by Damon Knight
Absently Naismith pressed the button on the side of the box.
The viewscreen lighted up, and he was looking into the pale, lean face of the man on the identity card. A voice began to speak—a nasal, negligent, cultured voice. Naismith caught a few words, recognized them as a date a few weeks earlier than the one on the “all-night gala” announcement.
He set the box down with reverent care. He had had an incredible piece of luck, and had almost failed to recognize it.
He was looking at the journal of Isod Rentro, a passenger aboard this ship in the year of our Lord 11,050.
Rentro was dressed in a loose-fitting blouse of metallic silver-white, with a violet scarf at his throat. His skin was pale and unhealthy-looking, very faintly freckled, as if it had seldom been exposed to the sun. His hands were thin. He gestured wearily with a long carved holder in which a green stick of something was smoldering.
The scene flickered, changed. Naismith was looking out at a vast space in which crowds of colorfully dressed people moved, while Rentro’s commentary continued. He was looking, Naismith realized, at the spaceship’s berth before the takeoff.
Another ship was visible in the distance, under the dome of a gigantic transparent roof. Music was playing; colored streamers were twisting through the air.
A chime sounded, and Naismith saw faces turn, hands begin to wave. Like an elevator dropping, the whole vast concourse slowly began to drift downward. Above, the transparent roof parted, opened out into two graceful wings. They, too, drifted downward and out of sight.
Naismith had a glimpse of a misty landscape, quickly and silently shrinking. Clouds whipped past and were gone. The horizon grew round, then the earth assumed the shape of a bowl, a sphere, visibly dwindling. The sky grew purple, then black; stars appeared.
The screen flickered again. Rentro came into view once more, still sitting calmly in his cabin, with an expression of amused boredom. He spoke a few final words, gestured, and the screen went dark.
It lighted again immediately. Rentro appeared, dressed in a different costume, against a background Naismith recognized.
He caught his breath involuntarily. This was a place he knew
—the great lounge at the end of this section, the one with the enormous central chandelier and the tiers of balconies.
Walls, furniture, everything was exactly the same: but the vast room was brilliantly lit, aswarm with people. It was like watching a corpse suddenly grow vividly, beautifully alive.
Rentro turned, faced the screen, spoke a few words. A young woman in a white gown came into view; her complexion was rosy, her eyes surrounded by startling blue rings of cosmetics.
Rentro took her casually by the arm, spoke her name—Izel Dormay—and added a few words which made them both smile. The view changed again….
Naismith followed the record through the first few weeks of the voyage. Allowing for the difference in technology and in the incredible consumption-level of these people, it was very much like a luxury cruise of the twentieth century. The passengers played games, watched the entertainment screens, ate, drank, strolled about. Once or twice a ship’s officer appeared, spoke a few polite words into the screen. The crew and most of the passengers were human, but Naismith occasionally glimpsed members of Lall’s race.
Then there was a change. It happened so gradually that Naismith was not aware of it at first. The crowds in the lounges and game rooms grew less. Crew members in their gray and black uniforms were more in evidence, and moved more pur-posefully. Once Naismith saw a stumbling, slack-jawed man being helped out of a room by two crewmen: he looked drunken or perhaps drugged. Rentro’s commentary was dis-dainfully cool, as usual, but Naismith caught a worried expression on his face.
A day or so later, there was no mistaking the difference.
Few people were in the lounges or on the promenades. Rentro ventured out briefly, then went back to his cabin; his next entry in the journal was made there, and so were all those that followed. His expression grew daily more strained: he looked, Naismith thought, like a badly frightened man. Once he made a long speech into the machine, which Naismith would have given much to interpret, but he could only catch a word here and there, no matter how often he played it over—“carrying,”
“danger,” “contagion.”
A day later, the entry was brief, and Naismith was able to make it out: “We are returning to Earth.”
The rest of the journal consisted of brief entries, only the date and a few perfunctory words, with two exceptions. In the first, Rentro spoke at some length, seriously and soberly, from time to time consulting a tablet he held in his hand: it occurred to Naismith that he was making his will.
The second time, after announcing the date and repeating a phrase he had used several times before, Rentro suddenly and horrifyingly lost his composure. With a distorted, writhing face, he shouted something into the machine—four words, of which Naismith could make out only one. It was “Greenskins”—
the contemporary name for Lall’s people.
Two days after that, the journal stopped. It simply ended, without any clue to what had happened next.
Naismith searched the adjoining suites, then and on the following day, and found three more such personal journals.
When he had run them all off he was no wiser: all told essentially the same story, and all ended abruptly, at varying times, before the ship reached Earth.
For the time being, he gave it up. Naismith had been two weeks alone in the ship, enduring its green silences, and the solitude was beginning to wear on him. He began to think of going back to the aliens. He had explored the ship as thoroughly as he could, in the limits of the time he had spent, and without going near the red trails left by Lall and Churan.
It occurred to him for the first time that this precaution might have been unnecessary.
