James Blish

SKYSIGN

CONTENTS

I, II, III, IV, V, VI

Und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln

Und mit funfzig Kanonen

Wird entschwinden mit mir.'

Pirate-Jenny: The Threepenny Opera.

I

Carl Wade came back to consciousness slowly and with a dull headachy feeling, as though fighting off a barbiturate hangover - as under the circumstances was quite possible. He remembered right away that he had been one of the people who had volunteered to go aboard the alien spaceship which had been hanging motionless over San Francisco for the last month. The 'lay volunteer', the Pentagon men had insultingly called him. And it was likely that the aliens would have drugged him, because to them, after all, he was only a specimen, and therefore possibly dangerous

But that didn't seem quite right. Somehow, he could not bring his memory into focus. He hadn't actually been taken aboard the ship, as far as he could recall. On the night before he had been supposed to join the volunteer group, in honour of his own approaching martyrdom (as he liked to think of it) he and some friends from the local Hobbit Society, including the new girl, had cycled up to Telegraph Hill to take a look at the great ship. But it had only just continued to hang there, showing no lights, no motion, no activity of any kind except a faint Moon-highlight, as had been the case ever since it had first popped into view in the skies over Berkeley - it responded only to the answers to its own radio messages, only to answers, never to questions - and the club had quickly gotten bored with it.

And then what? Had they all gone off and gotten drunk? Had he managed to get the new girl to bed and was now about to have one of those morning-afters beside her? Or was he in a cell as an aftermath of a brawl?

No one of these ideas evoked any echo in his memory except old ones; and a persistent hunch that he was on the spaceship, all the same discouraged him from opening his eyes yet. He wondered what insanity had ever led him to volunteer, and what even greater insanity had led the Pentagon people to choose him over all other saucerites and other space nuts.

A vague clink of sound, subdued and metallic caught his attention. He couldn't identify it, but somehow it sounded surgical. As far as it went, this matched with the quiet around him, the clean coolness of the air, and the unrumpled, also apparently clean pallet he seemed to be lying on. He was neither in a jail nor in the pad of anybody he knew. On the other hand, he didn't feel ill enough to be in hospital ward; just a little drugged. The college infirmary? No, nonsense, he'd been thrown out of college last year.

In short, he must be on the ship, simply because this must be the day after yesterday. The thought made him squeeze his eyes still tighter shut. A moment later, further speculation was cut off by a feminine voice, unknown to him, and both pleasantly sexy and unpleasantly self-possessed, but obviously human. It said:

'I see you've given us his language, rather than him ours.'

'It cops out on - rules out - avoids - obviates making everyone else on board guard their tongues,' a man's voice replied. 'Man, I really had to dig for that one. He's got a constipated vocabulary; knows words, but hates them.'

'That's helpful, too,' the woman's voice responded. 'If he can't address himself precisely, it'll matter less what we say to him.'

Man, Carl thought, if I ever get that chick where I want her, I'll sell chances on her to wetbacks. But she was still talking:

'But what's he faking for, Brand? He's obviously wide awake.'

At this Carl opened his eyes and mouth to protest indignantly that he wasn't faking, realized his mistake, tried to close both again, and found himself gasping and goggling instead.

He could not see the woman, but the man called Brand was standing directly over him, looking down into his face. Brand looked like a robot - no; remembering the man's snotty remark about his vocabulary, Carl corrected himself: He looked like a fine silver statue, or like a silver version of Talos, the Man of Brass (and wouldn't Carl's damned faculty advisor have been surprised at how fast he'd come up with that one!). The metal shone brilliantly in the blue light of the surgery-like room, but did not look like plate metal. It did not look hard at all. When Brand moved, it flowed with the movement of the muscles under it, like skin.

Yet somehow Carl was dead sure that it wasn't skin, but clothing of some sort. Between the metallic eye-slits, the man's eyes were brown and human, and Carl could even see the faint webbing of blood-vessels in their whites. Also, when he spoke, the inside of his mouth was normal mucous membrane - black like a chow's mouth instead of red, but certainly not metal. On the other hand, the mouth, disconcertingly, vanished entirely when it was closed, and so did the eyes when they clinked; the metal flowed together as instantly as it parted.

"That's better,' the man said. 'Check his responses, Lavelle. He still looks a little dopey. Damn this language.'

He turned away and the woman - her name had certainly sounded like Lavelle - came into view, obviously in no hurry. She was metallic, too, but her metal was black, though her eyes were grey-green. The integument was exceedingly like a skin, yet seeing her Carl was even more convinced that it was either clothing or a body-mask, for there was nothing at all to see where Carl instantly looked. Also, he noticed a moment later, either she had had no hair or else her skull cap - if that was what she wore -was very tight, a point that hadn't occurred to him while looking at the man.

She took Carl's pulse, and then looked expertly under his upper eyelids. 'Slight fugue, that's all,' she said with a startling pink flash of tongue. Yet not quite so startling as Brand's speaking had been, since a pink mouth in a black face was closer to Carl's experience than was any sort of mouth in a silver face.'He can go down to the cages any time.'

Cages?

'Demonstration first,' Brand, now out of sight again, said in an abstracted voice. Carl chanced moving his head slightly and found that his horizon headache was actually a faint one-side earache, which made no sense to him at all. The movement also showed him the dimensions of the room, which was no larger than an ordinary living room - maybe 12' by 13' - and painted an off-white. There was also some electronicapparatus here and there, but no more than Carl had seen in the pads of some hi-fi bugs he knew, and to his eyes not much more interesting. In a corner was a dropdown bunk, evidently duplicating the one he now occupied. Over an oval metal door - the only ship-like feature he could see - was a dial-face like that of a huge barometer or clock, its figures too small to read from where he lay, and much too closely spaced too.

Brand reappeared. After a moment, the shining black woman called Lavelle took up a position a few feet behind him and to his left.

'I want to show you something,' the man said to Carl. 'You can see just by looking at us that it would do you no good to jump us - to attack us. Do you dig - do you understand that?'

'Sure,' Carl said, rather more eagerly than he had intended. As a first word, it wasn't a very good one.

'All right.' Brand put both his hands on his hips, just below his waist, and seemed to brace himself slightly. 'But there's a lot more to it than you see at the moment. Watch closely.'

