this has been just to drive me into a position where I’d have to do what you wanted?”
“Yes,” She smiled again, and again Naismith felt a wave of repulsion.
“But why me?”
“Because you’re a Shefth. Look—” She fumbled in her handbag. “Catch this.” Her hand came up; something small and white hurtled toward him.
Naismith’s left hand went out, caught the thing in mid-air, batted it violently away. It bounced on the grass and came to rest.
“You see?” she asked, a little shakily, staring at him with her luminous amber eyes. “That’s why. Your reflexes are twice as fast as any—normal human being’s.” She stopped. “But I’ve said enough. Just one more word, Professor Naismith! Struggle against us. That’s what we want. The more you struggle, the more ready you’ll be. Now good-by.”
She turned away. Taut with anger, Naismith stepped after her, took her by the arm.
Her bare flesh burned cold into his palm. She was as cold as a lizard—or a corpse.
Naismith let go hastily. Her amber eyes stared coldly into his as she said again, “Good-by, Professor Naismith.” Then she turned, and this time Naismith did not try to stop her. He watched until she disappeared around a curve of the flame-tree-bordered path.
After a moment his eye was caught by a glint of white on the lawn a few yards away. He went to it, stooped and picked it up. It was the object Miss Lall had tossed at him: a chrome tube like an oversized lipstick. He removed the cap gingerly: there was a brown substance inside, the end apparently worn by use. On his thumb it left a brown smear, which would not come off, although he rubbed it vigorously with his handker-chief.
Turning the tube around, he saw lettering stamped into its side:
“WESTMORE CHARACTER SKINTONE No. 3: DARK SUNTAN.”
Naismith went home in a mood of suppressed fury. He pulled the machine down from the closet shelf again, set it on his kitchenette table, and stared at it while he ate a sandwich and drank coffee. The food satisfied his hunger, but his attention was not on it. He looked at the sleek, gleaming metal case as if by sheer force of staring he could penetrate its secrets. The metal was blue, like blued steel, but with iridescent glints of color. When he looked closely, he could just make out the fine parallel lines of the machining. That was what, gave it the iridescence, apparently. He examined the three oval inlays, tried again to turn or depress them, tried to force his fingernail into the cracks around them, but the separation was too fine. He turned the machine over, looking again for any joint, but there was none: except for the three inlays, the case was all one piece.
A prickle of uneasiness went up his spine. A machine is incomplete without controls. This had none. Therefore it was incomplete: the controls were elsewhere.
Someone, out there, invisible… sitting in a room, watching Naismith every moment… with his finger on a button?
Naismith’s fists clenched. The thing was dangerous, lethal; the fact that it came from Churan was proof enough that it was meant to work against him. And yet it was the only solid piece of evidence he had.
What else was there? He cast his mind back over the conversation with Miss Lall: all of it seemed subtly unpleasant now. Like an electric current, that cold touch of her arm had run back over all his memories of her.
After a moment he got up and took his notepad from the desk. Sitting again at the kitchenette table, he turned to the page where he had already listed what he knew about Lall and Churan, and wrote underneath: “Shefth. Mutated ortholidan (sp.?). Not Terrestrial species.”
Under that again, he scrawled, “Am I?” And immediately crossed it out with two heavy black lines.
He stood up, paced back and forth twice across the small room, then went with sudden decision to the visiphone and punched a number. To the university switchboard operator who answered, he said, “Professor Sturges, please.”
“I’ll see if he’s available.” The screen went gray, then blinked to life again. A pale young man peered myopically out of the screen. “Bio office.”
“I’d like to talk to Professor Sturges, please.”
“Okay, I’ll get him.” He disappeared from the screen, and Naismith heard his distant voice calling, “Hey, Harry—run down and tell Prof Sturges there’s a visi for him.”
After another wait, Sturges’ cropped gray head and sallow, intelligent face came on the screen. Sturges held the Chair of Xenology; he was a quiet man, said to be well thought of in his field; Naismith had only met him once or twice, at faculty luncheons.
“Sturges, I need some information in your line, if you will.”
“Of course, but aren’t you—” Sturges blinked at him with faint suspicion.
