Anywhen (20 page)

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—

The 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.

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
not
supposed 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 the 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.

And after all, what could they do to him if they caught him, besides knock him out? The hell with them. Here goes.

Once more, the door opened readily.

The corridor was as eventless as ever; the ramp to the park now closed. He continued along the long smooth curve, which obviously skirted the park closely, just outside the cage doors. Once he stopped to lay his ear to one of the cages. He heard nothing, but he did notice a circle with a pattern of three holes in it, like a diagram of a bowling ball, just where the lock to an ordinary door would be placed for someone of Brand’s height.

That made him think again as he prowled. So the metal people needed handles and locks! Then they couldn’t jump about in space as magically as they wanted you to think they could. Whatever the trick was, it wasn’t teleportation or time-travel. It was an illusion, or something else to do with the mind, as both Carl and Jeanette had guessed: memory blanking, or mind reading. But which?

After he had crept along for what seemed like a mile, the elliptical pathway inflected and began to broaden. Also, there was a difference in the quality of the light up ahead: it seemed brighter, and, somehow, more natural. The ceiling was becoming higher, too. He was coming into a new kind of area; and for some reason he did not stop to examine—perhaps only that the inside curve of the corridor was on his right, which as evidence was good for nothing—he felt that he was coming up on the front of the ship.

He had barely begun to register the changes when the corridor put forth a pseudopod: a narrow, shallow metal stairway which led up to what looked like the beginning of a catwalk, off to the left. He detoured instinctively—in the face of the unknown, hide and peek!

As he went along the outward curving catwalk, the space ahead of him continued to grow bigger and more complicated, and after a few minutes he saw that his sensation that he was going bowwards had been right. The catwalk ran up and around a large chamber, shaped like a fan opened from this end, and ending in an immense picture window through which daylight poured over a cascade of instruments. On the right side of the room was a separate, smaller bank of controls, divided into three ranks of buttons each arranged in an oval, and surmounted by a large clock face like the one Carl had noticed when he first awoke in the ship’s EEG room. The resemblance to the cockpit of a jet liner was unmistakable; this was the ship’s control room.

But there was something much more important to see. Brand—or someone almost exactly like him—was sitting in one of two heavy swivel seats in front of the main instrument board, his silver skin scattering the light from the window into little wavelets all over the walls to either side of him. Occasionally he leaned forward and touched something, but in the main he did not seem to have much to do at the moment. Carl had the impression that he was waiting, which the little flicks of motion only intensified—like a cat watching a rubber mouse.

Carl wondered how long he had been there. From the quality of the light, the time was now either late morning or early afternoon—it was impossible to guess which, since Carl could not read the alien clock.

A movement to the right attracted both men’s attention. It was a black-metaled woman: Lavelle. Of this identification Carl was dead sure, for he had paid much closer attention to her than to her consort. Lifting a hand in greeting, she came forward and sat down in the other her chair, and the two began to talk quietly, their conversation interspersed with occasional bursts of low laughter which made Carl uncomfortable for some reason he did not try to analyze. Though he could catch frequent strings of syllables and an occasional whole sentence, the languagewas not English, Spanish or French, the only ones he was equipped to recognize; but it was quite liquid, unlike a Germanic or Slavic tongue. Ship’s language, he was certain.