Instantly the silver man and Lavelle changed places. It happened so suddenly and without any transition that for a second Carl failed to register what he was supposed to have noticed. Neither of the two metal people had moved in the slightest. They were just each one standing where the other one had been standing before.

'Now -' the man said.

At once, he was back where he had been, but the gleaming black woman - man, that outfit was sexy! - was standing far back, by the oval door. Again, there'd been not a whisper or hint of any motion in the room.

'And once more -'

This time the result was much more confusing. The metal aliens seemed to have moved, but after a while Carl realized that they hadn't; he had. The switch was so drastic that for an instant he had thought they - all three of them - were in another room; even the hands of the dial-face looked changed. But actually, all that had happened was that he was now in the other bunk.

The switch made hash of a hypotheses he had only barely begun to work out: that the metal skins or suits made it possible for Brand and Lavelle to swap places, or jump elsewhere at will, by something like teleportation. If that was how it worked, then Carl might just hook one of those shiny suits, and then, flup! and -

- and without benefit of suit white or black, he was in the other bunk, huddled in the ruins of his theory and feeling damned scared. On the face of a cathode-ray oscilloscope now in his field of view, a wiggly green trace diagrammed pulses which he was sure showed exactly how scared he was; he had always suspected any such instrument of being able to read his mind. The suspicion turned to rage and humiliation when Lavelle looked at the machine's display and laughed, in a descending arpeggio, like a coloratura soprano.

'He draws the moral,' she said.

Wetbacks. Also King Kong, if possible.

'Possibly,' said the silver man. 'We'll let it go for now, anyhow. It's time for the next subject. You can get up now.'

This last sentence seemed to be addressed to Carl. He stiffened for a moment, half expecting either the metal people or the room - or perhaps himself - to vanish, but since nothing at all changed, he slid cautiously to his feet.

Looking down at the feet, and on upward from there as far as he could without seeming vain about it, he discovered that he was wearing the same scuffed sneakers and soiled slacks he had been wearing when he had gone cycling with the Hobbit crowd, except that both the clothing and his own self under it had been given a thorough bath. He was offended by that discovery, but at the moment not very much. Did it mean that there really had been no events between that expedition to Telegraph Hill, and this nightmare?

'Am I on the ship?' he said. It was a difficult sentence to get out.

'Of course,' said the silver man.

'But I never got to join the official party - or I don't think -'

'Nobody will come aboard with the official party, Jack. We selected the few we wanted from among the cats your people designated. The rest will cool their heels.'

"Then what am I -'

'Too many answers,' Lavelle said.

'Never mind,' said the silver man. 'It won't matter for long, chicklet. Come along Mister - Wade? - yes; we'll interview you later, and answer some of your questions then, if we feel up to it. Lavelle, stay here and set up for the next live one. And Mister Wade, one other thing, should you feel ambitious, just bear in mind-'

The metal-skinned people changed places, silently, instantly, without the slightest preparation, without the slightest follow-through.

'- that we're a little faster on the draw than you are,' Brand finished from his new position, evenly, but his voice smiting Carl's other ear like a final insult. 'We need no other weapons. Dig me?'

'Yulp,' Carl said. As a final word, it was not much better than his first.

The sheathed man led him out of the oval door.

II

Numb as he had thought he was by now to everything but his own alarm, Carl was surprised to be surprised by the spaciousness of what they had called 'the cages'. His section of them reminded him more of an executive suite, or his imaginings of one - a large single bedroom, a wardrobe, a bathroom, and a sort of office containing a desk with a small TV screen and a headset like a cross between a hair-drier and a set of noise-mufflers.

He had been marched to this in total silence by the silver man, through a long corridor where they had passed several others of the metal people, all of whom had passed them by wordlessly and with their eyes as blanked out as Little Orphan Annie's. Once they had arrived at the cage, however, Brand had turned affable, showing him the facilities, even including a stock of clean clothes and seating him at last at the desk.

'I'll talk to you further when there's more time,' the silver man said. 'At the moment we're still recruiting. If you want food, you can call for it through that phone. I hope you know that you can't get away. If you cut out of the cage, there'd be no place where you could wind up.'

Brand reached forward to the desk and touched something. Under Carl's feet, a circular area about the size of a snow-slider turned transparent, and Carl found himself looking down at the Bay area through nothing but ten miles or more of thin air. Even moderate heights had always made him sick; he clutched at the edge of the desk and was just about to lose his option when the floor turned solid again.

'I wanted you to see,' Brand said, 'that you really are aboard our ship. By the way, if you'd like to look through there again, the button for it's right here.'

'Thanks,' Carl said, calling up one of his suavist witticisms, 'but no thanks.'

'Suit yourself. Is there anything else you'd like until we meet again?'

'Well... you said you were bringing more, uh, Earth people up here. If you could bring my wife...?'

The answer to this was only of academic interest to Carl. He had been separated from Bea for more than a year, ever since the explosion about college; and on the whole it had been painless, since they had been civilized enough to have been married in the first place only at common law and that a little bit by accident. But it would have been nice to have had someone he knew up here, if only somebody with a reasonably pink skin. The silver man said:

'Sorry. None of the other males we expect to bring aboard will know you, or each other. We find it better to follow the same rule with females, so we won't have any seizures of possessiveness.'

He got up and moved toward the door, which was the usual shape for doors, not oval like the last one. He still seemed relatively gracious, but at the door he turned and added:

'We want you to understand from the outset that up here, you own nobody - and nobody owns you but us.' And with that, in a final silent non-explosion of arrogance, he flicked into nothingness, leaving Carl staring with glazed eyes at the unbroached door.

Of course no warning could have prevented Carl, or anyone else above the mental level of a nematode, from trying to think about escape; and Carl, because he had been selected as the one lay volunteer to visit the spaceship possibly because he had thought about spaceships now and then or read about them, thought he ought to be able to work out some sort of plan - if only he could stop jittering for a few minutes. In order to compose his mind, he got undressed and into the provided pyjamas - the first time he had worn such an outfit in ten years - and ordered the ship (through the desk phones) to send him a bottle of muscatel, which arrived promptly out of a well in the centre of the desk. To test the ship's good will, he ordered five more kinds of drinks, and got them all, some of which he emptied with conscious self-mastery down the toilet.

