Element 79

Zoomen

In the second half of July I was able to get away on a two-week vacation. I decided to go off “Munro-bagging” in the Scottish Highlands. Hotel accommodation being difficult in the Highlands in the summer, especially for a single person, I hired a caravan with a car to match. Driving north the first day, I got precisely to the Scottish border immediately south of Jedburgh. The evening was beautifully fine. I argued I didn’t want to spend the whole of the morrow driving, if indeed the morrow was going to be as clear as this. The obvious tactic was to be away at the first light of dawn. By ten o’clock I could be well across the Lowlands. Then I could spend the afternoon “doing” one of the southern peaks, perhaps in the Ben Lawers range.

It fell out as I had planned. I reached Killin not much after ten a.m., found a caravan site, bought fresh meat and other provisions in the town, and set off for Glen Lyon, with the intention of walking up Meall Ghaordie. The afternoon was as fine and beautiful as it could possibly be. I quitted the car at the nearest point to my mountain and set off across the lower bogland. I moved upward at a deliberately slow pace, in part because this was my first day on the hills, in part because the sun was hot. I remember the myriads of tiny colored flowers under my feet. It took about two hours to the summit. I sat down there and munched a couple of apples. Then I laid myself flat on a grassy knoll, using my rucksack for a pillow. The early start and the warm day together had made me distinctly sleepy. It was not more than a minute, I suppose, before I nodded off.

I have fallen asleep quite a number of times on a mountain top. The wakening always produces a slight shock, presumably because you are heavily conditioned to waking indoors. There is always a perceptible moment during which you hunt for your bearings. It was so on this occasion, except the shock was deeper. There was a first moment when I expected to be in a normal bedroom, then a moment in which I remembered that by rights I should be on the summit of a mountain, then a moment when I had become aware of the place where I had in fact awakened and knew it was not at all the right place, not the summit of Meall Ghaordie.

The room I was in was a large rectangular box. I scrambled to my feet and started to inspect the place. Perhaps it may seem absurd to imply that a boxlike room needed inspection, particularly when it was quite empty. Yet there were two very queer things about it. The light was artificial, for the box was wholly opaque and closed, except where a passageway opened out of one of the walls. The distribution of the light was strange. For the life of me I simply could not determine where it was coming from. There were no obvious bulbs or tubes. It almost seemed as if the walls themselves were aglow. They were composed of some material which looked to my inexpert eye merely like one of the many new forms of plastic. But in that case how could light be coming out of such a material?

The box was not nearly as large as I had at first thought. The dimensions in fact were roughly thirty by fifty feet, the height about twenty feet. The lighting produced the impression of a place the size of a cathedral, an effect I have noticed before in underground caves.

The second strange thing was my sense of balance. Not that I found it difficult to stand or anything crude like that. When climbing a mountain the legs quickly become sensitive to balance. If I had not just come off a mountain, it is likely the difference would have passed unnoticed. Yet I could feel a difference of some kind, slight but definite.

My explorations naturally led to the passageway, which didn’t go straight for very far. Round a bend I came to a forking point. I paused to remember the division. There were more twists and turns, so that soon I had the strong impression of being in a maze. It gave me the usual moment of panic, of feeling I had lost my way. Then I reflected I had no “way” to lose. Instantly I became calm again and simply strolled where my fancy dictated. The passage eventually brought me back to the large boxlike room. There in the middle of it was my rucksack, the rucksack against which I had laid my head on the summit of Meall Ghaordie. I tried several times and always I came back to the boxlike room. Although the passages had the semblance of a multitude of branches, this also was an illusion. In fact there were eight distinct ways through the system. I managed to get the time required for a single “transit” of the passageways down to about ninety seconds, so the whole arrangement, if not actually poky, was not very large in size. It was just that it was made to seem large.

I did still another turn through the passageways and was startled on this occasion to hear running feet ahead of me. My heart thumped madly, for although I might have seemed calm outwardly, fear was never very far from my side. Around the corner ahead burst a girl of about eighteen or so clad in a dressing gown. At the sight of me, standing there blocking the passageway, she let out a nerve-shattering scream. She stood for twenty or thirty seconds and then flung herself with extreme violence into my arms. “Where are we?” she sobbed, “where are we?” She went on repeating her question, clutching me with a good, powerful muscular grip. Without in any way exceeding natural propriety, I held her closely; it was a natural enough thing to do in the circumstances. Suddenly I felt an acute nausea sweep through me, akin to the late stages of seasickness. The clinch between us dissolved in a flash, for the girl must have felt the same sickness, since she instantly burst out with a violent fit of vomiting.

