The Enormous Room
Page 8
VIII
By Tuesday they were all in a state of anxiety and scarcely-containedrage. Their surveillance was casual, often non-existent, yet not oncehad they been able to block the wall of their prison or open the greatdoor of the laboratory. Circumstances, chance, fate, whatever you wantedto call it, something had stopped them every time.
There were three giants in the lab today. Sometimes there would be oneof them, sometimes as many as five; but always there would be the onewho had first removed them from the box, who seemed to be the headscientist, giving orders, bullying the others in the queer emotional wayof these creatures. Today there were three. As usual, when they had letthe humans out, the lab was clean and orderly. The sloppy scientists hadvery efficient janitors, thought Adam. By this time the place was ashambles.
Out in the lab, there rose the honking sound of pain and anger--some ofthe noises they made, especially the commands, were recognizable now tothe people--and a sharp slap. Then Mrs. Full hurried into the box,carrying a number of two-foot-square slabs under her arm.
"What happened, ma'am?"
"Hello, Adam. The criminal Watkins played a few bars of a real song onthat device, and the brutes hit him." She laid down the slabs. "Ourharmonies enrage them, I think perhaps cause them actual pain. They heldthe sides of their heads where ears ought to be, and shook themselvesand made those hideous noises."
"They hit me when I sang the other day," said Adam, "remember?"
"That's right. Look here." She sat down, pulled one of the thick slabsonto her lap. "I found these under a shelf out there. One of thecreatures knocked them off and I picked them up. I wondered why they hadbeen up there, when so many stacks of them just sit around on thefloor."
"I never saw any like these, ma'am. They have that little ridge on theedge there, and the border of different colored stuff around 'em."
"Watch what happens when I push the ridge upward, Adam. It's like anautomatic button." She pressed it and the slab, at first gay orange,turned pale blue; on it appeared three lines of squiggly characters,like a cross between Arabic writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
"A magic slate," said Adam. "That's neat!"
"You haven't seen anything yet," she told him, and pushed the ridgeagain. The writing disappeared, and out of the slab leered a bullgorilla, paws on chest, eyeing Adam with beady, ridge-browedmalevolence. It took a second for sanity to convince him that it wasonly a picture: three-dimensional, on a two-dimensional sheet ofplastic, but so real he half-expected the beast to charge out at him."What about that?" she asked.
He hit his thigh with a fist. It was a photograph, he imagined, but madeby an illusory process so far ahead of anything humanity could producethat it seemed he might glimpse whatever was behind the gorilla if heput his eyes down to the side of the slate. "Gosh!" he said, feeling ita little naive but afraid to swear in front of her. "Isn't thatsomething!"
"It's a book," she said, "an album of photographs. Look here."
The next picture was an equally miraculous one of half a dozen monkeyssitting on a tree trunk. Adam looked at it, then at the farthest trunkin their box of a room. Undeniably it was the same one.
Under the picture was a line of squiggles that probably spelled out thescientists' equivalent of "monkeys."
"They were here, in this place," said Adam. "The giants must haveexperimented on them too." He turned his eyes up to the woman and sawthat she was white and drawn. "What happened to them?" he asked. "Therearen't any monkeys here now."
"Exactly," she said. She put on the next picture, and after a moment thenext.
Dogs greeted his eyes, so real he could almost hear them pant; a cowgazed stolidly at him; a cheetah sat on a mound of straw with clown'shead cocked inquisitively; two cockatoos perched in rigid still life onthe silver rod of the prison box.
"What happened to them?" he asked again.
"The experiments ended," she said.
Then there flashed out a thing like a blue sponge with legs, a thingwhich sat in the cat's-cradle they had speculated so much about. Fromits center two ruby eyes blazed with three-dimensional fire. _That_never came from Earth! Mars or Venus could have produced it, maybe, or aplanet so far from Earth that it bore no name. He said as much, hisvoice quavering.
She stared at him. Moistening her lips, she said, "If that was here, inthis box, then _where are we_?"
He shook his head. He could not even guess. "What's next?"
The last picture in the slate was a group portrait of himself, theFulls, Summersby, Watkins, and Porfirio Villa.
When was that taken? They were sitting in a circle on the straw, eatingsomething. Peering closely, he thought it must be the vegetables, forthere was a small heap of round things next to Calvin Full which wereprobably buckeyes. Sunday night, then.
"They must have taken it through the food panel," he said. "Are thereany more pictures?"
"That's all. I don't know what's in the other ones yet."
Calvin came in. She handed him the first "book" and showed him how tooperate it. He flipped through it and when he came to the monstrosity inthe web his eyes widened. "What is it?" he asked, in the hard twang ofhis region.
"A guinea pig, like all the others including us," his wife said.
"The tree trunks are explained now," said Adam, half to himself. "Thesand box, too. That isn't a very scientific-looking treatise, but Iguess it's more of a memento, a record of us all." He raised his browsin a facial shrug. "Us and the monkeys," he said. "Gosh!"
* * * * *
She took the next big slate on her lap. It was lavender. The first fewpages to appear were covered with the curious writing, very large andonly a few words to a page. Then came pictures of many things, notphotographs but drawings and paintings in vivid color, and the thingscould in no way be linked to science. There were portraits of the tallcreatures themselves, in various settings, some in labs like this one,some outdoors in a landscape that was predominantly scarlet and green;there were group scenes in which they ate odd-looking foods and walkeddown blue pathways and examined strange pets and familiar animals. Undereach picture was a short grouping of squiggles, marks, scribbles, etc.