Then he thought, jingling a luxurious bourbon-and-ginger abstractedly; the sound of ice was peculiarly comforting. Why the hell had the Pentagon people picked him as the 'lay volunteer', out of so many? The alien ship had asked for a sampling of human beings to go back to its far star, and of these, it had wanted one to be a man of no specialities whatsoever - or no specialities that the ship had been willing to specify. The Pentagon had picked its own samplings of experts, who probably had been ordered to 'volunteer'; but the 'lay volunteer' had been another matter.

Like everyone else, Carl had been sure the Pentagon would want the 'lay volunteer' actually to be a master spy among all possible master spies, not a James Bond but a Leamas type, a man who could pass for anything; but it hadn't worked that way. Instead, the Pentagon had approved Carl, one slightly beat and more than slightly broke dropout, who believed in magic and the possibility of spaceships, but - leave us face it, monsters and gents - didn't seem to be of much interest either to alien or to human otherwise.

Why, for instance, hadn't the 'lay volunteer' the aliens wanted turned out to be a Bircher, a Black Muslim, a Communist or a Rotarian - in short, some kind of fanatic who purported to deal with the real world - instead of a young man who was fanatic only about imaginary creatures called hobbits? Even the ordinary science-fiction fan would have been better; why was a sword-and-sorcery addict required to try to figure his way out of a classical spaceship clink?

Gradually, he began to feel - with pain, and only along the edges - that there was an answer to that. He got up and began to pace, which took him into the bedroom. Once there, he sat down nervously on the bed.

At once, the lights went out. Wondering if he had inadvertently sat on a trigger, he stood up again; but the darkness persisted.

Were the metal people reading his mind again - and trying to suppress any further thinking? It might work. He was damn-all tired, and he'd been out of practice at thinking anyhow. Well, he could lie down and pretend to be asleep. Maybe that would -

The lights went on.

Though he was dead sure that he hadn't fallen asleep, he knew that he was rested. He remembered that when he had looked down the sink-hole under the desk, lights had been coming on around the Bay. Gritting his teeth and swallowing to keep down the anticipated nausea, he went out to the desk and touched the button.

One glance was enough, luckily. It was high morning on Earth. A night had passed.

And what was the thought he had lost? He couldn't remember. The ship had finessed him - as easily as turning a switch.

III

He ordered breakfast; the ship delivered it. The bottles and glasses, he noticed, had been taken away. As an insulting aftermath, the ship also ran him another bath without his having ordered it. He took it, since he saw nothing to be gained by going dirty up here; it would be as unimpressive as carrying a poster around that sink-hole. No razor was provided; evidently the ship didn't object to his beard.

He then went after a cigarette, couldn't find any, and finally settled for a slow burn, which was easy enough to muster from all his deprivations, but somehow wasn't as satisfying as usual. I'll show them, he thought; but show them what? They looked invulnerable - and besides, he had no idea what they wanted him for; all the official clues had been snatched away, and no substitutes provided.

How about making a play for Lavelle? That would show that chrome-plated s.o.b. But how to get to her? And again, show him what? Carl knew nothing about these people's sexual taboos; they might just not give a damn, like most Earth people on a cruise. And besides, the girl seemed pretty formidable. But lush; it would be fun to break her down. He'd been through stuffier chicks in his time: Bea, for instance, or - well, Bea, for instance. And the separation hadn't really been his fault

His stomach twinged and he got up to pace. The trouble was that he had nothing to impress Lavelle with but his build, which really wasn't any better than Brand's. His encyclopedic knowledge of the habits of hobbits wasn't going to crush any buttercups around here, and he doubted that being able to sing Fallout Blues in two separate keys would, either. Dammit, they'd left him nothing to work with! It was unfair.

Abruptly remembering last night's drinks, he stopped at the desk and tried asking for cigarettes. They materialized instantly. Well, at least the aliens weren't puritans'- that was hopeful. Except that he didn't want a complaisant Lavelle; that wouldn't show anybody anything, least of all himself. There was no particular kick in swingers.

But if they gave him drinks and butts, they might just let him roam about, too. Maybe there was somebody else here that he could use, or some other prisoner who could give him clues. For some reason the thought of leaving the cage sparked a brief panic, but he smothered it by thinking of the ship as a sort of convention hotel, and tried the door.

It opened as readily as the entrance to a closet. He paused on the threshold and listened, but there was absolutely no sound except the half expected hum of machinery. Now the question was, supposing the opening of the door had been an accident, and he was not supposed to be prowling around the ship? But that was their worry, not his; they had no right to expect him to obey their rules. Besides, as Buck Rogers used to say under similar circumstances, there was only one way to find out.

There was no choice of direction, since the corridor's ends were both unknown. Moving almost soundlessly - one real advantage of tennis shoes -he padded past a succession of cage doors exactly like his own, all closed and with no clues for guessing who or what lay behind them. Soon, however, he became aware that the corridor curved gently to the right; and just after the curve passed a blind point, he found himself on the rim of a park.

Startled, he shrank back, then crept forward still more cautiously. The space down the ramp ahead was actually a long domed hall or auditorium, oval in shape, perhaps five city blocks in length and two across at the widest point, which was where the opening off the corridor debouched. It seemed to be about ten stories high at the peak, floored with grass and shrubbery, and rimmed with small identical patios - one of which, he realized with a dream-like lack of surprise, must back up against his own cage. It all reminded him unpleasantly of one of those enlightened zoos in which animals are allowed to roam in spurious freedom in a moated 'ecological setting'.

As he looked down into the park, there was a long sourceless sigh like a whisper of metal leaves, and doors opened at the back of each patio. Slowly, people began to come out - pink people, not metal ones. He felt a brief mixture of resentment and chagrin; had he stayed in his own cage, he would have been admitted to the park automatically now, without having had to undergo the jumpy and useless prowl down the companionway.

Anyway, he had found fellow prisoners, just as he had hoped; and it would be safer down there than up here. He loped eagerly downhill.

The ramp he was following ran between two patios. One of them was occupied by a girl, seated upon a perfectly ordinary chair and reading. He swerved, braking.

'Well, hi there!' he said.

