Beyond the Barrier

Chapter Eight

After a moment Lall and Churan yawned together like two frogs, showing the dark greenish roofs of their mouths: the effect was grotesquely unpleasant. “We are tired,” Lall said.

“It is late.” She rose, followed by Churan, and led the way to the room opening off the far end of the lounge, opposite the one she and Churan had used. The child trailed after them, dragging its doll by one arm.

The door was closed, but opened at Lall’s touch. She stood aside. “This will be your sleeping room, Mr. Naismith. I think you will find all you need.”

The three stood waiting. Naismith glanced in; there was a low bed, a footstool, some ambiguous half-real draperies on the wall. He made no move to. enter. “Thank you,” he said.

“You will sleep here?” Lall asked plaintively.

“When I am ready. Good night.”

“But at least you will inspect the room, to see if everything is to your liking?” Churan demanded.

Lall turned her head and said something to him in their own hissing, guttural speech. She turned back. “Just as you wish, then, Mr. Naismith. We will talk again in the morning.”

The three aliens crossed the lounge and entered their own room. The door slid shut after them.

Naismith paused a moment, listening: he could hear Lall and Churan moving about in their room, talking sleepily together, with occasional bursts of acrimony. There was no point in waiting any longer. Naismith moved noiselessly out into the corridor. The drifting red trail guided his feet; at the first turning, he deliberately left it. He went down a flight of stairs, stepped through a narrow doorway, and found himself in darkness relieved only by spectral, phosphorescent glows from the outlines of machinery here and there. He kept moving down the narrow aisle, under a low ceiling, not pausing to examine any of the machines he passed. For the moment all he wanted was to put distance between himself and the three aliens.

After a quarter of an hour, even the phosphorescent markings thinned out and ceased. He was groping in total darkness, thoroughly lost in the interior of the great ship.

Satisfied that he was secure for the moment, Naismith sat down in the darkness and considered his position. In spite of its immense, almost overwhelming implications, the problem was basically that of buyer against seller. Each party had something the other wanted, and each was determined to give as little as possible. Naismith’s first objective was to keep the aliens from coercing him: that was now accomplished, since he was out of their reach. His next objective must be to im-prove his bargaining position. That meant, above all, increasing his knowledge: for it was knowledge that Lall and Churan held out as bait, and knowledge again that gave them a tactical superiority. His course, therefore, was clear. He must begin by exploring the ship, no matter how many weeks or even months—

The thought broke off. A breath of danger was passing down the narrow corridor, making his skin prickle and his nostrils widen. He stared blindly into the darkness: was the shadow-egg, invisible and intangible, passing there?

Whatever it was, in a moment it was gone. Naismith rose and once more began feeling his way down the corridor.

Hours later, he found a narrow passage leading off at right angles, and crossed the waist of the ship, emerging finally in a huge deserted salon. Here the moving overhead lights followed him again, but there were no red trails on the floor, and he guessed that Lall and Churan had never been in this area.

In the days that followed, Naismith prowled the empty ship alone. Its gigantic scale never ceased to oppress and astonish him: it was impossible to imagine what kind of people could have built a vessel like this, equipped it so massively and elaborately, and then left it to be mounded over on the Colorado plain.

Wherever he went, the lights winked on ahead, winked off behind. There must be some way of illuminating whole rooms at once, but Naismith had not found it. He moved in a moving circle of pale light, while all around him was green silence.

There were cyclopean galleries and choirs, around which he crawled like a fly; there were baths, gymnasia, theaters, game rooms, machine rooms, all empty with an inexpressible emptiness, hollow, not-quite-echoing….

Never once did he catch a glimpse of the aliens or their shadow-egg, although he felt sure they were trying to find him.

Everywhere he went, there were enigmatic, silent machines, including some that he guessed were television instruments, but he could not make them function. Here and there he saw symbols printed on the walls; they were in an alphabet resembling the Cyrillic, but with many added characters. Nowhere could he find a deck plan of the ship, a directory, a travel booklet, anything that would give him the least clue to the object of his search.

At last, on the fourth day, entirely by accident, he found it.

He was in a room filled with the omnipresent balloon-like armchairs and with tall, angular devices, chest high, on which square greenish plates of metal were arranged in two slanting, overlapping rows, forming an inverted V. They might have been magazine racks, with the thick metal plates substituting for magazines. As the thought came, Naismith put his hand casually on one of them, and the thing flapped open with a clatter. Crouched, ready to fight or run, he stared at it.

The rank of overlapping plates had opened, exposing the whole face of one of the plates: and where a blank square of greenish metal should have been, he saw a moving, brilliantly colored picture.

Naismith’s breathing quickened. He hardly heard the voice which spoke casually and incomprehensibly from the machine.

