by Alien Planet
There must be some special way of setting the key, I thought, and tried to turn it to a position halfway between on and off. It immediately slipped from my fingers to the off position and the panel slid to with a bang to cut off the pictured meal.
Once more I turned the key. The panel slipped back again, and a wholly new procession of dishes began. This time I gave my attention to the edges of the panel itself. At one corner there was a small projection that might be either a stud or the head of a screw. I tried pressing it, and when that was without result, remembered in time that I had never seen Ashembe use a button-control of any kind; everything had been turnable keys. With a flash of inspiration I turned the stud. Picture and voice ceased immediately; the screen, like the panel before it, slid back, and a moment later there appeared in the deep-recessed hole a round container of brass.*
* More likely the vessel was gold which, of course, has no particular value on Murashema.
I lifted it out and took it over to the table. At one side near the base, the inevitable key was placed in a countersunk niche. I turned it; there was a snap and the lid of the container came away in my hands revealing a dish like a soup-plate filled with a jelly from which a faint flower-like odor exuded.
A round flat spoon accompanied it. I tasted it—it was sweet and pungent, of the same character as the foods Ashembe had made on the Shoraru, and I ate with a relish sharpened by hunger. The dish finished, I returned to the screen, snapped it again into position by means of the stud and when another pictured dish appeared, ordered it by the same means as the last.
My dinner over, the problem of how to dispose of the dishes arose. I decided that they would probably be returnable by the same means that brought them, and snapping on the food key again, I turned the stud and when the panel slid back, balanced one of the used containers on top of the new one that appeared in the gap. There hardly seemed to be room for more.
I shot the screen back into position, waited a moment for the containers to be taken care of and then opened it again. Three containers came tumbling out of the narrow space and I opened them, to find two entirely new dishes of food in addition to the empty dish I had left there.
There was only one thing to do and that was to try more keys. I already knew what the second and third of the series would produce. The fourth snapped another panel back, and on the screen I saw a couple of diminutive figures in Murasheman costume who began to speak and move around. A play of some kind. I shut it off and tried the next key.
The result was truly startling. Instead of a single panel, half a dozen small ones at the base of the wall and all the way around slid back, revealing rows of tiny nozzles from which jets of water issued with such force that I was nearly carried off my feet. I hastily shut the panels, but the damage was done. My dining room was already half afloat and the water was pouring through into the living room. I snapped the door shut to cut off the floor, and balancing myself with some difficulty on the seat of one of the chairs to get out of the water, turned the key again in the hope that the faucets were accompanied by a drainage arrangement for disposing of the surplus water. It seemed that they were, for the floor rose no higher, but whenever I shut the panels, a residue of water remained on the floor. I turned to the next key.
This time I got a current of warm air from panels at top and bottom of the room. It dried the water in a trice, whistled through the room in a miniature gale and would even have carried off one of the spoons, had I not rescued it. It was all very useful, but I was getting no further with my problem of dirty dishes.
With the next key I finally achieved success. A panel next to the one that had brought me my dinner slid back on what would be called a dumbwaiter on Earth. In it I placed my dishes, shut the panel, and when I opened it again, found that they were gone.
By this time I was thoroughly tired. I decided to try the bedroom and its devices.
Luck was with me there. The first key I turned caused a big panel to slide back in the wall, revealing a bed on four wheels, which, animated by a spirit of its own, trundled out into the middle of the room. At the same time, apparently by means of some synchronized device, a slow current of cool, fresh air, from an indiscernible source, filled the whole apartment. Had it not been for the light which streamed uninterruptedly through the glass outer walls, the sleeping arrangements would have been perfect.
I woke after ten hours with a fine feeling of comfort and strength. After keying the bed back into place, I went to the dining room and had breakfast.
Breakfast out of the way, I started out with the determination of trying every key in the three rooms, which were extraordinarily bare by Earthly standards. I decided to try the living room. The second key would bring me an attendant, I recalled—so I tried the first key.
Bzzz-click! said a piece of machinery somewhere, and I stood in utter darkness! Fortunately my hand was still at the key. I snapped it back again and turned in time to catch sight of the quickly-rising shutters that closed off the glass wall of the apartment. If I had only known that the night before!
Passing over the second key, I tried the next. A portion of the wall slid back, revealing a screen like that from which my dinner had been ordered. On it appeared the picture of a Murasheman city, the towering walls glowing in the rays of a dawn sun. The point of view changed as one watched, the whole gorgeous structure appearing to sink and tilt. A moment more and I was looking down on it from above. Seen from overhead, the city was no longer a collection of towers but a flat, gray plain, with markings of various colors here and there, and little figures running about on it. It struck me suddenly that the whole city was roofed in.