She looked up, smiling politely but not at all as pleased to see another inmate as he could have hoped. She was small, neat and smoky, with high cheekbones and black hair-perhaps a Latin Indian, but without the shyness he usually counted upon with such types.

'Hello,' she said. 'What have they got you in for?'

That he understood; it was a standard jailhouse question.

'I'm supposed to be the resident fantasy fan,' he said, in an unusual access of humility. 'Or that's my best guess. My name's Carl Wade. Are you an expert?'

'I'm Jeanette Hilbert. I'm' a meteorologist. But as a reason for my being here, it's obviously a fake - this place has about as much weather as a Zeppelin hangar. Apparently it's the same story with all of us.'

'How long have you been here?'

'Two weeks, I think. I wouldn't swear to it.'

'So long? I was snatched only last night.'

'Don't count on it,' Jeanette said. 'Time is funny here. These metal people seem to jump all around in it - or else they can mess with your memory at will.'

Carl remembered the change in the clock face, back when Brand and Lavelle had been showing off their powers for him. It hadn't occurred to him that time rather than space might have been involved, despite that clue. He wished he had read more Hubbard - something about transfer of theta from one MEST entity to another - no, he couldn't recapture the concept, which he had never found very illuminating anyhow. Korzybski? Madame Blavatsky? The hell with it. He said:

'How'd you come on board?'

'Suddenly. It was taken right out of my apartment, a day after NASA volunteered me. Woke up in an EEG lab here, having my brain-prints taken.'

'So did I. Hmm. Any fuzzy period between?'

'No, but that doesn't prove anything.' She looked him over, slowly and deliberately. It was not an especially approving glance. 'Is that what fantasy fans usually wear?'

He was abruptly glad that his levis and shirt were at least clean, no matter how willy-nilly. 'Work clothes,' he explained.

'Oh. What kind of work?'

'Photography,' he said, masking a split-second's groping with his most winning smile. It was, he knew, a workable alias; most girls dream of posing. 'But they didn't bring my cameras and stuff along with me, so I guess I'm as useless as you are, really.'

'Oh,' she said, getting up, 'I'm not sure I'm so useless. I didn't bring my barometer, but I still have my head.'

Dropping her book on the chair, she swung away and went back into her cage, moving inside her simple dress as flexibly as a reed.

'Hey, Jeanette - I didn't mean -just a -'

Her voice came back: 'They close the doors again after an hour.' Then, as if in mockery, her own door closed behind her, independently.

For want of anything else to do, he stepped into the patio and picked up the book. It was called Experimental Design, by one Sir Ronald Fisher, and the first sentence that he hit read: 'In fact, the statement can be made that the probability that the unknown mean of the population is less than a particular limit, is exactly P, namely Pr (u<x+ts)=P for all values of P, where t is known (and has been tabulated as a function of P and N).' He dropped the thin volume hastily. He had been wondering vaguely whether Jeanette had brought the book with her or the ship had supplied it, but suddenly he couldn't care less. It began to look as though all the chicks he encountered on this ship had been born to put him down.

Disappointed at his own indifference, he remembered her warning, and looked quickly back at the top of the gangway down which he had come. It was already closed. Suppose he was cut off? There were people down there in the park that he still wanted to talk to - but obviously not now. He raced along the esplanade.

He identified his own cage almost entirely by intuition, and it seemed that he was scarcely in it five minutes before the door to the patio slid shut. Now he had something else to think about, and he was afraid to try it, not only because it was painful, but because despite Jeanette's theories about time and memory, he still thought it very likely that Lavelle and her consort could read his mind. Experience, after all, supported all three theories indifferently, thus far.

But what about the other door? Increasingly it seemed to him that he hadn't been intended to go through it. He had been told that he couldn't get out of his cage; and the one hour's access to the park was nothing more than admission to a larger cage, not any sort of permission to roam. The unlocked outer door had to have been an accident. And if so, and if it were still open, there should still be all sorts of uses he might make of it

He froze, waiting to be jumped into the next day by the mind-readers. Nothing happened. Perhaps they could read his mind, but weren't doing it at the moment. They couldn't be reading everybody's mind ever minute of the day; they were alien and powerful, but also very obviously human in many important ways. All right. Try the outer door again. There was really nothing in the world that he wanted to do less, but the situation was beginning to make him mad, and rage was the only substitute he had for courage.

And after all, what could they do to him if they caught him, besides knock him out? The hell with them. Here goes.

Once more, the door opened readily.

IV

The corridor was as eventless as ever; the ramp to the park now closed. He continued along the long smooth curve, which obviously skirted the park closely, just outside the cage doors. Once he stopped to lay his ear to one of the cages. He heard nothing, but he did notice a circle with a pattern of three holes in it, like a diagram of a bowling ball, just where the lock to an ordinary door would be placed for someone of Brand's height.

That made him think again as he prowled. So the metal people needed handles and locks! Then they couldn't jump about in space as magically as they wanted you to think they could. Whatever the trick was, it wasn't teleportation or time-travel. It was an illusion, or something else to do with the mind, as both Carl and Jeanette had guessed: memory-blanking, or mind-reading. But which?

After he had crept along for what seemed like a mile, the elliptical pathway inflected and began to broaden. Also there was a difference in the quality of the light up ahead: it seemed brighter, and, somehow, more natural. The ceiling was becoming higher, too. He was coming into a new kind of area; and for some reason he did not stop to examine - perhaps only that the inside curve of the corridor was on his right, which as evidence was good for nothing - he felt that he was coming up on the front of the ship.

He had barely begun to register the changes when the corridor put forth a pseudopod: a narrow, shallow, metal stairway which led up to what looked like the beginning of a catwalk, off to the left. He detoured instinctively - in the face of the unknown, hide and peek!

As he went along the outward-curving catwalk, the space ahead of him continued to grow bigger and more complicated, and after a few minutes he saw that his sensation that he was going bow-wards had been right. The catwalk ran up and around a large chamber, shaped like a fan opened from this end, and ending in an immense picture window through which daylight poured over a cascade of instruments. On the right side of the room was a separate, smaller bank of controls, divided into three ranks of buttons each arranged in an oval, and surmounted by a large clock-face like the one Carl had noticed when he first awoke in the ship's EEG room. The resemblance to the cockpit of a jetliner, writ large, was unmistakable; this was the ship's control room.

