“We sat on both sides of the table, on benches as rough as the table, and he—Mr. Wilson—gave us some papers of questions with places for answers.”
Dr. Johnson scribbled on his pad.
“The note I just made—” he waved a bland, scrubbed hand—“is to the effect that nothing these people—the Wilsons—may have asked you or the others is to be construed as reflecting on you. And, Lester—your answers as you indicated them last night, were creditable to you. This at least, is plain sailing—a simple recheck. Try to give us again some of these interesting ‘I. Q.’ test questions. You will not be interrupted.”
“Yes.” Lester thought for a moment. “Well, I’d say they were somewhat anthropological, in the ideological sense. There were about twenty questions. The first was, not quite verbatim of course, like this… ‘Certain Oceanic Cultures have held themselves to be descended, variously, from the Sun—also from the Shark. Is such a belief reasonable, unreasonable, or a little of both?’ There were check marks, so you could indicate; and then a Yes-No double square for a specific summarizing answer to a sort of resume question, an overall evaluation, and that question, separately indented, was briefer and just said ‘Are the above theories in your opinion completely ridiculous?’ I skipped the first part of the question and checked ‘Yes’ for ridiculous.”
The heads of the doctors wagged in silent approval. Lester continued.
“Question No. Two. That, I think, was the one about Science. It read this way. ‘Science has made available considerable exact data, and drawn many conclusions predicated on such data and on acceptable points of view in theory. Should an educated and intelligent man not necessarily versed in any specific Science accept all of the definitely expressed opinions of scientifically trained men as being valid and final?’ Again I checked the Yes square.”
He was basking a little now in the approval that filled the room like a friendly atmosphere. Though there was bound to be a snag—He hurried a little.
“There came next seventeen questions you might find anywhere. Most of them concerned covered axiomatic facts. One was, is a straight line always the shortest distance between two points? Another was, is the Earth the only planet capable of sustaining life? Another—”
Dr. Johnsons smile was positively revivifying.
“I promised not to interrupt—” he said ever so suavely. “But our fair witness and adviser will forgive me for saving you trouble. You’ve corroborated your memory sufficiently—to all the seventeen next questions, you answered, very naturally, Yes.”
“Yes,” echoed Lester Norman. “To all but one. I was worried about it! Not that I thought there were other possible reasonable answers, but you know how it is; you don’t pass any test by sticking to one answer all the time. I really tried to find some other points of view—I couldn’t—”
“Ha! Ha! Nor could I have. Nor you, Chenkov?”
The soft shy voice answered in its little conscious accent. “Surely, nor I.”
“Yes to them all, with one exception, then,” said Dr. Johnson. “And the last question again? Question No. Twenty, this would be? Just repeat it for the memory check.”
“‘Would you be willing to discuss affairs of the greatest gravity with representatives from another planet?’ That was Part (a) of Question Twenty, and its Part (b) read ‘Would you accompany visitors from another planet on a cruise to involve educational broadening and discussion as indicated above, traveling by what your newspapers and others designate as Flying Saucers?’”
There was silence now, thick and palpable. Lester knew he was running near the edge of safety. No one said anything now, no one helped him, and he ended, his voice trailing: “After that question there were several blank lines following an instruction which read ‘State reasons.’”
The silence again, and then a laugh. Dr. Johnson’s famous, contagious laugh, at its best.
“All right, my boy. No need to hesitate over that one, I’m sure!” he declaimed gaily.
“1 remember your answers. There you could use the ‘No’ column that had been worrying you. You answered No to (a) and (b); and under ‘State reasons’—if you’ll give us that again—”
Lester cleared his throat nervously.
“Under reasons. Yes. Of course, I said there were no such things as Flying Saucers, and people representing themselves as coming from other planets would be impostors, and either madmen, pranksters, or, possibly, spies.”
The little nurse’s brown eyes caught Lester’s for a moment. They were, he thought, enigmatic. No doubt because she knew that just ahead was the fatal rock of last night’s shipwreck.
To put things off, perhaps, Lester made his little digression.
“Because it was—awfully important to me, I’d like to repeat just one of the questions we skipped,” he offered. “The one about—about—love,” (And why, he thought, do I balk at that? At the word.. People admit love to be a fact—or do they? Sex, friendship, the joint enterprise we call marriage, yes…but people aren’t very romantic about love. The word isn’t really used too often, except of course in Church where ministers talked about God’s love all they like.) He resumed: “The question was—‘Do you believe in love at first sight? and is love based on spiritual affinity?’
“We overlooked that I gave that a No answer too,” he reminded them. “That answer I’d have changed if I could—because Valerie—”
“But,” Chenkov injected oily—“How could you? It was a ridiculous question. Love grows out of many things, if you care to use the word, which has an unfortunate halo of bygone romanticism about it. It grows from congeniality, propinquity, common interest, a reasonable trust and confidence perhaps—”
“That’s about what I said,” Lester agreed sadly. “That one said give reasoning, also. And I did. About as you put it.”
”Naturally,” said Dr. Johnson.
”Naturally,” said Dr. Chenkov.
”Your girl, Valerie. She saw your answers?” asked Brown Eyes.
