“It comes off an animal,” said Feliz sourly. Then he brightened. “But you can get a sort of poor substitute out ofthe same machine that produced this slop. You just change the settings—”
“Sabotage!” said the jailer. His eyes lit up, then faded again. He shook his head. “No, no,” he said sadly. “I’m too old. You don’t get me to commit no sabotage.”
"Oh, get out of here!" Feliz snarled, picking up the gruel. After all, there were calories in the junk and by now his stomach was shrunk—if he could judge by the way it felt— almost to pea-size.
"I committed some sabotage once," said the jailer, lingering.
“I’ll bet,” said Feliz, swallowing a spoonful of the gruel and grimacing at the taste.
“Watered the coffee in the bachelor’s mess to make it go farther.”
“Uh.”
“Yep,” said the jailer. “Just poured myself a full pint of plain water and dumped it in. Nobody ever suspected.”
“Yeah.”
“But I was young then,” said the jailer with a sigh. “A man gets older, he gets to thinking before he goes about taking harebrained chances and defying authority like that: Nowdays I just stand in line with my cup like the rest, and if there isn’t enough coffee to reach down to my end of the line, I just count my blessings and take a cup of plain water.”
“I’ll bet you do,” said Feliz, eyeing him.
“That’s right. You’ve got to learn to live with life, that’s what I say,” said the jailer, and went off.
Left alone, Feliz ate his gruel and got up to have a look through the dirty translucent pane that pretended to be a window in his cell. He had evidently been asleep for some time following the second clobbering with the night sticks, for it was now late afternoon outside the building. He crossed to the bars that screened the corridor side of his cell and wrapped his two thick hands around them.
He could handle a good many things that would baffle the strength of an ordinary man. Attitude, thought Feliz, had a good deal to do with it—although of course strength was important also. But it was the determination not to be conquered. . . He took a good grip on the bars, planted his feet firmly and tried to force two of them apart. The muscles creaked and cracked in his arms and spots began to swim before his eyes. He felt the bars give slightly, and stopped, gasping, to look at them. He had spread them about an inch and a half—to a new width of about nine and a half inches.
On the other hand, thought Feliz wisely, sitting down on the cot in the cell once more, brains are better than brawn any day. The intelligent man thinks his way out of a bad spot.
Just then the corridor lights—evidently thousand year automatics—glowed up into brightness to compensate for the rapidly dwindling daylight. Feliz blinked in the sudden increase of illumination and heard a small voice suddenly address him out of the glare.
“Pardon me,” it said timidly. “But are you really not an hallucination after all?”
Feliz blinked and got to his feet. With the adjustment of his dazzled eyes, he became suddenly aware of a face peering around the edge of the wall that separated his cell from the next, where that wall met the bars of the corridor. It was the face of the girl in the woods.
“You!” bellowed Feliz.
The face disappeared. Feliz jumped to the bars and pressed his face against them. He was just able to make her out, shrinking against the bars of the cell alongside.
“Come here,” said Feliz.
She shook her head.
“Come here!” snapped Feliz impatiently. “I won’t grab you. Can’t you see I’m locked in here?” He shook the immovable bars, or attempted to shake them, by way of making his point.
Shyly, she approached.
"Are you sure you aren’t an hallucination?" she repeated.
“Do I look like one?” roared Feliz.
“Oh, yes,” said the girl. “You aren’t wearing the right kind of clothes for a real person at all.”
Feliz stared at her.
“What kind of clothes do real people wear?” he finally asked.
“Why, real clothes,” said the girl. “Of course. Like mine.”
“Oh.”
“Of course, your clothes are brown instead of”—she blushed—“black. That’s one of the reasons I came here looking for you. When I thought of that, I mean.”
“Oh, you did, did you?”
She blushed again.
“Well, of course, when I bit into it—”
“Bit?” Feliz found himself hanging onto the bars like a boxer on the ropes.
