"I have seen you," said Villa to Adam, who was gnawing on a drumstick. "You wear the wig and a bone in the nose, and a tigerskin around you."
"Sure," said Adam. "I'm the Wild Man from Zululand. It's one job where my color's an advantage."
"A fine job!" said Villa. "You should have come down to my stand. The best chili in New York."
"I had a bowl there last week. Without my make-up, I mean."
"I will give you a bowl free when we go home. With tacos," added Villa generously.
"It's good stuff," said the boy.
Calvin Full wiped his fingers and his lips on a handkerchief. He looked about at the hall, through which the giants had now scattered; some of them were tinkering with the machines, others were simply loitering, as if bored by the whole matter of scientific research. They had lost their early wariness of the humans, and did not carry the green goads, but kept them tucked into holsters at the back of their swishing skirts.
One of them removed the blond man, Watkins, and set him to doing something with a pipe-and-block apparatus. The processes they went through with their strange mechanical and electrical gadgets, the end results they achieved, were a mystery to Calvin. And as the afternoon wore on, their conduct as a whole became even more mysterious. It was, from human standards, totally irrational. One would begin a test, analysis, or whatever it might be; he would follow it through its devious windings to its ambiguous result, or to no result, and suddenly leave it to begin something else, or come to watch the humans perform.
The longer he observed their conduct, the more worried he became. Finally, after a good bit of hiding and spying, he found out something which he had been trying to figure for hours; and then it seemed time for him to talk to someone about their escape.
The blond man had been peering into his briefcase. He zipped it shut quickly as Calvin approached, with a kind of guilty movement. What does he have in there? Calvin wondered.
"Mr. Watkins," he said, rubbing his chin and wishing he had a razor, "did you ever see a scientist, or laboratory assistant, skip from one thing to another as these creatures do?"
"I never did."
"Nor did I. They don't take care of their equipment, either; several times one or another has kicked down a neat pile of gear, and once I distinctly heard something break."
"It might be junked machinery," suggested Watkins.
"I doubt it."
One of the giants made a raucous noise—Brangg!
"And how irritable they are, in addition to their capriciousness and sloppiness! I can't imagine a race of emotional misfits producing equipment of such complexity. Their science is beyond ours in many ways, yet look at this place." He made a broad gesture. "When we were let out this morning, it was clean and well ordered. I've inspected dairies that were far dirtier. Now it's a hodge-podge of scattered materials, upset stacks of gear, tipped-over instruments. What sort of mind can bear such confusion?"
Watkins smiled. "The minds that conceived—well, that vertical maze, for instance—must be orderly after a fashion, even though it isn't the human fashion."
"This is far from what I wanted to say, though. Have you been noticing the door?"
"There isn't much to notice. It's a sliding panel like our wall."
"When one of the creatures leaves, he passes his right hand across what is evidently an electric eye beam, as nearly as I can place it about ten or eleven feet off the floor. That opens the door."
"Good going, Cal!" said Watkins. "I hadn't seen 'em do it."
"Our try for escape should be made as soon as possible," went on Calvin in a low voice. "As we've talked about, the object of these tests and experiments may be to infect us with neuroses—" Watkins grinned again—"I know my phrasing isn't right," said Calvin stiffly, "but I never looked into such matters. There's also Summersby's suggestion about the fate of guinea pigs. So I think we'd better try to get out right away."
"With five of them here?"
"If we have any luck, we may find an opportunity, yes. Occasionally they get absorbed in something, and that door makes no noise."
Watkins looked at his briefcase uncertainly. "Okay," he said finally. "May as well try it. Though God knows where we are when we do get out of the lab."
Calvin congratulated himself on his choice of an ally. "Good man," he said.
In the next hour they managed to build a crude platform beside the door, of various boxlike things, nondescript plastic blocks and impedimenta. The giants didn't even look at them. They were, indeed, a strange race. Now the platform was high enough so that Calvin felt he could reach the opening ray.
Summersby wandered over. "What are you doing?" he asked, seeming to force out the question from politeness, not curiosity.
"We're going to make a break, High-pockets," said Watkins. "Want to help?"
"They won't let you," said the big man.
"We can try, can't we?" asked Watkins hotly.
"It's your neck."
"Listen, you may be the size of a water buffalo, but if Cal and Adam and I piled on you, you'd go down all right. Why don't you cooperate?"
Summersby stared at him a moment and Calvin thought he was going to say something, something that would be important; but he shrugged and went across the hall and into the prison box.
"What's eating that big bastard, anyway?" said Watkins.
Calvin believed he knew, but it was not his secret; it was Summersby's. He said nothing.
"Watch it," said Watkins. "They're coming." The two men scurried behind their rampart. The five giants marched, flat-footed, down the hall, their thick arms swinging. The door opened and all of them went out. It closed behind them.
"How about that!" said Watkins exultantly, a grin on his face.
"I'll get Mrs. Full and the others," said Calvin. He felt a tingle of rising excitement. "Get up there and be ready to open it. We'll give them five minutes and then make our break."
"Right." Watkins was already clambering up the boxes and blocks.
Calvin almost ran to his wife. She was standing in front of the color organ. "Dear," he said, and halted.
"Yes, what is it, Calvin?"
"I don't know. I was going to say—"
A sluggishness was pervading his body, a terrible lassitude crept through his brain. What was it? What was happening?
"I was going to—"
He caught her as she slumped, but could not hold up her weight, and sank to the floor beside her. His eyes blinked a couple of times. Then knowledge and sensation vanished together.
Tom Watkins awoke slowly. He had a cramp in one arm from sleeping on it, but otherwise he was conscious of a comfortable, healthy feeling, which told him he'd slept well and long. He stretched and brushed a few pieces of straw from his face.
Straw?
He suddenly remembered sitting down on their platform, very sleepy and worried because of the abruptness of it.
He sat up. Summersby had just stood, yawning. "Did you carry me in here?" he asked the big man.