The pictured city rose toward me, slipped a little to one side, and then stood still; the point of view changed and I saw two Murashemans alighting from a vehicle like a small edition of an airplane with diminutive wings, no propeller at all in front and a long, knife-like helicopter blade that was just ceasing to revolve. I heard the sound of their feet on the roof of the city and they began to talk. Another play.
The next key gave me what appeared at first to be a different type of play (or movie). I saw a group of men sitting in a large oval hall walled with windows and running into a series of arches at the top. One of them was making a speech. Though I could understand no word of what he was saying, there was something so arresting in his demeanor that I kept the screen on. To my surprise, it suddenly went blank, a voice spoke a few words in Murasheman and another picture began to form.
I saw the scrubby pines and rolling sandy hills of the hunting ground before me. A group of men clad, not in the neutral leather jerkins of the people of the hunting ground, but in bright uniforms of a peculiar electric magenta, were marching through the scrub. I noted that they wore closefitting metal helmets with nasals * and neckpieces and carried shields inscribed with some device.
* The noseguard of a helmet.
As I watched, I could catch the motion of others to left and ahead of the party, scouts thrown out to guard them against surprise. Then one in the center of the group, who wore a crested helmet as an indication of authority, turned to speak to one of the others, and I saw it was Ashembe!
The picture was already beginning to fade when, remembering my experience with the dinner, I leaped forward and found the little stud at one side of the panel. I turned it; the picture came back in full strength, and I was watching the expedition to the Shoraru.
Ashembe and his guard marched through the forest glades without pause or interruption. Once there was a flicker of motion among the trees at one flank, but it proved to be only one of the scouts who had killed some small animal and was bringing it in to hand to the main guard. Half an hour of watching this uneventful progress was plenty. I turned the stud.
Workmen, now, handling a tall, intelligent machine at the top of one of the cities. They were placing molds of various shapes in position and as they did so, the spout of the machine discharged a viscous, shining material of a pale yellow color. I let the picture
fade out to one of a seashore and white-winged boats speeding across an ocean as clear and blue as a sapphire. A voice accompanied this picture and a shadowy pointer appeared across it to indicate one of the craft. Then this too, faded.
Apparently this was the Murasheman version of a newspaper. This, like the play, would do for a little later. I snapped the key off and turned to the next one.*
* With this chapter Schierstedt's division of the manuscript into chapters ceases. The remainder is written hurriedly, and in some cases the text is so hopelessly muddled that I have not made any attempt to straighten it out. I have, however, taken the liberty of dividing the remainder of the manuscript into chapters.
XIV
A HIGH narrow panel revealed a row of little pulltabs with letters on them. I pulled at one and a thin sheet of metal attached to a spool somewhere came running out. It was covered with Murasheman characters arranged in columns, and as the first character of each word appeared the same, I guessed it was a directory of some kind.
By this time I was learning how things worked on Murashema, and anxious to try the device out I looked for the inevitable studs. I found seven of them at one side of the directory rolls, each marked with a character or two. Working on the analogy of our own telephones, I turned them all in succession, some to one point and some to another.
The result was not long in arriving. The panel of the directory slid to with a click, another and larger one opened. On the metal screen appeared the picture of a room similar to my own living room. At the moment it was vacant, but as I looked, the door at the bedroom side snapped back and there emerged an exceedingly fat and pink gentleman dripping wet and with a long red robe clutched around him.
He looked so much like a Thanksgiving Day pig, trussed up for roasting, that I could not forbear a burst of laughter. The irritation in his countenance increased, then changed to bewilderment; he said something and began to make motions which indicated a desire to decapitate me. I hurriedly turned the key that shut off the screen.
The next key in the series gave me nothing but a blank screen and a voice which repeated some question several times in a tone that grew increasingly querulous as I failed to reply and finally shut off altogether. The next key proved to be for the door into the hall, but I was afraid of being locked out.
The next key brought a gust of fresh and invigorating cold air, but the remainder was a complete washout. There was one for cleaning the room (which, of course, I turned on with the same blissful ignorance I had expended on the one in the dining room) and one for drying it, a key that showed an empty panel which slid back on an equally empty dumbwaiter. There was a row of studs beside this one, probably for ordering various objects, and I did not venture it.
This exhausted the resources of the living room and the dining room was already pretty well used up. There remained the bedroom. My first attempt here met with a reception that was dampening in both senses of the word. The bedroom door closed with a click, panels in the ceiling slid back with another, and I was treated to the Murasheman equivalent of a bath—a quick shower of hard, driving rain that wet my ragged clothes to my skin and filled the room with a couple of inches of water before I was able to turn it off.
In a moment or two I was shivering; the air was distinctly chilly by our standards, and I did not quite dare to peel off my clothes in view of the efficiency of the telephone system. The moment for an appeal to an attendant seemed to have arrived.
Leaving little puddles where my shoes squished on the floor, I walked across the living room, turned the second key and waited.
