The Visitor at the Zoo

IV

THE food in the tray turned out to be a steaming mess of something dark green and odorous, the consistency of mud, with chunks of fibrous substance mixed up in it.

The biped was hungry, but repelled by the unappetizing appearance and smell of the stuff, and did not touch any. Next door he heard the scrape of a spoon on the metal plate: the female was eating hers, anyhow. The keeper had removed the table from her doorway and lectured her severely. He had not heard what she replied, if anything. The biped tried to sip water from the bowl on his tray, found that his stiff mouth would not permit it, and dashed the bowl to the floor with a sudden howl of fury. Immediately afterward he grew thirsty, and filled the bowl again from the washbowl faucet. He tried lapping the water with his tongue, and got some relief that way, but not enough water to swallow. He ended by pouring water into his open mouth, half choking himself before he discovered the trick of throwing his head back to swallow.

His chest and legs were sodden, the feathery spines clumped together with moisture. He felt acutely uncomfortable until he had dried himself with a towel. For some reason, the trivial incident depressed him severely. He tried to cheer himself up by thinking of the unfinished letter hidden in the desk, but to his despair found that he no longer cared about it. He sat in the inner room and stared dully at the wall.

He was roused from his torpor by footsteps in the office space, and Griick’s cheerful voice calling, “Fritz! Emma!” The pimpled young keeper came in, looked at his untouched tray and removed it without comment.

The biped got up, simply because it would have required mpre resolution to stay where he was. He followed the keeper into the office space.

The keeper was showing the tray to Griick and Wenzl, who stood side by side, Griick ample in brown broadcloth, Wenzl narrow in his white smock. “Nothing eaten, sirs.”

Wenzl glared, but Griick said expansively, “Never mind, never mind! Take it away, Rudi - this morning our guest is not so hungry, it’s natural! Now!” He rubbed his fat pink hands together, beaming. “But where is our beautiful Emma?” He turned. “Emma?”

The female was in the doorway of her room, peeping out, only one side of her face visible. At Griick’s command she advanced a few steps, then hesitated. Her arms were raised, both hands clasped tightly over her forehead, hiding the knob.

“But, Emma,” said Griick reproachfully, “is this our hospitality? When were we ever so impolite? And our friend’s first day, too!”

She made a wordless sound, looking at the biped.

“You are alarmed, Emma, he frightens you?” Griick asked, looking from one to another. Ah, loveling, there is nothing to be frightened of. You are going to be great friends - yes, you will see! And besides, Emma, what about all the work that is here?”

The female spoke up unexpectedly, in a thin, absurdly human voice. “Take him away, please, and I’ll do it all myself, Herr Doktor.” She glanced toward the biped, then ducked her head.

“No, no, Emma, that is not right. But let me tell you something. Because you are so alarmed, so frightened, we want you to be happy, Emma, we are going to do something to relieve this fear. (Wenzl, some chalk.) Fritz shall stay and help you with the work -”

“No, no.”

“Yes, yes! And you will like it, wait and see. (The chalk, Wenzl - ha!)” Wenzl had spoken sharply to Rudi, the pimpled young keeper, who, blushing, had fumbled in his pockets and produced a piece of pink chalk. Wenzl, snatching it, now handed it to Griick.

“See here, Emma,” said Griick soothingly, “we are going to draw a line on the floor. I draw it myself, because I want you to be happy - so …” Bending with a grunt, he began at the wall between the two bedroom doors and drew a wavering chalk line across the room, separating it into two roughly equal parts.

“Now,” he said from the far side, straightening up in panting triumph, “see here, Emma, on this side, Fritz stays. Correct, Fritz?”

“Whatever you like,” said the biped indifferently.

“See, he gives me his promise,” said Griick, with emphasis. “And my promise to you, Emma. So long as he stays on his side of the room, you will work on your side, and not be frightened. But if he should cross over the line, Emma, then you have my permission to be frightened again, and to run into your room and bar the door! Understood?”

The female seemed impressed. “Very well then, Herr Doktor,” she said at last.

“Good!” ejaculated Griick. He rubbed his hands together, beaming. “Now, what else is left?” He looked around the room. “Wenzl, move one of those typewriters so that Fritz has one to use. And some of the work, also, on this side - not too much for Fritz, I’m sure Emma works much faster! Good, good.” He started to leave, followed by Wenzl and the young keeper. “Until next time, then, Emma, Fritz!”

The door closed.

THE biped made as if to sit down at his desk. At his first movement Emma flinched back, jaw gaping in fright, hands over her knob. This startled the biped, who said irritably, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Don’t speak to me,” the female said faintly. She clutched her knob. Her body was trembling all over, slightly but perceptibly.