“Quite correct,” Sturges replied, still in reserve. “In fact, no intelligent race at all. One or two are about as smart as a chimpanzee, according to the Europeans. Why?”
“A student of mine asked me to criticize an imaginative story of his,” Naismith said, improvising. “Now this may be a little harder. Does the word ‘Shefth’ mean anything to you?”
Sturges repeated it without interest, then shook his head slowly. “No.”
“Zug?”
“No.”
“Have you ever heard of an organism called an ortholidan?”
“Never,” said Sturges succinctly. “Is that all?”
Naismith hesitated. “Yes, that’s it. Thank you.”
“Any time,” said Sturges distantly, and broke the connection.
Naismith sat looking at the blank screen. He had been on the point of asking Sturges, “Could a living human being be as cold to the touch as a lizard?”
But he knew the answer. Reptiles and amphibia are cold to the touch because they have no self-regulating temperature mechanism. The temperature of warm-blooded animals varies between narrow limits; if it rises or falls beyond those limits, generally speaking, the animal dies.
But a cold-blooded animal’s body temperature is always within a degree or two of the temperature of the air. And it had been cool and overcast this morning on the campus, when he met the Lall creature….
Naismith stood up, his muscles murderously taut. These people, whatever they were, knew more about him than he did himself. And that was intolerable.
“A Shefth,” he said aloud. The word still meant nothing to him, called up no image.
Where had he been, what unimaginable things had he done, during the thirty-one years that were blank in his memory?
Where on Earth… or off it?
Naismith thought frozenly, “Everything depends on what action I take at this moment.” With every nerve alert, he could sense the gathering danger around him as if it were a visible, geometric web.
Suddenly he remembered the card the assistant registrar had given him, and took it out of his pocket. According to the schedule, Lall had no classes this afternoon. Her address was given as 1034 Colorado Avenue, Apt. C30, Santa Monica.
The tube took Naismith to within a block of the address he wanted—one of the old gray-stone apartment complexes, built during the Cold War, with deep shelters and storage vaults underneath. The “C30” in Lall’s address, he knew, meant that she lived in the third sub-basement of the converted shelters.
The foyer with its peeling plastic walls was empty. Naismith took the elevator down into a narrow corridor, poorly lighted, with numbered red doors at intervals. The ceiling was oppressively low; the floor was scuffed gray tile.
In a dead-end passage, he found the door marked “C30.” A plastic card gummed to the door read “Lall.”
Naismith paused, listening. There was no sound from beyond the door, and he had a sudden conviction that the apartment was empty. He pressed the buzzer.
The door clicked, swung wide.
In the opening stood Miss Lall, dressed as he had seen her that morning. Behind her he glimpsed a disordered, green-walled room. Cigarette smoke swirled up through the cone of yellow light projected by a lamp.
“Come in, Mr. Naismith,” the creature said, and moved aside.
Naismith’s back muscles tightened. He stepped to the room, then paused.
Beyond a table, watching him with cold amber eyes, sat a brown-skinned man with a beard. After a moment, his resemblance to Lall was obvious.
Naismith walked forward. “You are Churan,” he said.
“I am.”
Naismith said grimly, “You sent me the machine. And you sent that lawyer to get me out of jail.”
“Thank me for that, at least,” the man said, narrowing his eyes. The table before him was littered with food and crumpled plastic. He picked up a chicken leg, gnawed it, spat out a piece of gristle. Scraps dribbled into his beard. He gazed up at Naismith with insolent eyes.
Lall came around and sat on the arm of a chair. Together, Naismith thought, they looked more inhuman than either alone. They were like two gigantic frogs, painted and dressed in human clothing.
A stir of revulsion went through him. “Exactly what do you want from me?” he demanded.
“To begin with, why not sit down and talk reasonably together? What can be lost?”
Naismith hesitated, then sat in a leather chair facing the table. The room, he saw now, was cluttered with an astonishing number and variety of things. Books and papers were stacked unevenly on the floor, piled on tables. Naismith saw an icon, a bronze Chinese dragon, a plastic windup toy, a string of cheap green beads, a can of soup. Balls of paper and plastic had been tossed carelessly into corners. There were scraps of food on the floor. Dust was thick everywhere.