“Well, after all,” said the girl, bursting suddenly into rapid and obviously highly embarrassed speech, “there’s nothing more natural than a person having an hallucination about something she wanted very much, and who would have thought there would be food of that shape and color and taste that you gave me. I mean, how was I to tell it was food at first? But after I ran away with it and I couldn’t resist taking a bite because it sort of smelled like food, and it turned out to be so good, I ate it all.”
“I bet,” said Feliz, thinking of those two thick slices of honest bread and that one gloriously thick slice of cold roast beef. He salivated.
“It was so good!”
“I know,” said Feliz.
“Just delicious.”
“I know. I know.”
“That stuff in the center. It had such a chewy, nutty, tasty—”
“Will you stop it!” roared Feliz, in agony. “I haven’t eaten anything in six months!”
“Six months!” said the girl, staring at him round-eyed.
“Nearly. Nothing decent!” growled Feliz. “And I can’t get out,” he added despondently. “I’ll starve in here.”
“Oh, don’t do that! ” said the girl. She ran to the door of his cell and did something. There was a click and it swung open. She came in and took him by the hand. “I’ll take you back to that funny house of yours and you can get some stuff to eat for yourself. ”
Feliz looked from her to the open door of the cell. He opened his mouth and then closed it again.
“What?” said the girl. “Is something wrong?”
“No,” said Feliz with great feeling. “Nothing is wrong. Nothing. And nothing is going to be wrong until I can look at it from behind a full stomach. Let’s get out of here." And he started off up the corridor in the direction in which he had first seen her retreat.
“Not that way,” she called after him. “Let’s go out this way. There’s a hole through the wall. It’s quicker.”
Chapter VI
They went out through the hole in the building, up through dark streets in a gloaming only spottily relieved by the few undamaged streetlights remaining, across the square and toward the edge of the city. The few black-clad people they met paid no attention to them. Neither did the color-dressed people—which brought the girl down in a slight case of sniffles by the time they reached the edge of the city.
"Going to be a fine walk in the dark," said Feliz gloomily. “Well, it’s not far, anyway,” said the girl.
“Hah,” said Feliz. “Don’t tell me. I’ve walked it.”
“Yes, but you went all crooked,” said the girl. “I was watching you. Actually, we should be there in about ten minutes.”
She was right of course.
"Wow! said Feliz, as he helped the girl through the hatch and closed it behind him. The interior lights in the control room and the cabin, and what had once been the galley, went on automatically. "I could eat a horse and sleep for a week."
"What a horse? Could you?" said the girl. "Why?"
"Ever hear of an accelerated metabolism?"
"No."
"Well, that's what I've got—naturally," said Feliz. "I need sleep and food. Lots of both. Of course, I have a fair amount of energy—" He was opening the food locker and hauling out items already processed and prepared. "Ah!” he had just found the remains of the beef. He tore off a large piece and put it in his mouth. Manna from heaven, that’s what
it tasted like, he thought. “Help yourself,” he mumbled to the girl.
She poked interestedly among the pile of comestibles. “What funny food.”
“Funny?” said Feliz around a mouthful of cheese and bread. “What’s funny about it? What do you eat?”
“Fruits,” she said. “Nuts. Vegetables, raw. Natural food. Nature’s bounty.”
“How about that synthetic gunk I got in that prison?”
“Oh, that—that’s what the hallucinations eat.”
“Hallucinations!" barked Feliz. “Don’t start that again.”
The girl sat down suddenly in the pilot’s control board chair with a thump and began to keen like a rejected puppy. “Oh, I’m so mixed up,” she wailed.
"Hold it! Hold it! Cut it out!" cried Feliz hastily. "Maybe I can help you.”
The girl stuck her head up.
“Would you?” she said.
"Can try, can’t I?” growled Feliz. The girl uncurled and sat up in the chair. “Suppose you fill me in on what happened to you anyway.”
The girl sniffed, but kept control of herself.
