Element 79 Read online

  Bill Bailey greeted each of the four women in his own broad style. For Giselda Horne, in a cleaned dressing gown, it was no more than a terse, “Take it off, love, come in an’ cool down.”

  He didn’t get far with Hattie Foulds, a farmer’s wife from northern Lancashire. To his, “Come in, love, come right in ’ere by me. Come in to mi lap an’ smoulder,” she instantly retorted with, “Who’s this bloody great bag of wind?”

  Nevertheless, it was clear from the beginning that Hattie Foulds and Bill Bailey made a “right” pair. As the days and weeks passed, they made every conceivable attempt to get into physical contact with each other. It became a part of our everyday existence to walk past some spot from which the sound of violent retching emerged. The other women affected disgust, but I suspect their lives would also have been the poorer without these strange sexio-gastronomic outbursts. Bailey never ceased to talk about it. “Can’t even match your fronts together before it hits you,” he would say, “but we’ve got to keep on trying. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”

  The two remaining women were much the most interesting to me. One was an Englishwoman, a face I had seen before somewhere. When I asked her name, she simply said she had been christened “Leonora Mary” and that we were to call her what we pleased. She came in that first day wearing a full-length mink coat. She was moderately tall, slender, dark with fine nose and mouth. A long wolf whistle from Bailey was followed by, “Enjoy yer shower, baby?”

  This must be the woman Bailey had seen. She must have got herself trapped in the deluge exactly as I had done. With most of her clothing wet she was using the mink coat as a covering.

  The remaining woman was Chinese. She came in wearing a neat smock. She looked silently from one to another of us, her face like stone. Under her imperious gaze, Bailey cracked out with, “Eee, look what we’ve got ’ere. ’Ad yer cherry plucked, love?”

  They wanted to know about the stars, about the way Daghri and I figured out where we were going and so on and so forth. As the hours and days passed we watched the planets move slowly across the walls. We watched the inner planets getting fainter and fainter while Jupiter hardly seemed to change. But after three weeks even Jupiter was visibly dimming. The ship was leaving the solar system.

  Of all these things everybody understood something. It was wonderful to see how suddenly acute the apparently ignorant became as soon as they realized the extent to which their fate depended on these astronomical matters. Throughout their lives the planets had been remote, recondite things. Now they were suddenly as real to everybody as a sack of potatoes, more real, I thought, for I doubted if any of us would ever see a potato again (erroneously, as it turned out).

  Of the Einstein time dilatation, they could make out nothing at all, however. It was beyond them to understand how in only a few years we could reach distant stars. I just had to tell them to accept it as a fact. Where were were going, they all wanted to know. As if I could answer such a question! All I could say was that we had somehow been swept up by a raiding party, similar to our own parties rounding up animals for a zoo. It all fitted. Wasn’t this exactly the kind of setup we ourselves provided for animals in a zoo? The boxes to sleep in, the regular food, the restrictions on mating, the passages and the cathedral hall to exercise in?

  My longest conversations were with Daghri and with the aristocratic Mary. Mary and I found that so long as we kept about three feet apart we could go pretty well anywhere together at any time without falling into the troubles which were constantly afflicting Bill Bailey and Hattie Foulds. Quite early on, Mary wanted to know why we were so hermetically sealed inside this place. Animals in a terrestrial zoo can at least see their captors, she pointed out. They breathe the same air, they glower at each other from opposite sides of the same bars. Not in the snake house or the fish tank, I answered. We look in on snakes, we look in on fish, but it is doubtful if either look out on us in any proper sense. Only for birds and mammals is there much in the way of reciprocity in a terrestrial zoo. Mary burst out, “But snakes are dangerous.”

  “So may we be. Oh, not with poison like snakes, perhaps with bacteria. This place may be a veritable horror house so far as our captors are concerned.”

  I was much worried about the Chinese girl, Ling was her name, for she had the problem of language to contend with as well as the actual situation. It was also very clear that Ling intended to be harshly uncooperative. I asked Mary to do what she could to break the ice. Mary reported that Ling “read” English but didn’t speak it, not yet. Gradually as the days passed, we managed to thaw out the girl to some small degree. The basic trouble was that Ling had been a politician of quite exalted status in one of the Chinese provinces. She had been a person of real consequence, not in virtue of birth, but from her own determination and ability. She gave orders and she expected obedience from those around her. Her glacial attitude to us all was a general expression of contempt for the degenerate West.

  Our clothes, while easily cleaned in the showers, became more and more battered and out of shape as time went on. We dressed as lightly as possible consistent with modesty, a commodity variable from person to person. One day Bill Bailey, clad only in underpants, came into the cathedral, threw himself on the floor and said, “Oo, what a bitch! A right bitch, that. Used to run real cockfights back on the farm, illicit-like. She’d take on any half-dozen men after a fight. Says it used to key her up, put her in tone. That’s what we need ’ere, Professor, a bloody great cockfight.”

  Ling, who was standing nearby, looked down at Bailey. “That is the sort of man who should be whipped, hard and long. In my town he would have been whipped for all the people to see.”