We both stood there panting. I steadied myself against the wall of the passageway for my knees felt weak. “And who might you be?”

“Giselda Horne,” she answered. The voice was American.

“You’d better take that thing off,” I said, indicating the dressing gown, now the worse for wear from the sickness.

“I suppose so. I was in a room down here when I came to.” The girl led the way to a box, precisely square as far as I could tell, opening out of the very passageway. I felt certain I must have passed this spot many times, but there had been no opening before. Giselda Horne staggered into the box, moaning slightly. I made to follow but soon stopped. I was only just inside when another wave of sickness hit me in the pit of the stomach. Some instinct prompted me to step back into the passage. As I did so, silently and rapidly a panel slid back closing off the box. With the double attack I was hard put to it to take any action, but I did manage to shout through to the girl and to bang my fist on the panel. If she made any answer I was unable to hear it. I tried to walk off the sickness by touring through and through the system of passages, but to no avail. I felt just as rotten as before. At quite some length, for I must have gone through the system many times by other routes before I found it, I came on exactly such a square box as Giselda Horne had gone into. With some apprehension I stepped inside it. Two things happened. A similar panel slid closed behind me, and within thirty seconds the sickness had gone.

This box was a cube with sides about twelve feet. It contained absolutely nothing except a heavy metal door, let into one of the walls, which opened to a moderate tug. Inside was a volume about the size of a fairish oven, in which I found a platter covered with stuff. Before I could examine it further the nausea started again. This time it seemed as if I too would reach the vomiting stage. Just in time the panel slid open and I staggered into the passage with the irrational thought that I must reach the toilet before my stomach hit the roof. Out in the passage the sickness dropped steeply away. In minutes I felt quite normal again. Then suddenly it started up once more, the paneling opened, as if to invite me back into the box, and once inside the sickness was gone. The process was repeated thrice more, in and out of the box. Long before the end of the lesson I knew exactly what it meant—move in, move out, to orders. From where? I had no idea, but one thing the lesson had done for me, my fears had quite gone. Manifestly I was under some kind of surveillance, a surveillance whose mode of operation I couldn’t remotely guess. Yet instead of my fears being increased, the exact opposite happened. From this point on, I was not only outwardly calm but I was inwardly master of myself.

With the passing of the sickness I felt quite hungry. Apart from a light lunch on the slopes of Meall Ghaordie, my last meal had been at five a.m. on the Scottish border. I tried the stuff on the platter in the oven. It was neither pleasant nor unpleasant, about like vegetable marrow. How nutritive it was I couldn’t tell at all, so I simply ate until I was no longer hungry.

Next I noticed the floor was softer here than it was in the passage or than it was in the big rectangular box. It would be quite tolerable to sleep on. It was harder than the usual bed, but after the first two or three days it would seem comfortable enough. What about a toilet? There was nothing here in the box at all appropriate to a toilet. So how did one fare if taken short with the panel closed? I determined to put the matter to test. I made preparations to use the floor of the box itself. I didn’t get very far, nor had I expected to do. The sickness came, the panel slid by, and within a minute I found a new box opening out off the passage. Stepping inside I discovered one large and one small compartment. The small compartment was obviously the privy, for it had a hole about a foot in diameter in its floor. I made the best use of it I could, wondering what I should do for toilet paper. My thoughts on this somewhat embarrassing subject were interrupted by a veritable deluge descending on my head from above. I hopped out of the smaller compartment into the large one. Here the downpour was somewhat less intense, about the intensity of a good powerful shower. Within seconds I was soaked to the skin. The shower stopped and I began to peel off my sodden clothes. I had just about stripped when the shower started up again. Evidently it went off periodically, every three or four minutes in the fashion of a pissoir. Stripped naked, I was heartily glad of the downpour, for I had sweated fairly profusely in my walk up the mountain. Clearly the liquid coming down on my head was essentially water, but it had a soapy feel about it. I stood up to about half a dozen bouts, in which I washed out my clothes as best I could. Then I carried the whole dripping caboodle back to my box. It would take several hours, I thought, for the heavier garments, particularly the trousers, to dry out, so I resolved to try for some sleep. As I dozed off I wondered what items I might lack for in this singular situation. I had no razor, but then why not grow a beard? By the greatest good fortune I always carry a small pair of scissors in my rucksack. At least I could eat, keep clean, and cut my nails.