“Well,” she said, “I’m an artist.”
“Go on. Go on.”
“Well,” she said, “I mean, we’re all artists of course, in the sense that the human mind needs to find one means or another for creative self-expression. But I’m a painter, of the new classic school of expression.”
Feliz’s eyebrows went up.
“You mean you don’t know? I thought everybody knew that. The new classic school of thought believes in interpretative representationalism. ”
Feliz’s eyebrows stayed up.
“Well, you know! No, I suppose you don’t. Well, you know what representational painting is, don’t you? You see a house and you paint a house. It’s like making a print of it. Well, interpretative representationalism is when you represent the house exactly as it is; but through the modified use of color and the addition of imaginative detail you interpret the scene in terms of your own personal-creative essential and make it manifest.”
Feliz’s eyebrows came down, defeated.
“You do understand what I mean?” she said.
“Absolutely,” he told her.
“Well, there you have it. It was all so wonderful, and .then”—the girl’s voice began to grow moist again— “I began putting in imaginative details that were just like hallucinations.”
“Hold it,” said Feliz. “Please.”
“I was a fool! ” said the girl, covering her eyes with the palm of one hand and extending the other at arm’s length, palm out, as if warding off something. "Wasn’t I a fool? Tell me I was a fool.”
“Why?” said Feliz. “How should I know if you were or not?”
The girl took the palm away from her eyes, indignantly. “You aren’t very helpful,” she said.
Feliz yawned hugely. He was having trouble keeping his eyes open, now that he had no empty stomach to prod him awake.
“Need . . . little sleep,” he said.
“But I’m not finished.”
“Oh. . .” Feliz yawned again. “Okay. Go on.”
"Well, sooner or later I was bound to be discovered. I said to a good friend of mine, Esi Malto—I said to her, Esi, I really shouldn’t mention this to a soul . . .”
Feliz dozed off, in spite of his good intentions.
“ . . . and bang! I was disintegrated.”
Feliz sat up with a jerk. He had missed a lot evidently. No matter. Tomorrow was another day. What was he thinking of? A couple hours of nap and he would be fine.
He lurched to his feet and across the control room to the cabin.
“Twen’ winks . . ." he muttered, fell on the bunk and was lost to the world.
When he woke, the hatch to the ship was open, letting sunlight flood across half the floor on the control room. Was it. . .? Yes, it was morning. Must be. Feliz sat up, massaging the stiff cords of his neck.
"Hark, hark," the girl was singing, somewhere outside the ship:
—the lark doth greet the new-born day.
With joyous heart and bright array.
‘Joy! Joy! doth say.
And air-borne, flitteth on his way.
“Snubg, smudg,” grunted Feliz, scrubbing his wire- bristled, forty-eight-hour beard with a sleep-numbed fist; and, earth-borne, clumped heavily into the ship’s washroom, where he undressed, climbed under the shower and turned it on, smoking hot.
About twenty minutes later, shaved, cleanly dressed and awake at last, he emerged. The girl, he found, was seated at the control desk. From somewhere she had produced a stick of charcoal and was drawing something on a clean page of his log book. Feliz took a closer look. It was a sketch of a sort of hairy monster in Feliz’s clothes, stretched out on its back with its mouth open, asleep and obviously snoring.
“Thanks,” said Feliz.
"Oh, do you like it?” said the girl, looking up. “I put a lot of myself into it.”
“Yeah,” said Feliz. “I’d like it better if it wasn’t in my log book." Feliz was realizing just now that he’d forgotten to get rid of the log with his other identification; not that it seemed to matter now.
“Why?”
“Because—never mind,” said Feliz. “I’m sure the port inspectors will understand.” He rubbed his hands together. “Well! How about a bite of breakfast?”
“Are you hungry again?” said the girl. “You ate just before you fell asleep.”
“What’s that got to do with it?” asked Feliz, rummaging in the food locker. Abruptly, he stopped rummaging, stood upright, turned about and began to walk across the control room toward the open hatch.