This was it; he had found it: this was the library, The picture he was watching showed a woman in an oddly cut red garment, posturing before a background of vaguely Oriental domes that gleamed in bright sunshine. The picture changed; now he was looking at a passageway between earth-colored buildings, down which men in white robes walked with heads bowed. It might almost have been a street scene in ancient Turkey or Egypt, except that the men were leading bright blue, hairless beasts of burden….

The picture changed again. Now, under a gigantic orange sun, stick-thin brown creatures with many legs were building a scaffold of wooden rods. Naismith understood that he was being shown an interstellar travelogue: ports of call at which this very ship had touched, perhaps… He watched until the pictures stopped, then closed the machine, opened it at a different place.

A new picture sprang into being: this time he saw two men, with thin, bearded faces, demonstrating some sort of physical apparatus. There was a thing that looked a little like a Crookes tube, and what might have been a series of accumulators. He could not understand a word of the spoken commentary, though the language sounded hauntingly familiar. The subject, at least, was apparently unrelated to the previous one. The arrangement, then, was either random or alphabetical, with a strong probability of the latter… all he had to do was to find the key to it.

That took him two more days. Then his progress was rapid.

The written language was a much modified English, phoneti-cized, with a simplified grammar and many vocabulary changes.

The spoken language was more difficult to follow, slurred and elided that it was almost impossible to follow, but Naismith found he could neglect it by concentrating on reference codes which produced displays of printed books, page by page. By the end of his fourth day in the library, he had an accurate conception of the world these star-travelers had inhabited.

He had found out two things of importance, and another of possible significance. First, the entries under “Time Energy” in the library showed that the state of the art had not advanced since his own era; in fact, the temporal energy generator was regarded as a toy. There was no possibility, therefore, of his discovering another shadow-egg aboard the ship or being able to construct one: that invention was still to come.

Second, the Lenlu Om—Lall’s people—were natives of a planet of 82 Eridani, and had been introduced into the Solar System in about the year 11,000. They were not called by that name, but the characteristics of those shown in the pictures were unmistakable.

Third, the framed pictures Naismith found on the walls, in places where Lall and Churan had apparently never been, were paintings and stereographs of Terrestrial scenes, including a number of portraits. The people represented, like those in the library machines, were ordinary native Terrestrials, in no way remarkable to Naismith’s eye except for their costumes.

As far as Naismith could tell, pictures were missing from their frames wherever the aliens had gone. It was conceivable that this was simply the result of looting, but Naismith did not think it likely. The aliens seemed indifferent to all the other articles of value around them in the ship, and had apparently taken nothing from the world of 1980. It was Naismith’s tentative opinion that something in the pictures was distasteful to Lall and Churan—that they had taken them down, and very likely destroyed them, in order to be rid of an unpleasant reminder.

Naismith sat up in bed. The room lights slowly came on as he did so, showing the unfamiliar walls paneled in magenta and apple green. As usual, he had worked in the library until he felt it unwise any longer to ignore his increasing fatigue; then he had chosen a new suite of rooms—there were hundreds, in this section of the ship alone, and he never used the same one twice—prepared and eaten his dinner, and gone to bed. But the thought that had come to him was so radical, so breathtaking—

In all the time he had spent aboard the ship, although he had many times wondered what had become of its passengers and crew, it had never once occurred to him to look for any personal possessions they might have left behind. The spotless, orderly appearance of everything in the ship had made him assume unconsciously that the rooms had been cleaned out and set in order when its passengers left.

And yet he knew that this ship cleaned and tidied itself. Dust deposited anywhere in a room slowly crept toward the nearest baseboard gutter, where it ran into channels—Naismith had traced them in the narrow passages behind the walls—leading to storage bins and, Naismith guessed, eventually to conversion chambers. Clothing taken from a closet and dropped on the floor would slowly, over the course of a few hours, creep back to its proper place, shedding its dirt in the process. Even the trails of sticky pigment Lall and Churan had left to guide them around the ship must have to be renewed every few days. And therefore—

Naismith swung himself out of bed in mounting excitement.

Having examined a few of the wall closets in these living suites and found them empty, he had lost interest in them. But some of the bedrooms—this one, for example—had clothing in their closets!

He cursed his own stupidity. If clothing were part of the rooms’ standard equipment, as he had unthinkingly assumed, why would some rooms have it and not others? But if this room had been occupied at the time the ship made its final landing, and if the occupant had left his clothing behind, then it was an almost foregone conclusion that he had left other possessions as well.

Naismith went straight to the largest wall panel, thumbed the control strip to open it, found it empty. He tried the smaller, cubical one on the adjoining wall.

At first it seemed equally empty; then he saw a scrap of paper or foil on the bottom of the compartment. He drew it out.

