The voice said: “Return the trays when you have finished. You are not going to be harmed. You will be returned to your homes in two-hundred-and-sixteen hours. You are in no—”
“Who are you? Let us out of here, damn it,” Macklin shouted, jumping to his feet.
“—danger,” the voice continued inexorably, talking through Macklin’s outburst.
“You’re going to pay for this,” Macklin yelled, shaking a fist at the ceiling.
The voice was silent.
They waited expectantly, but the room remained silent.
A few moments passed, and then Patience O’Neill stood and carried her tray to the column and placed it in a niche. She did the same with the boy’s and Maria’s. Larry returned his own and Macklin, muttering irritably, took care of his and Valerie’s. The column turned slowly; the empty trays disappeared. Once again the surface of the wall was smooth and unbroken.
“Well, what are we going to do?” Macklin demanded.
“There isn’t anything we can do, I’m afraid,” Patience said. “They say we are not to be harmed. In two-hundred-and-sixteen hours, which is nine full days, we are to be returned to our homes.”
“You trust them, eh?” Macklin said.
“Well,” Patience said, in her practical fashion, “it doesn’t matter a great deal whether I do or don’t. I can’t do anything about it, one way or the other.”
“You make sense,” Valerie Ward said. “We can’t do a damn thing. We’re helpless.”
“No, we’re not,” Larry Colby said unexpectedly.
“What do you mean?”
“We can think. That’s something.”
Macklin laughed unpleasantly. “Think your way through a stone wall, eh?”
“It’s been done before,” Larry said. Pie stretched out his long legs and rested his head against the wall. They were watching him, except for old Maria, with skeptical expressions. “The human mind has some pretty handsome achievements to its credit. They didn’t split the atom with an axe, remember. Einstein just sat down and thought about it.”
Patience was looking thoughtful now, and Valerie seemed interested. Little Dickie was plainly sleepy and bored; he didn’t see why this newspaperman should be talking this way when he had all those exciting stories in his head. Macklin resented Valerie’s respect for Larry. If there was a way out of this mess, he, Worthington Macklin, would see it, and not this under-paid scribbler.
“Okay, okay,” he said. “Start thinking about it. Let’s see what happens.”
“I’ve already thought about it,” Larry said, grinning widely.
“Oh, yes? Well, what’s your solution?”
“So far I’ve drawn a blank,” Larry said. “But I’m going to keep at it. You’re all welcome to join in the effort, of course.”
There followed a few seconds of uneasy silence. Finally, Valerie shrugged and said, “What are we supposed to think about?”
“Try this, for a start,” Larry said. “Think about that voice. What part of the country, or the earth, produced that peculiar voice?”
Macklin snorted. “It wasn’t Texas, by God.”
“Or Maine,” Patience said, after a few seconds silence.
“I can’t place it,” Valerie said.
“That seems to me worth thinking about,” Larry said.
They sat in silence, frowning now and thinking. Or trying to think . . .
As nearly as they could judge time, three days passed uneventfully. They had been fed nine times, they had felt the need for sleep on three separate occasions, and so they guessed that seventy-two hours, roughly figuring it, had passed since they first found themselves in this prison.
The voice had not spoken again.
They were getting edgy and restless, particularly Valerie and Macklin. She was bored to distraction, and her fears were returning. Macklin’s constant self-praise was getting on her nerves. He, on the other hand, was convinced he’d made a conquest. One night he had awakened and tip-toed into her sleeping room. He had made a much faster exit, his ears scalded by Valerie’s comments on his presumption, his crudeness, his staggering ego.
However, they made it up, after a fashion, the next morning. Macklin protested that it had been an accident, that he was walking in his sleep, and Valerie, who was essentially good-hearted, pretended that she believed him.
On the morning of the fourth day, after breakfast, Larry Colby called them together and studied them with a faint little smile.
“I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes,” he said. “I’ve got an idea I want to test.”
“The result of all this thinking?” Macklin asked with ponderous sarcasm.
“Yes, that’s it,” Larry said pleasantly.
Something in his manner held their attention. They were receptive to hope; they were empty vessels eager to be filled.
“Let’s sit down and get comfortable,” Larry suggested.
They formed a rough circle on the floor.
“Okay, I’ll fire away,” Larry said. “Someone, plural or singular, has kidnapped us and is holding us prisoner. Now, they’ve got a reason for that, or they don’t have one. That’s the big simple fact. They’re sane, or insane. Do any of you disagree?”
“I don’t understand,” Patience said.
“Well, look at it this way. This kidnapping took plans, money, organization. If there’s no reason behind it, then whoever engineered it is nuts—as we use the term. The alternative is that we were abducted for sound, sane reasons. Now—if our captors are insane, we can’t hope to guess at their motives. They don’t have motives of the sort we might apprehend. Therefore, our only sensible procedure is to assume that our captors are sane, and try, by thinking, to determine their motives.”
“Hell, that’s impossible,” Macklin said irritably.