“Are you going somewhere?” said the girl.
“Yes!” yelled Feliz, climbing out of the hatch. “Stop me!”
He reached the ground and, turning toward the city, began to march off.
“Help!” he shouted.
The girl scrambled out of the hatch and hurried after him.
“Don’t you want to go?” she said. “If you don’t want to go wherever it is you’re going, why are you going?”
“Because I can’t help myself. Something’s making me go.”
“Oh!” said the girl.
“What do you mean, oh?” demanded Feliz, looking sideways and down at her as she hurried to keep up.
“You’re under compulsion.”
“Yes,” said Feliz. "I would say that. I would say that I was under some sort of compulsion. Yes, I think that describes it rather well.”
“You don’t have to be mean about it,” said the girl.
They walked on a little farther and entered under the trees that reached to the slope overlooking the city.
"What did you do to get put under compulsion?" said the girl.
“I met that old unmentionable bag of bones that calls himself your mayor!” snarled Feliz, his face purple with effort from the unsuccessful fight he was making against the coercion being exercised upon him. “The misbegotten unclean article of refuse did this to me once before!”
“Oh, dear,” said the girl. “El Hoska is awfully severe. He’s the one who disintegrated me.”
Feliz craned his neck to stare at her.
“Him? The same one?”
“He said”—the girl’s lower lip began to quiver at the memory—“I’d become so maladjusted that there was no longer any hope of correcting me. He said I was a danger to the community. I would have to be disintegrated—I told you all this last night.”
“Tell me again.”
“He told me I’d have to be disintegrated. And he snapped his fingers and bang! Just like that I ceased to exist.”
“So that’s it,” said Feliz, thoughtfully.
“What’s what?”
“Nothing,” said Feliz. “You wouldn’t understand. Except you might as well get used to the idea that you weren’t really disintegrated after all. You didn’t cease to exist at all. ”
“Oh, yes, I did.”
“Of cour
se you didn’t. You exist right now, don’t you? For pete’s sake!” said Feliz exasperatedly.
“Well, I most certainly do not! I guess I know whether I exist or not!"
“If you don’t exist, how come I see you and hear you?”
“You’re just an hallucination,” said the girl stubbornly. But there was a quaver of uncertainty in her voice.
They had been following the nearest thing to a straight line among the trees. Now they came out near the stone wall where Feliz had first met El Hoska. And there, sure enough, was the elderly gentlemam, seated on the comer of his wall.
“Good morning, good morning, good morning! ” he said, leaping to his sandled feet as Feliz marched up. “You had a pleasant night, I trust?”
“I don’t suppose,” said Feliz in measured tones, “that there would be any particular use in asking you to turn me loose?”
“But, my boy! ” said El Hoska. “If you really, basically, did not wish to fall in with my desires, certainly you wouldn’t do so. The human mind is a free entity. How can I possibly force you to do what you do not want to do?”
“Because,” said Feliz between his teeth, “you happen to be a natural psi talent. Psi-Man Verde—you don’t know him, but he’s a lot like you—would probably give his right arm and half his left to get you on his staff.”
“Come, come,” said El Hoska, gently. “This is wild talk. You are like most ignorant people who have had little contact with civilization—you instinctively fear the natural forces and science. You must understand such fears are mere superstition.”
“Superstition?” said Feliz.
"Of course! What you think to be compulsion upon you is merely a strong desire, a strong, loving desire on the part of all my happy people to have a closer acquaintance with you. Naturally, since I am my people’s representative, the desire is channeled through me. Dear, dear," said El Hoska reprovingly, “you have never been taught that this is a moral universe we live in. No one can coerce anyone else against his will. If it looks like someone is being made to do something he doesn’t wish, you can rest assured this is only an illusion. Basically, the coerced one wants the illusion of being dominated. This is very good science.”
“It is?” said Feliz.
Delusion World Page 4