Suppose the aliens had begun to use the time machine to search for him as soon as they had found him missing. Almost certainly they would have begun by searching their own lounge and the corridor outside it, for a month or so into the future.
If they had done that, and found him, there would never have been any necessity to search elsewhere in the ship. Accordingly, if Naismith was in fact going to be found in the aliens’ suite or near it, he could roam anywhere he pleased until that time, elsewhere in the ship, without any fear of discovery.
It was a curious sensation, following the fading red trail on the carpet. Here and there still fainter trails branched off.
Doubtless the aliens had first explored the ship at random, as he himself had done; these early trails led nowhere. But the strong red trail, recently renewed, meant that there were places in the ship the aliens wanted to revisit. What were they?
The path led through empty galleries and lounges, down a broad corridor, up a stair… Naismith’s own knowledge of the ship soon failed him; he no longer knew where he was except in a general sense.
He passed through an anteroom into a vast, echoing natatorium surrounded by balconies. Cushions and reclining chairs were strewn beside the pool; the tank itself was filled with clear water. There was no debris on the bottom, not a particle of dust visible on the surface. Remembering the colorful crowds he had seen in Rentro’s journal, Naismith was oppressed by the sense of their almost-living presence—as if they had only stepped into the next room for a moment….
Beyond the natatorium was a row of dressing rooms, and beyond that, unexpectedly, a small gymnasium. Here, for the first time, there was evidence of an alien presence. The parallel bars, horses, trampolines had been pushed aside, and three small black-metal boxes lay in the middle of the polished floor.
One had a line of transparencies and dials on its upper face.
Remembering the machine the aliens had used on him in their Los Angeles apartment, Naismith was careful not to approach them. He skirted the room cautiously, looking for a continua-tion of the red trail, but there was none: it ended here.
He turned. And Churan was
standing in the doorway, with a black, lensed machine on a tripod beside him.
With shock tingling through his nervous system, Naismith took a step forward; the machine swiveled slightly on its mounting to follow him. He stopped.
“Don’t do it, Naismith,” Churan said tensely. “This is a force gun, locked onto you as its target. If I press the release—” he showed Naismith a tiny control box in his hand—
“or if you move too suddenly, the gun will fire.”
Naismith forced himself to relax. “Why the armament?” he asked contemptuously.
“We have decided it is safer. If you have no plan to attack us, it will make no difference to you. Now follow, please, and make no sudden moves for your own safety.”
He backed away, and the machine rolled back beside him, its glittering lenses swiveling to stare at Naismith, almost with an air of intelligence: as if the machine were alive, watching him….
I should have looked for the arsenal, Naismith thought, with a sick feeling of defeat. But perhaps it would not have made any difference—they would have found me there before I could take anything…
Churan backed out into the middle of the corridor and stopped. The headband with its metal box lay on the carpet.
“Pick it up,” he ordered curtly.
Naismith moved forward as slowly as he dared. “Where are Lall and the child?” he asked, temporizing.
“Safe,” Churan spat. “Pick up the headband!”
Naismith stooped, got the thing in his fingers. Tell me, Churan,” he said, “why all this caution? Why can’t you just go forward in time and see if everything turns out all right?”
Churan’s amber eyes gleamed. “We did that, Mr. Naismith.
The results—were ambiguous. We decided to take no chances with you. Put on the headband.”
Naismith raised the headband, weighing it in his hands. He swayed slightly, watching the feral head of the machine turn, almost imperceptibly, on its oiled socket. What was the principle involved? Heat? If he could somehow manage to reduce his body temperature—
Churan glared. “Put it on!”
Naismith’s body tensed. For reasons he could not clearly understand, the thing he held was intensely abhorrent. It might be better to jump, take his chances—
“I warn you!” said Churan, holding the control box in squat fingers.
Naismith’s lips pulled back in a grimace. He raised the headband, slowly fitted it over his skull.
The last thing he saw, before darkness crashed around him, was Churan’s triumphant smile.
Chapter Nine
His head ached. He was sitting on the floor, holding his head in his hands to quiet the throbbing pain. He looked around, moving with exaggerated caution, for the slightest motion made his head feel as if it were about to split.
The headband lay across the room, bent out of shape. Churan was staring at him, breathing hard; sweat was beaded on his narrow forehead.
“How do you feel?” he asked hoarsely.
Naismith tried to sit up, groaned and slumped back. “Pain in my head,” he answered indistinctly. “What happened?”
“You tore off the helmet halfway through,” Churan muttered. “It’s lucky for you that I had neutralized the gun. Make no mistake—it’s locked on again now!” He twitched, and resumed, “I don’t understand how— You are not supposed to be able to resume voluntary control until after the memory unit has stopped working.… Do you understand everything I say?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Naismith asked, and then halted, trans-fixed by a realization that almost drove his pain into the background.
He and Churan were not speaking English. They were talking in the language of his dreams—the same hissing, guttural tongue the aliens used—but now every word was clear.
“Who is the Highborn?” Churan demanded, inching nearer.
“The hereditary aristarch,” Naismith answered impatiently.