”All our answers were read out,” Lester said, speaking to her. But Dr. Johnson said, “Wait,” and went and pushed the call bell.
“And start the recorder, Chenkov,” he directed. “We may want a detailed check of the rest of it. I buzzed Dr. Schwartz, he thought the superintendent of the hospital ought to be in on this. Just in case.”
It took only a moment, and Dr. Schwartz was in the room too, and seated. He hadn’t been far off. There was an eagerness about him that Lester didn’t like. He was a tall, thin man, very dark—his name Schwartz, German for black, was appropriate to him. His features were thin and sharp almost vulpine. He leaned forward resting dark, slender, hairy hands on his knees—studying Lester, who now looked away from him.
Dr. Johnson prompted Lester, for the first time sharply.
“Then what happened? Briefly, but leaving nothing out!” he demanded.
“The Wilsons were across from the table, by a big unglassed window, kind of leaning against the wall. They collected the papers and glanced over them together—just four, it didn’t take long. Wilson said—I want to read your answers back to you. Maybe when you’ve all heard each other’s—somebody will want to change an answer. Feel free to do so.”
A white moth flew in at the unscreened hospital window and went flopping around the shaded lamp.
“It was amazing to me, the way some of the others had answered. Peter Kyle, principally, had simply refused to answer; most of his, spaces were blank. Wilson read his out first, and asked him why he did that; and Pete said something like, Well, I feel as though I haven’t the context or the background. I know what people would—usually—expect me to answer; but I feel as though I didn’t know the score. You people aren’t doing this for a joke, so you have in your mind—something. I’d have to talk to you about these things.”
“Then, Wilson said a funny thing, I thought. He smiled at Pete,
and he said—‘But you have answered.’ And he made a little note on the corner of Pete’s paper and put it in his pocket. Then he read off Valerie’s signature; he took hers next.”
“Go on,” said Dr. Johnson.
“Valerie isn’t like other people, she never was, I’d often noticed the way she thinks for herself—tries things out and makes them come out some other way, maybe just to see if she can. Well, this is what she made of Question One, Doctor. That was about the aboriginal beliefs in descent from the Sun, or from, for instance a shark. Valerie’s comment—not verbatim—was to the effect that Why not? If the Sun’s light made plant life grow on Earth and then animal life; and if the evolutionary theories were right about the fish crawling out of the water and up on the earth before there was animal life at all, and the days of Genesis being long, long days equal maybe almost to millennia, so far as she knew—Why were they wrong? Certainly they were not being ridiculous.
“She went down the line like that, too. She believed in love needing to include a spiritual affinity, though it was very rare; perhaps sometimes you experienced it when you weren’t looking for it and tried not to recognize it—if people followed their hearts and their instincts, maybe it would show up recognizably in more lives.
“And as to people on other planets, why not, again, why not? If it wasn’t possible for carbon compound beings to exist, there might be countless other forms of shaped and informed intelligent energy and purpose and—and soul, she said! Electrical beings; beings who breathed hydrogen; but so far as that went, why carbon compound oxygen breathers could live inside the Moon, or under the atmosphere of Venus, or partly inside Mars—Scientists had to back up from their theories too often to be so dogmatic! She really went to town, she really wrote a thesis! Naturally, she would be honored and happy to deal with people out of Flying Saucers from other planets—she had always halfway dared to hope—There should be people elsewhere in the Universe made in God’s image, and a little more civilized—”
He checked sharply, and looked at the faces ringing him round.
“You won’t make trouble for her—wherever she is?—And, you don’t think I had ever encouraged her in her theories?”
“We don’t know where she is,” Dr, Johnson soothed him. “And you are only quoting. We asked you to do that.… What did the other girl make of the concentrated idiocy? And tell us again, first, just why Valerie’s answers upset you so? You might have talked her out of her foolishness, once you found out—after all, she probably is a science fiction reader, and they get queer ideas, but it’s mostly on the surface. You could have straightened her out, perhaps.”
“I never had a chance to think about that,” Lester said thickly, bitterly. “But let me take it in order. I’ll get it straighter—”
Dr. Schwartz spoke for first time.
“Yes. Let him take it in order. I want this straight,” he said.
“You asked what Irene made out of her questionnaire,” Lester resumed. “She had drawn a line through the whole thing, and written one sentence at the bottom.”
“This Wilson read that aloud too?”
“He read it aloud,” Lester told him. “It was brief enough, I think I can give it verbatim. Irene had written ‘Since I can’t be as I was after this, and since I understand—a little—will you take me with you, please?’”
“Wilson commented on that—I think you said!”
“Wilson said: ‘It’s the thought waves. She’s received from Dikon.” Then he called that name—Dikon. And—there was another one in the room with us. A man—”
“A man in a business suit like Wilson’s, who also shone—and who slipped in through the door you weren’t watching—or a window—” Dr. Johnson’s tone was a mixture of irony and practicality.