I slept much longer than I intended, nearly ten hours. When I awoke I noticed the box door, cell door if you like, was open. Before touring again through the passageways, or patronizing the privy with its remarkable drenching qualities, I tested the metal oven door. A new platter was there, piled high with the same vegetable marrow stuff.

My clothes were snuff dry. So the humidity had to be quite low, as I had thought was probably the case. I trotted along to the showers in my underpants only, for these would easily be dried should I misjudge the pissoir. Fortunately the panel was open, and it remained open from that time on, so far as I am aware, so I waited for the flush, then darted in and darted out before the thing fired itself for the next occasion. At the best of times my mountaineering clothes are distinctly rough. After their recent wetting and drying they were now baggy and down-at-heel in the extreme. I saw no point in putting on my boots and simply went barefoot, rather like a shipwrecked mariner.

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.

“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.”

“But millions do the same. I did, everybody does!”

“Yes, but they know not what they do. I knew what I was doing. For twenty years now I’ve been clear in my mind about it. Yet I’ve gone on taking the line of least resistance. I made minor adjustments, like eating more fish and less meat, but I never faced the real problem. I knew what I was doing.”

The weeks passed, then the months. Long ago, Mary and I had begun to share the same cell for sleeping. We had no trouble with the sickness, even when we shared my rucksack for a pillow. The same favor was not immediately extended to the others. The favor perhaps was granted because I had kept my small scrap of knowledge about the zoomen strictly to myself.

The day did come, however, when the others were allowed into physical contact. There was no mistaking the day, for Bill Bailey appeared in the cathedral clad only in his now tattered underpants, shouting, “Bloody miracle. We got on last night, real good and proper.” Then he was off, high-stepping, knees up, like a boxer trotting along the road. Round and round the cathedral he went chanting, “Raw eggs, raw eggs, mother. Oh, for a bloody basin of raw eggs.”

Giselda Horne was standing nearby. “What does it mean?” she asked rather shyly.

“It means, my dear, that we’re only nine months away from our destination,” I answered.

This narrative was discovered in curious circumstances many many years after it was written, indeed long long after it had become impossible to identify the particular mountain mentioned by its author, Meall Ghaordie.

Landing on a distant planetary system, the crew of the fifth deep interstellar mission were astonished to discover what seemed like a remarkable new species of humanoid. The language spoken by the creatures was quite unintelligible in its details, but in the broad pattern of its sounds it was strikingly similar to an archaic human language.

The creatures lived a wild, nomadic existence. Yet they were imbued with a strong religious sense, a religion apparently centering around a “covenant,” guarded day and night in a remote stronghold. It was there, in a remote mountain valley, that the creatures assembled for their most solemn religious ceremonies. By a technologically advanced subterfuge, access to the “covenant” was at length obtained. It turned out to be the story of the “Professor,” reproduced above without emendations or omissions. It was written in a small book of the pattern of an ancient diary. This it was the creatures guarded with such abandoned ferocity, although not a word of it did they understand.

The manuscript has undoubtedly created many more problems than it has solved. What meaning can be attached to the fanciful anatomical references? What was “Munro-bagging”? These questions are still the subject of bitter debate among savants. Who were the sinister zoomen? Could it be that the Professor and his party turned out to be too hot to handle, in a biological sense, of course, and that the zoomen were forced to dump them on the first vacant planet? The pity is that the “Professor” did not continue his narrative. His writing materials must soon have become exhausted, for the above narrative almost fills his small diary.

It was the appearance of the creatures which misled the fifth expedition into thinking they were dealing with humanoids, not humans. It was the unique combination of flaming red hair with intense green, Mongoloid eyes. Did these characteristics become dominant in the mixed gene pool of the Professor’s party, or was the true explanation more direct and elementary?