“What can we offer you in return for your cooperation, Mr.
Naismith?” Churan asked. He picked up an orange, began to tear the skin off with his greasy fingers. “Money?”
Naismith did not reply.
“Knowledge?” Churan said delicately. Both aliens smiled.
Naismith leaned forward. “Very well. You claim to know all about me. Let me hear some proof of that—give me details.”
Churan shook his head. “Payment in advance, Mr. Naismith? Not a very good method of dealing.” He made a face, spoke a few guttural words to Lall.
“Doing business,” she said.
“Yes—doing business. We will not tell you everything now, Mr. Naismith. You have already learned something—that you are a Shefth, that the Lenlu Din sent you back—”
Lall interrupted him with a hissed word. He shrugged. “Well, it does not matter. There is still much for you to learn.” He stuffed a segment of orange into his mouth and began to chew, blinking at Naismith in time with the motion of his jaw.
Naismith felt an unreasonable anger. He said, “You’re asking me to go into this blindly. Why should I trust you?”
Churan spat out a seed, stuffed another segment of orange in. With his mouth full, he asked, “What other choice do you have?”
“I can refuse,” Naismith said. “I can stay here, live out my life.”
“You are already under suspicion of murder,” Churan commented. “You will lose your job—”
Naismith stood up.
“I am only stating facts, Mr. Naismith,” Churan said, staring up at him. “If necessary, you will be convicted of murder and will receive a long prison sentence. We can even arrange for painful accidents to happen to you while in prison.”
Lall spoke to him warningly. He shrugged, and said, “Only facts. Be realistic, Mr. Naismith—if you do not agree now, you will later.”
Naismith felt choked with anger. His voice was low. “What if I kill you instead?”
Churan flinched. “You will not,” he said hastily. “But if you did, who would answer your questions?”
Naismith was silent. Churan’s blunt forefinger stirred the papers on the table. “Meanwhile, if you want proofs, I will give you some proofs. Look at this, Mr. Naismith.”
Naismith glanced down. Churan’s fingers were spreading out a mare’s nest of amateur-looking color photographs.
Naismith recognized a dim picture of Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, a shot of the Neumann Obelisk in downtown Los Angeles, a grinning closeup of Churan himself. Then something different came into view.
It was an oblong of what seemed to be clear plastic. In it were three tiny figures against a shadowy background.
The illusion of depth was so perfect that the figures seemed to be sunken beneath the surface of the table. Two were shorter than the other; and Naismith recognized Lall and Churan by their stance, even before he leaned ne
ar enough to make out the features. The third—
He stiffened incredulously. The third man was himself.
There was no mistake. Back in his apartment, Naismith took the photograph out of his pocket again and examined it for the third tune. He had stared at it on the tube car going home, until the glances of other passengers had made him feel conspicuous.
There he was, embedded in the clear plastic, looking almost as if he might move or speak. Beside him, the two aliens gazed out with self-satisfied smiles.
“Where was this taken?” he had asked Churan. The alien had grinned up at him. “Not was—will be, Mr. Naismith. You are going with us into the future, and this picture will be taken there. So you see, there is no point in argument.” He giggled, and after a moment Lall joined in. Their hoarse, grunting laughter was so unpleasant to Naismith that he pocketed the photograph and fled.
Now, staring at it again, he was compelled to believe. The background showed a room like none he had ever seen before.
The walls were paneled in magenta and ivory strips of some substance that looked hazy and blurred at the edges, although the rest of the picture was in sharp focus. There were chairs, tables of unfamiliar shapes.
He knew in his bones that the room was not of this place and time. Either he and the aliens had been together in the past, in that blank period that was the first thirty-one years of his life… or else Churan had been telling the literal truth: this was a picture of something yet to happen—a snapshot from the future.
If the aliens themselves could come back from the future into present time—if the gun he had seen in his room could be projected back—why not a photograph?
But if that were so, how could he possibly escape?
He ate a solitary dinner, went to a movie, but discovered after half an hour that he had no idea what he had been watching.
That night, he dreamed.
Chapter Four