  The girl’s expression was imperious, although her voice was quiet. Because of this, because also of her curious accent and use of words—which I have not attempted to imitate—the others, particularly Bailey, did not realize what she had said. To me the girl’s attitude demanded action. I took her firmly by the arm and marched her along the passages until we came to the first open cell. Strangely enough, this action induced no sense of sickness in either of us. “Now see here, Ling, you’re not in China anymore. We’re all captives in this place. We’ve got to keep solidly together, otherwise we’re lost. It’s our only strength, to give support to each other. If it means putting up with a man like Bailey, you’ve just got to do it.”

  Even in my own ears this sounded flat and feeble, which is always the way with moderation and reason; it always sounds flat and feeble compared to an unrelenting fanatic or bigot. Certainly Ling was not impressed. She looked me over coolly, head to toe, and made the announcement, “The time will come when it will be a pity you are not ten years younger.”

  I was taking this as a left-handed compliment when she added, “I shall choose the Australian.”

  “I think you’ll have trouble from the American girl.”

  Ling laughed—I suppose it was a laugh, the eyes, I noticed, were an intense green, the teeth a shining white. The girl must be using the soapy solution in the shower baths. It tasted pretty horrible but it allowed one to clean away the vegetable marrow food on which we were obliged to subsist.

  I gave it up. The best I could see in Ling’s point of view was that her ideology represented a last link with Earth. Perhaps it was her way of keeping sane, but it was entirely beyond me to understand it. I was much more impressed at the way Ling always contrived to look neat, always in the same smock.

  We were undereating, because unless you were actively hungry there was no point in consuming the tasteless vegetable marrow stuff. It was mushy with a lot of moisture in it. Even so, I was surprised we managed without needing to drink, for there was no possibility of drinking the one source of fluid, the liquid in the shower bath. I could only think we were generating a lot of water internally, by oxidizing the vegetable marrow material. Every now and then we had an intense desire to chew something really hard. I used to bite away at the cord from my rucksack, often for an hour at a time.


  The natural effect of the undereating was that we were nearly all losing weight. I had lost most of the excess ten pounds or so which I never seemed to get rid of back on Earth. Ernst Schmidt had lost a lot more, so much in fact that he had discarded my anorak. He went around now only in the bathing trunks which he had tightened in quite a bit. Getting fit had become a passion with the German. He had taken to running through the passages according to a systematic schedule, ten laps from the cathedral and back again for every hour he was awake. Sometimes I accompanied him, to give my muscles a little exercise, but I could never be so regular about it. He commented on this one day.

  “A strange difference of temperament, Professor. We often have these little runs together, but you can’t quite keep them up. Of course, I understand you have not the same need as I. But even if you had the need, you couldn’t keep them up. No, I think not.”

  “Personal temperament?”

  “It is an interesting question. Both personal and national, I think. A misleading thing in politics—and in business—is the description given to your people. Anglo-Saxons, eh? What is an Anglo-Saxon, Professor, a sort of German, maybe?”

  “We’re always supposed to be a kind of first cousins. There’s the similarity of language, for one thing.”

  “Accidental, imposed by a handful of conquerors. Look at me. I speak English, if you will pardon me, I speak it with an American accent. Does that make me an American? Obviously not. I speak this way because Americans have conquered my particular world, the business world.”

  “Go on.”

  “It is a pity we have no mirrors in this place. If we had a mirror, let me tell you how you would see yourself. You would see a tallish man, with a fair skin, a big red beard, and blue eyes. You would see a Celt, not a German. Your people are Celts, Professor, not Germans, and that is the true source of the difference in our temperaments, you and I.”

  “So you think it goes a long way back?”

  “Three thousand years or more, to the time when we Germans threw you Celts out of Europe. Yes, we understand a lot about each other, you and I, but we understand each other because we have fought each other for a long time now, not because we are the same.”

  I was surprised at the turn of the conversation. Schmidt must have noticed something of this in my face. “Ah, you wonder how I can tell you these things? Because these things are my real interest, not the packing of meat, for who should be interested in the packing of meat?”

  “What does all this lead you to?”

  “We Germans can pursue a goal relentlessly to the end. You Celts can never do so. You have what I think is called an easygoing streak. It was this streak which made the Romans admire you so much in ancient times. But it was this weakness which very nearly cost you the whole of Europe, my friend.”

  “To be easygoing can mean reserve, you know, reserve energy in times of real crisis.”

  “All, you are thinking of winning the last battle. It was like that in each of the wars of this century, wasn’t it? You won the last battles, you won those wars. Yet from victory each time you emerged weaker than before. We Germans emerged each time stronger, even from defeat.”

  “Because of a tenacity of purpose?”

  “Correct, Professor.”

  “What is it you are really telling me, Herr Schmidt? That in whatever should lie ahead of us, you will come out best?”

  “A leader will emerge among us. It will be a man, an intelligent man. This leaves the choice between the two of us. Of the others, the one is a buffoon, the other a simple countryman. Which of us it will be, I am not sure yet.”

  “Don’t be too easygoing, Herr Schmidt. You contradict yourself.”

  Schmidt laughed. Then he became more serious.

