Anywhen (19 page)

No one of these ideas evoked any echo in his memory except old ones; and a persistent hunch that he was on the spaceship, all the same, discouraged him from opening his eyes yet. He wondered what insanity had ever led him to volunteer, and what even greater insanity had led the Pentagon people to choose him over all the saucerites and other space nuts.

A vague clink of sound, subdued and metallic, caught his attention. He couldn’t identity it, but somehow it sounded surgical. As far as it went, this matched with the quiet around him, the clean coolness of the air, and the unrumpled, also apparently clean pallet he seemed to be lying on. He was neither in a jail nor in the pad of anybody he knew. On the other hand, he didn’t feel ill enough to be in a hospital ward, just a little drugged. The college infirmary? No, nonsense, he’d been thrown out of college last year.

In short, he
must
be on the ship, simply because this must be the day after yesterday. The thought made him squeeze his eyes still tighter shut. A moment later, further speculation was cut off by a feminine voice, unknown to him, and both pleasantly sexy and unpleasantly self-possessed, but obviously human. It said:

“I see you’ve given us his language, rather than him ours.”

“It cops out on … rules out … avoids … obviates making everyone else on board guard their tongue,” a man’s voice replied. “Oan, I really had to dig for that one. He’s got a constipated vocabulary; knows words, but hates them.”

“That’s helpful, too,” the woman’s voice responded. “If he can’t address himself precisely, it’ll matter less what
we
say to him. But what’s he faking for, Brand? He’s obviously wide awake.”

At this Carl opened eyes and mouth to protest indignantly that he wasn’t faking, realized his mistake, tried to close both again, and found himself gasping and goggling instead.

He could not see the woman, but the man called Brand was standing directly over him, looking down into his face. Brand looked like a robot—no; remembering the man’s snotty remark about his vocabulary, Carl corrected himself: He looked like a fine silver statue, or like a silver version of Talos, the Man of Brass—and wouldn’t Carl’s faculty advisor have been surprised at how fast he’d come up with that one! The metal shone brilliantly in the bluelight of the surgery-like room, but it did not look like plate metal. It did not look hard at all. When Brand moved, it flowed with the movement of the muscles under it, like skin.

Yet somehow Carl was dead sure that it wasn’t skin, but clothing of some sort. Between the metallic eye slits, the man’s eyes were brown and human, and Carl could even see the faint webbing of blood vessels in their whites. Also, when he spoke, the inside of his mouth was normal mucous membrane—black like a crow’s mouth instead of red, but certainly not metal. On the other hand, the mouth, disconcertingly, vanished entirely when it was closed, and so did the eyes when they blinked; the metal flowed together as instantly as it parted.

“That’s better,” the man said. “Check his responses, Lavelle. He still looks a little dopey. Damn this language.”

He turned away and the woman—her name had certainly sounded like Lavelle—came into view, obviously in no hurry. She was metallic, too, but her metal was black, though her eyes were gray-green. The integument was exceedingly like a skin, yet seeing her, Carl was even more convinced that it was either clothing or a body mask. He noticed a moment later, either she had no hair or else her skull cap—if that was what she wore—was very tight, a point that hadn’t occurred to him while looking at the man.

She took Carl’s pulse, and then looked expertly under his upper eyelids. “Slight fugue, that’s all,” she said with a startling pink flash of tongue. Yet not quite so startling as Brand’s speaking had been, since a pink mouth in a black face was closer to Carl’s experience than was any sort of mouth in a silver face. “He can go down to the cages any time.”

Cages?

“Demonstration first,” Brand, now out of sight again, said in an abstracted voice.

Carl chanced moving his head slightly, and found that his horizon-headache was actually a faint, one-sided earache, which made no sense to him at all. The movement also showed him the dimensions of the room, which was no larger than an ordinary living room—maybe 12′ x 13′—and painted an off-white. There was also some electronic apparatus here and there, but no more than Carl had seenin the pads of some hi-fi bugs he knew, and to his eyes not much more interesting. In a corner was a drop-down bunk, evidently duplicating the one he now occupied. Over an oval metal door—the only shiplike feature he could see—was a dial face like that of a large barometer or clock, its figures too small to read from where he lay, and much too closely spaced.