Printed on the foil in luminous purple letters were the words,

“GIGANTIC ALL-NIGHT GALA! Dancing! Sensorials!

Prizes! Y Section ballroom, beginning 23 hours 30, 12th day of Khair…” followed by a date which Naismith translated as 11,050.

It was little enough in itself, but Naismith clutched it as if it were precious. He went on from one wall to another, searching out panels and opening them. But the results were dis-appointing: a plastic identity card made out in the name of Isod Rentro, and bearing the stereo picture of a man’s lean, foxy face; a bundle of metallo-plastic tokens strung on a wire; and a toy of some sort, a gray plastic box with a tiny viewscreen.

Absently Naismith pressed the button on the side of the box.

The viewscreen lighted up, and he was looking into the pale, lean face of the man on the identity card. A voice began to speak—a nasal, negligent, cultured voice. Naismith caught a few words, recognized them as a date a few weeks earlier than the one on the “all-night gala” announcement.

He set the box down with reverent care. He had had an incredible piece of luck, and had almost failed to recognize it.

He was looking at the journal of Isod Rentro, a passenger aboard this ship in the year of our Lord 11,050.

Rentro was dressed in a loose-fitting blouse of metallic silver-white, with a violet scarf at his throat. His skin was pale and unhealthy-looking, very faintly freckled, as if it had seldom been exposed to the sun. His hands were thin. He gestured wearily with a long carved holder in which a green stick of something was smoldering.

The scene flickered, changed. Naismith was looking out at a vast space in which crowds of colorfully dressed people moved, while Rentro’s commentary continued. He was looking, Naismith realized, at the spaceship’s berth before the takeoff.

Another ship was visible in the distance, under the dome of a gigantic transparent roof. Music was playing; colored streamers were twisting through the air.

A chime sounded, and Naismith saw faces turn, hands begin to wave. Like an elevator dropping, the whole vast concourse slowly began to drift downward. Above, the transparent roof parted, opened out into two graceful wings. They, too, drifted downward and out of sight.

Naismith had a glimpse of a misty landscape, quickly and silently shrinking. Clouds whipped past and were gone. The horizon grew round, then the earth assumed the shape of a bowl, a sphere, visibly dwindling. The sky grew purple, then black; stars appeared.

The screen flickered again. Rentro came into view once more, still sitting calmly in his cabin, with an expression of amused boredom. He spoke a few final words, gestured, and the screen went dark.

It lighted again immediately. Rentro appeared, dressed in a different costume, against a background Naismith recognized.

He caught his breath involuntarily. This was a place he knew

—the great lounge at the end of this section, the one with the enormous central chandelier and the tiers of balconies.

Walls, furniture, everything was exactly the same: but the vast room was brilliantly lit, aswarm with people. It was like watching a corpse suddenly grow vividly, beautifully alive.

Rentro turned, faced the screen, spoke a few words. A young woman in a white gown came into view; her complexion was rosy, her eyes surrounded by startling blue rings of cosmetics.

Rentro took her casually by the arm, spoke her name—Izel Dormay—and added a few words which made them both smile. The view changed again….

Naismith followed the record through the first few weeks of the voyage. Allowing for the difference in technology and in the incredible consumption-level of these people, it was very much like a luxury cruise of the twentieth century. The passengers played games, watched the entertainment screens, ate, drank, strolled about. Once or twice a ship’s officer appeared, spoke a few polite words into the screen. The crew and most of the passengers were human, but Naismith occasionally glimpsed members of Lall’s race.

Then there was a change. It happened so gradually that Naismith was not aware of it at first. The crowds in the lounges and game rooms grew less. Crew members in their gray and black uniforms were more in evidence, and moved more pur-posefully. Once Naismith saw a stumbling, slack-jawed man being helped out of a room by two crewmen: he looked drunken or perhaps drugged. Rentro’s commentary was dis-dainfully cool, as usual, but Naismith caught a worried expression on his face.

A day or so later, there was no mistaking the difference.

Few people were in the lounges or on the promenades. Rentro ventured out briefly, then went back to his cabin; his next entry in the journal was made there, and so were all those that followed. His expression grew daily more strained: he looked, Naismith thought, like a badly frightened man. Once he made a long speech into the machine, which Naismith would have given much to interpret, but he could only catch a word here and there, no matter how often he played it over—“carrying,”

“danger,” “contagion.”

A day later, the entry was brief, and Naismith was able to make it out: “We are returning to Earth.”

The rest of the journal consisted of brief entries, only the date and a few perfunctory words, with two exceptions. In the first, Rentro spoke at some length, seriously and soberly, from time to time consulting a tablet he held in his hand: it occurred to Naismith that he was making his will.

