11 (AUG. 1, FRI.)
Be good and you will be lonesome.
—Mark Twain
I woke up. It was completely dark. For a few seconds I stared up into the blackness, then turned on my side and tried to go back to sleep. But in a moment I realized I wasn't in my own bed and remembered that I was a prisoner.
Fully awake, I sat up. The room, becoming light in a gradual effulgence, revealed itself as a cube about nine feet on each side, furnished with two things—a seven-foot couch, covered with a coarse wool material, and me. There was nothing else. I couldn't trace the source of the light. I lay down and the light faded; I sat up and it came on again.
My wristwatch was gone and I had no idea how long it had been since my capture. I had been marched in silence to the clearing, passing through four or five of the wall-less rooms. No one had spoken as I was led to one of the hatches of the spaceship.
I had made various remarks as I was being taken in—such as "What's going on?" "You can't do this to me," "I've got to get to work, for pete's sake," and "Listen, will you?"—but my captors weren't conversation-minded.
I was led up a ramp and into the relatively dim interior of the spaceship. I had a recollection of narrow corridors and an occasional notice painted on the wall in some alien script. Then I was pushed into a cabin and the door closed behind me. My captors stayed outside, but there was a man in the room, sitting behind a long table in one of the two big chairs. He was wearing a woolen cloak. He was older than any of the bright young men I'd seen before, white haired and grave in expression. He was tossing a ball from hand to hand. It wasn't a baseball, but I had said, for no reason that I could remember now, "I'm a Braves fan myself."
He smiled and said, "Sit down," indicating the other chair. "Yankees."
"That's no team," I said, sitting down, "that's a machine."
"Be that as it may," he said, "you must wonder why we are here."
"Not at all," I said. "You're not on my property." I was saying whatever came into my mind. I think my idea was to discomfit him and provoke him into saying something he didn't plan to—something revealing.
He kept tossing the ball from hand to hand. It was about the size of a handball, hard and black but apparently not rubber.
He revealed nothing. "The dew is heavy in the morning," he said, looking at my soaked clothing. "And you've got a nasty scratch. Would you like something for it?"
"What have you got?" I asked. "Mendicants?" I was freely associating, having nothing better in mind.
"Oh, yes. Medicantsandmendicants. Menders and vendors and buttons and bows. Pills and potions and ankle-length hose."
I decided this was part of an attempt to hypnotize me and looked away from his tossing ball.
"And Mendes-France," I said, "and Hugh Gaitskell and Krishna Menon."
"Not to mention Sam Kent," he said. "Here, catch."
He tossed the ball to me and in reflex I caught it.
I woke up in the nine-foot cube.
Somewhere between then and now I'd been stripped of my sopping clothes and garbed in one of their woolen cloaks. It didn't itch as I'd imagined it would. In fact, I was quite comfortable. I wasn't hungry or thirsty either. I judged by this that it had been only a few hours since I'd caught the ball, which apparently was some kind of knockout drop, and been transferred to this cubic prison and its automatic lighting.
I got off the couch and explored. The walls, floor and ceiling were made of a gray metallic substance, neither cold nor warm to the touch. The couch was nothing more than an extension of the floor—two feet high and seven feet long—with half a dozen thick brown woolen blankets over it. There was no crack or seam in any wall to indicate a door and no vent to bring in the clean air I was breathing. I sat down, baffled.
After a while I said, "Hey!"
There was no answer.
I lay down and the light went out. I sat up again. The light came on.
My cloak had no pockets. I took it off and, naked, turned it inside out. It taught me nothing. I put it back on and thought idly of smoking a cigarette. There are times when I sit at the news desk and words simply will not come unless I light a cigarette. It may be that I don't take a single puff after the first one, but the mere action of lighting the cigarette sets the old train of thought to operating. But now I couldn't have cared less if I never had a cigarette. Or a drink. Or food.
But my curiosity was still perking. I got to my feet and made another circuit of the little room. I found something I'd overlooked before. On one of the walls near a corner were two knobs, one above the other. They were set out a scant quarter inch from the wall and were of the same color and material.
"This opens the door," I told myself, turning the top one clockwise.
No door opened.
"Then this does," I said, turning the other one.
Instead I got music. I'd found a radio.
It was Perez Prado, that musical humorist, ripping out an unabashed Latinate romp through an old standard, giving it new excitement with his dramatic pauses and irreverent burps.