“Shone!” Lester exclaimed, dreamy in spite of himself. Remembering a dream—or an impossible happening that ought to be a dream—
“He was—almost all shine. He didn’t have on a business suit—I’d say—maybe a tunic? I—I—I saw the door outlined behind him—Damn it, I’m trying to say, through him. He was—too handsome—a transparency—he couldn’t be real. But he was real!”
“He wasn’t!” rebuked Dr. Johnson sharply. “We’ve conceded the luminosity in the case of the Wilsons. They were out to—Well, I have a theory that will hold water as to their purpose. Anyhow, if they were so smart with Halloween illusion, they could have gone a bit further. Thrown some kind of image—” He looked around the room. Dr. Schwartz inclined his head, thinking. Dr. Chenkov was staring a little blankly. Dr. Johnson challenged the blankness.
“Well, Chenkov, why not? You thought the luminosity might have been real, a real thing—chemically produced. I’m trying to give Lester’s impressions a possible basis in fact. The Wilsons accomplished, I think, just what they set out to do. Why not a luminous image, something that looked like pure light, even like an angel from Heaven if you like—and something quite naturally transparent. Why not?”
Chenkov rallied at his superior’s tone.
“Why not?” he agreed; but there was a faintness about it.
“You can agree, Lester?” Dr. Johnson prompted him in turn. “A produced image, that appeared to be very bright, like light, but was transparent. Not an entity. You agree?”
“Then what happened to Irene?” Lester protested desperately.
“Nothing at all. She went out through the door and found another boat or something. Had enough of it, and left the rest of you there,” said Dr. Johnson.
But Lester was in the grip of the thing that had banished caution last night, that must banish it now. They shouldn’t have driven him through all this again, he thought desperately. Because he had seen what he had seen—and heard what he had heard—
“Mrs. Wilson went over and stood by Irene. ‘Dikon has loved you for some time,’ she told her. ‘And that is why you want to be one of us. Only—you can’t go back! There’s a difficult knack to taking on the non-radiant flesh of you earth people—Dikon will never be able to do it temporarily as my husband and I can do. He has—other places to go, where his vibrations are stepped up even higher than is normal for us, and this makes it impossible for him to lower his at all. It simply can’t be done. There is only one way—’
“She stopped. I think she stopped because of the way Irene and this Dikon were looking at each other. It was like two people who had belonged together for all their lives—longer than that!—for ages—I know I m talking like a fool and you’re recording it, but that’s what it was like. And—slowly, as though they were drawn—they were moving toward each other—And Mr. Wilson called suddenly: ‘Irene, wait! If you touch him—it will be like touching the lightning. But if you aren’t afraid, it will be quite all right but think—Think, first—’
“I don’t think she listened to him at all. I don’t think she cared about anything—except this Dikon.
“They met just inside the doorway. There was a blinding flash of light—and a funny sharp smell like lightning striking too close—
“The doorway was empty. And the man who called himself Wilson said to Pete— ‘You understand that they belonged to each other?’ And Valerie—ran to Pete and put her arms around him and said, ‘Oh, Pete, you do understand! Don’t care, don’t be hurt— We’ve learned so much and there’s so much more—’”
There was menace in the room.
Chenkov’s soft voice broke it. “Even with Halloween tricks and lots of lighting, we need some shading of that from you, Lester. Mr. Norman, I should say we are not really that well acquainted even in your free and easy American way. Maybe, Mr. Norman, the young lady ran head on into some electrical circuit that made the illusions. Maybe, even, there was a stroke of summer lightning. But what I cannot understand—Mr. Norman, did you not seek an explanation? Did you not do anything, for instance, to show this girl you seem to have lost so unwillingly, this Valerie, how silly it
all was—Did you not try to, well, as in the books, to hold the lady?”
Lester swallowed with difficulty, and resumed, under the same compulsion to tell the truth.
“I heard Mrs. Wilson saying to me very softly ‘Lester, you can see it has all to work out this way.’ And then I forgot everything, because the glare of the flash had half blinded me, and now I could see again.
“I could see the door, and outside the moonlight, white as silver on the lonely beautiful trees and shrubs and grass of the desolate island. I could see walking through the moonlight the two of them—both now so bright—with their arms around each other—going away from us. And Valerie and Pete were in the room, but it was true that it had to be that way—they were looking at each other almost as Irene and that Dikon had looked at each other—they had gone away from me—”
Brown Eyes gave a little gasp and sobbed once, softly.
“Oh, Lester, you didn’t have to say it again—” she breathed.
“But he did say it again,” Dr. Schwartz remarked in a satisfied voice. “You had a theory about motive, Dr. Johnson. A motive for the Wilson couple. Will you state it clearly?”
“Lester will do that, poor boy. Just as last night, he’s going to be completely and fatally frank—” said Dr. Johnson. “The motive, Lester. We have all the rest—as you insist it happened. Now, the motive.”
“I own this big research plant. Everybody knows I inherited it and that—Well, it means income to me. A big income on top of a fortune that’s big enough too.” Lester was very tired. It was true. As last night, now that he had lived all that again he was worn out, and didn’t care about anything, really. “I let other people run it for me, and they are doing just what still other people want them to do with it. If Valerie and I married, the Wilsons said it would be a waste, and Pete would just go on working for me.
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 50
