“Or were they just assuming that we would panic and break down before we got anywhere?” countered Lawrence, and went off at a tangent: “Given a few days, I’ll be speaking
a pidgin version of this language. It’s probably highly subtle and sophisticated, but we’ll be able to make ourselves clear.”
“What do you suppose goes on here?” Mrs. King inquired, having been occupying herself with a study of their field of vision.
Lawrence drew a wry parallel with an African trying to make sense out of a post office without knowing how to read and write. Amusement relieved their tension momentarily, but it came back when Joe turned around and saw that a film had come up over the opening through which they had entered.
“I’ll bet that’s solid as a rock,” he thought.
The creatures who had come forward to surround him were moving back to their original places with a shuffling gait. Time passed. There was once more the overwhelming silence which had prevailed when they first looked in here.
And then a familiar voice sounded into the stillness. It said, “I am Gyul Kodran.”
Spinning on his heel, Joe was too late to see how Gyul Kodran had arrived. He was simply there in the midst of the others of his kind—for they were of his kind. He no longer shielded himself by wearing the garment of shifting forces which had protected him on Earth, and he stood revealed as another slate and brown creature, of average size and typical appearance.
Once again Joe allowed Lawrence to control his speech. He said, “You seem to have broken our agreement.”
Faint puzzlement seemed to affect the alien. He said, “I am accustomed to your manner of hasty thinking. It is as well. Explain.”
“I was promised the use of what I brought with me—food and necessities. Where have you put it?”
Other members of the team thrust forward suggestions; Lawrence accepted some, rejected others, and went on in a level voice.
“Moreover, if you meant what you said when you informed us that our representative was to prove himself capable of existence among you, you should have provided some basic information. I am prepared to do my best; how can I, without someone to teach me your language, to explain to me how I can come by your medium of exchange if you have one, to
interpret to me warnings which will prevent me from accidentally harming one of your people?”
He concluded with a defiant stare at Gyul Kodran. It was plain that he had somehow seized an advantage over the other; he wanted to exploit it.
There was a pause. During it, Joe caught sight of what he believed to be the spokesman of the group, who had asked if he was well, listening covertly from the background. None of the other creatures was paying any attention.
“Very well,” said Gyul Kodran heavily. “Let it not be said that we deceive you. Come with me.”
He strode forward. One of his many appendages caught’ Joe by the arm and drew him towards the opening to the outside. Reflexively Joe tensed against the grip, but yielded in time to offer no resistance.
He stepped through the opening—and together with the rest of the team wondered for a moment whether he had gone insane.
By all the laws of normal space, he should have found himself once again on the gallery along the side of the building like a ribbed shell. Instead, he was surrounded by brilliant lights—blue, white, red, green, purple—mingled like patchwork on a gray ground. The lights shifted, twisted, turned. They were underfoot, beside and overhead.
Gyul Kodran, still grasping Joe’s arm, marched straight ahead. They seemed to get nowhere although they walked for almost a minute through the flashing colored shafts. Joe’s mind was still numb, as numb as his companions’, when Gyul Kodran abruptly turned straight up, and they emerged.
And this time, they truly were in a city.
They had arrived, then, in a park on the outskirts, and Mrs. King’s suggestion that the golden weaving objects were equivalent to a flowerbed was probably correct. It was almost home-like to find himself now in something altogether resembling a city of Earth, with identifiable buildings, with crowds, with vehicles. That was the first reaction.
Then Joe began to remember what he had thought in the car going from the project out to the airport on route for the Pacific: how would an alien look at an earthly city? And he had a wildly dissociated feeling as he began to realize that his first impression was inconceivably wrong.
True, there were buildings here. But they were shaped more like the functional coverings of machinery: cones, trapezoid forms, spirally twisted columns, in a bewildering assortment of colors, among which dark blue and black predominated.
They had neither entrances nor windows visible.