Brand reappeared. After a moment, the shining black woman called Lavelle took up a position a few feet behind him and to his left.

“I want to show you something,” the man said to Carl. “You can see just by looking at us that it would do you no good to jump us … to attack us. Do you dig … do you understand that?”

“Sure,” Carl said, rather more eagerly than he had intended. As a first word, it wasn’t a very good one.

“All right.” Brand put both hands on his hips, just below his waist, and seemed to brace himself slightly. “But there’s a lot more to it than you see at the moment. Watch closely.”

Instantly, the silver man and Lavelle changed places. It happened so suddenly and without any transition that for a second Carl failed to register what he was supposed to have noticed. Neither of the two metal people had moved in the slightest. They were just each one standing where the other one had been standing before.

“Now—” the man said.

At once, he was back where he had been, but the gleaming black woman—man, that outfit was sexy!—was standing far back, by the oval door. Again, there’d been not a whisper, or hint of any motion in the room.

“And once more—”

This time, the result was much more confusing. The metal aliens seemed to have moved, but after a while Carl realized that they hadn’t;
he
had. The switch was so drastic that for an instant he had thought they—all three of them—were in another room; even the hands of the dial face looked changed. But actually, all that had happened was that he was now in the other bunk.

The switch made hash of a hypothesis he had only barely begun to work out: that the metal skins, or suits, made it possible for Brand and Lavelle to swap places, or jump elsewhere at will, by something like teleportation. Ifthat was how it worked, then Carl might just hook one of those shiny suits, and then,
flup!
and …

… And without benefit of suit white or black, he In the other bunk, huddled in the ruins of his theory and feeling damned scared. On the face of a cathode-ray oscilloscope now in his field of view, a wiggly green trace diagrammed pulses which he was sure showed exactly how scared he was; he had always suspected any such instrument of being able to read his mind. The suspicion turned to rage and humiliation when Lavelle looked at the machine’s display and laughed, in a descending arpeggio, like a coloratura soprano.

“He draws the moral,” she said.

“Possibly,” said the silver man. “We’ll let it go for now, anyhow. It’s time for the next subject. You can get up now.”

This last sentence seemed to be addressed to Carl. He stiffened for a moment, half expecting either the metal people or the room—or perhaps himself—to vanish, but since nothing at all changed, he slid cautiously to his feet.

Looking down at the feet, and on upward from there as far as he could without seeming vain about it, he discovered that he was wearing the same scuffed sneakers and soiled slacks he had been wearing when he had gone cycling with the Hobbit crowd, except that both the clothing and his own self under it had been given a thorough bath. He was offended by the discovery, but at the moment not very much. Did it mean that there really had been
no
events between that expedition to Telegraph Hill, and this nightmare?

“Am I on the ship?” he said. It was a difficult sentence to get out.

“Of course,” said the silver man.

“But I never got to join the official party—or I don’t think …”

“Nobody will come aboard with the official party, Jack. We selected the few we wanted from among the cats your people designated. The rest will cool their heels.”

“Then what am I—”

“Too many answers,” Lavelle said.

“Never mind,” said the silver man. “It won’t matter for long, chicklet. Come along, Mr …. Wade? … yes; we’ll interview you later, and answer some of your questionsthen, if we feel up to it. Lavelle, stay here and set up for the next live one. And Mr. Wade, one other thing: Should you feel ambitious, just bear in mind …”

The metal-skinned people changed places, silently, instantly, without the slightest preparation, without the slightest follow-through.

“ … That we’re a little faster on the draw than you are,” Brand finished from his new position, evenly, but his voice striking Carl’s other ear like a final insult. “We need no other weapons. Dig me?”

“Yulp,” Carl said. As a final word, it was not much better than his first.

The sheathed man led him out the oval door.

Numb as he had thought he was by now to everything but his own alarm, Carl was surprised to be surprised by the spaciousness of what they had called “the cages.” His section of them reminded him more of an executive suite, or his imaginings of one—a large single bedroom, a wardrobe, a bathroom, and a sort of office containing a desk with a small TV screen and a headset like a cross between a hair-dryer and a set of noise-mufflers.