"I was going to ask you that."
"Christ! What happened?" He was wholly awake now. "Did you drop off out in the lab?"
"Yeah."
"So'd I," said Adam. He was sitting next to the Mexican, whom he now pushed gently. "You okay, Porfirio?"
Villa erupted with a grunt. The Fulls were looking at each other owlishly.
And then it hit him. Watkins twisted, cased the floor, and saw nothing but straw and fountain and tree trunks. He was literally staggered, and nearly lost his balance.
His briefcase was gone!
He stared about wildly, panic lifting in him like a swift debilitating disease. Then he took four fast steps and grabbed Summersby by the coat. It was queer, but he didn't even think of anyone else having taken it. Summersby towered over him, but he could be brought down.
"Okay, you skyscraper," said Watkins, "where'd you put it?"
"Put what?"
"My case! Where is it?"
"I never touched your damned case."
Well, Watkins could smell honesty, and here it was. That startled amazement was genuine. He glared at Adam Pierce, Villa, the Fulls. Not that last pair, surely! As rock-ribbed and staunchly honest as their New England coasts, and about as imaginative. Not the colored boy, either, a good kid; and he didn't think it was Villa.
"We must have been carried in here by the scientists," said Adam rationally. "Maybe they left it outside."
That was logical. But he'd had a death-grip on the handle when he fell asleep, just as he always did. He looked at them all again. He went from wall to wall, kicking the straw. Then he scowled at the sand box, the only place a thing that size could be stashed away. He was suddenly on his knees, tossing sand left and right.
Avoiding certain places, he checked the pile. Nothing! Not a scrap of leather or a piece of green paper!
"If you are through," said Villa heavily, "I wish to use the box."
"Go ahead, Viva." Watkins walked across the room, groping for a cigarette, then remembering he had none left. "What happened out there?" he asked loudly. "Were we doped? Something in the chickens?"
"We were awake for a long time after we ate," said Adam. "Not even these people could make a drug act on six of us in the same minute, after that long; too many differences in metabolism. If that's the word I want."
"They weren't even in the room when we dropped off," said Mrs. Full.
That was a tip-off. Watkins momentarily forgot his great loss. "They left, and in a minute, we were asleep. They must have pumped some sort of gas into the lab. Sleep gas."
"Is there such a thing?" asked Cal. "An anesthetic vapor that would permeate such a large place so quickly?"
"Is there such a thing as a four dimensional maze?" asked Adam shortly.
Watkins grinned. He wasn't the only one who needed his morning coffee.
Then he thought of his briefcase again. He tried to push the moving wall to one side; no go. He got mad again. "It's no good to them," he said. "What do they want with it?"
"It couldn't have been so important that—" began Full.
"Important?" Watkins was yelling now, and although he disliked raising his voice and making scenes, he did it now, with furious pleasure. "Cal, you never saw anything more important in your life than that case, and I don't care how many blue-ribboned cows you've gaped at!"
"What was in it?" asked Villa.
"Money, goddammit, money!" It didn't matter if his secret came out now. In this insane place, God knew where, the cautious habits of half a lifetime slid away. "The best haul I'd made this year. The contents of the safe of Roscoe & Bates, that's what was in it! Better than twenty-two thousand in good, green cash!"
"The contents of a safe?" Calvin Full frowned. "You mean you were a messenger, taking it somewhere, and got on that roller coaster with—"
Adam Pierce laughed abruptly. "No, he wasn't a messenger," he said. "He wasn't any messenger. He's a safe-cracker. Mr. Watkins, what good do you think it'd do you in here?"
"We'll get back."
"You're a safe-cracker?" asked Mrs. Full, her pale face lengthening with horror, disgust, and fear. "A criminal?"
"In a manner of speaking, ma'am," said Tom Watkins, "I am."
"I'll be hanged," said Summersby. "And you accused me of stealing your loot. I ought to butter you all over the wall."
"You try it, you overgrown galoot. I didn't do a hitch in the Philippines for nothing." Watkins smoothed back his hair, which was dangling into his eyes. "Sure, I'm a safe man. Don't worry, Mrs. Full, that doesn't mean I'm a thug." She looked scared.
"That's right," said Adam, still chuckling. "This boy's the aristocracy of crime. You don't have to worry about your purse. He only plays around with big stuff."
Tom flipped him a grin. "I'll bet you even know why I was on the coaster."
"Sure. You were hiding out."
"That's it. If I kept out of sight till dark I was okay. They were out for me, because my touch is known; but who'd think of checking an amusement park?" He turned as Cal made a noise in his throat. The Vermonter was a study in outraged sensibilities.
"You—you swine," he said, a typical Victorian hero facing the mustache-twisting villain. "You stole that money—"
"My morals and your morals, Cal," said Watkins as genially as he could, "are probably divergent, but it doesn't make a whale of a difference now, does it?"
Full turned to his wife and began to mutter to her.
Villa said, "I don't like crooks, I run a respectable stand and I am an honest man," and scratching his hand where the healed burn was, he turned away likewise. Summersby was sitting on the tire, and only Adam looked sympathetic. The boy wasn't crooked, that was plain, but Watkins had the glamor that a big-time thief has for the young, the fake aura of Robin-Hoodism.
He shook his head. He'd had to spill it. For a while they'd trusted him and now he was a pariah.
The food panel opened and something plumped in. Watkins glanced at his chronograph. Ten o'clock Saturday. He went over to the food.
It was a big, glossy chocolate-brown vulture with a blue head.
"Well," said Adam. "Well, now, I don't know."
"They pulled a boner this time," said Watkins. "Unless it's part of the conditioning."
Villa picked it up. "It weighs many pounds. It's warm, just killed. I don't want any of it." He dropped it on the straw. "With my spices, perhaps; but not cooked on that grill, without sauce and spice. Aargh!"
