"chap-09" - читать интересную книгу автора (Biggle Lloyd Jr. - All The Colours Of Darkness)

9

Darzek floated.

He was fully relaxed and ready to end his dive with a neat flip onto his feet, automatic in hand if circumstances required it. He was also prepared to talk his way out of an awkward predicament in the Paris Terminal, if that was where he and Miss X emerged.

But he knew instantly that he was not in the Paris Terminal.

And he floated.

He soared completely over Miss X, who stood looking up at him, arms half-raised, face immobilized in an expression that had no parallel even in Darzek’s considerable inventory of facial expressions. Momentarily he experienced an exhilarating sensation of flying, but his mind was much too preoccupied to enjoy it. He collided gently with the far wall, rebounded a short distance, and twisted to memorize the room with a glance as he dropped easily to the floor.

Instantly his attention was arrested by a grotesquely tall, grotesquely thin apparition that presided over an enormous instrument board near the transmitter frame. Darzek’s dramatic entry had caught it in the act of rising from a tall stool. It remained in a half-crouch, one hand frozen in position at the controls, the other waving aimlessly, as though to banish Darzek from its sight.

Darzek had only a second or two to contemplate its impossible expanse of bald head, its weirdly wide face and peculiar, swathing apparel before a sudden movement by Miss X triggered a lightning snatch for his automatic.

But the figure at the instrument board had held his attention too long. Before his hand could reach the gun, darkness crashed down on him.

He regained consciousness slowly, and found himself totally paralyzed. A painful, tingling sensation throbbed through his entire body. It was at once terrifyingly strange and familiar, like the inexplicable recurrence of -a half-forgotten nightmare. He struggled furiously, he cried out for help again and again, and when finally he desisted and lay quietly vanquished and soaked with perspiration, he had neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound.

He was unable to open his eyes, and his head seemed to gyrate strangely. He wondered whether his hearing was affected. The voices in the room sounded enormously distant and babbled impossible, unending chains of hissing and buzzing consonants.

His mind began posing a series of childish questions, and he found, much to his disgust, that he did not know where he was or what had happened. Finally he asked himself, "Who am I?", immediately responded, "Jan Darzek," and felt better.

Footsteps padded softly towards him. A hand touched his forehead, a dryly cold, almost abrasive hand that grated his skin, and then lifted his head and dropped it. The strangely familiar tingling sensation had receded to his limbs, and to his delight he found that he could feebly wiggle his toes.

The hand touched his forehead again before the footsteps padded away. The remote conversation continued. "She shot me!" Darzek’s mind exclaimed suddenly. "Miss X shot me—. with—" There had been something in her hand, but he had not even recognized it as a weapon.

A surge of memory flipped him abruptly into the past. He lay on the sidewalk outside his office building, looking up into the patrolman’s worried face. His hands and feet tingled oddly.

"So that’s how it was," he mused. "Just like that night, only a stiffer dose. No wonder they couldn’t find a lump on my head!"

The aftereffects faded rapidly. Soon the pain was no more than a dull, numbing throb, and he had full control of his toes. He could have opened his eyes and looked about, but he was determined to risk no movement that might attract the attention of those in the room. He remembered only too well the terrible weakness he had experienced before, his inability to stand without assistance. He would feign unconsciousness until that weakness had passed, and he could, if he chose, come up fighting.

He inventoried his mental picture of the room he had entered so unexpectedly. It was shaped like an enormous cylinder laid on one flattened side. The curved surface was milky white, and it diffused light. At first Darzek rejected the notion; but he had seen no lights anywhere, and yet the room was brilliantly lighted. The soft white glow of the curving walls and ceiling lighted the room.

The transmitter frame stood at one end, with the instrument board angling out from it. A wide ledge ran the length of the room on both sides—for sleeping purposes, perhaps, for there were long objects like sleeping bags lying on it. A curving, glittering metal surface, as tall as the room, bulged from the flat wall by the instrument board. Except for the one stool he had noticed no furnishings.

And he had floated. He thought long about that, hesitant to face up to the obvious implications. He had floated, and therefore there was no gravity. And yet, when he reached the end of the room he had dropped to the floor, so there was gravity. Or would complex factors such as his momentum and the angle at which he bumped the wall control his movement? He wished he had Ted Arnold’s knowledge of physics.

If his own specialization was people, what could he make of that person—that thing—at the instrument board? The place defied all logic, and so did its inhabitants.