He had been marched to this in total silence by the silver man, through a long corridor where they had passed several others of the metal people, all of whom had passed them by wordlessly and with their eyes as blanked out as Little Orphan Annie’s. Once they had arrived at the cage, however, Brand had turned affable, showing him the facilities, even including a stock of clean clothes, and seating him at last at the desk.

“I’ll talk to you further when there’s more time,” the silver man said. “At the moment we’re still recruiting. If you want food, you can call for it through that phone. I hope you know that you can’t get away. If you cut out of the cage, there’d be no place where you could wind up.”

Brand reached forward to the desk and touched something. Under Carl’s feet, a circular area about the size of a snow slider turned transparent, and Carl found himself looking down at the Bay area through nothing but ten miles or more of thin air. Even moderate heights had always made him sick; he clutched at the edge of the desk and was just about to lose his option when the floor turned solid again.

“I wanted you to see,” Brand said, “that you really are aboard our ship. By the way, if you’d like to look through there again, the button for it is right here.”

“Thanks,” Carl said, calling up one of his suavest witticisms, “but no thanks.”

“Suit yourself. Is there anything else you’d like, until we meet again?”

“Well … you said you were bringing more, uh, Earth people up here. If you could bring my wife I would … ?”

The answer to this was of only academic interest to Carl. He had been separated from Bea for more than a year, ever since the explosion about college; and on the whole it had been painless, since they had been civilized enough to have been married in the first place only at common law and that a little bit by accident. But it would have been nice to have had someone he knew up here, if only somebody with a reasonably pink skin.

The silver man said: “Sorry. None of the other males we expect to bring aboard will know you, or each other. We find it better to follow the same rule with females, so we won’t have any seizures of possessiveness.”

He got up and moved toward the door, which was usual shape for doors, not oval like the last one. He still seemed relatively gracious, but at the door he turned and added:

“We want you to understand from the outset that up here, you own nobody—and nobody owns you but us.” And with that, in a final silent nonexplosion of arrogance, he flicked into nothingness, leaving Carl staring with glazed eyes at the unbroached door.

Of course no warning could have prevented Carl, or anyone else above the mental level of a nematode, from trying to think about escape; and Carl, because he had been selected as the one lay volunteer to visit the spaceship possibly because he had thought about spaceships now and then or read about them, thought he ought to be able to work out some sort of plan—if only he could stop jittering for a few minutes. In order to compose his mind, he got undressed and into the provided pajamas—the first time he had worn such an outfit in ten years—and ordered the ship (through the desk phone) to send him a bottle of muscatel, which arrived promptly out of a well in the center of the desk. To test the ship’s good will, he ordered five other kinds of drink, and got them all, some of which he emptied with conscious self-mastery down the toilet.

Then he thought—jungling a luxurious bourbon-and-ginger abstractedly; the sound of ice was peculiarly comforting—why the hell
had
the Pentagon people picked him as the “lay volunteer,” out of so many? The alien ship had asked for a sampling of human beings to go back to its far star, and of these, it had wanted one to be a man of no specialties whatsoever—or no specialties that the ship had been willing to specify. The Pentagon had picked its own sampling of experts, who probably had been ordered to “volunteer”; but the “lay volunteer” had been another matter.

Like everyone else, Carl had been sure the Pentagon would want the “lay volunteer” actually to be a master spy among all possible master spies, not a James Bond but a Leamas type, a man who could pass for anything; but it hadn’t worked that way. Instead, the Pentagon had approved Carl, one slightly beat and more than slightly broke drop-out, who believed in magic and the possibility of spaceships, but—let us face it, monsters and gentlemen—didn’t seem to be of much interest either to alien or to human otherwise.

Why, for instance, hadn’t the “lay volunteer” the aliens wanted turned out to be a Bircher, a Black Muslim, a Communist, or a Rotarian—in short, some kind of fanatic who purported to deal with the
real
world—instead of a young man who was fanatic only about imaginary creatures called hobbits? Even an ordinary science-fiction fan would have been better; why was a sword-and-sorcery addict required to try to figure his way out of a classical spaceship clink?