True again: there were crowds here. But they streamed in even, ranked flows—here a group of slate and brown beings like Gyul Kodran, there a group of gray-white ones, such as he had seen in the building they had just left, more like Gyul Kodran, and then groups of creatures different from all the rest. Here and there among the flowering ranks one of the tall downy golden objects bobbed rather like a captive balloon.
He was standing on a semicircular platform raised about four inches above the surrounding ground. That ground was not the surface of a street. There were no streets here—only intervals and areas between buildings.
Gyul Kodran was regarding him curiously, almost as if in satisfaction, almost as though waiting for a comment. Joe felt Rohini Das nudge him mentally; she wanted to slip into control.
Not absolutely certain what she was going to say, he permitted it with slight reluctance.
At once she addressed the alien. “Are you familiar with our mathematical notation?”
“Of course,” said Gyul Kodran, taken aback.
“Then let me disappoint you. That quick trip from where we were before was probably accomplished by an application of a derivative function in terms of less-than-
c
at about the fourth level of expansion of the hyperphotonic series. The lights are very pretty, but they must waste a good deal of power.”
There was pleasant malice in Rohini’s mind as she spoke, and the rest of the team, appreciating it, complimented her.
Gyul Kodran took a backward step, which carried him over the rim of the semicircular platform to the level of the ground. He said, “Rather accurate. But the lights, of course, are route-markings.”
“The same thing could be done for less power with—oh, but what’s the difference? If you’re satisfied, you’re satisfied.”
Rohini, mentally chuckling, slipped back and allowed Joe to
resume control. He noticed that Gyul Kodran had been definitely put out by Rohini’s comment. He was taking his time over collecting himself.
Meantime, a group of the grayish aliens had halted in their march-like, uniform progress past the platform, and were forming into a ring to study Joe like a museum curiosity. That was comforting; it was the first sign of interest that the passers-by had yet shown.
“This way,” said Gyul Kodran abruptly, and began to walk past the end of the group of grayish creatures. The one on the end of the line sidled into Joe’s path causing Joe to stop.
Gyul Kodran did not seem to notice, but simply walked on.
Joe tried stepping to one side, as though the blocking of the path had been by chance. The grayish alien copied him. It was deliberate, and for a reason.
While he was casting around for a solution, he felt Stepan indicate the desire to take over. An inkling of what he intended to do reached Joe; he yielded instantly.
A pause, while Stepan tensed and relaxed important muscles, then a rapid sideways leap, and four quick paces forward, bounding like a jack rabbit.
He was alongside Gyul Kodran once more.
Apparently his guide had noticed nothing, or if he had he was taking no interest. He was making directly for the side of a structure like a fat, sidewise-tilted cylinder, colored indigo blue. As he approached, part of the side of the cylinder changed its appearance as the side of the ship had done when he emerged on to the beach of the lonely Pacific island.
A thick, fetid creature like a bloated snake began to wind out of the wall, pouring swiftly like a flood. Gyul Kodran stepped aside, and Joe copied him.
The blue snake passed on, swollen and featureless. It entered one of the passing groups of beings and vanished.
“Your belongings have been put here,” said Gyul Kodran, and stepped into the building. Joe did the same, feeling the wall yield but tug at him like tacky elastic mist. Polarization of a limited area—again, wasteful of power; the same function could be performed by a revolving door. His engineer’s mind reviewed possibilities.
“There,” said Gyul Kodran, and indicated a large room—a
section of the cylinder, horizontally floored, where his crated belongings were stacked up. “You require water; it is here. You require waste-disposal facilities; they too are here. Now kindly refrain from troubling me again during your stay; I have other calls on my time. I will see you when we call you to announce our verdict.”
He hesitated one moment, again seeming to be puzzled, and then was gone.
“W
ELL, THERE’S
one thing to be said for all this: at least we can’t get lonely.”
Joe had to put considerable effort into the feeble wisecrack as he sat on the edge of his bed eating the first meal he had been able to get that day directly out of its can.
