Element 79 (2 page)

I padded along the passage knowing that sooner or later I would reach the “cathedral,” as I had come to think of the big rectangular box. Another box was open, different certainly from mine, and different, I thought, from that of Giselda Horne. I was just on the point of stepping inside when a voice behind me said “hello” in a foreign accent. I turned to find an Indian of uncertain middle age standing there. He stared rather wildly for perhaps thirty seconds and reached for support against the wall. To my surprise he went on, “It is not the stomach sickness. It is a matter of shock to see you, sir, for I attended a lecture you gave in Bombay last year. Professor Wycombe is it?”

“I did give a lecture in Bombay. You were in the audience?”

“Yes, but you will not remember me. It was a rather large audience. Daghri is my name, sir.”

We shook hands. “You have been in the big room, sir?”

“Yes, many times.”

“Recently, sir?”

“Yesterday. That is to say, before I slept. Perhaps ten hours ago.”

“Then you will find it has changed.”

Daghri and I hurried along the passages until we emerged into the cathedral. On the walls now were a mass of points of light, stars obviously. The projection onto the flat surfaces introduced distortions, of course, but this apart we were looking up at a complete representation of the heavens, both hemispheres.

“What does it mean, sir?” whispered the Indian.

For the moment I made no attempt to answer this critical question. I asked Daghri to tell me how he came to be there. He said he remembered walking out in the evening in the Indian countryside. Then suddenly, in a flash, it seemed, he was in this big cathedral room. It appeared almost as if he had walked around a corner in the road to find himself, not in the countryside anymore, but right there in the middle of this room, more or less at the exact spot where I myself had wakened.

Accepting that both Daghri and I were sane, there could only be one explanation. “Daghri, it must be that we are in some enormous spaceship. This display here on the walls represents the view from the ship. We’re seeing the pilot’s view out into space.”

“My difficulty with that thought, sir, is to find the Sun.”

I pointed to the bright patch lighting the entrance to the passageway. “That I think must be the Sun.”

“Is there any way to make sure of this, sir?”

“Quite easily. All we need do is sit and watch. The motion of the ship, if we are in a ship, must produce changes in the planets. We only need to watch the brighter objects.”

Within half an hour we had it, the apparent motion of the Earth itself, for the Earth-Moon combination was easy to pick out, once you looked in the right direction. Within an hour or so we had Venus and Mars, and already we knew the rough direction we were traveling—toward the constellation of Scorpius. We also knew the approximate speed of the ship, something above two thousand miles an hour. Reckoning the ship to be accelerating smoothly, and trusting to time from my watch, I was able to check the acceleration itself. It was quite close to ordinary gravity, a bit larger than gravity as I calculated it. This might well be the difference I had noticed in my legs right at the beginning.

It was while we were thus watching the display on the walls of the cathedral that the others slowly filtered in, one by one over a period of about five hours. The first to appear was a sandy-haired man going a bit thin on top. He announced himself as being of the name Bill Bailey, a butcher from Rotherham, Yorkshire, and where the hell was he, he’d like to know, and where was the bacon and eggs, and who was the bird he’d seen in the bloody showers, half-naked she was, but he didn’t object to that, the more naked the better so far as he was concerned. For a badly frightened man it was a good performance. Although I never took to Bill Bailey, the never-ending stream of ribald remarks which issued from his lips served in the months ahead to lighten a thoroughly grim situation, at any rate so far as I was concerned.

There were two other men and four women, making a total of nine captives. Of the whole nine of us, only two had been acquainted before, Giselda Horne and Ernst Schmidt, a German industrialist. Schmidt and the girl’s father were in the same line of business, meat-packing, and Schmidt had been visiting the Horne family in Chicago. He and Giselda had been swimming in the household pool when the “snatch,” as I liked to call it, had taken place. Schmidt had suddenly found himself in the central part of the “cathedral,” clad only in his swimming trunks. Giselda had found herself in one of the cell-like boxes attired in her dressing gown. Schmidt was pretty mad about the trunks, for obviously there was no chance of him acquiring any decent clothes here. Since we were not permitted to touch each other, since the temperature in the ship was a dry seventy degrees or thereabouts, there really wasn’t any logical reason for clothes. Nevertheless, I could see Schmidt’s point. I gave him the anorak out of my rucksack. Although it was no doubt ludicrous to do so, he was glad to wear it.