  “In a known situation, a German will always win. He will win because all his energies are directed to a clear-cut purpose. In an unknown situation, it is all much less sure.”

  I mention these events in some detail because there were three points in them which came together. Hattie Foulds and her cockfights, Ling and the whipping she would have liked to administer on the person of Bill Bailey, and now Schmidt’s reference to himself as a meat-packer. It made a consistent theory, except for one very big snag, Daghri. I had a long serious talk with the Indian. He denied all my suggestions with such poise and dignity that I felt I simply must believe his protestations of innocence. My theory just had to be wrong. I became depressed about it. Mary noticed the depression, she wanted to know what it was all about. I decided to tell her of the things in my mind.

  “Everyone of us is affecting an attitude, or considering some problem,” I began.

  “How do you know? About me, for instance.”

  “You are considering the moral problem of whether you should permit yourself to bear children into captivity.”

  Mary looked me full in the face and nodded.

  “My problem from the beginning,” I went on, “has been to understand something of the psychology of the creatures running this ship. Zoomen, is the way I like to think of them. What the hell are they doing and why? Obviously taking samples of living creatures, perhaps everywhere throughout the Galaxy.”

  “You mean there might be animals from other planets on this ship?”

  “Quite certainly, I would think. Through the walls of this cathedral, through the passage walls there will be other ‘quarters,’ other rooms and passages with other specimens in them.”

  “Literally, a zoo!”

  “Literally. Yet my curiosity about those other compartments and their contents is less than my curiosity about the human content of this particular compartment. There are nine of us, four of us from the British Isles, an American girl, a Chinese girl, an Indian, a German, and an Australian. What kind of a distribution is that? Seven out of nine white. Can you really believe interstellar zoomen have a color prejudice?”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t easy to grab people, they took the first they could get.”

  “Doesn’t hold water. Geographically, they snatched us from places as wide apart as Europe, America, India, Australia, and China. They snatched McClay, Daghri, and myself from the quiet countryside, they took you from the busy streets of London, Ling from a crowded town, Schmidt and Giselda Horne from the suburbs of Chicago. It doesn’t seem as if the snatching process presented the slightest difficulty to them.”

  “Have you any idea of how it was done?”

  “Not really. I just visualize it like picking up bits of fluff with a vacuum cleaner. They simply held a nozzle over you and you disappeared into the works.”

  “To come out in this place.”

  “It must have been something like that. Where had we got to, this color business. Differences in color might seem very unimportant to these zoomen. We only see these differences, like the differences between you and Ling, because an enormous proportion of the human brain is given over to the analysis of what are really extremely fine distinctions. It could be the zoomen hardly notice these distinctions, and if they do they don’t think them worth bothering about.”

  “Then perhaps there was some other method of choice?”

  “Must have been. If humans were snatched at random, a good half would be yellow or black. You’d only get a distribution as queer as this one if you had some system or other. But not a color system.”

  “Sounds like a contradiction.”

  “Not necessarily. Right at the beginning it occurred to me that justice might be the criterion.”

  “Justice!”

  “Look, if you were taking a number of humans into lifelong captivity, it might occur to you to choose the very people who had themselves shown the least feeling for the captivity of other animals, or for the lives of other animals.”

  “My coat!”

  “Yes, your mink coat must have marked you out from the crowd in the street. The zoomen spotted it, and at the blink of an eye you were into their vacuum cleaner.”

  Mary shuddered and then smiled wryly.

&nb
sp; “I always thought of it as such a beautiful coat, warm and splendid to look at. You really believe it was the coat? I only use it for a pillow now.”

  “A lot of things fit the same picture. Schmidt was a meat-packer. Giselda Horne’s father was in the same business, stuffing bloody bits of animals into tins.”

  Mary was quite excited, her own plight forgotten as the puzzle fitted into place. “And McClay reared the animals, and Bailey was a butcher, an actual slaughterer.”

  “And the cockfights for Hattie Foulds.”

  “But what about you, and Ling, and Daghri?”

  “Leave me out of it. I can make a good case against myself. Ling and Daghri are the critical ones. You see, there isn’t much animal-eating among Asiatic populations, really because they haven’t enough in the way of feeding stuffs to be able to rear animals for slaughter. This seemed to me to be the reason why only two Asiatic people had been taken. It occurred to me that possibly even these two might have been chosen in some other way.”

  “What about Ling?”

  “Well, to Ling people are no more than animals. I’ve little doubt Ling has had many a person whipped at her immediate discretion, at her pleasure even, for all I know.”

  “And Daghri?”

  “Daghri is the contradiction, the disproof of everything. Daghri is a Hindu. Hinduism is a complicated religion, but one important part of it forbids the eating of animals.”

  “Perhaps Daghri doesn’t have much use for that aspect of his religion.”

  “Exactly what I thought. I charged him with it directly, more or less accusing him of some form of violence against either animals or humans. He denied it with the utmost dignity.”

  “Maybe he was lying.”

  “Why should he lie?”

  “Perhaps because he’s ashamed. You know, Daghri is different in another way. What odds would you give of taking nine people at random and of finding none of them with strong religious beliefs?”

  “Very small, I would imagine.”