Watkins thought, Amen to that. He rubbed the sandy bristles on his chin. No razor or soap here. It dawned on him that he was thirsty, and he went to the fountain. As it always did when he bent over to drink, the curious web of silver strands in the corner caught his eye. There were so many puzzles about this damned lab that he despaired of ever solving all of them.
After fifteen minutes, the wall opened. They went out, Villa carrying the vulture. He flung it at the feet of the chief scientist, who was there with two associates.
"No!" he bellowed up at it. "We do not eat this!" He articulated slowly, clearly, as though to a foreigner with a slim knowledge of English. It picked up the great bird and regarded it closely, then without warning threw it at one of the other giants.
The vulture caught it on the side of the head and knocked it off balance; falling to its knees, it bleated out an angry sound and dived for the boss' legs. They went down together in a gargantuan scrimmage that made the humans dance backward to avoid being smashed by the thick swinging arms.
Tom Watkins walked off, unimpeded, to look for his briefcase. It was nowhere in the lab. He cursed bitterly. Twenty-two grand, up the spout.
The head scientist, having chastised the other, left the room; Watkins had a glimpse of another fully as large, with something like a big table therein. Shortly the creature returned, carrying in one arm a load of wood chips, and in the other a bulgy, leathery thing that turned out to be a partially stunned octopus, still dripping the waters of an unknown ocean.
They killed it, rebuilt their grill (larger this time), and cut up the octopus and cooked and ate it. It wasn't as bad as Watkins had feared.
After a dragging day, they were locked into their box—no one had a chance to gimmick the wall, for the giant were watching them closely—and shortly afterward a load of raw vegetables was dumped in.
Watkins paced the floor after he had eaten, waiting for the sleep gas, determined to combat it if he could. When the drowsiness came, he walked faster. It didn't do any good. He knew he was sinking to the floor. Powerful stuff, he said to himself, very powerful st—
Mrs. Full kept close to Calvin all through Sunday. They had been here since Thursday, all these men without women, and she knew there were men who had to have women frequently or they became vicious and could not be stopped by any thought of consequences. The Mexican seemed all right, but you never knew with a person from a Latin country.
Another facet of the same problem was the fact that she and Calvin were supposed to be on their honeymoon. She faced it: she was frustrated. She wanted a honeymoon, no matter what sort of prison they were in. So after their first meal on Sunday, she asked Calvin to fix up a private apartment in their prison.
With various materials, plastic blocks and the different sizes of slabs, and some screens of translucent fabric she had dug up in a corner, he made a walled-off compartment just large enough for two.
Then one of the scientists looked in, saw what he was doing, and promptly knocked it down.
Adam, who had been helping in the latter stages, squinted at the ceiling of the box. "You know, Mrs. Full, I think they can see us through that. If it's opaque to us, it still might be transparent to them; like a mirror, I mean, I've seen them at home, mirror on one side, window from the other. That'd explain the light we get in here. And if they want to observe us all the time, then this private cell of yours would make 'em mad."
"Butithad no roof," she objected.
"That's right." He shook his head. "Another theory gone poof."
"I'll build it again," said Calvin stubbornly, and did so. This time the giants left it alone. He and Adam made a screen for the sand box too, and built a permanent grill on one side of the box.
By Tuesday they were all in a state of anxiety and scarcely-contained rage. Their surveillance was casual, often non-existent, yet not once had they been able to block the wall of their prison or open the great door of the laboratory. Circumstances, chance, fate, whatever you wanted to call it, something had stopped them every time.
There were three giants in the lab today. Sometimes there would be one of them, sometimes as many as five; but always there would be the one who had first removed them from the box, who seemed to be the head scientist, giving orders, bullying the others in the queer emotional way of these creatures. Today there were three. As usual, when they had let the humans out, the lab was clean and orderly. The sloppy scientists had very efficient janitors, thought Adam. By this time the place was a shambles.
Out in the lab, there rose the honking sound of pain and anger—some of the noises they made, especially the commands, were recognizable now to the people—and a sharp slap. Then Mrs. Full hurried into the box, carrying a number of two-foot-square slabs under her arm.
"What happened, ma'am?"
"Hello, Adam. The criminal Watkins played a few bars of a real song on that device, and the brutes hit him." She laid down the slabs. "Our harmonies enrage them, I think perhaps cause them actual pain. They held the sides of their heads where ears ought to be, and shook themselves and made those hideous noises."
"They hit me when I sang the other day," said Adam, "remember?"
"That's right. Look here." She sat down, pulled one of the thick slabs onto her lap. "I found these under a shelf out there. One of the creatures knocked them off and I picked them up. I wondered why they had been up there, when so many stacks of them just sit around on the floor."
"I never saw any like these, ma'am. They have that little ridge on the edge there, and the border of different colored stuff around 'em."
"Watch what happens when I push the ridge upward, Adam. It's like an automatic button." She pressed it and the slab, at first gay orange, turned pale blue; on it appeared three lines of squiggly characters, like a cross between Arabic writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
"A magic slate," said Adam. "That's neat!"
"You haven't seen anything yet," she told him, and pushed the ridge again. The writing disappeared, and out of the slab leered a bull gorilla, paws on chest, eyeing Adam with beady, ridge-browed malevolence. It took a second for sanity to convince him that it was only a picture: three-dimensional, on a two-dimensional sheet of plastic, but so real he half-expected the beast to charge out at him. "What about that?" she asked.
He hit his thigh with a fist. It was a photograph, he imagined, but made by an illusory process so far ahead of anything humanity could produce that it seemed he might glimpse whatever was behind the gorilla if he put his eyes down to the side of the slate. "Gosh!" he said, feeling it a little naïve but afraid to swear in front of her. "Isn't that something!"
"It's a book," she said, "an album of photographs. Look here."
The next picture was an equally miraculous one of half a dozen monkeys sitting on a tree trunk. Adam looked at it, then at the farthest trunk in their box of a room. Undeniably it was the same one.
