Element 79 (3 page)

“A strange difference of temperament, Professor. We often have these little runs together, but you can’t quite keep them up. Of course, I understand you have not the same need as I. But even if you had the need, you couldn’t keep them up. No, I think not.”

“Personal temperament?”

“It is an interesting question. Both personal and national, I think. A misleading thing in politics—and in business—is the description given to your people. Anglo-Saxons, eh? What is an Anglo-Saxon, Professor, a sort of German, maybe?”

“We’re always supposed to be a kind of first cousins. There’s the similarity of language, for one thing.”

“Accidental, imposed by a handful of conquerors. Look at me. I speak English, if you will pardon me, I speak it with an American accent. Does that make me an American? Obviously not. I speak this way because Americans have conquered my particular world, the business world.”

“Go on.”

“It is a pity we have no mirrors in this place. If we had a mirror, let me tell you how you would see yourself. You would see a tallish man, with a fair skin, a big red beard, and blue eyes. You would see a Celt, not a German. Your people are Celts, Professor, not Germans, and that is the true source of the difference in our temperaments, you and I.”

“So you think it goes a long way back?”

“Three thousand years or more, to the time when we Germans threw you Celts out of Europe. Yes, we understand a lot about each other, you and I, but we understand each other because we have fought each other for a long time now, not because we are the same.”

I was surprised at the turn of the conversation. Schmidt must have noticed something of this in my face. “Ah, you wonder how I can tell you these things? Because these things are my real interest, not the packing of meat, for who should be interested in the packing of meat?”

“What does all this lead you to?”

“We Germans can pursue a goal relentlessly to the end. You Celts can never do so. You have what I think is called an easygoing streak. It was this streak which made the Romans admire you so much in ancient times. But it was this weakness which very nearly cost you the whole of Europe, my friend.”

“To be easygoing can mean reserve, you know, reserve energy in times of real crisis.”

“All, you are thinking of winning the last battle. It was like that in each of the wars of this century, wasn’t it? You won the last battles, you won those wars. Yet from victory each time you emerged weaker than before. We Germans emerged each time stronger, even from defeat.”

“Because of a tenacity of purpose?”

“Correct, Professor.”

“What is it you are really telling me, Herr Schmidt? That in whatever should lie ahead of us, you will come out best?”

“A leader will emerge among us. It will be a man, an intelligent man. This leaves the choice between the two of us. Of the others, the one is a buffoon, the other a simple countryman. Which of us it will be, I am not sure yet.”

“Don’t be too easygoing, Herr Schmidt. You contradict yourself.”

Schmidt laughed. Then he became more serious.

“In a known situation, a German will always win. He will win because all his energies are directed to a clear-cut purpose. In an unknown situation, it is all much less sure.”

I mention these events in some detail because there were three points in them which came together. Hattie Foulds and her cockfights, Ling and the whipping she would have liked to administer on the person of Bill Bailey, and now Schmidt’s reference to himself as a meat-packer. It made a consistent theory, except for one very big snag, Daghri. I had a long serious talk with the Indian. He denied all my suggestions with such poise and dignity that I felt I simply must believe his protestations of innocence. My theory just had to be wrong. I became depressed about it. Mary noticed the depression, she wanted to know what it was all about. I decided to tell her of the things in my mind.

“Everyone of us is affecting an attitude, or considering some problem,” I began.

“How do you know? About me, for instance.”

“You are considering the moral problem of whether you should permit yourself to bear children into captivity.”

Mary looked me full in the face and nodded.

“My problem from the beginning,” I went on, “has been to understand something of the psychology of the creatures running this ship. Zoomen, is the way I like to think of them. What the hell are they doing and why? Obviously taking samples of living creatures, perhaps everywhere throughout the Galaxy.”

“You mean there might be animals from other planets on this ship?”

“Quite certainly, I would think. Through the walls of this cathedral, through the passage walls there will be other ‘quarters,’ other rooms and passages with other specimens in them.”