Not more than five minutes later one of those disembodied voices, which pop at you from all corners of Murashema, said something from the door. I opened it and the attendant entered. He was a little wizened man of perhaps fifty, dressed in sober blue clothes, loose jerkin sleeved to the elbows and provided with a belt and numerous pockets, closefitting trousers that ended at the knee and soft boots or shoes that ran up to meet the trousers. The shoulders of his jerkin bore a light blue emblem of complicated design, woven into the cloth. As I opened the door, he bent his knees and spread his hands in the gesture of greeting.
"Come in," said I. "Dry clothes? Can do?" And I held out the edge of my water-soaked coat.
For answer he produced from one of his pockets a tensal helmet, fitted it on and sat down in one of the chairs, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.
"I want some dry clothes, if it's not too much trouble,"
I said. "These are pretty ragged anyway. I can arrange to pay for them later, I suppose."
Up he jumped, snapping off the tensal and dashing across the room to the key which gave on the empty panel. When the voice spoke, he answered and a moment later a picture appeared on the panel.
A figure was turning and twisting before a background of yellow and gray not unlike that of the walls of my room. I saw it was a man, dressed in the same Murashema costume my attendant wore. His costume was crimson and white and he was booted and belted in black. My servant indicated the picture with his finger, making a gurgling noise, the purpose of which was apparently to express his extreme admiration for it. A moment later the figure stepped away to be replaced by one clad in vivid diagonals of blue and yellow. My assistant gave a little gasp of admiration and looked at me questioningly. I comprehended that this was a style show, but picture me in that combination! To the obvious disappointment of my attendant, I shook my head, and the figure passed from the screen. I negatived a variety of others until one appeared in a suit of gray-green with belt and boots in bright blue. I nodded and pointed and the attendant, with a look that clearly indicated his disgust for so anemic a taste, turned one of the studs at the side of the panel.
"Your name?" I asked him to fill in the time as it closed. Out came the tensal. "What is your name?" I repeated. "Fixi Hadeg," he said, removing the apparatus. "Biyamo Oksen." He pointed to the emblem on his shoulder. "Hadeg," I repeated, and added "Good." I had to halt his motion for the tensal to find out what this word meant.
A voice at the door announced a visitor and Hadeg hurried to open it to a melancholy looking individual in pale lavender, who pushed a machine from which projected a system of padded knobs. There was a moment's conversation and by means of signs and the unbuttoning of my coat I was informed that they wished me to undress. With a glance over my shoulder at the telephone panel, I did so, while the man with the machine surveyed my hair and beard with a covert interest, picking up each garment as I let it fall and examining the buttons. It was not until that moment that I noted that neither of the Murashemans had a single button visible anywhere.
Once stripped, I was steered to a position in front of the machine. The lavender man turned a key in it, and the knobs, actuated by the machinery within, began to move over my whole body, feeling it to the tune of a portentous clicking within the device. They tickled. Under Hadeg's directions, I turned slowly round, the knobs felt gently down my back, and then still guided by my attendant I thrust first one foot and then the other into holes at the base of the instrument. The man in lavender nodded, shut off his machine and took it out again.
The next question was finding something to do. "Can't I learn Murasheman?" I asked when Hadeg had his tensal on again, "or have you some other means of amusement?"
He nodded brightly, stepped to the telephone-television panel and turned the key as I fled to the bedroom. I don't - know whom he called. They had a long conversation, at the end of which he came to get me and, turning to the newspaper key, showed me Ashembe sitting with his men in a circle, eating. By the inefficient method of signs, I was at last made to understand that learning Murasheman would have to wait until the return of my friend. Seeing that I had grasped the idea at last, Hadeg turned to one of the plays, and when I disapproved this, for lack of better occupation, returned to the panel by means of which he had summoned the tailor.
Upon its surface there appeared a row of weapons and armor. I shook my head again. Hadeg sighed and spoke a
few words into the machine. The weapons gave place to a representation of the cubical chessboard. At last there was something I could understand. I nodded eagerly.
Hadeg turned a stud at the side of the panel and a moment later a clear voice spoke out into the room and he snapped open the dumbwaiter to reveal the chessboard. It was considerably larger than the one Ashembe had made and the pieces were beautifully worked, whether carved or molded, I could not tell. (Though from what I have learned since, I assume they were cast—the Murasheman dislikes the handwork of carving.) In a few minutes Hadeg and I were deep in the game and we played comfortably along until he led the way to the dining room for lunch.
We had hardly finished the meal before the voice from the next room spoke again, and we went to take my new clothes from the dumbwaiter. There was a closefitting undergarment just short of knee length and of silky texture; the outer garments were simply the boots, trousers and jerkin like those I described Hadeg and the tailor as wearing, with the exception that they were of the color I had chosen and that the shoulder bore a white star, woven into the green of the cloth. Of buttons there was not one. The clothes were secured by a series of tongue-snaps and the belt closed around my middle by the same means.