The biped, trying to ignore her involuntary starts and shrieks, moved to the desk and sat down. He took the cover off his machine, looked at the heap of dictaphone spools in the in basket, then opened the desk drawer and quickly glanced inside to make sure his letter was there. By this time, the female was in the doorway of her room, poised for further flight.

Under her horrified gaze, the biped did not dare take his unfinished letter out of the drawer. He picked up the first dictaphone spool, inserted it in the machine, put the earphones on his head and began to listen.

A sudden loud noise in his ears made him jump and tear off the earphones. After a moment he turned down the volume and cautiously tried again. A voice was speaking faintly; he recognized it as Griick’s, but could not make out the words. He turned the spool back to start. The abrupt sound came again, and this time he realized that it was Griick clearing his throat.

He turned up the volume. Griick’s voice was saying, “Attention, Emma! Here is tape number two of Some Aspects of Extra-Terrestrial Biology. Begin. Bibliography. Birney, R. C. Bayee-air-en-eh-ipsilon, Emma. Phylum and genus in the Martian biota. Journal of comparative physiology, 1985, 50, 162 to 167. Bulev, M. I. Bay-oo-ell-eh-fow, Emma. Remember, not with vay again, as last time! A preliminary study of natator veneris schultzii. Dissertation abstracts, 1990, 15, 1652 to 1653. Cooper, J. G. …”

The biped irritably removed the earphones and switched off the machine. The earphones did not press hard on his small external ears, but they felt unfamiliar and made him nervous.

The female had moved out a few steps from her doorway, but when he glanced up, she backed away hastily.

The biped swore. After a moment, reluctantly, he turned the dictaphone spool back to the beginning and put the earphones on again. He rolled paper into the typewriter carriage, then switched on the dictaphone and began trying to type as he listened. But in the first few words he typed there were so many errors that he ripped the paper out and threw it in the wastebasket.

There was a stifled shriek from the female, who had advanced halfway across the room. Clutching her knob, she retreated two steps.

“Don’t look at me!” she piped.

“Then don’t shriek,” said the biped, annoyed. He rolled another sheet into the machine.

“I wouldn’t shriek, if you only wouldn’t look at me.”

He glanced up. “How can I help looking at you if you shriek?”

Except for another piping sound, more a gasp than a scream, she made no reply. The biped went back to work. Touching one key at a time with painful care, he managed to get through five entries in the bibliography before making an error.

He threw the pages away and started over once more.

TIME passed. At length he was aware that the female had crossed the room to her desk. He concentrated on his work, and did not look up. After a few minutes, he heard the clatter of her machine. Her typing was smooth and rapid; the carriage banged against the stop, banged back, and reeled off another line.

Angrily, the biped hit a key too hard and it repeated. He ripped the page out.

“You are spoiling all your work,” she said.

He glanced up - her hands leaped to her knob - he looked down again. “I can’t help it if I am,” he said.

“Weren’t you taught to type properly?”

“No. I mean yes.” The biped clenched his three-fingered fists in frustration. “I know how to type, but this animal doesn’t. I can’t make his hands work.”

She stared at him with her mouth slightly open. It was plain that she did not understand a word.

The biped growled angrily and went back to his work. After a moment he heard the clatter of Emma’s machine begin again.

For a long time neither spoke. Keeping at it grimly, in the next hour the biped managed to complete a page. He took it from the machine and put it into his out basket with a feeling of triumph. Glancing over at the female’s desk, he was a little disconcerted to note that her out basket was heaped with typescript and dictaphone spools, while her in basket was empty.

His back and his hands ached from the unaccustomed work. He felt weary and dejected again. How was he going to finish the letter, the all-important letter, while the female was constantly in the same room? Perhaps if he deliberately frightened her once again …

The thought ended as he heard the outer door open. Emma looked up expectantly. The clatter of her machine ceased. She covered the machine in two deft movements and stood up.

In walked Griick, beaming and nodding; then Wenzl, grim as ever; finally the pimply keeper with his cart.

Griick’s expression changed slightly when he glanced at the biped.

“Please!” he ejaculated, making upward motions with his fat hands. Belatedly realizing what was meant, the biped got up and stood at attention beside his desk, as Emma was doing beside hers.

“Good!” cried Griick happily. “Excellent! You see, Fritz, a little politeness, and everything is better.” He turned to Emma, examined the contents of her out basket, beaming with approval. “Fine, Emma, good work. Emma shall have three bonbons with her dinner! You hear, Rudi?”

