The Onslaught from Rigel, Fletcher Pratt [smallest ebook reader .TXT] 📗

Then the pain ceased, the light went off and something was clamped about his head.

A minute more and he had been flipped over on his back, and with the same whirring of motors that had attended his arrival, was carried back through the passage and into the hall of the blue dome. He was still held firmly; but now there was a difference. He could wiggle in his bonds.

With a clicking of machinery, he was tilted up on the plane that held him. A hole yawned before his feet and he slid rapidly down a smooth incline, through a belt of dark, to drop in a heap on something soft. The trapdoor clicked behind him.

He found himself, unbound, on a floor of rubber-like texture and on rising to look around, perceived that he was in a cell with no visible exit, whose walls were formed by a heavy criss-crossed grating of some red metal. It was a little more than ten feet square; in the center a seat with curving outlines rose from the floor, apparently made of the same rubbery material as the floor itself. A metallic track ended just in front of the seat; following back, his eye caught the outline of a kind of lectern, now pushed back against the wall of the cell, with spaces below the reading flat and handles attached. Against the back wall of the cell stood a similar device, but larger and without any metal track. Beside it two handles dangled from the wall on cords of flexible wire.

This was all his brief glance told him about the confines of his new home. Looking beyond it, he saw that he was in one of a row of similar cells, stretching back in both directions. In front of the row of cells was a corridor along which ran a brightly-burnished metal track, and this was lined by another row of cells on the farther side.

The cell at Sherman's right was empty, but he observed that the one on the left had a tenant—a metal man, like himself in all respects and yet—somehow unlike. He stepped over to the grating that separated them.

"What is this place, anyway?" he inquired.

His neighbor, who had been sitting in the rubber chair, turned toward him a round and foolish face with a long, naked upper lip, and burst into a flood of conversation of which Sherman could not understand one word. He held up his hand. "Wait a minute, partner," he said. "Go slow. I don't get you."

The expression on the fellow's face changed to one of wonderment. He made another effort at conversation, accompanying it with gestures. "Wait," said the aviator, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?... Francais?... Habla Espanol?... No? Dammit what does the guy talk? I don't know any Italian—Spaghetti, macaroni, Mussolini!"

No use. The metal face remained blankly uninspired. Well, there is one thing men of all races have in common. Sherman went through the motions of drawing from his pocket a phantom cigarette, applying to it an imaginary match, and blowing the smoke in the air.

It is impossible for a man whose forehead is composed of a series of lateral metal bands to frown. If it were the other would have done so. Then comprehension appeared to dawn on him. He stepped across to his lectern, and with his toes, pulled the bottom slide open, extracted from it a round rubber container and reaching through the bars, handed it to Sherman.

The aviator understood the difference that had puzzled him in the beginning. Instead of the graceful back-sweeping curve that sets a man's head vertical with his body, this individual had the round-curved neck and low-hung head of the ape.

CHAPTER XII The Poisoned Paradise

To hide his surprise Sherman bent his head to examine the object the ape-man had handed him. It was about the size of a baseball with little holes in it. He inserted a finger in one of the holes, and a stream of oil squirted out and struck him in the eye. His neighbor gave a cry of annoyance at his clumsiness and reached through the bars to have the ball returned. As he received it there came sudden flickerings of lights along the hall from somewhere high up, like the trails of blue and green rockets. The mechanical ape-man dropped the oil-ball and dashed to the front of his cell.

Sherman saw a vehicle proceeding down the line of cells; a kind of truck that rode on the track of the corridor and was so wide it just missed the gratings. It had a long series of doors in its sides, and as it came opposite an occupied cell, stopped. Something invisible happened; the bars of the cell opened inward and the inmate emerged to step into a compartment which at once closed behind him.

When it stopped at the ape-man's cage Sherman watched the procedure closely. A little arm appeared from beneath the door of the compartment and did something to one of the lower bars of the cell. But the truck passed Sherman by, moving silently along to other cells beyond him.

He turned to examine the room more closely, and as he did so, saw that a second truck was following the first. This one, with an exactly reversed procedure, was returning robots to their cells. This second truck dropped an inmate in the cell at his right (another ape-man) and trundled along down the line, but as it reached the end of the corridor, turned back and running along till it came to his cell, stopped, flung out the metal arm, and opened the bars in invitation.

Sherman had no thought of disobeying; as long as he was in this queerest of all possible worlds, he thought, one might as well keep to the rules. But he was curious about the joint of the cage and how it unlocked and he paused a moment to examine it. The machine before him buzzed impatiently. He lingered. There came a sudden clang of metal from inside the car, a vivid beam of blue light called his attention, and looking up, he saw the word "EXIT" printed in letters of fire at the top of the compartment.

With a smile he stepped in. A soft light was turned on and he found himself in a tiny cubbyhole with just room for the single seat it provided and on which he seated himself. There was no window.