Under the picture was a line of squiggles that probably spelled out the scientists' equivalent of "monkeys."
"They were here, in this place," said Adam. "The giants must have experimented on them too." He turned his eyes up to the woman and saw that she was white and drawn. "What happened to them?" he asked. "There aren't any monkeys here now."
"Exactly," she said. She put on the next picture, and after a moment the next.
Dogs greeted his eyes, so real he could almost hear them pant; a cow gazed stolidly at him; a cheetah sat on a mound of straw with clown's head cocked inquisitively; two cockatoos perched in rigid still life on the silver rod of the prison box.
"What happened to them?" he asked again.
"The experiments ended," she said.
Then there flashed out a thing like a blue sponge with legs, a thing which sat in the cat's-cradle they had speculated so much about. From its center two ruby eyes blazed with three-dimensional fire.Thatnever came from Earth! Mars or Venus could have produced it, maybe, or a planet so far from Earth that it bore no name. He said as much, his voice quavering.
She stared at him. Moistening her lips, she said, "If that was here, in this box, thenwhere are we?"
He shook his head. He could not even guess. "What's next?"
The last picture in the slate was a group portrait of himself, the Fulls, Summersby, Watkins, and Porfirio Villa.
When was that taken? They were sitting in a circle on the straw, eating something. Peering closely, he thought it must be the vegetables, for there was a small heap of round things next to Calvin Full which were probably buckeyes. Sunday night, then.
"They must have taken it through the food panel," he said. "Are there any more pictures?"
"That's all. I don't know what's in the other ones yet."
Calvin came in. She handed him the first "book" and showed him how to operate it. He flipped through it and when he came to the monstrosity in the web his eyes widened. "What is it?" he asked, in the hard twang of his region.
"A guinea pig, like all the others including us," his wife said.
"The tree trunks are explained now," said Adam, half to himself. "The sand box, too. That isn't a very scientific-looking treatise, but I guess it's more of a memento, a record of us all." He raised his brows in a facial shrug. "Us and the monkeys," he said. "Gosh!"
She took the next big slate on her lap. It was lavender. The first few pages to appear were covered with the curious writing, very large and only a few words to a page. Then came pictures of many things, not photographs but drawings and paintings in vivid color, and the things could in no way be linked to science. There were portraits of the tall creatures themselves, in various settings, some in labs like this one, some outdoors in a landscape that was predominantly scarlet and green; there were group scenes in which they ate odd-looking foods and walked down blue pathways and examined strange pets and familiar animals. Under each picture was a short grouping of squiggles, marks, scribbles, etc.
"Can that be a science book?" asked Cal, leaning over his wife's shoulder. The beings were pictured as simply as possible, in no minute detail whatever, and their activities were of the dullest and most prosaic sort.
This pattern was followed through page after page—a picture (some of them were of things so alien they could not be placed by either the Fulls or himself), a single character, then a short word and another, long or short as the case might be. After a dozen of them had flashed on and off Adam noticed that the large character was always repeated at the beginning of the last word.
When he realized what it meant, the whole business clicked into focus. The whole damned deal, the lab and the scientists and the experiments and the meaning of the four magic slates, and everything. There was no particular reason why this last slate should have done it, for it was no more suggestive than many other things that he had seen; it was simply the last piece of evidence, the final push that sent him headlong into terrible knowledge.
Carefully, desperately, he went over it all in his mind, while the Fulls spoke in low tones.
God, he thought,oh, God!He was shivering now. He was more terrified than he had ever been before. His tongue felt thick.
The punishments, the high stool and the arbitrary cuffs and swats; the gadgets, the mazes, the puzzles; were they all a part of the conditioning to neurosis of a scientific experiment? They were not.
Adam had found an answer, the only possible answer. The fourth slate had given it to him, although a hundred hints of it had shown up every day. His psych teacher would be ashamed of him for muddling along so many days, believing in a theory that was so plainly impossible.
He addressed Mrs. Full. She was a little sharper than her husband, and this was more in her line, too. He had to make her discover the same answer. He had toknowit was right. And then he had to get out of that place in a hell of a hurry.
"Ma'am, you know what this is?"
"No, Adam."
"Look here. See this big letter, repeated at the first of this word?"
"Yes."
He flipped a few "pages" past. "It's the same with all of them, you see? And the middle word is always the same—four curly letters. You know what that middle word is?"
"No, Adam."
"It's 'stands for' or 'means.'" He stared at her. "Get it?"
She thought an instant. "Of course. Adam, that's very clever of you." She wasn't scared yet. She hadn't seen the implication.
"'Stands for'?" Calvin repeated.
"A stands for Apple," explained Mrs. Full. "Or A stands for Airship, or whatever it might be. It's an alphabet book, dear."
She still hadn't caught it. "Remember when Mr. Full built the cubbyhole here," Adam said, "and the giant knocked it down? Why was he angry?"
"I suppose they want to observe us without any hindrance."
"No, ma'am," he said with conviction. "That was simple frustration. They want to see everything, whether it's interesting to them or not. They aren't scientifically disappointed if they can't, they're just frustrated. Think of the punishment we get, slaps, the dunce stool."
"As though we were children," she said.
"Exactly. Now, here are these books. An alphabet book, and these others. What age would you figure them for? You taught kindergarten, you said. This is something I wouldn't know."
"I'd say they're for fairly bright children about five or six years old."
"Or for us," said her husband, "when they start to teach us their language."
"They are children's books, though, with short sentences and the gaudy pictures our own children love." Mrs. Full stared at Adam. Her brown eyes widened. "Adam," she said, "you've guessed something."
"You guess it too," he pleaded. She had to corroborate his own idea. "Think of all the things about them we haven't been able to make out."
"Nursery books...." she said slowly. "Instability to the point of insanity, if you found it in adult humans. Sloppiness and inefficiency, when these machines point to a high degree of neatness of mind. Wandering attention, inability to concentrate for long periods. Positive tantrums over nothing. Cruelty and affection mixed without rhyme or reason." She took him by the arm, her fingers strong with fear and urgency. "Tell me, Adam."