Larry glanced at him. “We won’t know until we try. Now, I have a plan which is based on this hypothesis: we six persons were brought together because we have something in common. What that may be, I haven’t the faintest idea. However, if we use our brains, we might be able to find out. I’m convinced that we’ve got to work on this assumption: that we all share some attribute, some peculiarity, something, and because of it we’ve been brought here.”
“I think you’re dealing in fantasy,” Valerie said shortly.” What could we possibly have in common? Look at us: could you imagine a more haphazard, unrelated group of people?”
“That appears to be the case,” Larry said. “But let’s not buy appearances. Here’s what I’m going to do to you hapless people.” He paused, smiling; but his eyes were grave. “I’m going to tell you the story of my life. I’ll try to make it brief, but, God knows, I can’t do much to make it interesting. The point is, you may spot some similarity to your own experiences. We may have all met before, we may all have seen the same thing, heard the same thing, been exposed to the same thing—and that common experience is what we’ve got to unearth.”
“Preposterous,” Macklin muttered.
“No, it’s not,” Patience said quickly. “I see what Larry means.”
Dickie was bored. None of this interested him. “Tell me a story,” he said wistfully to Larry.
“That’s what I intend to do,” Larry said. “Here it goes, folks, the story of my life.”
He began, where conventional biography decrees, with his birth. That event occurred in Elgin, Illinois, and was comparatively unsung.
“I played Elgin once,” Valerie said.
“Okay, there’s our first connection,” Larry said. “Do you see what I mean now?”
Macklin snapped his fingers, and said, “Tommyrot! What is proven by the fact that you were born in a town in which Miss Ward happened to appear a good many years ago as an actress?”
“Nothing at all,” Larry said. “But this is just the start. Maybe we can find more of the intersecting coincidences. Now let me go
Larry told them of his early schooling, and all he could remember of what he had been thinking a
nd dreaming at that time. His years at the State University were fairly typical; he had tried for the football team but hadn’t made it, he had landed a job on the school paper, and, in his last year had edited the Annual. There had been experiments with sex, alcohol, and ideas, and his reactions had been those of a healthy body and alert mind.
“I got a job on the local paper, and two years later moved up to the Chicago Express as a police reporter,” he said.
That was in 1960, the year before the final phase of what they called The Last War. Larry had been in the army since his third year of college. He had been in uniform while working on newspapers; there hadn’t been any such animal as an able-bodied civilian since the war started in 1955. Everybody was in it; working days were cut to four hours, and the military took the rest of a man’s time.
“I went into active service then in 1961,” Larry said, glancing about at the circle of faces. “I served in London, and lived at the Cumberland Hotel.” He went on, giving them all the details he could remember, watching eagerly for some change in their expressions, some glow of recognition; but there was none.
“Well,” he said, at last, “that brings me up to the end of the war. Anything strike a bell?”
They were silent.
“My life was much different,” Patience said, after a short pause. “I—I don’t see how there could be any connection, Larry.”
“Of course not,” Macklin said belligerently. “I’ll told you this was all a lot of nonsense.”
“Oh, stop shouting,” Valerie said. “I’m slightly less than enthusiastic, myself, but I’m willing to string along. Larry, I stopped at the Cumberland in London, too. That same year.”
Larry felt the shock of excitement. Was he going to get his hands on one of the tangled, mysterious skeins that bound this haphazard group together?
“But what does that mean?” Valerie said.
“Okay, let’s don’t press that one yet,” Larry said sharply. “Let me keep going. Let’s see, now. Soon after the war.”
He’d gone back to the paper. The next year the world had received the news it had been expecting for a decade. Contact with beings from space. They had announced themselves by means of radio. That was in 1963. In space ships they had approached within a hundred thousand miles of Earth, had rendezvoused there and, for three weeks, had held conversations with scientists of America, Great Britain, France, and even China and Russia. America was well-equipped to repel a hostile invader; The Last War had accelerated the production of guided Hydrogen bombs that could destroy anything that came within ten thousand miles of their launching sites. These terrible weapons were manned and ready, but they hadn’t been needed. The Martians were friendly, incurious beings; they hadn’t wanted to descend to Earth. After three weeks of exchanging information, they had returned to Mars, and the radio connection had been broken by the great distance they thus put between themselves and Earth.
“That was a great disappointment to me,” Larry said. “We needed all the knowledge in the Universe to help us re-build our own countries. I thought there was a chance for permanent peace if we had been able to get closer to the Martians. But, in my frank opinion, our government loused up that chance by a kind of atavistic isolationism—here we sat, guns trained on their ships, and acted surprised when they said no thanks, to any suggestion that they land.”
“By God, I knew you were one of them Inter-planetary radicals,” Macklin said hotly. “Good riddance to the Martians, and any other of them alien planets, I say. Let ’em go back where they came from. We don’t need them here running down our civilization.”
There was a short pause. Then Larry said, tiredly: “Okay, that’s beside the point, I guess. I thought one thing, you thought another. Let’s get back to my autobiography.”