“This isn’t in the least how I expected it to be,” Mrs. King commented.
“You’re dead right,” chimed in Lawrence. “I’m starting to have some rather interesting suspicions. Propose detailed consideration of what we’ve learned.”
Joe stopped eating, the can and the spoon grasped unnoticed in his hands. “Lawrence?”
“Almost one-third of the test period is up. What have we learned, seen and done?” Lawrence slipped into control of the body, dropped the spoon into the can, and began to raise fingers to count up items.
“One: we have succeeded in making a few short trips outside our quarters. And we’ve found our way back.
“Two: we have acquired a hesitant knowledge of the local
lingua franca
. I suspect this is a hybrid language capable of expression in visual and kinetic terms as well as in terms of sound—the grayish aliens certainly don’t communicate by sound.
“Three: we have succeeded in keeping out of people’s hair, or whatever they have instead of hair. Is that a list of pride-inducing achievements?”
“What we have not done is a much longer list,” commented Joe gloomily.
“Agreed.” Stepan took over. “Questions: why if this Federation of Worlds is so vast and impressive, are there only at most a dozen different races here?”
Mrs. King snapped in, “These are the ones capable of existing under conditions here—radiation, oxygen, gravity.”
“Reasonable,” granted Stepan. “But what have we found besides that? Have we found the mind-shaking advanced social order, the staggering technical achievements, which we looked forward to? No! This city is fairly impressive, but in fact it’s a tumble of children’s building blocks; Rohini understands its design in terms of simple mathemetical functions. She also suggested at once the means of transport they employ here. By now Joe probably knows how to build a copy.”
Joe frowned. “This is peculiar,” he conceded. “So far we haven’t seen anything that we couldn’t expect to acquire for ourselves in another century or so.”
“Myself, I am especially disappointed in their culture,” said Mrs. King. “As has been pointed out, this city is impressive, but it is sterile, cold, in some ways clumsy. The only essentially attractive thing we have yet seen was the weaving dance of the golden ones on our arrival. Even that was rigid, like a mathematical prediction.”
“Is there nothing beyond what we have seen, do you suppose?” Stepan suggested musingly. The others caught a glimpse of what he was thinking, and turned wonderingly to see more.
“I am no psychologist,” he pursued, and they felt once more the aching sense of lack due to the loss of Schneider. “But I have been turning over the memory of the first day when Gyul Kodran was bringing us here. Were we not all struck by the measured, uniform, almost marching progress of the crowds in the streets? Each creature was with a group of its own kind, except for the golden bobbins, and we know from what we saw at first that they too have to congregate and move together and perhaps reestablish their corporate identities.”
He ended on a questioning note. Lawrence snatched up the suggestion and carried it forward with enthusiasm.
“I’m blind and stupid!” he exploded passionately, bringing
sudden warmth to Joe’s face. “Why am I not seeing what lies under our nose? Stepan, you must be right. Think that the only creatures we have yet encountered who have shown independence and decision in the one case, curiosity in the other, were Gyul Kodran and the grayish one who blocked our path. Blocked our path as one might act to tease an animal and provoke it into amusing behavior.”
“I think we must not be overready to jump at what seems to be an attractive conclusion,” Joe ventured. Rohini Das gave a scornful reply.
“Nor must we dismiss the logical conclusion because it seems attractive! My view is this: that Gyul Kodran’s Federationers are
afraid
of us. I say they set this test in terms of an individual because they and all the other races allied with them are worth nothing as individuals. Wouldn’t this explain why they were not truly expecting us to come into the city and bother them? They probably thought they would just have to go and collect us from where they left us, starved and shivering and frightened, and send us home.”
“Why set the test at all?” Stepan asked, and Lawrence at once sprang in with an answer.
