The Enormous Room Part 8

For a couple of hours they were put through paces, all of them; sometimes one man would be working a gadget while all the scientists and humans watched him, at other periods they would each be hard at work doing something the result of which they had no conception of.

Several of the machines could be figured: the pink maze, one or two others; and Watkins had at least a theory on the organ. The sleek modernistic machinery which directed the airs.h.i.+p was plain enough. There were certain designs and arrangements to follow that flew it up and down the room. They were hard to memorize but Mrs. Full and the somber ranger, Summersby, became adept at them.

Then there were the others....

There was a remote control device that played "music," weird haunting all-but-harmonies that sounded worst when the creatures appeared most pleased, and earned the punishment stool or a brutal cuffing for the operator when he did manage to produce something resembling a tune.

Evidently bearing a relation to this was the sharp slap Adam got when he started to sing "The Whiffenpoof Song" while idling around a pile of outsize blocks like a child's building bricks. What the human ear relished, the giant ear flinched from.

There was a sort of vertical maze that verged on the four-dimensional, for when they thought they were finding a way out the top they would come abruptly to the side, or even the bottom, and have to begin anew.

This one was obviously impossible to figure out, thought Watkins. It must be one of the ways in which the scientists induced neuroses in their experimental subjects. He had a quick mind for puzzles and intricacies of any kind, but this one stumped him cold.

"You think it's calculated to drive you crazy?" he asked Cal.

The New Englander considered for a minute. Then he nodded. "Possibly,"

he said.

"You think it might work?"

This time Cal pondered longer. At last he said, "Not if we don't let it."

"I could develop a first-cla.s.s neurosis," said Watkins to Mrs. Full, "if I let myself really go."

"We must all keep our heads, Mr. Watkins," she told him. "Those of us who have not given up--" She glanced at Summersby with a frown--"must hold a tight rein on ourselves."

"That's right, ma'am," he said. They all called her "ma'am" or "Mrs.

Full." n.o.body knew her first name. He wondered if she'd be insulted if he asked her, and decided that she would.

Capriciously, then, on the heels of a series of punishments, the head scientist went out of the room and came back with food for them. It flung the food--three chickens--on the floor. Villa s.n.a.t.c.hed one of them up with a happy shout, but at once his dark face soured. "Raw? How can we cook them?" His hand with the fowl dropped limply to his side.

"We can make a fire," said Calvin. Watkins was a little surprised that it was Cal who made the suggestion first, but the Vermont man added, "I've made enough campfires to know something about it."

"Mr. Full is an enthusiastic hunter," said his wife.

"A fire of what?" asked Villa, managing to look starved, helpless, and wistful, all at once.

Summersby said, "There are plates of plastic over there, and plenty of short rods. I don't know what these beasts use them for, but if they're fireproof, we can construct a grill with them." He went without further talk to a stack of the multicolored slabs and dowels, which lay beside a neat array of what looked like conduit pipes, electromagnets, and coiled cable. He picked up an armload. One of the giants put a hand down before him. He pushed it aside and strode back to the group. Gutty, thought Watkins, or just hungry? Or is it his sense of kismet?

"I'll cut some kindling from the trees in our room," said Calvin. "Who has a knife?"

Summersby handed him a large pocket knife, and set about making a grill over two of the plastic slabs. It was a workmanlike job when he had finished. He held his lighter under one of the rods, which was apparently impervious to fire. He nodded to himself. Looks more human, thought Watkins, than he has yet.

Villa was plucking one of the chickens, humming to himself. Mrs. Full was working on another, Adam on the third. Watkins felt useless, and sat down, running his fingers along the smooth side of his briefcase.

Cal made a heap of chips and pieces of wood and bark under the grill.

Summersby lit it. The giants, who were grouped around them at a few yards' distance, mumbled among themselves as the shavings took flame.

The plucked and drawn fowls were laid on the grill. Watkins' mouth began to water.

"Now if we only had some coffee," he said to Adam. "One lousy pot of greasy-spoon coffee!"

VI

"I have seen you," said Villa to Adam, who was gnawing on a drumstick.

"You wear the wig and a bone in the nose, and a tigerskin around you."

"Sure," said Adam. "I'm the Wild Man from Zululand. It's one job where my color's an advantage."

"A fine job!" said Villa. "You should have come down to my stand. The best chili in New York."

"I had a bowl there last week. Without my make-up, I mean."

"I will give you a bowl free when we go home. With tacos," added Villa generously.

"It's good stuff," said the boy.

Calvin Full wiped his fingers and his lips on a handkerchief. He looked about at the hall, through which the giants had now scattered; some of them were tinkering with the machines, others were simply loitering, as if bored by the whole matter of scientific research. They had lost their early wariness of the humans, and did not carry the green goads, but kept them tucked into holsters at the back of their swis.h.i.+ng skirts.

One of them removed the blond man, Watkins, and set him to doing something with a pipe-and-block apparatus. The processes they went through with their strange mechanical and electrical gadgets, the end results they achieved, were a mystery to Calvin. And as the afternoon wore on, their conduct as a whole became even more mysterious. It was, from human standards, totally irrational. One would begin a test, a.n.a.lysis, or whatever it might be; he would follow it through its devious windings to its ambiguous result, or to no result, and suddenly leave it to begin something else, or come to watch the humans perform.

The longer he observed their conduct, the more worried he became.

Finally, after a good bit of hiding and spying, he found out something which he had been trying to figure for hours; and then it seemed time for him to talk to someone about their escape.

The blond man had been peering into his briefcase. He zipped it shut quickly as Calvin approached, with a kind of guilty movement. What does he have in there? Calvin wondered.

"Mr. Watkins," he said, rubbing his chin and wis.h.i.+ng he had a razor, "did you ever see a scientist, or laboratory a.s.sistant, skip from one thing to another as these creatures do?"

"I never did."

"Nor did I. They don't take care of their equipment, either; several times one or another has kicked down a neat pile of gear, and once I distinctly heard something break."

"It might be junked machinery," suggested Watkins.

"I doubt it."

One of the giants made a raucous noise--_Brangg!_

"And how irritable they are, in addition to their capriciousness and sloppiness! I can't imagine a race of emotional misfits producing equipment of such complexity. Their science is beyond ours in many ways, yet look at this place." He made a broad gesture. "When we were let out this morning, it was clean and well ordered. I've inspected dairies that were far dirtier. Now it's a hodge-podge of scattered materials, upset stacks of gear, tipped-over instruments. What sort of mind can bear such confusion?"

Watkins smiled. "The minds that conceived--well, that vertical maze, for instance--must be orderly after a fas.h.i.+on, even though it isn't the human fas.h.i.+on."

"This is far from what I wanted to say, though. Have you been noticing the door?"

"There isn't much to notice. It's a sliding panel like our wall."