He continued to listen to the voices, and thought he made out the overtones of an argument. For a time he occupied himself with sorting the voices out, and labeling them, and trying to estimate the number of people in the room. He had positively identified four different voices when someone spoke out from close by, and again a cold hand rasped against his forehead. It was all he could do to keep from recoiling.

"You can get up now," a voice said in English. "We know you are awake."

He continued to feign unconsciousness. The argument resumed, and became voluble. A fifth voice joined in. Hands seized Darzek, pulled him to a sitting position, and supported him there. He kept himself relaxed, but in the movement he managed to nudge his shoulder holster. They had not taken his automatic. Or had they unloaded it and replaced it?

He weighed his chances carefully, and dismissed the idea of coming off the floor with automatic in hand. For a second or two he would be vulnerable from the rear, and he could not handle five of them unless he chose his position carefully.

He decided on a plan of action, opened his eyes, and went through the motions of struggling to his knees.

The argument spiraled away into silence. There were five of them grouped about him, and as they watched him he feigned dizziness, regained his balance, and calmly stared at each of them in turn. To his amazement, they avoided his eyes.

Miss X was still wearing the disguise he had followed into the transmitter. Madam Z was there, in one of her disguises. There was a strange male, an attractive-looking boy in his late teens or early twenties.

And there were two things.

At first Darzek had difficulty reconciling the things with the apparition he had seen at the instrument board. That figure had been tall and absurdly thin; these were tall and absurdly wide. Only after he had struggled to his feet did he realize that they were wide when seen from the front; thin when seen from the side. Either view was like looking into a distorting mirror.

He continued to stare at them. They appeared not so much like living beings as a patented fabrication for populating nightmares. Their facial features were hideously concave, the enormous, widely separated eyes, the single, gaping nostril, the puckered mouth all weirdly inverted as though to open inward on some misshapen fantasy of a drunken artist. There were no ears; there were no hair, no eyebrows or lashes, not even a suggestion of eyelids. The necks were slender pipes. The flesh, what was visible of it, was a ghostly, flaccid blue. They were swathed in what appeared to be unending, overlapping layers of bandage from feet to throat to hands. The hands— The very ugliness was hypnotic. He tore his gaze away from them, took a step, looked again. The hands had four nailless fingers, which were delicately, almost transparently webbed.

He took another step, and pretended to stagger. Miss X moved to support him, but he shook her off and walked slowly to the far end of the room, stomping his feet as if to restore circulation, rubbing his hands together, pausing once to rub his legs. They made no move to interfere. When he neared the transmitter frame he turned, and his automatic was in his hand.

"Raise your hands above your heads!" he snapped.

For a long moment they stared uncomprehendingly at the gun. Then the male slowly raised his hands, and Madam Z followed. The others made no move at all. One of the things spoke, and Miss X replied.

"Speak English!" Darzek ordered.

"She was only asking if it is a weapon," Miss X said.

"She?" Darzek said blankly.

"You would refer to her as—"

One of Miss X’s hands leaped, snatched at something in a fold of her clothing. Darzek coolly shot her in the arm. The report rang out thunderously in that bare room, and left his ears ringing. "Now will you raise your hands?" he asked.

Miss X spoke a single, matter-of-fact word. "Barbarian." She raised her hands, and the two things followed her example. If her arm pained her she showed no sign of it. Darzek searched the five faces for some trace of emotion—fear, anger, perhaps disgust. He found none. They continued to look imperturbably in his direction, but even across the full length of the room they would not meet his eyes.

"I don’t think so highly of you, either," Darzek said to Miss X. "Now I suppose you’ll have to be patched up. Is there any first-aid equipment in this place?"

One of the things suddenly became aware of Miss X’s wound. It—she—whirled and examined the arm carefully. Then, with a single leap, she soared to the other end of the room, and at her touch a door rippled open in the bulging metal.

Rippled. Darzek thought of venetian blinds and zippers, but neither comparison was adequate. The solid metal rippled aside, and the thing darted through the opening and reappeared a moment later, flipping it shut behind her. Darzek followed the movement warily, and watched closely as she went to work on Miss X’s arm. She held it firmly with one hand, and dabbed a liquid with the other. Then she turned calmly, faced Darzek, and raised her hands.

Darzek backed slowly away from them, and hoisted himself onto the stool by the instrument board. From there he could keep the five of them under surveillance and also cover the transmitter. He had thinking to do, and he had to do it quickly.