“Very good, Herr Doktor,” said the keeper, with a bow. He put three large lumps of some drylooking, pale green substance on a plate which already contained a sort of gray-brown stew, and carried it into Emma’s room. When he returned, Griick was staring at the biped’s out basket with an expression of hurt disbelief.

“Fritz, can this be all?” asked Griick. “For a whole morning’s work? Surely you can’t be so lazy!”

The biped muttered, “I did the best I could.”

Griick shook his head sadly. “No bonbons for Fritz today, Karl. What a shame, eh, Wenzl? Poor Fritz has earned no bonbons. We are sorry for Fritz. But to give him bonbons for such work would not be fair to Emma, who works hard! Correct, Wenzl?”

Wenzl, fixing the biped with a cold and unregretful stare, said nothing. Griick went on, “But this afternoon, if there is an improvement - well, we shall see! Until then-” He picked up the single page in the biped’s basket, glanced at it again, and clucked his tongue. “Not correct! Not correct!” he said, stabbing a blunt finger against the page. “Here are mistakes, Fritz! So little work, and also so bad! And where … where are the carbon copies?”

“No one said anything to me about any carbon copies,” the biped replied angrily. “As for the typewriting, I’ve told you, this animal’s body is unfamiliar to me. Let me see you type with somebody else’s fingers, and see if you do as well!” He felt a little dizzy, and went on shouting without caring much what happened. You can take your whole damned Zoo, for all I care, he said, shaking his fist in Griick’s face, “and slide down my-”

The room was tilting absurdly to the left, walls, Griick, Wenzl, keeper, Emma and all. He clutched at the desk to stop it, but the desk treacherously sprang up and struck him a dull blow across the face. He heard Griick and the keeper shouting, and Emma’s voice piping in the background; then he lost interest and drifted away into grayness.

“LIE still,” said a fretfully reassuring voice.

The biped looked up and recognized the gigantic face of Prinzmetal, the surgeon. Prinzmetal’s large brown eyes were swimming over him; Prinzmetal’s soft mouth was twisted nervously.

Shock and strain, said Prinzmetal over his shoulder. The biped could make out two or three other persons standing farther back in the room. He was lying, he now realized, on the cot in the back room of his cage. He felt curiously limp and weak.

“It’s all right,” said Prinzmetal soothingly. “You lost consciousness a moment, that’s all. It could happen to any highly-strung creature. Lie still, Fritz, rest a little.” His face turned, receded.

Griick’s voice asked a question. Prinzmetal replied, “Nothing - he will be as good as new tomorrow.” Feet shuffled on the concrete floor. The biped heard, more dimly: “It’s a good thing it isn’t something organic, Herr Doktor. What do we know about the internal constitution of these beasts, after all? Nothing whatever!”

Wenzl’s voice spoke briefly and dryly. “When we get a chance to dissect one-”

They were gone. The biped lay quietly, staring at the discolored ceiling. He heard the door close; then there was silence except for a faint, far-off strain of music from somewhere outside. No sound came from the inner office, or from Emma’s room next door.

At length the biped got up. He relieved himself in the little bathroom, and drank some water. He realized that he was hungry.

His tray was on the folding table near the bed. The biped sat down and ate the brownish-gray stew, then picked up one of the two round lumps of dry greenish stuff which lay at the side of the tray - the “bonbons” Griick had made so much of. The biped put the thing cautiously in his mouth, then paused incredulously. The lump, which was almost as dry to the tongue as its appearance suggested, had a subtle, delicious flavor which was utterly different from anything the biped had ever tasted before. It was not sweet, not salt, not bitter, not acid. His eyes closed involuntarily as he sucked at it, causing it to grow slowly moister and dissolve in his mouth.

When it was gone he ate the other one, and then sat motionless, eyes still closed, savoring the wonder of this unexpected good thing that had happened to him. Tears welled in his eyes.

How was it possible that even in his captivity, and his despair, there should be such joy?

THE central building of the Berlin Zoo, built in 1971 by the architect Herbert Medius, was a delightful specimen of late 20th-century architecture but had several irremediable defects. For example, the garden-roof dining room, used on formal occasions by Griick and his staff, was roofed with a soaring transparent dome into which arcs of stained glass had been let, and at certain times of the year the long, varicolored streaks of light from this dome, instead of dripping diagonally down the lemonwood and ebony walls, lay directly on the diners’ tables and colored what was in their plates. The canvas curtains which were supposed to cover the dome’s interior had never worked properly and were now, as usual, awaiting repair. Consequently, although Herr Doktor Griick’s bauernwurst and mashed potatoes had the rich brown and white tones with which they had come from the kitchen, Prinzmetal’s boeuf au jus was a dark ruby, as if it had been plucked raw from the bleeding carcass; Rausch’s plate was deep blue; and Wenzl’s was a pure, poisonous green. The visitors, of course, Umrath of Europa-News, Purser Bang of the Space Service and the trustee Neumann, had been placed in uncolored areas, except that a wedge of the red light that stained Prinzmetal’s place occasionally glinted upon Neumann’s elbow when he lifted his fork.