The Prado record ended and a recorded commercial came on:
"Ladies, stop tearing the end off the wrapper on a loaf of bread," was the message I got. From this exhortation to the ladies, I judged that this was daytime radio.
The next station was more informative: "Temperature now 75 degrees—bright and enjoyable. And we hope it's nice where you are this fine Friday morning...."
Friday! It had been Thursday when my neighbor's boy had led me through the apple orchard. I wondered if young Harry had reported my capture, and if he had, whether anybody believed him.
My next thought was of Mae. She must be worried sick about me. She wouldn't have worried till suppertime yesterday, when I didn't get home on time—unless the office had called her to find out why I hadn't come to work, as it probably had. That meant she'd already had 24 hours of anxiety. I banged on the walls with my palms, then kicked with the flat of my bare foot, but no one came.
"Can't stay in bed?" the radio asked me. "Get up and still get five stay-in-bed benefits."
I turned the volume up as high as it would go, hoping that would attract the attention of my captors. But the rest of the booming commercial and the ensuing rendition ofStardust—a song I can do without—did nothing but hurt my ears.
I reduced the volume for a panegyric to "the most delightfully different cigarette ever made" and reflected that in spite of the fact that my own pack was gone with my clothes I didn't want to smoke.
Nor was I thirsty, I realized during subsequent commercials praising the joys of Coke and Seven Up. And I wasn't hungry, not reacting to the one about there being "more crackling good taste in every slice"—meaning bacon. And fortunately, considering the john-less aspect of my cell, I didn't have to go to the bathroom. My appetites seemed to have vanished with the 24 hours that had gone out of my life since I caught that handball in the alien's office.
What were they doing to me? I wondered. What had they done to me? I paced the limited confines of my prison, occasionally banging on the hard wall, then threw myself on the couch. As I lay down the lights went out and the radio faded. I sat up. The lights came on again and the radio woke up to say:
"Time for news from American—live at 55! The news in just a moment."
"From Hackensack, New Jersey, an interesting sidelight on the aliens," the voice was saying in the verbless way of radio newsmen. "Commuters, faced with a new fare increase totaling 81 per cent in ten months, revolted against the Susquehanna Railroad today and rode to work in a bus provided by the Monolithians. They pay $24 a month instead of the $35 the new railroad fare would have cost. There was no immediate comment from the Susquehanna, but a spokesman from the commuters' association said the idea is so successful that a second group is joining...."
That being the first news item, it was obvious that nothing startling had been going on. Whatever all those duplicate men were planning to do, they hadn't done it yet.
"In Boston, a group of alien volunteers pitched in with a will to help tow away illegally parked cars. In the first two hours they towed away 28 unmarked police cars...."
WABC's newscast came five minutes before the hour. I switched to the NBC station, "where news comes first"—meaning on the hour—and endured the opening gongs which were NBC's substitute for big black headlines. It started off with a couple of non-Monolithian items from overseas.
"More news in a moment. But first—"
"Isn't there someone, somewhere, whose voice you'd like to hear? Well then, why not pick up your telephone...."
I yelled at it, "Yes, God damn it! Why don't I just?" and switched it off.
I must have fallen asleep. I came to in darkness and when I sat up the lights glowed on. I tried the radio again. Music.
I still wasn't hungry or thirsty and I still didn't have to go to the bathroom. I wondered if I were being watched. I looked again for a possible tiny television eye but couldn't see any. I considered thumbing my nose in all directions, as a morale factor, but decided it would be undignified.
I wondered what time it was, how long I'd slept. Somehow it sounded like early evening music, suitable for housewives preparing dinner and men driving home from a hard day at the office.
Then station identification told me it was seven o'clock (P.M.) and asked whether right about here I would like a beer. The answer was no. All I wanted was to get out.
"And now we bring you that popular round-table discussion of events of the day,News and Newsmen," the radio said, "featuring the men who edit the news for leading papers and wire services. Tonight our subject is 'Monolithians—Friend or Foe?' and our panel consists of Russell Sidenam, city editor of theWorld-Telegram; Barton Pascal, reporter on theDaily News; Herb Small, from the world desk of the Associated Press; and Sam Kent, assistant editor of the New York bureau of World Wide News...."
A few minutes later, after the inevitable commercial, I heard my own voice passionately defending the Monolithians as men of principle and high conscience whose only purpose was to uplift their brethren on Earth to a realization of their manifest destiny as worthy members of the community of the Interstellar Realm.