But there was something much more important to see. Brand -or someone almost exactly like him - was sitting in one of two heavy swivel seats in front of the main instrument board, his silver skin scattering the light from the window into little wavelets all over the walls to either side of him. Occasionally he leaned forward and touched something, but in the main he did not seem to have much to do at the moment. Carl had the impression that he was waiting, which the little flicks of motion only intensified -like a cat watching a rubber mouse.

Carl wondered how long he had been there. From the quality of the light, the time was now either late morning or early afternoon - it was impossible to guess which, since Carl could not read the alien clock.

A movement to the right attracted both men's attention. It was a black metalled woman: Lavelle. Of this identification Carl was dead sure, for he had paid much closer attention to her than to her consort. Lifting a hand in greeting, she came forward and sat down in the other chair, and the two began to talk quietly, their conversation interspersed with occasional bursts of low laughter which made Carl uncomfortable for some reason he did not try to analyse. Though he could catch frequent strings of syllables and an occasional whole sentence, the language was not English, Spanish or French, the only ones he was equipped to recognize; but it was quite liquid, unlike a Germanic or Slavic tongue. Ship's language, he was certain.

Their shadows grew slowly longer on the deck; then it must be afternoon. That double prowl up the corridor must have taken longer than he had thought. He was just beginning to feel hungry when there was a change that made him forget his stomach completely.

As the metal people talked, their voices had been growing quieter and a little more husky. Now, Brand leaned forward and touched the board again, and instantly, like flowers unfolding in stop-motion photography, the metal suits - aha, they were suits! - unpeeled around them and seemed to dissolve into the chairs, leaving them both entirely nude.

Now would be the time to jump them, except that he was quite certain he couldn't handle both of them. Instead, he simply watched, grateful for the box seat. There was something about the girl besides her nudity that was disquieting, and after a while Carl realized what it was. Except for her baldness, she bore a strong resemblance to the first girl he had ever made time with by pretending to be a photographer, a similarity emphasized by the way she was sitting in the chair.

Obviously the pose was not lost on Brand either. He got to his feet with a lithe motion, and seizing her hand pulled her to her feet. She went to him freely enough, but after a moment struggled away, laughing, and pointing at the smaller control board, the one with the clock. Brand made an explosive remark, and then, grinning, strode over to the board and

the room was dark and empty. Blinking amazedly, Carl tried to stir, and found that his muscles were completely cramped as if he had been lying on the metal edge in the same position all night.

Just like that, he had the key in his hands.

He began to work out the stiffness slowly, starting with fingers and toes, and surveying the control room while he did so. The room was not really completely dark; there were many little stars gleaming on the control boards, and a very pale dawn was showing through the big window. The large hand on the clock face had jumped a full ninety degrees widdershins.

When he felt ready to take on a fight if he had to - except for his hunger, about which he could do nothing - Carl went back to the stairs and down into the control room, going directly to the smaller of the two boards. There was no doubt in his mind now about what those three ovals of buttons meant. If there was any form of dialogue he understood no matter what the language, it was the dialogue of making out. As plain as plain, the last two lines the denuded metal people had spoken had gone like this:

LAVELLE : But suppose somebody (my husband, the captain, the doctor, the boss) should come in?

BRAND: Oh hell, I'll (lock the door, take the phone off the hook, put out the lights) fix that!

Blackout.

What Brand had done was to put everyone on board to sleep. Out of the suits, he and Lavelle must have been immune to whatever effect he had let loose, so they could play their games at leisure. A neat trick; Carl wouldn't mind learning it - and he thought he was about to.

Because Carl himself was awake now, it was pretty clear that the other prisoners were also; maybe they had been freed automatically by the passage of the clock past a certain point in the morning, and would be put back to sleep just as automatically after supper. It also seemed clear that for the prisoners, the effect didn't depend upon wearing one of the metal suits or being in the cages, since Carl had been knocked out up on the catwalk, almost surely unsuspected. The suits must be the captain's way of controlling the crew - and that meant that Brand (or Brand and Lavelle) must run the shop, since this board was too powerful to allow just anybody to fool with it. Carl rubbed his hands together.

One of these three circles must represent the crew; another, the cages; the third - well, there was no telling who was controlled by those buttons - maybe crew and prisoners at once. But the oval in the middle had the fewest number of buttons, so it was probably a safe bet that it controlled the cages. But how to test that?

Taking a deep breath, Carl systematically pressed each and every button on the left-hand oval. Nothing happened. Since he himself was not now sprawled upon the deck, unconscious again, he could now assume that the crew was once more fast asleep -with the unavoidable exception of any, who had been out of their suits, like the lovers.

Now for the sparser oval. Trying to remind himself that he now had plenty of time, Carl worked out by painful memory and counting upon his fingers just where the button which represented his cage probably was. Then, starting one button away from it, he went again all around the circle until he was one button on the opposite side of what he thought was his own.

It took him a long time, sweating to work himself up to touching either of those two bracketting buttons, but at last, holding his breath, he pressed them both at once, watching the clock as he did so.

He did not fall and the clock did not jump.

The ship was his.

He was not in the slightest doubt about what he was going to do with it. He had old scores by the millions to pay off, and was going to have himself one hell of a time doing it, too. With an instrument like this, no power on Earth could stop him.

Of course he'd need help: somebody to figure out the main control board with him, somebody with a scientific mind and some technical know-how, like Jeanette. But he'd pick his help damn carefully.

The thought of Jeanette made him feel ugly, a sensation he rather enjoyed. She'd been damn snippy. There might be other women in the cages too; and the aborted scene of last night in the control room had left him feeling more frustrated that usual. All right; some new scores, and then he'd get around to the old ones.

V

It was high morning when he got back to the control room, but still it was earlier than he'd expected it to be. There hadn't been many women in the cages, but either they got less and less attractive as he went along, or the recent excitement and stress had taken more out of him physically than he'd realized. Otherwise he was sure he could have completed such a programme handily, maybe even twice around. Oh well, there was plenty of time. Now he needed help.

The first thing to do was to disconnect the clock in some way. That proved to be easy: a red bar under it simply stopped it. Since nobody, obviously, had visited the control room since his last tampering, he now had the whole ship in permanent coma.