The machine carried him along smoothly for perhaps five minutes, stopped and the door opened before him. He issued into another blue-domed hall. A small one this time, containing a rubber seat like that in his cell, but with an extended arm on which rested a complex apparatus of some kind. The seat faced a white screen like those in movie theaters.

He seated himself and at once a series of words appeared in dark green on the screen. "Dominance was not complete," it said. "Communication?" Then below, in smaller type, as though it were the body of a newspaper column. "Lassans service man. Flier writing information through communication excellent. Dinner bed, book. No smoking. Yours very truly."

As he gazed in astonishment at this cryptic collection of words it was erased and its place was taken by a picture which he recognized as a likeness of himself in his present metallic state. A talking picture, which made a few remarks in the same incomprehensible gibberish the ape-man had used, then sat down in a chair like that in which he now rested, and proceeded to write on the widespread arm with a stylus which was attached to it. The screen went blank.... Evidently he was supposed to communicate something by writing.

The stylus was a metal pencil, and the material of the arm, though not apparently metallic, must be, he argued from the fact that it seemed to have electric connections attached. As he examined it, the blue lights flickered at him impatiently. "The white knight," he wrote in a fit of impish perversity, "is climbing up the poker." Instantly the words flashed on the screen.

Pause. "IS CLIMBING" declared the screen, in capitals; then below it appeared a fairly creditable picture of a knight in armor followed by a not very creditable picture of a poker. Sherman began to comprehend. Whoever it was behind this business had managed a correspondence course of a sort in English, but had failed to learn the verbs and he was being asked to explain.

For answer he produced a crude drawing of a monkey climbing a stick and demonstrated the action by getting up and going through the motions of climbing. Immediately the screen flashed a picture of the knight in armor ascending the poker by the same means, but it had hardly appeared before it was wiped out to be replaced by a flickering of blue lights and an angry buzz. His interlocutor had seen the absurdity of the sentence and was demanding a more serious approach to the problem. For answer Sherman wrote, "Where am I and who are you?"

A longer pause. "Dominance not complete," said the screen. Then came the picture of the first page of a child's ABC book with "A was an Archer who shot at a frog" below the usual childish picture. Then came the word "think." With the best will in the world Sherman was puzzled to illustrate this idea, but by tapping his forehead and drawing a crude diagram of the brain as he remembered it from books, he managed to give some satisfaction.

The process went on for three or four hours as nearly as Sherman could judge the time, ending with a flash of the word "Exit" in red from the screen and a dimming of the blue-dome light. He turned toward the door and found the car that had brought him, ready for the return journey. As it rumbled back to his cell he ruminated on the fact that none of the men (or whatever it was) behind this place had yet made themselves visible, for it was incredible that beings of the type of the metallic ape-man who occupied the next cell to his should have intelligence enough to operate such obviously highly-developed machinery.

But what next? He pondered the question as the car deposited him in his cell. Obviously, he was being kept a prisoner. He didn't like it, however comfortable the imprisonment.

The first thing that suggested itself was a closer inspection of his cell. The lectern yielded an oil-ball like that the ape-man had given him and another, similar device, containing grease. There were various tools of uncertain purpose and in the last drawer he examined a complete duplicate set of wrist and finger joints. The larger cupboard had deep drawers, mostly empty, though one of them contained a number of books, apparently selected at random from a good-sized sized library—"Mystery of Oldmixon Hall," "Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1903," "The Poems of Jerusha G. White"—a depressing collection.

This seemed to exhaust the possibilities of the cell and Sherman looked about for further amusement. His ape neighbor had pressed himself close to the bars on that side, indicating his interest in what Sherman was doing by chuckling bubbles of amusement. Further down the line one of the ape-men was holding the pair of handles that projected from the wall beside his cabinet. Sherman grasped his also; there was a pleasant little electric shock and in the center of the wall before him a slide moved back to disclose a circle of melting light that changed color and form in pleasing variations. The sensation was enormously invigorating and it struck the aviator with surprise that this must be the way these creatures.... "These creatures!" he thought, "I'm one of them...." the way these creatures acquired nourishment. The thought gave him an inspiration.

"Hey!" he called in a voice loud enough to carry throughout the room. "Is there anyone here that can understand what I'm saying?"

There was a clank of metal as faces turned in his direction all down the line of cages. "Yes, I guess so," called a voice from about thirty feet away. "What do you want to say?"

Sherman felt an overwhelming sense of relief. He would not have believed it possible to be so delighted with a human voice. "Who's got us here and why are they keeping us here?" he shouted back.

A moment's silence. Then—"Near's I can make out it's a passel of elephants and they've got us here to work."

"What?" Sherman shouted back, not sure he had heard aright.

"Work!" came the answer. "Make you punch the holes on these goddam light machines. It wears your fingers off and you have to screw new ones in at night."

"No, I mean about the elephants."

"That's what I said—elephants. They wear pants, and they're right smart, too."

Insoluble mystery. "Who are you?" called the aviator.

"Mellen. Harve Mellen. I had a farm right here where they set up this opry house of