“Literally, a zoo!”

“Literally. Yet my curiosity about those other compartments and their contents is less than my curiosity about the human content of this particular compartment. There are nine of us, four of us from the British Isles, an American girl, a Chinese girl, an Indian, a German, and an Australian. What kind of a distribution is that? Seven out of nine white. Can you really believe interstellar zoomen have a color prejudice?”

“Perhaps it wasn’t easy to grab people, they took the first they could get.”

“Doesn’t hold water. Geographically, they snatched us from places as wide apart as Europe, America, India, Australia, and China. They snatched McClay, Daghri, and myself from the quiet countryside, they took you from the busy streets of London, Ling from a crowded town, Schmidt and Giselda Horne from the suburbs of Chicago. It doesn’t seem as if the snatching process presented the slightest difficulty to them.”

“Have you any idea of how it was done?”

“Not really. I just visualize it like picking up bits of fluff with a vacuum cleaner. They simply held a nozzle over you and you disappeared into the works.”

“To come out in this place.”

“It must have been something like that. Where had we got to, this color business. Differences in color might seem very unimportant to these zoomen. We only see these differences, like the differences between you and Ling, because an enormous proportion of the human brain is given over to the analysis of what are really extremely fine distinctions. It could be the zoomen hardly notice these distinctions, and if they do they don’t think them worth bothering about.”

“Then perhaps there was some other method of choice?”

“Must have been. If humans were snatched at random, a good half would be yellow or black. You’d only get a distribution as queer as this one if you had some system or other. But not a color system.”

“Sounds like a contradiction.”

“Not necessarily. Right at the beginning it occurred to me that justice might be the criterion.”

“Justice!”

“Look, if you were taking a number of humans into lifelong captivity, it might occur to you to choose the very people who had themselves shown the least feeling for the captivity of other animals, or for the lives of other animals.”

“My coat!”

“Yes, your mink coat must have marked you out from the crowd in the street. The zoomen spotted it, and at the blink of an eye you were into their vacuum cleaner.”

Mary shuddered and then smiled wryly.

“I always thought of it as such a beautiful coat, warm and splendid to look at. You really believe it was the coat? I only use it for a pillow now.”

“A lot of things fit the same picture. Schmidt was a meat-packer. Giselda Horne’s father was in the same business, stuffing bloody bits of animals into tins.”

Mary was quite excited, her own plight forgotten as the puzzle fitted into place. “And McClay reared the animals, and Bailey was a butcher, an actual slaughterer.”

“And the cockfights for Hattie Foulds.”

“But what about you, and Ling, and Daghri?”

“Leave me out of it. I can make a good case against myself. Ling and Daghri are the critical ones. You see, there isn’t much animal-eating among Asiatic populations, really because they haven’t enough in the way of feeding stuffs to be able to rear animals for slaughter. This seemed to me to be the reason why only two Asiatic people had been taken. It occurred to me that possibly even these two might have been chosen in some other way.”

“What about Ling?”

“Well, to Ling people are no more than animals. I’ve little doubt Ling has had many a person whipped at her immediate discretion, at her pleasure even, for all I know.”

“And Daghri?”

“Daghri is the contradiction, the disproof of everything. Daghri is a Hindu. Hinduism is a complicated religion, but one important part of it forbids the eating of animals.”

“Perhaps Daghri doesn’t have much use for that aspect of his religion.”

“Exactly what I thought. I charged him with it directly, more or less accusing him of some form of violence against either animals or humans. He denied it with the utmost dignity.”

“Maybe he was lying.”

“Why should he lie?”

“Perhaps because he’s ashamed. You know, Daghri is different in another way. What odds would you give of taking nine people at random and of finding none of them with strong religious beliefs?”

“Very small, I would imagine.”

“Yet none of us has strong religious beliefs, except Daghri.”

I saw exactly what Mary meant. To Daghri, religion might be no more than a sham. Perhaps the Indian was no more than a gifted liar.