Next, he counted down to Jeanette's button and pushed it. That ought to awaken her. The only remaining problem was to work out how that three-hole lock on her cage worked.

That didn't turn out to be easy at all. It took an hour of fumbling before it suddenly sank inward under his hand and the door slid back.

Jeanette was dressed, and stared at him with astonishment.

'How did you do that?' she said. 'What's wrong with the phone Where's the food? Have you been doing something stupid?'

He was just about to lash back at her when he realized that this was no time to start the breaking-off routine, and instead put on his best master-of-the-situation smile, as if he were just starting up with her.

'Not exactly,' he said. 'But I've got control of the ship. Mind if I come in?'

'Control of the ship? But - well, all right, come in. You're in anyhow.'

He came forward and sat down at her version of his desk. She backed away from him, only a little, but quite definitely.

'Explain yourself,' she said.

He didn't; but he told her the rudiments of the story, in as earnest and forthright a manner as he had ever managed to muster in his life. As he had expected, she asked sharp technical questions, most of which he parried, and her superior manner dissolved gradually into one of intense interest.

All the same, whenever he made the slightest movement to stand up, she stepped lightly away from him, a puzzled expression flitted across her face and then vanished again as he fed her new details. He was puzzled in turn. Though the enforced ship's-sleep hadn't prevented her from being highly responsive - in fact, it was his guess that it had helped - he was sure that she had never awoken even for a second during the morning and hence had nothing to blame him for. Yet it was obvious that she knew, somewhere in the back of her mind that something had happened to her, and associated it with him. Well, maybe that would be helpful too, in the long run; a cut cake goes stale in a hurry.

When he was through, she said reluctantly: 'That was close observation, and quick thinking.'

'Not very quick. It took me all morning to work it out.'

Again the flitting, puzzling expression. 'You got the right answer in time. That's as quick as anybody needs to be. Did you wake anybody else?'

'No just you. I don't know anybody else here, and I figured you could help me. Besides, I didn't want a mob of released prisoners running around the ship kicking the crew and fooling with things.'

'Hmm. Also sensible. I must say, you surprise me.' Carl couldn't resist a grin at this, but took care to make it look bashful. 'Well - what do you suggest we do now?'

'We ought to figure out the main control board. See if it's possible for us to run the ship without anybody from the crew to help - and how many hands from the cages we'd need to do the job.'

'Yes,' she said thoughtfully. 'At a guess, the main control board is as rational as the sleep-board is. And the two captains -Brand and Lavelle - must be able to run the ship from there all by themselves in a pinch; otherwise the threat of knocking all the rest of the crew out wouldn't have sufficient force. Interesting social system these people must have. I don't think I like them.'

'Me neither,' Carl said with enthusiasm. 'I hate people who whip serfs.'

Jeanette's eyebrows rose. 'The crew can't be serfs. They wear the metal suits - a powerful tool in any hands - and can take them off whenever they like if they want to duck the sleep-compulsion. But obviously they don't. They can't be serfs; they must be something like chattel slaves, who'd never dream of changing status except to other owners. But that's not nearly the most interesting problem.'

'What is, then?'

'How the buttons put us to sleep. We don't wear the suits.'

Since this was the problem Carl most badly wanted to solve secretly and for himself alone, it was the one he most badly wanted Jeanette not to think about; yet since he had no clues at all, he had to chance at least a tentative sounding before trying to divert her from it. He said: 'Any ideas?'

'Not at the first moment. Hmm... Did you have a headache when you first woke up on board?'

'I've got it still,' he said, patting the back of his neck tenderly. 'Why? Does that signify?'

'Probably not. I'll just have to look at the board, that's all. We'd better go take a thorough look around.'

'Sure. This way.'

She was very thorough - exasperatingly so. Long after he would have been sure that he had seen everything, she would return to some small instrument complex she had looked at three or four times before, and go over it again as if she had never seen it before. She volunteered nothing except an occasional small puff of surprise or interest; and to his questions, she replied uniformly, 'I don't know yet.' Except once when after she had bent over a panel of travelling tapes for what must have been twenty minutes, she had said instead, 'Shut up for ten seconds, will you?'

In the meantime, the sun was reddening towards afternoon again, and Carl was becoming painfully conscious of the fact that he had had nothing to eat since breakfast the day before. Every minute added without any food shortened his temper, reduced his attention span and cut into his patience. Maybe the girl was getting results, and maybe not, but he was more and more sure that she was putting him on. Didn't she know who was boss here?

Maybe she thought she could make a dash for the sleep-panel and turn him off. If she tried that, he would knock her down. He had never been that far away from the panel; he was on guard.

Suddenly she straightened from the main board and sat down in one of the heavy swivel chairs. It promptly began to peel her clothes off. Though he had not told her anything about this trick, she got up quickly so that it left her only slightly shredded around the edges. She eyed the chair thoughtfully, but said nothing. For some reason this was her most galling silence of all.

'Got anything?' he said harshly.

'Yes, I think so. These controls require an optimum of three people, but two can run them in an emergency. Ordinarily I think they use five, but two of those must be standbys.'

'Could one man handle them?'

'Not a chance. There are really three posts here: pilot, engineer, navigator. The pilot and the navigator can be the same person if it's absolutely necessary. Nobody can substitute for the engineer. This ship runs off a Nernst-effect generator, a very tricky form of hydrogen fusion. The generators idle very nicely, but when they're drawing real power they have to be watched - more than that, it takes a real musician's hand to play them.'

'Could you do it?'

'I'd hate to try. Maybe with a month of ant-steps, saying "May I" all the way. But if the thing blew at this altitude it'd take out the whole West Coast - at a minimum. There's an awful lot of hydrogen in the Pacific; I wouldn't answer for what a Nernst fireball would really start.'

'Good.'

She swung on him, her brows drawing together. 'What's good about it? What are you up to, anyhow?'

'Nothing very awful,' he said, trying to be placating. Til tell you in a minute. First of all, have you figured out how to get the grub moving again? I'm starving.'

'Yes, that's what the third oval on the sleep board is - the phone system locks. There's a potentiometer system on the side of the board that chooses what's activated - food, phones, doors, and so on. If you'll move over a minute, I'll show you.'