Jim McClay was a tall, wiry Australian sheep farmer of about thirty-five. He had been snatched while out on his farm driving a Land Rover. Then he too was suddenly in the middle of the cathedral. The experience had very naturally knocked a good deal of the spring and bounce out of the man. But the confidence would soon return. I could see it would return by the way he was looking at Giselda Horne. She was a natural for the Australian, tall, too, and well-muscled.

Bill Bailey greeted each of the four women in his own broad style. For Giselda Horne, in a cleaned dressing gown, it was no more than a terse, “Take it off, love, come in an’ cool down.”

He didn’t get far with Hattie Foulds, a farmer’s wife from northern Lancashire. To his, “Come in, love, come right in ’ere by me. Come in to mi lap an’ smoulder,” she instantly retorted with, “Who’s this bloody great bag of wind?”

Nevertheless, it was clear from the beginning that Hattie Foulds and Bill Bailey made a “right” pair. As the days and weeks passed, they made every conceivable attempt to get into physical contact with each other. It became a part of our everyday existence to walk past some spot from which the sound of violent retching emerged. The other women affected disgust, but I suspect their lives would also have been the poorer without these strange sexio-gastronomic outbursts. Bailey never ceased to talk about it. “Can’t even match your fronts together before it hits you,” he would say, “but we’ve got to keep on trying. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

The two remaining women were much the most interesting to me. One was an Englishwoman, a face I had seen before somewhere. When I asked her name, she simply said she had been christened “Leonora Mary” and that we were to call her what we pleased. She came in that first day wearing a full-length mink coat. She was moderately tall, slender, dark with fine nose and mouth. A long wolf whistle from Bailey was followed by, “Enjoy yer shower, baby?”

This must be the woman Bailey had seen. She must have got herself trapped in the deluge exactly as I had done. With most of her clothing wet she was using the mink coat as a covering.

The remaining woman was Chinese. She came in wearing a neat smock. She looked silently from one to another of us, her face like stone. Under her imperious gaze, Bailey cracked out with, “Eee, look what we’ve got ’ere. ’Ad yer cherry plucked, love?”

They wanted to know about the stars, about the way Daghri and I figured out where we were going and so on and so forth. As the hours and days passed we watched the planets move slowly across the walls. We watched the inner planets getting fainter and fainter while Jupiter hardly seemed to change. But after three weeks even Jupiter was visibly dimming. The ship was leaving the solar system.

Of all these things everybody understood something. It was wonderful to see how suddenly acute the apparently ignorant became as soon as they realized the extent to which their fate depended on these astronomical matters. Throughout their lives the planets had been remote, recondite things. Now they were suddenly as real to everybody as a sack of potatoes, more real, I thought, for I doubted if any of us would ever see a potato again (erroneously, as it turned out).

Of the Einstein time dilatation, they could make out nothing at all, however. It was beyond them to understand how in only a few years we could reach distant stars. I just had to tell them to accept it as a fact. Where were were going, they all wanted to know. As if I could answer such a question! All I could say was that we had somehow been swept up by a raiding party, similar to our own parties rounding up animals for a zoo. It all fitted. Wasn’t this exactly the kind of setup we ourselves provided for animals in a zoo? The boxes to sleep in, the regular food, the restrictions on mating, the passages and the cathedral hall to exercise in?

My longest conversations were with Daghri and with the aristocratic Mary. Mary and I found that so long as we kept about three feet apart we could go pretty well anywhere together at any time without falling into the troubles which were constantly afflicting Bill Bailey and Hattie Foulds. Quite early on, Mary wanted to know why we were so hermetically sealed inside this place. Animals in a terrestrial zoo can at least see their captors, she pointed out. They breathe the same air, they glower at each other from opposite sides of the same bars. Not in the snake house or the fish tank, I answered. We look in on snakes, we look in on fish, but it is doubtful if either look out on us in any proper sense. Only for birds and mammals is there much in the way of reciprocity in a terrestrial zoo. Mary burst out, “But snakes are dangerous.”