And what he had just seen was enough to unsettle the thinking of any sane man. He’d hoped to inflict a minor flesh wound, but he had to shoot quickly, and the arm was moving, and the tiny slug had struck it dead center. It flattened on impact, which it shouldn’t have done, and ripped a dreadful hole completely through the arm.

But it did not strike bone, and the wound did not bleed.

And under the casual medical treatment he had just witnessed the wound had already closed, except for a gaping tear in what looked to be an exceptionally thick and tough epidermis.

Darzek found his thinking unequal to the situation. "All right," he said finally. "One of you—talk."

There was no response.

"You." He pointed to Miss X. "Where are we?"

No answer.

"Who are you?"

No answer.

It was obvious to him that he would not be in full control until he had mastered these—whatever they were—psychologically as well as physically. He turned for a quick look at the instrument board. "I wonder where a shot would do the most damage," he mused aloud. Ted Arnold would have given his eyeteeth, and perhaps a few molars as well, for a look at that board. The controls were cones, built up of variously colored perforated discs that were mounted upon a common center. Some kind of key, inserted in the perforations, could turn the discs individually or collectively—he thought. Other than that he could make nothing of it.

Miss X took a step forward. "We are on your Moon. If you damage our instrumentation you will never be able to return to Earth."

"And just where would that leave you?" Darzek asked with a grin. "Cut off from your source of liver extract?"

"I do not understand you."

"Aren’t you taking something for your anemia? You should. You’re the first person I ever shot who didn’t bleed."

He scrutinized each face in turn, and found the blankness of expression infuriating. The threat to their instrument board brought verbal protest, but no flicker of emotional reaction. They did not even appear to be indifferent. Just—blank.

He continued to talk, still feeling his way with them, probing for an opening. "Do you believe that dreams predict the future?" he asked. "A short time ago I dreamed I was on the Moon, looking down at Earth. It seemed ridiculous at the time, but here we are. How would I go about looking down at Earth?"

He did not expect an answer. Inhuman, he thought, as he inventoried the faces again. Or nonhuman. "Where are you from?" he asked. "Mars? Venus? Or somewhere—" he waved a hand "—beyond the Solar System? You called me a barbarian. I may even be abysmally stupid, by your standards, but I’ve had extensive practice in adding up simple facts. Two of you have family trees that are among no known earthly flora. By fact and deduction the same applies to the other three—in spite of your devilish talent for human disguises. Want to talk about it? No?"

He looked levelly at Miss X, who turned her head away. "Then I’ll talk about it. If the action I took in self-defense was barbarous, I’d very much like to know how you classify your own acts. You’ve damaged thousands of dollars’ worth of property belonging to the Universal Transmitting Company; you’ve interfered with the technological development of a civilization that certainly has done you no harm; you’ve severely and permanently injured Universal Trans technicians; you’ve—"

He got the reaction he had hoped for, but he savored it not at all. Though they burst into agitated talk, he had no way of telling whether they were angry, remorseful, or amused. Their faces were as devoid of expression as before.

The young male spoke in English. "None of those men were seriously injured."

"Two technicians got splinters of glass in their eyes," Darzek said. "One of them may lose his sight. Perhaps you don’t consider that a serious injury."

"We are sorry to hear this. We shall be severely reprimanded."

"What are you sorry about? The injuries or the reprimand?"

There was no answer.

"Considering the damage you’ve inflicted on persons and property, I’d like to have a definition of that word ‘barbarian’."

"The word was perhaps badly chosen," the male said.

"All of your other words seem to be very carefully chosen, and your pronunciation and grammar are flawless. Where did you learn your English?"

He did not answer.

Darzek was beginning to feel angry with himself. His verbal jousting had accomplished nothing of satisfaction, and he could not hold them at gun point indefinitely. Even if he tied them up he had no way of knowing when reinforcements might step through the transmitter, and eventually he would have to sleep.

Again he turned his attention to the instrument board, and attempted to manipulate the discs. All of them were locked into place. "Too bad I didn’t bring a few tools," he said. "A hammer and a crowbar, for example."

He slipped from the stool and moved to have a look at the other side of the board. The thing was at least a foot thick, fashioned of some nonmetallic substance, with corners and edges rounded and no visible seams. Darzek felt the back, thumped on it, ran his hand along the edge. Suddenly the entire back rippled into the base, and he stood gazing at an electronic engineer’s dream world. Sheer, transparent, multicolored threads formed a web of incredible complexity.