'In a minute,' he said. 'It's not that I don't trust you, Jeanette, but you know how it is - now that I've got my mitts on this thing I hate to let go of it.'

"That figures. What are you going to do with it?'

'I don't know till I've got it doped better. First, how about this business of putting the prisoners crumped without any suits?'

'No,' she said.

'Whadd'ya mean, no?' he said, feeling the ugliness rise again. 'Listen, chick -'

He caught himself, but with an awful feeling that it was too late. She watched him damping himself down with sober amusement, and then said:

'Go on. That was the true hyena laugh.'

He clenched his fists, and again fought himself back to normal, aware that she was observing every step of the process.

He said:

'I'm sorry. I'm tired and hungry. I'll try not to snarl at you again. Okay?'

'Okay.' But she said nothing more.

'So what about this crump effect?'

'Sorry I won't answer any more questions until you've answered one of mine. It's very simple. Once you've really got control of the ship - and you can't get it without me - what do you plan to do with it? You keep telling me you'll tell me "in a minute". Tell me now.'

'All right,' he said, his teeth on edge. 'All right. Just remember that you asked me for it. If you don't like it, tough tibby - it's not my fault. I'm going to use this ship and everybody on it to set things straight. The warmongers, the blue-noses, the fuzz, the snobs, the squares, the bureaucrats, the Uncle Toms, the Birchers, the Fascists, the rich-bitches, the... everybody who's ever been against anything is going to get it now, right in the neck. I'm going to tear down all the vested interests, from here to Tokyo. If they go along with me, okay. If they don't, blooey! If I can't put them to sleep I can blow 'em up. I'm going to strike out for freedom for everybody, in all directions, and all at once.There'll never be a better chance. There'll never be a better weapon than this ship. And there'll never be a better man than me to do it.'

His voice sank slightly. The dream was catching hold. 'You know damn well what'd happen if I let this ship get taken over by the Pentagon or the fuzz. They'd suppress it - hide it - make a weapon out of it. It'd make the cold war worse. And the sleep gadget - they'd run all our lives with it. Sneak up on us. Jump in and out of our pads. Spy. All the rest. Right now's our chance to do justice with it. And that by God is what I'm going to do with it!'

'Why you?' Jeanette said. Her voice sounded very remote.

'Because I know what the underdog goes through. I've gone through it all. I've been put down by every kind of slob that walks the Earth. And I've got a long memory. I remember every one of them. Every one. In my mind, every one of them has a front name, a hind name, and an address. With a thing like this ship, I can track every man jack of them down and pay them off. No exceptions. No hiding. No mercy... just justice. The real, pure simple thing.'

'Sounds good.'

'You bet it's good!'

'What about the Soviets? I missed them on your list, somehow.'

'Oh sure; I hate Communists. And also the militarists - it was the Pentagon that sucked us into this mess up here to begin with, you know that. Freedom for everybody - at one stroke!'

She seemed to consider that. 'Women, too?'

'Of course, women! The hell with the double standard! On both sides!'

'I don't quite follow you,' she said. 'I thought the double standard only had one side - the men could and the women couldn't.'

'You know damn well that's not so. It's the women who control the situation - they always can, they're the ones who get to say no. The real freedom is all on their side.'

'How'd you fix that?' she said, in a voice almost sleepy.

'I... well, I haven't had much of a chance to think about it -'

'I think you've thought about it quite a lot.'

Her shredded dress trailing streamers, Jeanette walked steadily away from the control board toward the corridor. Carl put his finger over her button.

'Stop!'

She stopped and turned, shielding her thighs with one hand in a peculiarly modest gesture, considering everything.

'Well?'

'I don't give a damn what you think. If you don't dig it, that's your nuisance - sorry about that, Chief. But I need you; I'll have you.'

'No you won't. You can put me to sleep and rape me, but you won't have me.'

'Yes I will. I can wake you up. And I won't feed you. You'll spend the rest of your time in your cage- hungry and wide awake. In the meantime, I'll fool with the boards. Maybe I'll wake somebody else who'll be willing to help. Maybe even one of the crew. Or maybe I'll make a mistake and blow everything up - if you weren't putting me on about that. Think about that for a while. Co-operate, or blooey! How about that?'

'I'll think about it,' she said. But she went right on walking.

Carl bit his tongue savagely and turned back to the main boards. These goddam do-gooders. In the pinch, they were all alike. Give them a chance to do something and they chicken out.

Now it was up to him. It would be nice to know where to find Lavelle. But it was nicer to be sure that Jeanette had him dead wrong. He had a mission now and was above that stuff, at least for the time being. Once he'd reduced the world, he could do better than either of them. Mmmmm.

Raging with hunger, he scraped his fingernails at the powerful little lights.

VI

But he had at last to admit that much of his threat had been simple bravado. The instruments and controls on the board were in obviously related groups, but without technical training he could not even figure out the general categories; and though everything was labelled, the very script the labels were written in was as unbreakable to him as an oscilloscope trace (which it strongly resembled).

Besides, his thinking was obviously not being improved by his having been without a meal for more than a whole day. He decided that he had better be reasonable. The only other course was to wake some crew member, on the chance that a random choice would net him a slave rather than an officer, and try to force him to read the inscriptions; but the risks in that were obvious and frightening. Unless he really wanted to blow up the joint - which in fact he had no intention of chancing - he had to make another try with Jeanette.

She didn't look nearly as haggard as he had hoped, but after all she had both eaten and slept a good deal more recently than he had. Realizing at the same time that he was not only haggard, but untrimmed and dirty, he made an extra effort to be plausible.

'Look, I'm sorry I frightened you. I'm tired, I'm hungry, and I'm on edge. Let's try to talk it all over again sensibly, like civilized people.'

'I don't talk to jailers,' she said coldly.

'I don't blame you. On the other hand, as long as you're bucking me, I have to keep some sort of control over you. You're the only prisoner who knows as much as I know. Hell, you know more than I know about some things.'

'The last I heard, you weren't just going to keep me locked up. You were going to torture me.'

'What? I said no such -'

'No sleep, no food - what do you call it? Punishment? Persuasion? I know what I call it.'