His breath hissed. He was filled with panic. Where there had been only anxiety for his own life and his world, there was now a fearful knowledge that he could scarcely bear without shrieking. She had it too, but she didn't dare say it. It was a horrible thing.
"These machines," he said, "aren't scientific testers at all."
"Yes?"
"They're toys."
"Yes?"
"We aren't guinea pigs. We're—we're pets. They've had other animals, from Earth and from God knows where, and now they have people."
"Yes. Go on, say it." She thrust her face fiercely up to his.
"Those twelve-foot 'scientists' are kids," he said. Then he stopped and deliberately got his cracking voice under control. She was just as frightened as he was but she wasn't yelling. "It's the only answer. Everything fits it. They're about five years old."
Calvin Full frowned. "If that's true, we're in trouble."
"You're damn right we're in trouble!" said Adam. "A kid doesn't take care of a pet like a scientist takes care of a guinea pig or a white rat. If it annoys him, he's liable to pick it up and throw it at a wall! I might get my head torn off for singing, or you could be dismembered for making a mistake with one of those toys."
"Some children tear the wings off butterflies," said Mrs. Full. She stood up. "I'll go and tell the others," she said firmly. "It doesn't seem to me that we have much time left."
"If we start to bore them—" began Adam, and shut up.
She went out. In about five minutes everyone had come into the box but Watkins, who was playing the color organ. They discussed the discovery in low voices, as though the alien children might be listening; Villa and Summersby examined the slates. After a while Watkins was pushed in, looking rather worn and frayed. Adam was standing in the far corner under the silver web. He saw the wall start to slide shut, remembered his dowel, and tried to see if it was still in place at the bottom of the wall.
He couldn't see it. Maybe it blended with the color behind it, or maybe somebody had accidentally kicked it out of place.
The wall slid shut.
Summersby was losing the sense of being apart, of having no problems no matter what happened. These people had drawn him into their trouble against his will; the situation was so bad that he could no longer tell himself he didn't give a damn. So he had a bad heart! He couldn't turn his back on these poor devils because of that. It was stupid and selfish. He felt sorry for them. He was uncomfortable with them, as he always was with standard-sized people, and he would still repel any attempt on their part to get close to him; but he was a little chastened by what he had been through. He recognized that.
It was all very well to say he didn't care where he died, but it would be a hell of a lot more dignified to accomplish it as a free man, rather than as a harried rabbit. Even if he were killed trying to escape, it would be endurable. But if his heart gave out while he was, say, trundling up and down the nursery in that ridiculous little auto thing, he knew his last breath would be a bitter one.
Adam had just said, "I laid a rod across the sill there." Summersby walked to the wall, which appeared to be closed as usual. Just as he came to it, he caught the sheen of metal in a thin line up the corner, and knew that he was seeing part of one of the machines in the nursery. The dowel had held the door.
Something moved outside; he could hear the dull slap of immense flat feet. They were going to be fed. He strolled away from the corner, saying quietly, "It worked, Adam. Don't check it now, though."
The small panel opened and one of the garishly hued platters was put in, loaded with a wriggling, seething mass of grubs and half-dead locusts.
"Supper?" cried Villa. "This is supper? Do they think we are a lot of African natives?"
"Well," said Adam, "I guess they were fooled by me." It was the first time he had made any sort of joke about his color. Possibly, thought Summersby, he's becoming one of the group, as I am. God knows the kid has as much reason to be bitter about people as I have; or more reason. It's put him on the defensive.
Summersby felt more chastened than ever.
No one cared to sample the insects. They walked away from the platter and hoped aloud that their captors would see the refusal and give them something else, but nothing was pushed in. After a quarter of an hour Watkins said, "Think it's safe to have a try at the door?"
"No," said Summersby.
Watkins jumped to his feet. "Listen, I've had all I can stomach of you!" he yelled. "If you don't want to help, okay, but keep your nose—"
"I was going to say that they'll be pumping in the sleep gas pretty soon, and we don't know whether they do it from outside the nursery or outside this box."
"That's right," said Calvin Full.
Watkins eyed him a moment. "I'm sorry, Summersby," he said then. "I shot off my mouth too quick."
"They filled the nursery with it once," went on Summersby, "but it seems logical to think they could also let it into this room alone. Maybe it works on them, maybe not; if it does, then they wouldn't flood the nursery with it every night, because the adults have to come in and clean the place up."
"A clever thought, Mr. Summersby," said the woman.
"Not particularly. At any rate, I'm going to stand by the crack and try to get enough air to stay awake; then when I think the coast's clear, I'll shove the door open and scout around. If I find a way out, I'll come back and drag you into the nursery and wake you."
"Why are you doing this?" asked Villa suspiciously. "No, Mr. Big Man, I don't like you going out alone. I think you wouldn't come back. You don't like us."
Watkins, evidently on edge from his mauling by the children, whirled on the Mexican. "Oh, shut your yap! The guy's doing you a favor." Then he said to Summersby, "I'll come along."
Summersby grinned wryly.
"I'm not saying you'd run out on us, man." Watkins made the motions of going through his pockets for a cigarette, which some of them still did occasionally out of hopeful habit. "I know locks and I might be able to help if you ran into trouble."
"Come on along, then." He put an eye to the thin slit. "Here comes one of them. It's the head scientist." He grinned. "Or the kid who owns us, who lives in this house and invites his little pals in every day to play with his toys and his pets."
The monster disappeared. Presently Watkins said, "It's in. I'm sleepy."
Summersby stretched as tall as he could and put his mouth to the crack, trying to breathe only what air came through from the nursery. He saw the enormous child pass on its way to the door, and shortly the sound of its heavy feet stopped. He felt drowsy, his eyelids flickered. He beat his hands together, sucking in air from the opening. Villa started to snore.