"Can that be a science book?" asked Cal, leaning over his wife'sshoulder. The beings were pictured as simply as possible, in no minutedetail whatever, and their activities were of the dullest and mostprosaic sort.
This pattern was followed through page after page--a picture (some ofthem were of things so alien they could not be placed by either theFulls or himself), a single character, then a short word and another,long or short as the case might be. After a dozen of them had flashed onand off Adam noticed that the large character was always repeated at thebeginning of the last word.
When he realized what it meant, the whole business clicked into focus.The whole damned deal, the lab and the scientists and the experimentsand the meaning of the four magic slates, and everything. There was noparticular reason why this last slate should have done it, for it was nomore suggestive than many other things that he had seen; it was simplythe last piece of evidence, the final push that sent him headlong intoterrible knowledge.
Carefully, desperately, he went over it all in his mind, while the Fullsspoke in low tones.
_God_, he thought, _oh, God!_ He was shivering now. He was moreterrified than he had ever been before. His tongue felt thick.
The punishments, the high stool and the arbitrary cuffs and swats; thegadgets, the mazes, the puzzles; were they all a part of theconditioning to neurosis of a scientific experiment? They were not.
* * * * *
Adam had found an answer, the only possible answer. The fourth slate hadgiven it to him, although a hundred hints of it had shown up every day.His psych teacher would be ashamed of him for muddling along so manydays, believing in a theory that was so plainly impossible.
He addressed Mrs. Full. She was a little sharper than her husband, andthis was more in her line, too. He had to make her
discover the sameanswer. He had to _know_ it was right. And then he had to get out ofthat place in a hell of a hurry.
"Ma'am, you know what this is?"
"No, Adam."
"Look here. See this big letter, repeated at the first of this word?"
"Yes."
He flipped a few "pages" past. "It's the same with all of them, you see?And the middle word is always the same--four curly letters. You knowwhat that middle word is?"
"No, Adam."
"It's 'stands for' or 'means.'" He stared at her. "Get it?"
She thought an instant. "Of course. Adam, that's very clever of you."She wasn't scared yet. She hadn't seen the implication.
"'Stands for'?" Calvin repeated.
"A stands for Apple," explained Mrs. Full. "Or A stands for Airship, orwhatever it might be. It's an alphabet book, dear."
She still hadn't caught it. "Remember when Mr. Full built the cubbyholehere," Adam said, "and the giant knocked it down? Why was he angry?"
"I suppose they want to observe us without any hindrance."
"No, ma'am," he said with conviction. "That was simple frustration. Theywant to see everything, whether it's interesting to them or not. Theyaren't scientifically disappointed if they can't, they're justfrustrated. Think of the punishment we get, slaps, the dunce stool."
"As though we were children," she said.
"Exactly. Now, here are these books. An alphabet book, and these others.What age would you figure them for? You taught kindergarten, you said.This is something I wouldn't know."
"I'd say they're for fairly bright children about five or six yearsold."
"Or for us," said her husband, "when they start to teach us theirlanguage."
"They are children's books, though, with short sentences and the gaudypictures our own children love." Mrs. Full stared at Adam. Her browneyes widened. "Adam," she said, "you've guessed something."
"You guess it too," he pleaded. She had to corroborate his own idea."Think of all the things about them we haven't been able to make out."
"Nursery books...." she said slowly. "Instability to the point ofinsanity, if you found it in adult humans. Sloppiness and inefficiency,when these machines point to a high degree of neatness of mind.Wandering attention, inability to concentrate for long periods. Positivetantrums over nothing. Cruelty and affection mixed without rhyme orreason." She took him by the arm, her fingers strong with fear andurgency. "Tell me, Adam."
* * * * *
His breath hissed. He was filled with panic. Where there had been onlyanxiety for his own life and his world, there was now a fearfulknowledge that he could scarcely bear without shrieking. She had it too,but she didn't dare say it. It was a horrible thing.
"These machines," he said, "aren't scientific testers at all."
"Yes?"
"They're toys."
"Yes?"
"We aren't guinea pigs. We're--we're pets. They've had other animals,from Earth and from God knows where, and now they have people."
"Yes. Go on, say it." She thrust her face fiercely up to his.
"Those twelve-foot 'scientists' are kids," he said. Then he stopped anddeliberately got his cracking voice under control. She was just asfrightened as he was but she wasn't yelling. "It's the only answer.Everything fits it. They're about five years old."
Calvin Full frowned. "If that's true, we're in trouble."
"You're damn right we're in trouble!" said Adam. "A kid doesn't takecare of a pet like a scientist takes care of a guinea pig or a whiterat. If it annoys him, he's liable to pick it up and throw it at a wall!I might get my head torn off for singing, or you could be dismemberedfor making a mistake with one of those toys."
"Some children tear the wings off butterflies," said Mrs. Full. Shestood up. "I'll go and tell the others," she said firmly. "It doesn'tseem to me that we have much time left."
"If we start to bore them--" began Adam, and shut up.
She went out. In about five minutes everyone had come into the box butWatkins, who was playing the color organ. They discussed the discoveryin low voices, as though the alien children might be listening; Villaand Summersby examined the slates. After a while Watkins was pushed in,looking rather worn and frayed. Adam was standing in the far cornerunder the silver web. He saw the wall start to slide shut, rememberedhis dowel, and tried to see if it was still in place at the bottom ofthe wall.
He couldn't see it. Maybe it blended with the color behind it, or maybesomebody had accidentally kicked it out of place.
The wall slid shut.