Not long after this conversation Daghri disappeared. For a while I thought he had retired, possibly in shame, to his boxlike cell. In one of my runs with Schmidt I noticed all the cells open. Daghri was not to be found in any one of them. We searched high and low, but Daghri simply was not there. “High and low” is an obvious exaggeration, for there wasn’t any possible hiding place in our aseptic accommodation. It was rather that we looked everywhere many times. Daghri was gone. The general consensus was that the poor fellow had been abstracted by the zoomen for “experiments.” I was of a similar mind at first, then it all clicked into place. I rushed into the cathedral. The others quickly followed, so we were assembled there, eight of us now. I studied the star pattern on the wall. We hadn’t bothered with it of late, treating it more as a decoration than as a source of information.

What a fool I’d been! I should have noticed the slight shift of the patterns back to their original forms. Owing to the motion of the ship, the stars had moved very slightly, but now they had moved back. The planets were there, too, the planets of our own solar system. The double Earth-Moon was there. So was the sunlight replacing artificial light at the entrance of the passageways—there was a small subtle difference.

“We’re being taken back,” I heard someone say.

I knew we were not being taken back. Daghri had been taken back, the contradiction had been removed. My instinct had been right, Daghri had been telling the truth. Daghri had ill-treated no animal, Daghri was saved, but not so the rest of us. The planets moved across the wall, just as they had done before. We were on our way out again.

The others couldn’t believe it at first, then they didn’t want to believe it, but at last as the hours passed they were forced to believe it. Disintegration set in quickly. Giselda Horne gave way badly. She seemed big and strong but really she was only an overdeveloped kid. I thought she might be better alone, so I took her back to her own cell. She nodded and went in. Silently, from behind me, Ling glided after Giselda Horne. I shouted to Ling to come out and leave the girl alone. Ling turned with a look of haughty indifference on her face. At that very moment the panel of the cell closed. There was just a fleeting fraction of a second in which I saw the expression on Ling’s face change from indifference to triumph.

The others gathered outside the cell. We could hear nothing from inside, for the panel was completely soundproof. The Chinese girl had judged the situation quite exactly. Giselda Horne was near the edge of sanity. With cutting and sadistic words, and with the force of an intense personality, Ling would push her over that edge.

The panel slid open. Horror-stricken, I gazed inside. Horror dissolved to laughter. Gone was Ling’s neat smock. Blood was oozing from long scratches on Giselda Horne’s face. Ling had evidently fought catlike, as I would have anticipated. Giselda Horne had fought in a different style. One swinging fist must have hit Ling on the mouth, for now it was puffy and bleeding. A fist had also whacked the Chinese girl a real beauty on the left eye. Ling staggered out, leaving Giselda Horne with a big smile on her face.

“Gee. that was real good,” said the American girl.

It was two days, two waking and sleeping periods, before I saw Ling again. She still contrived to appear reserved and haughty, even though the furious set-to had left her with the blackest eye I ever saw and with hardly any remnants of clothing.

“The American girl and I, we will share the Australian,” Ling said. “It is a pity you are not five years younger,” she added.

Mary took it all with a great calmness. “I had become reconciled to it, captivity, I mean. This really proves the zoomen have a sense of justice, to go back all that way to put Daghri home again.”

Somehow I couldn’t tell Mary. I knew the zoomen hadn’t made any mistake about Daghri. It was an experiment, done quite deliberately to see how we would react. The zoomen just couldn’t have read me so accurately and Daghri so badly. With Daghri gone, we made eight, four couples—the animals came into the Ark. Another thing, choose a smallish number. Being an irrational creature, a human might say, 7. A really rational creature would always choose a binary number, 8.

Mary put a hand lightly on my arm. “You never said what it was
you
had done.”

“My sin was the worst of you all. My sin was that I was a consumer. I ate the poor creatures McClay reared on his farm, the animals Bailey slaughtered, the bloody bits Schmidt stuffed into tins.”