Watkins said, "I'm about done, Summersby." He was kneeling at the crack below Summersby, and his voice was sluggish. In a few seconds he rolled over on the straw.
When did the adults come in to clean up? Summersby didn't dare wait much longer. He was fighting sleep with all his vigor. Possibly they wouldn't come till morning.
He had to chance it. He forced his fingers into the gap and heaved. The wall didn't move. Holding his breath, he propped one foot against the adjoining wall, dug his hands as far into the breach as possible, and hurled himself backward. The big door jolted an inch, hung, then slid back a couple of feet. He swung around and jammed himself through the aperture and the wall moved silently back into place; this time the dowel was not there, and when the wall stopped, there was no crack at the corner. Summersby must have kicked the dowel aside when he slid through. Watkins was inside, asleep.
He breathed deeply, and the effects of the sleep gas died, so that he was wide awake and felt very excited and eager. To analyze the reasons for his eagerness would have killed it, and besides he was in a hurry. He ran to the great door of the playroom, whose lintel towered twenty feet from the floor. Hastily he tossed apparatus, boxes, toy blocks, until he had made a pile five feet high.
Scrambling up this, the things sliding under his feet, he waved an arm above his head in the place where he believed the electric eye beam to be. Then the pile collapsed, and he fell into it, giving one knee a terrific crack and skinning his knuckles. The door glided open.
The next room was deserted, and the soft bluish light was dimmer here than in the nursery. This place was far less cluttered, containing no more than a big yellow machine, a gigantic table, and two six-legged chairs. There was a picture on the wall, the size of a barn's side, which he did not stop to look at.
The opposite door was open. The third room was a dining hall, with two tables and a number of chairs, these of metal with eight legs each. Luckily, there was no one in it.
In the next room—all four were in a straight line, and he thought, Either it's a long narrow house, or else it's as big as Rockefeller Center—there were a number of gadgets, colorful and complex like the children's toys, but of different construction. He glanced at them but did not pause until he came to the next door.
It was closed. He presumed its opener beam would be in the same place as that of the playroom, and looked around for something to stand on.
There seemed to be nothing small enough to move. He shoved at a couple of things, but they wouldn't budge. The only slim possibility was a big square brown box, set twelve feet off the floor on one of their mammoth tables. It was of a size to accommodate half a dozen cows, but looked as though it might be of flimsy enough materials, plastic probably, to push off the edge, from which it would fall exactly where he needed it.
He dragged a chair over, climbed up on its seat and then onto the table. He saw at once that the box would be immovable. There was an affair that might be a dynamotor attached to one side, various objects sticking out of the other, and four stacks of thick coils on top. He was turning away, hoping to find another door in one of the first rooms, when his eye was attracted to a square plate among the things on the right side of the box. The plate was glass, for its surface shone under the blue light, and he thought he saw the pin-point twinkling of stars in it.
On a hunch, he walked over to it. He knew quite a lot of astronomy and if this happened to be a telescope, he might be able to determine their location.
The field of the plate was full of stars, but in patterns he had never seen. He could not understand it. It was not a painting, for the stars twinkled. Where the blazes was the thing focused?
A huge dial beside the plate had a pointer and scores of notches, each labeled with a couple of squiggly characters. He turned the pointer experimentally. The screen blurred, showed a planet with rings: Saturn.
"Neat," he said to himself, and turned the pointer another notch. He got a view of a landscape, trees of olive green and crimson, seen from above. He tried other notches.
Finally, just as he had reminded himself that he had to hurry, he saw a familiar globe swim onto the glass. It was Earth, with the two Americas clearly defined.
What in hell...?
He pushed the pointer on, and was given another landscape, this time of prosaic hue, a meadow with a cow in it. He clicked the thing another notch and got a constellation pattern again. He pushed it back to the cow.
He felt his heart thudding fast, too fast; and he hoped with all his faculties that he wouldn't conk out before he had solved this riddle. There were other dials, other pointers, a little behind the first. He turned one slowly.
The cow grew larger until it almost filled the screen. Only when he could see nothing but its broad placid back did he realize that he was looking at this scene, as at the others, fromabove.
He tried a third pointer. The land whipped by beneath his gaze. He came to a city, the buildings reaching up to him in a wonderful illusion of depth.
Then it dawned on him what the machine was, and he gasped.
There was no use in looking for the outer door. He had found the answer to their last problem, and he had to get back to the box with that answer and thrash it out with all of them. There might be a salvation for them and there might not.
Leaving the screen showing the city, he jumped down off the table, raced back through the room and into the next, the dining hall. Still there were no signs of any of the giants. He had crossed the threshold of the third room when he heard a door open on his right. There was no time to gape around; he covered thirty feet in five strides, dodged under the hanging shelf of the strange yellow machine, like a low desk covered with cogwheels, and ran along beneath it till he came to the extreme end of the contrivance.
A pair of feet, either of which would have outweighed a draft horse, went past him; he dared not lean forward to see the rest of the brute, but it was undoubtedly an adult. It went into the playroom.
After twenty or twenty-five minutes, during which Summersby thought over the problem and agreed with himself that he couldn't find the solution alone, the giant came out of the playroom, crossed near his hiding place, and went out through a door beside the huge picture. It was not in a hurry, so he decided it had not noticed his absence from the box.
He dragged an easy chair over to the nursery door. It was just four times the size of Summersby's Morris chair at home, and about eight times as heavy. As he was crawling up the leg to the seat, he recalled that he had a bad heart. If he hadn't been clinging to the plastic with both arms, he would have shrugged.
He intercepted the beam and opened the door. Having no more than half a minute to get through before it shut, he had to leave the chair where it was. He hoped none of the adults would realize that its position had changed.
The playroom was clean and neat. Likely it would remain unvisited through the night. He went to the box and only then remembered it was shut tight. What did the kids do when they opened it during the day? He had seen them at it twice. They laid their hands on top of the box, there on the left.