“To humble us and bring us down. They knew that if they did not take a hand, they would have to face the possibility of our coming out to them on our own terms. They were probably banking on the humiliation of failure to make us hesitant afterwards. And they were not confident enough to keep us down forcibly—most likely, they didn’t think they could.”
“But Gyul Kodran came to Earth alone,” said Mrs. King softly.
“Did he?” Joe clapped his hand to his forehead. “Did he? We don’t know! There may be a hundred Gyul Kodrans! Remember he told us in his final speech before departure that he had consulted with the council or whatever the previous night; how? By instantaneous return to this capitol planet? Or by taking the place of his predecessor? We can’t say, can we?”
They shared a sudden warm optimistic glow of confidence. Joe resumed full control and determinedly spooned the last of the contents of the tin into his mouth.
“I think we might well go out and take another look at the
city, and see how it appears through rose-colored glasses,” he suggested.
The team agreed.
It was dusk outside. They had stayed out late one night, seeing that the exterior of the buildings gave back in the early hours of darkness the light they had absorbed during the day, on a slightly longer wave length. That could be done by man also; it would be costly, but it was a worthwhile idea. Joe had filed the technique for future reference.
They had also remained out to study the evening flow of traffic, and there was something extremely hard to understand. The flow never stopped; sometimes it increased and sometimes it diminished, but it always consisted of groups of ranked beings, moving with a common purpose to a common goal. In the twilight hours, the goal was usually a cup-shaped building with violet-banded walls. Once Joe had joined a flow of slate and brown aliens as they converged at such a building, the nearest to where he was quartered. But when he made to approach the entrance, one of the golden bobbins had drifted on its pedestal of down and paused beside him. It made no sign or signal, but there was an air of discouragement in its expectant pose. Joe changed his mind and turned away; when he glanced back a moment later, the golden bobbin had disappeared.
A few of the golden bobbins were in evidence among the monotonously flowing groups of aliens, and Lawrence fastened first on the problem of their presence and function.
“Police? Watchdogs? Was what we saw when we arrived a kind of exercise or drill?”
Collectively they remembered how the golden bobbin had warned them off from entering the violet-banded building. It was a unique phenomenon in their experience so far, but indicative.
“All the phenomena we’ve experienced are unique,” objected Joe when he knew which way their line of thought was tending. “What about that slice of light that shot up from the city just after we arrived, the grayish alien blocking our path, and the sounding of that alarm and having someone appear in the air before us?”
“Unique but not necessarily meaningful,” Lawrence commented. “For analogy’s sake: a savage comes to a city and sees
as he goes about a fire call, a smash and grab raid, a publicity gimmick involving a plastic sea serpent. Is he to conclude that the city’s business revolves around burning buildings, robbery and snake totems? Mark you, he probably would; it’s up to us to show better reasoning.”
“Granted,” Joe sighed. “Well, certainly there is something indicative in the way these golden things are always around. Shall we follow one and see what it does?”
“Why not?” the team responded.
Accordingly Joe glanced about him for the nearest of the golden bobbins, and spotted a particularly impressive specimen, slightly larger in all dimensions than the majority, poised not far from him at a point in the middle of an empty space of ground where two streams of hurrying aliens of Gyul Kodran’s species formed three streams and started to diverge. Why? Why should cars capable of a hundred miles an hour meekly halt at a red light?
They had learned during their stay so far to discriminate approximately between things which seemed to hold out no hope of comprehension and things which appeared potentially valuable items of knowledge. So far, most of the former had been in the category of social activity; Joe and Lawrence were coming to the conclusion that understanding technological tricks was not enough, that it was time to pay serious attention to the harder problems.
The question of the golden bobbins was as good a starting point as any.
They watched the golden bobbin for more than an hour, and it showed no sign of moving. When at last it did, it departed abruptly between two conical buildings where for the moment no traffic was passing. Joe followed, dodging the marching columns of aliens with some difficulty.
By the time he again came in sight of the bobbin, it was on the verge of vanishing behind a distorted cube. He had to hurry to catch up.