He continued doggedly, his hope running short. There had been the work at the paper, the unexpected Pulitzer prize for an exposé of a group which tried to control and profit from the exploitation of the drug which had finally licked cancer. There had been help on that one, from a casual friend who had got hold of the story and passed it on to him gratis. He had tried to share the honor with the man, but by the time the story broke his friend, who’d been a salesman of medical supplies, had moved on to another district and Larry hadn’t been able to contact him. The Pulitzer prize had been the high-water mark of his career; after that he’d drunk a bit more than necessary, and that, plus the demands of his job, had begun to put a slow drain on his vitality.
“And that’s about it,” Larry concluded. He felt tired and discouraged now, and vaguely apologetic. “Not very exciting, I know. But maybe there’s something there that will help us. Any comments?”
“I think you just wanted an excuse to brag about your Pulitzer prize,” Macklin said.
“That’s a stupid thing to say,” Patience O’Neill said sharply. “He’s trying to help us all, can’t you see?”
“Thanks,” Larry said. “Supposing you take a crack at it, Patience?”
“All right,” she said, coloring slightly. She cleared her throat and then began her story in a precise, careful voice. Larry listened intently as she sketched in her childhood and early schooling, listening for some point of reference with his own experience, hoping to find that something in common that must be, that had to be, the reason for their present involvement. Her life had been orderly, systematic, uneventful; in the Last War she had done what everyone else had done, namely, pitched in as air-raid observer, nurse, factory worker, while, at the same time, continuing her work as a teacher. There were a few ups and down, a lucky break occasionally, and many disappointments. Listening to her, and watching her small, earnest face, Larry found himself grateful that there were no serious relationships with men in her life.
This is a hell of a note, he thought. Even now, in the middle of this damnable situation, the gonads still run the show.
When Patience finished, she looked around, smiling with some embarrassment. “It’s very dull, isn’t it?”
“Sister, I’m glad I’m following you,” Valerie said. “Even if I’d spent the last forty years in a convent it would sound like a Freudian version of the Arabian Nights.”
“I know,” Patience said, with a helpless little smile.
“Oh, I livened it up,” Valerie said, but something in Patience’s humility brought a thoughtful, vulnerable frown to her pale high forehead. She patted Valerie’s shoulder unexpectedly. “Don’t let me up-stage you, kid. You had a happy time of it, which is something I kind of overlooked.” She glanced around at the circle of faces, grinning again, a saucy, reckless grin, every atom in her body reacting now to the audience, to her chosen ability to attract, to startle, to fascinate. “Fasten your seat belts, kiddies, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” she said.
Valerie’s account began innocently enough. She was born, it seemed, without scandal. And she got all the way to five without doing anything to alarm the nation’s vice squads. But from then on a purple thread came into her life, and it broadened with each passing year. Macklin began to cough and study the backs of his hands, and Patience blushed furiously and tried, with a total lack of success, to coax an expression of maidenly disapproval onto her face. Even Larry, whose background had been far from conventional, felt a bit like a gaping peasant listening to tales of royal dalliance.
The background was international, the names legendary, the incidents unprintable. However, Larry noticed, in spite of the deliberate shattering of all rules and codes, Valerie herself, seemed to retain a curious innocence. She was unmoral rather than immoral. There was a largeness of spirit, a good-humored, unthinking kindness, which invested her adventures with the airy unreality of fairy tales. There was nothing mean about her; she could take love from strangers, if they needed to give it, and she could take help from anyone, even a stranger, as she’d done on notable occasions.
But despite his interest, he realized that they were getting nowhere. What did he have in common with this creature? And, vastly more
preposterous, what could old Maria, or little Dickie, have in common with her?
When Valerie finished her narrative there was a depressing silence.
“Well?” she asked. “Weren’t any of you people in that pool of champagne that the Maharajah had filled for me?”
“I’m afraid not,” Patience said, smiling. Then: “But didn’t it—” She stopped, coloring.
“Goon!”
“Well—didn’t it just about tickle you to death? I had champagne once, and—”
Valerie laughed raucously. “Dearie, it was madness, just madness.”
Macklin reddened like a boiling lobster. “I’ve had enough of this—nonsense.”
“Oh, come off it,” Valerie said casually. “It’s a question of degree. You pinch a maid’s fanny, I go swimming in a pool of champagne with a platoon of princes. What’s the real difference?”
“I have never pinched—”
“Yeah, what were you doing in my room the other night, you old goat?”
“That was a—a miscalculation.”
“You bet it was.”
“Now, calm down, calm down,” Larry said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
“Well, you can continue without me,” Macklin said angrily. “I’ve had enough of this disgusting—ah—self-slander.”
He stood and marched into his room, carrying his dignity and disapproval like splendid plumes.
“Well, that does it,” Valerie said. “We get nowhere if he won’t play.”
They were all tired. Dickie had gone to sleep in old Maria’s arms. Larry sighed and said, “Let’s knock off for the time being. We’ll take a shot at it tomorrow.”
When Valerie left, Patience looked at Larry and said, “Did you learn anything at all, Larry?”
He shook his head . . .
They began again on the evening of the fourth day. Valerie, at Larry’s suggestion, had apologized to Macklin, and he rejoined the group; but everything in his manner indicated that he still thought the exercise a waste of time and, worse than that, distinctly degrading.
Collected Fiction (1940-1963) Page 297