Hauling over enough junk to make a pair of steps, he got onto the roof of the box. There was a bar, set into the coaming. He pressed it, leaned over, and saw the wall slide back. A second push returned it to its shut position. He opened it again, swung his legs over the edge, pressed the bar once more and dropped. Snatching up a green dowel from the floor, he jumped into the box as the door was closing. He had just time to lay the rod across the threshold, as Adam had done, before the wall reached it and was held.
Trying not to breathe, Summersby picked up Watkins and slung him over his shoulder. He forced his fingers into the crack and heaved. Again he threw his weight against the wall.
Then he was buckling at the knees, trying desperately to bring his mouth next to the opening, but not quite making it.
"Describe it again," said Watkins. "Give me all the details you can think of."
As Summersby went over what he remembered of the brown machine, Watkins tried to envisage it. A tough job, and he might not be able to handle it. To reverse a thing like that—when there'd be at least one or two principles he'd never heard of—well, that would be the job of a lifetime.
"How do you know that it's the instrument that brought us here?" he asked.
"It must be." Summersby looked intent, almost eager. "It has those dials that focus it almost pin-point on any planet they want; at least, I saw quite a few planets, from a distance and close up. I saw a cow and a city on Earth. Then there's the big brown box. It's hollow—the door was half open. If they bring things, living things, from other planets, they need a receiving station large enough to take 'em. The box. It's logical."
"It sure is." Adam whistled. "So we're on another planet. That was plain, if we'd thought about it seriously. No place on Earth could hide a race like this. Not with all the factories they must have to produce the toys and what you saw out there."
"Why couldn't we be inside the Earth?" asked Mrs. Full stridently.
Watkins said, "He lookeddownon Earth. That argues another planet."
"But how did they get us here? In two days?"
Watkins scratched his bristled chin and thought aloud. "It must have been instantaneous. Remember, we went through a quarantine and were healed of just about everything that was wrong with us. That must have taken a while."
"The octopus was still wet," said Adam, "and the grubs and locusts were still kicking. They must focus that rig on Earth and push a button and here it is, like that. Instant transmission of matter." He smiled weakly, as though he were proud of the phrase. He looked very frightened, thought Watkins, and unhappy.
Tom Watkins was scared, too, but not especially unhappy. For the first time in almost twenty years, he was free of worry about the bulls, the law. He only wished he knew what had happened to his loot.
"The planet," said Cal, "whatever its name is, must have the same gravity and atmosphere as Earth. Same water, too."
"That's right. So it's produced a race of critters with plenty of human characteristics," said Watkins.
"Have they done this before?" asked Mrs. Full. "I mean do you think we're the first to be snatched up?"
"No, I don't," said Watkins, surprised that she was talking directly to him. "People disappear all the time. Look at the famous ones: Judge Crater, Ambrose Bierce—"
"Somebody mention theMarie Celeste," growled Summersby.
The wall began to open.
"Here's the plan, quick," said Watkins. "I've got to get out and find the machine, and see if I can gimmick it so it'll work backward, send us home. The rest of you create a diversion, keep the kids' minds off me."
"What kind of a diversion?" asked Villa. His abstracted face showed plainly that he was thinking of his chili stand and what he would say to the idiot relief man about conditions he would doubtless find therein.
"If you were a kid with pets, intelligent ones, what would you watch them do for hours? Something unordinary—something you'd never imagine they'd do." He looked at his chronograph. "It's just ten. I never saw the gadget I couldn't figure out in two hours; if I'm not back by noon, you'd better come out, Summersby."
"What if it's four-dimensional?" asked Adam.
"It's possible I can cook up a way to reverse its action anyway. There are some principles of electricity and mechanics that must be universal."
"Shall we run the machines for them?" asked Mrs. Full. "To distract the children?"
"They're used to that," said Watkins. "They bore easy. Suppose you're a kid with a normal regard for pets. You've had cats and dogs and rabbits and now you have monkeys. The monkeys are a lot smarter and more versatile, but they have their limits too. You get jaded with 'em. But one day they—" he snapped his fingers—"they start playing soldiers! They drill, stage mock battles, die and come to life, scrimmage—hell, you go nuts! You can't take your eyes off 'em!"
"That's it," said Villa promptly. "The children have gorillas, cows, they have never seen anything like war."
"Maybe they don't know what war is," said Adam. "It might just look as if we were fighting. None of their toys show a sign of war being ever waged by this race, like our own kids' toys do."
"The toys of any people reflect their civilization in an unreliable and distorted way," said Cal Full rather stuffily. "A visitor from Mars in one of our playrooms would conclude that we already have spaceships and ray guns, and that our usual clothing is chaps, sombreros, and spacesuits."
"They'll get the idea," Watkins said impatiently. The giant children outside were bawling the word that meant "Come!" He was in a hurry. These fools were always arguing. "Let's go," he said. "The four of you line up over there, catch the kids' eyes, and High-pockets can boost me up to the beam. Then he'll join you."
Watkins grinned tightly, slapped Adam on the shoulder, poked Villa in the belly, and dived behind the nearest many-colored pile of gear the moment he saw the children weren't watching him. As he went toward the door, he heard Villa saying, "My fourth cousin Pancho was a great man for war, so I will be general. Spread out in the thin line and be ready to march when I command."
Summersby followed Watkins, and they came to the door. Watkins managed to get up on the big man's shoulders, and waved a hand above his head. Nothing happened.
"Stand on them," said Summersby.
He struggled to do so. "Un,dos,tres," roared the Mexican down the hall. "Begin!"
This time Watkins found the beam. The door glided aside. He dropped off Summersby's shoulders, jumped into the next room. A quick look showed him it was empty. As the door closed he heard Villa shouting hoarsely.
"Make bang noises for the guns. Fall dead, spring to life. We are mountain fighters of great skill. Climb on machines, drop off with bullets in your head, play you are—"
The door cut him off. Watkins chuckled. "What a ham," he said. He started for the opposite door.