And then, on a flat, round piece of ground among the buildings, the bobbin stopped.
It remained still for a moment, and then—unexpectedly-toppled to the ground. The fall made it roll slightly, perhaps once around its long axis. After a few moments, it was still
except for a rhythmical pumping motion of its surface, which caused waves to ripple in its downy covering.
“Can that possibly be natural behavior?” Joe put forward. Mrs. King answered automatically.
“How can we tell what is natural and what not? Better not to interfere.”
Joe glanced around for a place of concealment; he found an embrasure in the side of the nearest building, and slipped into it to watch and wait.
Time leaked by.
At last, when the rhythmical contractions of the fallen bobbin were getting slower and slower, there came a humming sound in the air—a deep, barely audible noise, like the one which they had heard on arrival.
“More bobbins coming!” guessed Joe, and looked round. From all sides bobbins had suddenly sprung into view; they were hastening forward, surrounding the fallen one, lifting it—how, could not be discerned, but it was not with limbs or tentacles, because they possessed neither. Shortly a group of them, which included the one who had fallen, left the area and passed out of sight.
Those that remained paused a moment. Then they began to converge at the point where Joe stood. The humming redoubled in volume and began to rise and fall.
At length, when Joe—feeling his palms sweat, his mouth dry—was hemmed in by ranked bobbins, a new note sounded with the underlying hum. It was just far enough away from a perfect octave to make his teeth grate. As once before, words formed out of the sound.
“How can you stand by and watch a fellow being die?”
The words bludgeoned into Joe’s mind, and with them came a sick sense of failure and despair at his and their overconfident stupidity.
And then the golden bobbins moved in on him.
Nonphysical bonds as strong as webs of steel pinioned Joe and lifted him off his feet between four of the golden creatures. They carried him away at the head of a column which moved almost like a parade, swaying a little, accompanied by a further increase of the deep bass humming. Every now and again other notes, much higher in the scale, chorded in briefly like striking sounds of indignation.
They held him sideways to their direction of travel, so that he could not see where he was being taken. Their featureless roundness seemed to make inward and outward their two important directions.
A few moments later, they were surrounded by the dazzling light patterns which Gyul Kodran had described as route markings on their nonspatial transport system; a little time went by there, and the direction in which they seemed to turn upon emerging was diagonally downward and not upward. At least, Joe assumed it was an act of emergence; all that visibly happened was that the lights vanished, and he was in a place of total darkness.
The bonds holding him dematerialized—if they were material at all—and he was dropped, staggering on to a yielding floor. There was a rustling, and the humming notes abruptly stopped.
He was alone.
Fighting down a sense of blind panic, he stretched out his arms and encountered walls nearby, as yielding as the floor. There was a sense of swaying, as though he had been dropped into a leather pouch about the waist of a walking giant. The darkness remained absolute. There was a sour smell like stale warm milk.
Silence.
“How were we to know?” protested Stepan with sudden anger, and the team’s minds snatched at the thought, twisting it and turning it like the point of a sword, and then looked toward Mrs. King.
Her answer quavered a little. “How could we interfere? For all I knew, it could have been an important lifestage. It looked like sudden sickness—but to interfere would have been worse still.”
Lawrence was suddenly grim and resigned. “This
is
not unknown,” he pointed out. “Stacking the deck against someone—Deny him the necessary skills and make out that he is therefore inferior.” Behind the thought were associated memories of how white had treated black in Africa.
“Were we right or wrong to think that these Federationers were deliberately handicapping us?” challenged Rohini. “I say they lied to us! I say that they are deceitful; so far from being better than we are, they are dishonest and afraid. But
why? Give me reasons for this stupid hoaxing, this cheating!”
Joe answered with a pall of gloom veiling his mind, “We dare not forget that we too are practicing deceit.”
“Do you think they know?” Chillingly, Stephen put out the possibility.