The second time, after announcing the date and repeating a phrase he had used several times before, Rentro suddenly and horrifyingly lost his composure. With a distorted, writhing face, he shouted something into the machine—four words, of which Naismith could make out only one. It was “Greenskins”—

the contemporary name for Lall’s people.

Two days after that, the journal stopped. It simply ended, without any clue to what had happened next.

Naismith searched the adjoining suites, then and on the following day, and found three more such personal journals.

When he had run them all off he was no wiser: all told essentially the same story, and all ended abruptly, at varying times, before the ship reached Earth.

For the time being, he gave it up. Naismith had been two weeks alone in the ship, enduring its green silences, and the solitude was beginning to wear on him. He began to think of going back to the aliens. He had explored the ship as thoroughly as he could, in the limits of the time he had spent, and without going near the red trails left by Lall and Churan.

It occurred to him for the first time that this precaution might have been unnecessary.

Suppose the aliens had begun to use the time machine to search for him as soon as they had found him missing. Almost certainly they would have begun by searching their own lounge and the corridor outside it, for a month or so into the future.

If they had done that, and found him, there would never have been any necessity to search elsewhere in the ship. Accordingly, if Naismith was in fact going to be found in the aliens’ suite or near it, he could roam anywhere he pleased until that time, elsewhere in the ship, without any fear of discovery.

It was a curious sensation, following the fading red trail on the carpet. Here and there still fainter trails branched off.

Doubtless the aliens had first explored the ship at random, as he himself had done; these early trails led nowhere. But the strong red trail, recently renewed, meant that there were places in the ship the aliens wanted to revisit. What were they?

The path led through empty galleries and lounges, down a broad corridor, up a stair… Naismith’s own knowledge of the ship soon failed him; he no longer knew where he was except in a general sense.

He passed through an anteroom into a vast, echoing natatorium surrounded by balconies. Cushions and reclining chairs were strewn beside the pool; the tank itself was filled with clear water. There was no debris on the bottom, not a particle of dust visible on the surface. Remembering the colorful crowds he had seen in Rentro’s journal, Naismith was oppressed by the sense of their almost-living presence—as if they had only stepped into the next room for a moment….

Beyond the natatorium was a row of dressing rooms, and beyond that, unexpectedly, a small gymnasium. Here, for the first time, there was evidence of an alien presence. The parallel bars, horses, trampolines had been pushed aside, and three small black-metal boxes lay in the middle of the polished floor.

One had a line of transparencies and dials on its upper face.

Remembering the machine the aliens had used on him in their Los Angeles apartment, Naismith was careful not to approach them. He skirted the room cautiously, looking for a continua-tion of the red trail, but there was none: it ended here.

He turned. And Churan was standing in the doorway, with a black, lensed machine on a tripod beside him.

With shock tingling through his nervous system, Naismith took a step forward; the machine swiveled slightly on its mounting to follow him. He stopped.

“Don’t do it, Naismith,” Churan said tensely. “This is a force gun, locked onto you as its target. If I press the release—” he showed Naismith a tiny control box in his hand—

“or if you move too suddenly, the gun will fire.”

Naismith forced himself to relax. “Why the armament?” he asked contemptuously.

“We have decided it is safer. If you have no plan to attack us, it will make no difference to you. Now follow, please, and make no sudden moves for your own safety.”

He backed away, and the machine rolled back beside him, its glittering lenses swiveling to stare at Naismith, almost with an air of intelligence: as if the machine were alive, watching him….

I should have looked for the arsenal, Naismith thought, with a sick feeling of defeat. But perhaps it would not have made any difference—they would have found me there before I could take anything…

Churan backed out into the middle of the corridor and stopped. The headband with its metal box lay on the carpet.

“Pick it up,” he ordered curtly.

Naismith moved forward as slowly as he dared. “Where are Lall and the child?” he asked, temporizing.

“Safe,” Churan spat. “Pick up the headband!”

Naismith stooped, got the thing in his fingers. Tell me, Churan,” he said, “why all this caution? Why can’t you just go forward in time and see if everything turns out all right?”

Churan’s amber eyes gleamed. “We did that, Mr. Naismith.

The results—were ambiguous. We decided to take no chances with you. Put on the headband.”

Naismith raised the headband, weighing it in his hands. He swayed slightly, watching the feral head of the machine turn, almost imperceptibly, on its oiled socket. What was the principle involved? Heat? If he could somehow manage to reduce his body temperature—

Churan glared. “Put it on!”

Naismith’s body tensed. For reasons he could not clearly understand, the thing he held was intensely abhorrent. It might be better to jump, take his chances—

“I warn you!” said Churan, holding the control box in squat fingers.

Naismith’s lips pulled back in a grimace. He raised the headband, slowly fitted it over his skull.

The last thing he saw, before darkness crashed around him, was Churan’s triumphant smile.