“So may we be. Oh, not with poison like snakes, perhaps with bacteria. This place may be a veritable horror house so far as our captors are concerned.”

I was much worried about the Chinese girl, Ling was her name, for she had the problem of language to contend with as well as the actual situation. It was also very clear that Ling intended to be harshly uncooperative. I asked Mary to do what she could to break the ice. Mary reported that Ling “read” English but didn’t speak it, not yet. Gradually as the days passed, we managed to thaw out the girl to some small degree. The basic trouble was that Ling had been a politician of quite exalted status in one of the Chinese provinces. She had been a person of real consequence, not in virtue of birth, but from her own determination and ability. She gave orders and she expected obedience from those around her. Her glacial attitude to us all was a general expression of contempt for the degenerate West.

Our clothes, while easily cleaned in the showers, became more and more battered and out of shape as time went on. We dressed as lightly as possible consistent with modesty, a commodity variable from person to person. One day Bill Bailey, clad only in underpants, came into the cathedral, threw himself on the floor and said, “Oo, what a bitch! A right bitch, that. Used to run real cockfights back on the farm, illicit-like. She’d take on any half-dozen men after a fight. Says it used to key her up, put her in tone. That’s what we need ’ere, Professor, a bloody great cockfight.”

Ling, who was standing nearby, looked down at Bailey. “That is the sort of man who should be whipped, hard and long. In
my
town he would have been whipped for all the people to see.”

The girl’s expression was imperious, although her voice was quiet. Because of this, because also of her curious accent and use of words—which I have not attempted to imitate—the others, particularly Bailey, did not realize what she had said. To me the girl’s attitude demanded action. I took her firmly by the arm and marched her along the passages until we came to the first open cell. Strangely enough, this action induced no sense of sickness in either of us. “Now see here, Ling, you’re not in China anymore. We’re all
captives
in this place. We’ve got to keep solidly together, otherwise we’re lost. It’s our only strength, to give support to each other. If it means putting up with a man like Bailey, you’ve just got to do it.”

Even in my own ears this sounded flat and feeble, which is always the way with moderation and reason; it always sounds flat and feeble compared to an unrelenting fanatic or bigot. Certainly Ling was not impressed. She looked me over coolly, head to toe, and made the announcement, “The time will come when it will be a pity you are not ten years younger.”

I was taking this as a left-handed compliment when she added, “I shall choose the Australian.”

“I think you’ll have trouble from the American girl.”

Ling laughed—I suppose it was a laugh, the eyes, I noticed, were an intense green, the teeth a shining white. The girl must be using the soapy solution in the shower baths. It tasted pretty horrible but it allowed one to clean away the vegetable marrow food on which we were obliged to subsist.

I gave it up. The best I could see in Ling’s point of view was that her ideology represented a last link with Earth. Perhaps it was her way of keeping sane, but it was entirely beyond me to understand it. I was much more impressed at the way Ling always contrived to look neat, always in the same smock.

We were undereating, because unless you were actively hungry there was no point in consuming the tasteless vegetable marrow stuff. It was mushy with a lot of moisture in it. Even so, I was surprised we managed without needing to drink, for there was no possibility of drinking the one source of fluid, the liquid in the shower bath. I could only think we were generating a lot of water internally, by oxidizing the vegetable marrow material. Every now and then we had an intense desire to chew something really hard. I used to bite away at the cord from my rucksack, often for an hour at a time.

The natural effect of the undereating was that we were nearly all losing weight. I had lost most of the excess ten pounds or so which I never seemed to get rid of back on Earth. Ernst Schmidt had lost a lot more, so much in fact that he had discarded my anorak. He went around now only in the bathing trunks which he had tightened in quite a bit. Getting fit had become a passion with the German. He had taken to running through the passages according to a systematic schedule, ten laps from the cathedral and back again for every hour he was awake. Sometimes I accompanied him, to give my muscles a little exercise, but I could never be so regular about it. He commented on this one day.