"Now that’s really clever," Darzek drawled. "An intelligent spider would die of envy."

He curbed his impulse to poke the automatic into those complicated vitals. Instead he raised his foot, slipped off a shoe, and with one lightning motion he raked the heel through the delicate electronic web. The slender threads broke easily. Splinters flew in all directions. Sparks snapped and crackled, and wisps of smoke floated from the cabinet.

One of the things started towards him. Darzek forced a retreat with a wave of the automatic, and swung the shoe a second time, with equally satisfactory results.

The thing babbled incomprehensibly.

"Speak English!" Darzek ordered.

"She can’t speak English," Miss X said. "She says it will take—take hours to repair the damage."

"That wouldn’t surprise me in the least," Darzek said, surveying the ravaged interior with satisfaction. "I’d say it’ll almost have to be rebuilt from scratch. Odd that there aren’t any wires leading into it. I suppose the controls work by radio, and it uses broadcast power, and that sort of thing. What is the power supply? Solar batteries?"

"Could we put our hands down?" the young male asked. "This is very tiring."

"Sorry. Until I’ve finished here, you’ll just have to stay tired. In the meantime you might remember that I’m allergic to sudden movements, and I shoot accurately with either hand. Could these knobs on the bottom have anything to do with the power input?"

On the wall behind the transmitting frame he found eight matching crystals. He nudged the wall, rapped on it, kicked it, leaned against it.

"There must be a door here somewhere," he said.

It rippled open so abruptly that he nearly fell through. He leaped back to regain his balance, and stood gazing into the room beyond. It contained fantastic things—a labyrinth of thick, crisscrossing crystal woven about a darkly looming cylinder that might have been the magic spider herself.

"Ah!" he said triumphantly. "The power plant?"

He kicked off a long piece of crystal as thick as his arm and tossed it aside. And another. And a third. The last he flung harder than the others, and it bounced twistingly, bounced again, and suddenly there was a flash and a roar, and searing heat. Darzek, knocked across the room by the blast, lay among the aliens, twisted in agony from his burns and totally indifferent to the pulverized fragments of wall that poured down on him.

9

Darzek floated.

He was fully relaxed and ready to end his dive with a neat flip onto his feet, automatic in hand if circumstances required it. He was also prepared to talk his way out of an awkward predicament in the Paris Terminal, if that was where he and Miss X emerged.

But he knew instantly that he was not in the Paris Terminal.

And he floated.

He soared completely over Miss X, who stood looking up at him, arms half-raised, face immobilized in an expression that had no parallel even in Darzek’s considerable inventory of facial expressions. Momentarily he experienced an exhilarating sensation of flying, but his mind was much too preoccupied to enjoy it. He collided gently with the far wall, rebounded a short distance, and twisted to memorize the room with a glance as he dropped easily to the floor.

Instantly his attention was arrested by a grotesquely tall, grotesquely thin apparition that presided over an enormous instrument board near the transmitter frame. Darzek’s dramatic entry had caught it in the act of rising from a tall stool. It remained in a half-crouch, one hand frozen in position at the controls, the other waving aimlessly, as though to banish Darzek from its sight.

Darzek had only a second or two to contemplate its impossible expanse of bald head, its weirdly wide face and peculiar, swathing apparel before a sudden movement by Miss X triggered a lightning snatch for his automatic.

But the figure at the instrument board had held his attention too long. Before his hand could reach the gun, darkness crashed down on him.

He regained consciousness slowly, and found himself totally paralyzed. A painful, tingling sensation throbbed through his entire body. It was at once terrifyingly strange and familiar, like the inexplicable recurrence of -a half-forgotten nightmare. He struggled furiously, he cried out for help again and again, and when finally he desisted and lay quietly vanquished and soaked with perspiration, he had neither moved a muscle nor uttered a sound.

He was unable to open his eyes, and his head seemed to gyrate strangely. He wondered whether his hearing was affected. The voices in the room sounded enormously distant and babbled impossible, unending chains of hissing and buzzing consonants.

His mind began posing a series of childish questions, and he found, much to his disgust, that he did not know where he was or what had happened. Finally he asked himself, "Who am I?", immediately responded, "Jan Darzek," and felt better.