“She—” Once more he stopped, in total dismay. The knowledge that he found in his mind, a complete and detailed history of the Highborn and her court, had not been there before.
“The process was successful, then,” Churan said with evident relief. “You missed the end of the disk, of course, but we can supply that later, if necessary. I was afraid that— Sit still until you feel better.” He turned, retreated.
He was back in a moment, followed by Lall. Both aliens were staring at him with an air of suppressed excitement.
Churan, muttering something under his breath, stepped over to the wall and picked up the damaged headband, showing it to Lall.
Her muddy complexion paled. She held out her hand for the headband, fingered the bent metal unbelievingly. “He did that?
While the educator was turned on?”
Both aliens stared at Naismith. “Does he have the compulsion?”
“Obviously not.”
Lall snarled at him, “How do you know?”
The pain in Naismith’s head had eased a little. He got gingerly to his feet and retreated with cautious movements to the wall. He leaned back, watching and listening, while the aliens erupted into a sudden furious argument.
“How, then?” Churan demanded, thrusting his face into Lall’s. “Tell me how.”
“Try it yourself!” she returned, and thrust the headband into his hand.
Churan looked at it with surprise; his amber eyes narrowed, then glinted with understanding.
“The disk will begin at the moment it was interrupted,”
Lall said. “Go ahead, put it on—what harm can it do you?”
Churan grinned mirthlessly. “True. Very well.” He pried dubiously at the bent framework. “I do not know if it will function—” He shrugged and put the headband on. His eyes closed, then opened again.
“Well?” the woman demanded.
Churan took the headband off slowly. “You were right. The compulsion formula was almost all there—he could have heard only the first syllable of it.”
Again the two aliens stared at him, with something like respect in their faces.
“This changes matters,” Churan muttered. He glanced sidelong at Naismith, and added, “Don’t forget, he understands what we say now. Come—” He took Lall’s arm, drew her aside.
Naismith straightened up. “Just a moment!” he said. “Are you going to go on trying to keep me in the dark? Because if so, I give you warning now that my cooperation is over. He gestured at the gun on its tripod. “Turn that thing off, and tell me what that machine was meant to make me do.”
The aliens looked at him sullenly. “There was a compulsion formula in it,” Lall said at last, “to make sure you would do as we wish, when you are past the Barrier.”
Naismith said, “Then the story you told me about myself was false?”
“No, it was true, every word,” said Churan earnestly, coming forward a step. “We only wanted to make sure—”
“Wait,” Lall interrupted. She peered into Naismith’s face.
“Mr. Naismith—do you hate the Lenlu Din?”
Naismith opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again. At her words, memories had begun to swim up out of some black place in his mind.
“The Lenlu Din…” he said. Plump, floating people in puffed costumes of scarlet and gold, peach, frost-white, orchid, buff. Shrill overbearing voices, glittering eyes….
“This may be the answer,” the woman was saying in a tense undertone to Churan. “Forget the compulsion—if he really hates them, he will do it because he wants to. Let us try him on the lie detector. What can we lose now?”
Churan looked uncertainly at Naismith, and there was a flicker of anger in his eyes. “How can I tell?” he muttered. “He is a Shefth.”
“All the more reason. We will do it. Come.” She beckoned to Naismith, started off down the corridor.
“The gun,” said Naismith, not moving.
“No,” she said. “We are going to be frank with you, Mr.
Naismith—but the gun stays, a litt
le longer.”
Naismith shrugged and followed. The gun retreated as he moved, rolling smoothly along beside the two aliens, with its lensed muzzle trained steadily on him.
It was that way all the way back to the aliens’ suite. The pain in Naismith’s head was receding, only a dull ache now, but his mind was confused by an insistent crowd of images, sounds, voices babbling together, faces that were unknown and yet familiar…
Yet he was dimly aware that there was something unex-plained about what had just happened. Why had Churan found him just there, in the corridor outside the gymnasium?…
They entered the lounge, where Yegga sprang up from the floor, spilling a bowl of something greenish-yellow, and went to its mother with an angry squall.
She cuffed it aside impatiently. “Sit down, Mr. Naismith.
Gunda, get the detector.”
“It will take a few—” Churan began. “No, I am wrong, I have to retrieve the time vehicle anyway. I may as well do it, and then—”
“Go, get it,” she said impatiently. Churan went out, with a last sullen glance at Naismith.
Naismith lowered himself into a chair, thinking hard. Lall sat down opposite him, her long amber eyes hooded and watchful. “What were you doing in the ship, all that time until Gunda found you?” she demanded.
Naismith stared back at her somberly. Twice now, he was thinking, someone had tried to tamper with his mind—first Wells, now Churan—and twice, while he was unconscious, something in him had exploded with incredible violence…
some thing buried in his mind. Naismith felt the birth of an angry impatience. This must not go on; sooner or later he must find a way to reach those buried depths, force them to give up their knowledge….
“I was in the library,” he answered.
Lall’s fingers curled tensely on the table. “And what did you find there?”