Wenzl, as always, sat stiff and silent at his place.

His sardonic eye missed nothing, neither the strained reluctance with which Rausch lifted his gobbets of blue meat to his lips, nor the exaggerated motion of Prinzmetal’s arm which lifted each forkful for an instant out of the sullen red light before he took it into his mouth. But Wenzl looked upon his dinner and found it green: he carved it methodically with his knife in his green hand, forked it up green and ate it green.

Umrath, the Europa-News man, was square and redfaced, with shrewd little eyes and pale lashes. He said, “Not a bad dinner, this. Compliment the chef, Herr Doktor. If this is how you feed the animals down there, I must say they live well.”

“Feed the animals!” cried Griick merrily. “Ha, ha, my dear Umrath! No, indeed, we have our separate kitchen for that, I assure you! To feed more than five hundred different species, some of them not even Terrestrial, that is no joke, you can believe me! Take for instance the Brecht’s Bipeds. Their food must be rich in sulfur and in beryllium salts. If we put that on the table here, you would soon be three sick gentlemen!”

Wenzl would eat it and not turn a hair, said Neumann, the aging trustee. He was quiet and dark, with a weary but businesslike air about him.

“Ha! True!” cried Griick. “Our Wenzl is made of cast iron! But the bipeds, gentlemen, not so. They are delicate! They require constant care!” “And money,” put in Neumann dryly, picking with his fork at the meat on his plate, which he had hardly touched.

“It’s true,” said Griick soberly. “They are rarities, and they come from eighteen lightyears away. One doesn’t go eighteen lightyears for a picnic, eh, Purser Bang?”

There was a rustling sound from the corner, which distracted the diners’ attention for a moment. Heads turned. Out of the dimness scuttled something small and many-legged, with skin of a sparkling pale blue. It turned upon them the jeweled flash of its tiny red eyes, then was gone into a hole in the wainscoting. The diners looked after it without comment.

The spaceman nodded. He was tall and taciturn, lantern-jawed, and looked more like a doorkeeper than an intrepid adventurer. He cut precise cubes from the meat on his plate and chewed them thoroughly before swallowing.

“Why spend so much for bipeds, then, Griick?” Umrath demanded. “They’re amusing, I suppose, in their way, but are they worth it?”

“My dear Umrath,” said Griick, laying down his fork in turn, “I must tell you, the bipeds represent the dream of my life. Yes, I confess, it’s true that I dream! After all, we are alive to do something in the world, to achieve something! That is why, dear Umrath, I schemed and wrote letters for five years, and why I traded two Altairan altar birds and how much money to boot I had better not mention - ” he glanced at Neumann, who smiled faintly “- for our wonderful new biped Fritz. He is here, he is well, and he is a mature male. We already have our female biped Emma. No other zoo on Earth has more than one. Laugh at me if you will, but it shall be Griick, and his Berlin Zoo, who is remembered as the first man to breed bipeds in captivity!”

“Some say it can’t be done,” put in Umrath.

“Yes, I know it!” cried Griick gaily. “Never have bipeds been successfully bred in captivity, not even on Brecht’s Planet! And why not? Because until now no one has successfully reproduced the essential conditions of their natural environment!”

“And those conditions are -?” asked Neumann with weary courtesy.

“That we shall discover!” said Griick. “Trust me, gentlemen, I have made already a collection of writings about Brecht’s Planet and especially the bipeds. There is no larger one in the Galacticum, not even excepting the Berlin Archive!” He beamed. “And between ourselves, gentlemen, Purser Bang has a connection with a group on Brecht’s Planet who are able to make physiological studies of the bipeds! Depend on it, they will give us valuable information - by way of Purser Bang, our good friend!” He reached over and patted Bang’s sleeve affectionately. The spaceman half-smiled, blinked and went on eating.

“Well then, here’s to the bipeds!” said Umrath, lifting his wineglass.

Griick, Prinzmetal, Rausch and Bang drank; Neumann merely raised his glass and set it down again. Wenzl, coldly upright, went on methodically cutting and eating his green meat.

“All the same,” said Neumann after a moment, “it seems to me that a good deal depends on Fritz.”