Footsteps padded softly towards him. A hand touched his forehead, a dryly cold, almost abrasive hand that grated his skin, and then lifted his head and dropped it. The strangely familiar tingling sensation had receded to his limbs, and to his delight he found that he could feebly wiggle his toes.

The hand touched his forehead again before the footsteps padded away. The remote conversation continued. "She shot me!" Darzek’s mind exclaimed suddenly. "Miss X shot me—. with—" There had been something in her hand, but he had not even recognized it as a weapon.

A surge of memory flipped him abruptly into the past. He lay on the sidewalk outside his office building, looking up into the patrolman’s worried face. His hands and feet tingled oddly.

"So that’s how it was," he mused. "Just like that night, only a stiffer dose. No wonder they couldn’t find a lump on my head!"

The aftereffects faded rapidly. Soon the pain was no more than a dull, numbing throb, and he had full control of his toes. He could have opened his eyes and looked about, but he was determined to risk no movement that might attract the attention of those in the room. He remembered only too well the terrible weakness he had experienced before, his inability to stand without assistance. He would feign unconsciousness until that weakness had passed, and he could, if he chose, come up fighting.

He inventoried his mental picture of the room he had entered so unexpectedly. It was shaped like an enormous cylinder laid on one flattened side. The curved surface was milky white, and it diffused light. At first Darzek rejected the notion; but he had seen no lights anywhere, and yet the room was brilliantly lighted. The soft white glow of the curving walls and ceiling lighted the room.

The transmitter frame stood at one end, with the instrument board angling out from it. A wide ledge ran the length of the room on both sides—for sleeping purposes, perhaps, for there were long objects like sleeping bags lying on it. A curving, glittering metal surface, as tall as the room, bulged from the flat wall by the instrument board. Except for the one stool he had noticed no furnishings.

And he had floated. He thought long about that, hesitant to face up to the obvious implications. He had floated, and therefore there was no gravity. And yet, when he reached the end of the room he had dropped to the floor, so there was gravity. Or would complex factors such as his momentum and the angle at which he bumped the wall control his movement? He wished he had Ted Arnold’s knowledge of physics.

If his own specialization was people, what could he make of that person—that thing—at the instrument board? The place defied all logic, and so did its inhabitants.

He continued to listen to the voices, and thought he made out the overtones of an argument. For a time he occupied himself with sorting the voices out, and labeling them, and trying to estimate the number of people in the room. He had positively identified four different voices when someone spoke out from close by, and again a cold hand rasped against his forehead. It was all he could do to keep from recoiling.

"You can get up now," a voice said in English. "We know you are awake."

He continued to feign unconsciousness. The argument resumed, and became voluble. A fifth voice joined in. Hands seized Darzek, pulled him to a sitting position, and supported him there. He kept himself relaxed, but in the movement he managed to nudge his shoulder holster. They had not taken his automatic. Or had they unloaded it and replaced it?

He weighed his chances carefully, and dismissed the idea of coming off the floor with automatic in hand. For a second or two he would be vulnerable from the rear, and he could not handle five of them unless he chose his position carefully.

He decided on a plan of action, opened his eyes, and went through the motions of struggling to his knees.

The argument spiraled away into silence. There were five of them grouped about him, and as they watched him he feigned dizziness, regained his balance, and calmly stared at each of them in turn. To his amazement, they avoided his eyes.

Miss X was still wearing the disguise he had followed into the transmitter. Madam Z was there, in one of her disguises. There was a strange male, an attractive-looking boy in his late teens or early twenties.

And there were two things.

At first Darzek had difficulty reconciling the things with the apparition he had seen at the instrument board. That figure had been tall and absurdly thin; these were tall and absurdly wide. Only after he had struggled to his feet did he realize that they were wide when seen from the front; thin when seen from the side. Either view was like looking into a distorting mirror.

He continued to stare at them. They appeared not so much like living beings as a patented fabrication for populating nightmares. Their facial features were hideously concave, the enormous, widely separated eyes, the single, gaping nostril, the puckered mouth all weirdly inverted as though to open inward on some misshapen fantasy of a drunken artist. There were no ears; there were no hair, no eyebrows or lashes, not even a suggestion of eyelids. The necks were slender pipes. The flesh, what was visible of it, was a ghostly, flaccid blue. They were swathed in what appeared to be unending, overlapping layers of bandage from feet to throat to hands. The hands— The very ugliness was hypnotic. He tore his gaze away from them, took a step, looked again. The hands had four nailless fingers, which were delicately, almost transparently webbed.