It was ten minutes to twelve. Summersby was panting like a spent hound. He had not exercised in months, not since the doctors had told him his heart was just about gone, and he was surprised that he hadn't keeled over before now. Dashing around playing guerrilla like some six-year-old! It had been a damn good idea, though. The giant children—there were two of them today—were still enthralled, lying on their bellies with their furry watermelon heads propped in fantastic two-thumbed hands.
Leaning against a pink plastic maze wall, puffing, he thought, I've almost grown to like them. Why?
Because for the first time since he was sixteen, John Summersby had to bend his neck back to look up at someone. These grotesque humanoidal beings were the only living things which did not make him feel overgrown, uncouthly out of proportion, a hulking lout. If a chair was too narrow for him, it would be like the head of a pin to one of these kids: if a fork felt uncomfortably small in his own hand, it would be a minikin indeed in one of those vast paws.
In their shadows, Summersby was a very small man. It was an unwonted sensation, the most satisfying he had ever experienced.
He looked at them out there, as they lay watching Mrs. Full and Adam mowing down Cal and Villa with imaginary Brownings. He grinned, felt his lips curve in the unaccustomed grimace, and thought with no particular bitterness that he was getting mellow in his last days. "Hello, High-pockets," he said softly to the kid that owned him. "How's the weather up there?"
At five to noon the door opened. Summersby, seeing its silent motion, left off the mimic gunplay and started for the wall, where he could intercept Watkins and find out whether he'd been successful. But the safe-cracker came running down the middle of the room, yelling.
"Come on, everybody!"
"Come on?"
The two giant children were on their feet, uncertain of what was happening. Obviously they didn't realize Watkins had been out of the room at all.
"The adults spotted me!" roared the blond man, swinging his briefcase wildly; where had he found that? "They're after me!"
Summersby let out an involuntary grunt when through the twenty-foot door came an eighteen-foot creature, a thing so mind-shakingly huge that even the ranger's size complex wasn't pleased by it. This was an adult: leaner in the body, broader of hand and thicker of limb, wearing trouserlike garments and a flaring jacket of royal purple caught by a ruby bar, it advanced calmly into the hall, clumping flat-footed in three yard strides. From its heavy-lipped gash of a mouth came noises like a whole orchestra badly in need of tuning.
"Hwhrangg!" it cried, waving its hands in the air. "Breemingg!" It appeared to be soothing the children, telling them that Daddy was here.
Mrs. Full, on the control platform, screamed. Her husband ran to her, Summersby stepped out irresolute, Adam stood stunned. But Porfirio Villa, afire with the heady make-believe carnage of the afternoon, was as quick to act as his fourth cousin Pancho could have been. A dozen waddling leaps, a swift swing of his legs over the side, and the Mexican landed in the little red vehicle with the vast control board, the car that only he had been able to master. Pressing buttons, pulling plungers, sliding levers, he whirled it around and sent it at the towering adult.
The beast skipped out of his way, blaring anger; he came about sharply, gunned his "motor"—if it was that—and rammed the gigantean enemy on the leg. There was the clear sharp snap of bone breaking. As Villa's car overturned, the creature fell at full length, with a crash like an elephant dropping out of a tree. It contracted its body and gripped its ankle with both hands, honking dismally.
Summersby was running. He skidded up to the groveling Villa, yanked him to his feet and shoved him out of range of the injured beast. The two children had broken into the barks that were their equivalent of weeping, one drawing its goading rod. Summersby crouched, went toward it, hoping to bring it down before it stunned him. As he came within diving range, though, the orange airship streaked over his head and jammed its nose into the child's belly. It folded over with a whoosh, grabbing its middle, as the toy wobbled off in eccentric flight.
Mrs. Full, the expert at flying the miniature vessel, was hectically jamming her blocks along their metal rods; something had gone wrong with the mechanism at the crash. Her husband hauled her off the seat and rushed her toward the door.
The remaining child stood in the middle of the floor, staring at its groaning, breathless playmate and at the maimed adult, honking a little frightened song to itself. Skirting it, the humans made for the door as fast as they could go.
Summersby overtook Watkins. "I found it okay," panted the crook.
"Can you work it?" They were through the door now, the two of them in the lead, running across the first of the rooms.
"There were other adults," said Watkins. "Three or four saw me. I don't know where they went."
"Can you work it?"
"The matter transmitter?" He grinned briefly. "Sure. There's two principles I don't get, but—"
The doorway before them was crowded by several of the giants. They came through, not hurrying, talking rather placidly; their movements had the swiftness of the children's without their jerkiness. In their hands were green goads. They pointed and came down upon the humans.
"Scatter!" yelled Summersby, and dodged under the shelf of the machine where he had taken cover last night. He went to the end. In seconds they would be peering under the shelf, spotting him, thrusting in their shockers and laying him out. And, damn it all, he cared! He didn't want to be stopped when so much of the fight was won. His heart might stop, he couldn't help that, but till it did he wanted to go on fighting. Balling his fists, he started to leave the sanctuary. Then he heard Adam Pierce begin to sing.
He had a high tenor voice, mellow with a sweet touch of huskiness in it, and he was singing "Drink to Me Only" at the top of his lungs.
He hadn't gone crazy! Summersby remembered the punishments they had endured for making harmonious noises on the musical toy, the slap Adam got for singing, the agonies the kids had gone through at Earth-type melody. Adam had thought of the only weapon they could use—song.
"Or leave a kiss within the cup," roared Summersby, and without further thought walked into the room. Watkins had chimed in now, breathless but true of pitch.
Three eighteen-foot brutes were standing there. Vast hands were pressed to bulbous heads, and agonized croaks came from gaping mouths. Whatever a tune did to them, it wasn't pleasant. What weird auricular structure could cringe so from a simple song? It did, and that was enough.