'All right,' he said. 'I was wrong about that. Why don't we start there? You tell me how to turn the food deliveries back on, and I'll do it. There's no harm in that. We'd both benefit.'

"That's right, you're hungry too. Well, it's controlled by that knob on the side of the sleep-board, as I told you. I'm not sure, but I think it's the third setting on the left - counter-clockwise, that is.'

'Good. I'll see to it that you get fed, and then maybe we can yak again.'

'Maybe.'

At the door, he turned back suddenly. 'This had better not be a gag. If that third setting wakes everybody up or something like that-'

'I don't guarantee a thing,' Jeanette said calmly. 'It's only my best guess. But I don't want the slavers awake again any more than you do. You're no picnic, but I like them even less.'

The point was all the more penetrating for its bluntness. Back in the control room, he set the dial as per instructions, and then raced back to his own cage to try it out. The ship promptly delivered the meal he ordered, and he stuffed himself gorgeously. As an afterthought, he ordered and got a bottle of brandy. He was still determined to puzzle out the control boards as far as possible by himself, and in his present stage of exhaustion a little lubricant might make all the difference.

He knocked on Jeanette's door in passing, but there was no answer.

'Jeanette!' he shouted. 'Jeanette, the food's on!'

Still no response. He wondered if the metal door would pass sound. Then, very faintly, he heard something like a whimper. After a long pause there was another.

He went on, satisfied. He was a little surprised to find that she was able to cry - up to now she had seemed as hard as nails except in her sleep - but it would probably do her good. Besides, it was satisfying to know that she had a breaking point; it would make his persuasions all the more effective, in the long run. And in the meantime, she had heard him announce that there was food available, so she should have a little better opinion of his good faith.

He went on up the corridor, cheerfully whistling Fallout Blues in two keys at once.

The control room window showed deep night, and had for a long time, when he decided to call himself defeated - temporarily, of course. The brandy had calmed some of his jumpiness and done wonders for his self-confidence, but it hadn't brought into his head any technical knowledge or any safe inspirations, either. And suddenly he was reelingly sleepy. The headache was worse, too.

There should be no danger in catching a little sack time. Everybody was already out except Jeanette, and she was locked in. Of course, she was a sharp apple, and might figure some way of getting out. It would be better to crump her. She'd probably appreciate it, too. It would give him two plusses to start the next conversation with.

He pressed the button that controlled her, and then, avoiding the strip-tease chairs, rolled himself comfortably under the big board.

He awoke slowly and naturally; he had almost forgotten how it felt, after the popped-out-of-nothingness effect that the ships' imposed awakenings produced, and for a little while he simply luxuriated in it. After all, there was no danger. The ship was his.

But it was unusually noisy this morning; a distant snarling of engines, an occasional even more distant murmer of voices

Voices! He shot upright in alarm.

He was no longer aboard the ship.

Around him was the sunlit interior of a small room, unmistakably barracks-like, with a barred window, furnished only by the narrow single bed in which he had been lying. He himself was clad in grey military-hospital pyjamas, and touching his face, he found that he was clean-shaven - his beard was gone - and had been given a GI haircut. A standard maroon military-hospital robe was folded neatly over the foot of the bed.

An aircraft engine thrummed again outside. Swearing, he ran to the window.

He was indeed locked up beside a military airfield - which one, he had no way of telling, but at least it was American. It was also huge. There was a lot of traffic.

And there was the alien spaceship, right in front of him, grounded. It was probably as much as three miles away, but it was still so enormous as to cut off most of the horizon.

It had been captured - and Carl Wade with it.

He wasted no time wondering how it had been done, or lamenting the collapse of his fantasies, in which, he realized, he had never really believed. The only essential thing now was - get away!

He spun to the door, and finding it locked, rattled it furiously.

'Hey!' he shouted furiously. 'Let me out of here! You've got no right - I'm a civilian - and a citizen -'

The lock clicked under his hand, and as he jumped back, there was the sound of a bolt being shot. The door opened and Jeanette came in, followed by two large, impassive, alert Air Force policemen. The girl looked fresh and beautiful; but she too had had a close haircut, all on one side; and there was a massive surgical compress taped under that ear.

'Good morning,' she said.

He continued to back away until he found himself sitting on the bed.

'I might have guessed,' he said. 'So you got the upper hand and sold out.'

'Sold out?' she said, her eyes flashing. 'I had nothing to sell. I couldn't use the ship properly. I turned it over to people who could. My own people - who else?'

'All right, then you chickened out,' Carl said. 'It's the same thing. What are you going to do with me?'

"They tell me you'll be questioned and let go. In your circles, nobody'd be likely to believe anything you say. Just in case any reporter looks you up, the Pentagon's arranged an interview with Time. They'll treat your remarks as science-fiction and that'll be the end of you as any sort of witness.'

'And that's all?' he said, amazed.

"That's enough. You're not accused of any crime. Of course, I suspect you committed one against me - but considering that it didn't even wake me up, it can't have been very much more than a token; just kid's stuff.'

This blow to his pride was almost more than he could take, but he was not going to try to set her straight with those two huge flics standing there. He said dully:

'How did you do it?'

'I figured out how the metal people induced sleep in us without our having to wear metal suits. When they first took us on board, they installed a little broadcaster of the sleep-waves, surgically, right next to our skulls - under the right mastoid process. That was what the headache was.'

Carl caressed his neck automatically. The headache was gone all that was left was a neat and painless scar.

'But what did you do?'

'I took it out, with your help. When you turned the food service back on, I ordered a tough steak, and I got a sharp knife along with it. Awake, the metal people probably wouldn't have allowed that, but the computers are brainless. So I cut the gadget out. As soon as I got the bleeding stopped, I went forward, found you asleep under the control board, and pressed your button. The rest was simple.'

He remembered the faint whimpers he had heard when he had passed the door that night. And he had thought she was softening up!

The worst of it was, in the like circumstances he could never have done it. He was afraid of blood, especially his own.

'Jeanette... Why did you do it?'

She was silent a long time. At last she said:

'Do you believe in God?'

'Of course not?' he said indignantly. 'Do you?'

'I don't know whether I do or not. But there's one thing I was sure of, right from the start: You'd be a damn poor substitute.'

Table of Contents

I

II

III

IV

V

VI