He took another step, and pretended to stagger. Miss X moved to support him, but he shook her off and walked slowly to the far end of the room, stomping his feet as if to restore circulation, rubbing his hands together, pausing once to rub his legs. They made no move to interfere. When he neared the transmitter frame he turned, and his automatic was in his hand.

"Raise your hands above your heads!" he snapped.

For a long moment they stared uncomprehendingly at the gun. Then the male slowly raised his hands, and Madam Z followed. The others made no move at all. One of the things spoke, and Miss X replied.

"Speak English!" Darzek ordered.

"She was only asking if it is a weapon," Miss X said.

"She?" Darzek said blankly.

"You would refer to her as—"

One of Miss X’s hands leaped, snatched at something in a fold of her clothing. Darzek coolly shot her in the arm. The report rang out thunderously in that bare room, and left his ears ringing. "Now will you raise your hands?" he asked.

Miss X spoke a single, matter-of-fact word. "Barbarian." She raised her hands, and the two things followed her example. If her arm pained her she showed no sign of it. Darzek searched the five faces for some trace of emotion—fear, anger, perhaps disgust. He found none. They continued to look imperturbably in his direction, but even across the full length of the room they would not meet his eyes.

"I don’t think so highly of you, either," Darzek said to Miss X. "Now I suppose you’ll have to be patched up. Is there any first-aid equipment in this place?"

One of the things suddenly became aware of Miss X’s wound. It—she—whirled and examined the arm carefully. Then, with a single leap, she soared to the other end of the room, and at her touch a door rippled open in the bulging metal.

Rippled. Darzek thought of venetian blinds and zippers, but neither comparison was adequate. The solid metal rippled aside, and the thing darted through the opening and reappeared a moment later, flipping it shut behind her. Darzek followed the movement warily, and watched closely as she went to work on Miss X’s arm. She held it firmly with one hand, and dabbed a liquid with the other. Then she turned calmly, faced Darzek, and raised her hands.

Darzek backed slowly away from them, and hoisted himself onto the stool by the instrument board. From there he could keep the five of them under surveillance and also cover the transmitter. He had thinking to do, and he had to do it quickly.

And what he had just seen was enough to unsettle the thinking of any sane man. He’d hoped to inflict a minor flesh wound, but he had to shoot quickly, and the arm was moving, and the tiny slug had struck it dead center. It flattened on impact, which it shouldn’t have done, and ripped a dreadful hole completely through the arm.

But it did not strike bone, and the wound did not bleed.

And under the casual medical treatment he had just witnessed the wound had already closed, except for a gaping tear in what looked to be an exceptionally thick and tough epidermis.

Darzek found his thinking unequal to the situation. "All right," he said finally. "One of you—talk."

There was no response.

"You." He pointed to Miss X. "Where are we?"

No answer.

"Who are you?"

No answer.

It was obvious to him that he would not be in full control until he had mastered these—whatever they were—psychologically as well as physically. He turned for a quick look at the instrument board. "I wonder where a shot would do the most damage," he mused aloud. Ted Arnold would have given his eyeteeth, and perhaps a few molars as well, for a look at that board. The controls were cones, built up of variously colored perforated discs that were mounted upon a common center. Some kind of key, inserted in the perforations, could turn the discs individually or collectively—he thought. Other than that he could make nothing of it.

Miss X took a step forward. "We are on your Moon. If you damage our instrumentation you will never be able to return to Earth."

"And just where would that leave you?" Darzek asked with a grin. "Cut off from your source of liver extract?"

"I do not understand you."

"Aren’t you taking something for your anemia? You should. You’re the first person I ever shot who didn’t bleed."

He scrutinized each face in turn, and found the blankness of expression infuriating. The threat to their instrument board brought verbal protest, but no flicker of emotional reaction. They did not even appear to be indifferent. Just—blank.

He continued to talk, still feeling his way with them, probing for an opening. "Do you believe that dreams predict the future?" he asked. "A short time ago I dreamed I was on the Moon, looking down at Earth. It seemed ridiculous at the time, but here we are. How would I go about looking down at Earth?"

He did not expect an answer. Inhuman, he thought, as he inventoried the faces again. Or nonhuman. "Where are you from?" he asked. "Mars? Venus? Or somewhere—" he waved a hand "—beyond the Solar System? You called me a barbarian. I may even be abysmally stupid, by your standards, but I’ve had extensive practice in adding up simple facts. Two of you have family trees that are among no known earthly flora. By fact and deduction the same applies to the other three—in spite of your devilish talent for human disguises. Want to talk about it? No?"

He looked levelly at Miss X, who turned her head away. "Then I’ll talk about it. If the action I took in self-defense was barbarous, I’d very much like to know how you classify your own acts. You’ve damaged thousands of dollars’ worth of property belonging to the Universal Transmitting Company; you’ve interfered with the technological development of a civilization that certainly has done you no harm; you’ve severely and permanently injured Universal Trans technicians; you’ve—"

He got the reaction he had hoped for, but he savored it not at all. Though they burst into agitated talk, he had no way of telling whether they were angry, remorseful, or amused. Their faces were as devoid of expression as before.

The young male spoke in English. "None of those men were seriously injured."

"Two technicians got splinters of glass in their eyes," Darzek said. "One of them may lose his sight. Perhaps you don’t consider that a serious injury."

"We are sorry to hear this. We shall be severely reprimanded."

"What are you sorry about? The injuries or the reprimand?"

There was no answer.

"Considering the damage you’ve inflicted on persons and property, I’d like to have a definition of that word ‘barbarian’."

"The word was perhaps badly chosen," the male said.

"All of your other words seem to be very carefully chosen, and your pronunciation and grammar are flawless. Where did you learn your English?"

He did not answer.

Darzek was beginning to feel angry with himself. His verbal jousting had accomplished nothing of satisfaction, and he could not hold them at gun point indefinitely. Even if he tied them up he had no way of knowing when reinforcements might step through the transmitter, and eventually he would have to sleep.

Again he turned his attention to the instrument board, and attempted to manipulate the discs. All of them were locked into place. "Too bad I didn’t bring a few tools," he said. "A hammer and a crowbar, for example."

He slipped from the stool and moved to have a look at the other side of the board. The thing was at least a foot thick, fashioned of some nonmetallic substance, with corners and edges rounded and no visible seams. Darzek felt the back, thumped on it, ran his hand along the edge. Suddenly the entire back rippled into the base, and he stood gazing at an electronic engineer’s dream world. Sheer, transparent, multicolored threads formed a web of incredible complexity.

"Now that’s really clever," Darzek drawled. "An intelligent spider would die of envy."

He curbed his impulse to poke the automatic into those complicated vitals. Instead he raised his foot, slipped off a shoe, and with one lightning motion he raked the heel through the delicate electronic web. The slender threads broke easily. Splinters flew in all directions. Sparks snapped and crackled, and wisps of smoke floated from the cabinet.

One of the things started towards him. Darzek forced a retreat with a wave of the automatic, and swung the shoe a second time, with equally satisfactory results.

The thing babbled incomprehensibly.

"Speak English!" Darzek ordered.

"She can’t speak English," Miss X said. "She says it will take—take hours to repair the damage."

"That wouldn’t surprise me in the least," Darzek said, surveying the ravaged interior with satisfaction. "I’d say it’ll almost have to be rebuilt from scratch. Odd that there aren’t any wires leading into it. I suppose the controls work by radio, and it uses broadcast power, and that sort of thing. What is the power supply? Solar batteries?"

"Could we put our hands down?" the young male asked. "This is very tiring."

"Sorry. Until I’ve finished here, you’ll just have to stay tired. In the meantime you might remember that I’m allergic to sudden movements, and I shoot accurately with either hand. Could these knobs on the bottom have anything to do with the power input?"

On the wall behind the transmitting frame he found eight matching crystals. He nudged the wall, rapped on it, kicked it, leaned against it.

"There must be a door here somewhere," he said.

It rippled open so abruptly that he nearly fell through. He leaped back to regain his balance, and stood gazing into the room beyond. It contained fantastic things—a labyrinth of thick, crisscrossing crystal woven about a darkly looming cylinder that might have been the magic spider herself.

"Ah!" he said triumphantly. "The power plant?"

He kicked off a long piece of crystal as thick as his arm and tossed it aside. And another. And a third. The last he flung harder than the others, and it bounced twistingly, bounced again, and suddenly there was a flash and a roar, and searing heat. Darzek, knocked across the room by the blast, lay among the aliens, twisted in agony from his burns and totally indifferent to the pulverized fragments of wall that poured down on him.