The Perfect Host (51 page)

Where is the end of the corridor?

What death will I meet there?

And the gray-faced man, kindly now, wishing him well, reassuring
him, making him certain that he would have his reward if he could answer these questions.

And the next thing had been his awakening here in the green-lit dark.

Hulon rose and stepped to the center of the corridor. He paused and listened. Nothing. He drew a deep breath, turned to the right and began to march down the corridor. The skin on his back crawled occasionally, away from the following darkness, and he did what he could to ignore it. He began to count his paces, looking back as he counted each fifteen. Surely nothing would overtake him in the time it took him to walk fifteen paces.

After a few minutes the counting and turning became automatic, and his senses became quite soothed—almost dulled—by the sameness of his surroundings. Occasionally, he passed one or two of the bubbles doing their purposeless gavotte on the floor. Once he saw two collide, fuse, burst and disappear.

Where was death?

It would have to be a death from outside himself, he reasoned. Aside from the fact that the featureless walls and floor gave him nothing to hang himself on, and the complete absence of anything which he might turn on himself, the idea of self-destruction was contrary to the very nature of the test. So, he realized suddenly, was any idea that he might die of hunger or thirst. There was no time limit to his test. Death must present itself to him, or he to it, and that might take days. He must sleep. Would death come to him in his sleep? He shrugged. He could only put off sleep as long as possible and then hope that he would sleep lightly enough to be warned of its approach.

He began to be thirsty. The next bubble he approached took his attention. He stopped and watched it for a moment, then drew a deep breath and picked it up gently. He remembered a story he had read once, called “Goldfish Bowl,” in which two men were trapped by super-intelligences, and got their water in globules which were apparently made of just water: when they bit into one they could drink what didn’t spill. Hulon was in a mood to forget everything
he had ever learned and simply to use what he saw. Accordingly he pressed his face into the bubble and drew it into his mouth. The surface let go and the bubble ceased to be a bubble, pouring down through his fingers. He cupped his hands and managed to gulp heartily, twice, before all the liquid was gone. It had a flavor something like beef extract and something like the water in which asparagus has been cooked, and he found it delicious. If the fluid had any ill effects, he could not feel them. He wondered for an instant at his own foolhardiness, and then concluded that he must have been told, before he came here, that the bubbles were safe for him.

He began to walk, and the resumption of his attention to the corridor brought sharply to him that something was different. It had happened gradually, and only his transient concentration on his thirst made it possible for him to notice the difference. It was in the light. It had lost its greenish cast and was now pure yellow.

“—Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen,” he muttered, and looked behind him. Nothing but advancing darkness. “One, two, three—

“Uh!”

The wordless syllable was wrenched from him by the glimmer ahead. It was utterly shocking. It was a feature in the featureless triangle. It was a new color in the dichromatic yellow and black. It was a new factor in the lulling sameness of the corridor. And it was a dead man.

He could tell that the man was dead. It was the sparseness of the flesh about the nostrils, the waxen quality of the wrinkled hands folded so meticulously, the statuesque stillness, and, ever so faintly, the smell.

It was the body of an old, old man. It was laid out stiffly, ankles together, hands folded on the thin chest. It wore a garment like Hulon’s but without the luminescence. It glowed, but obviously by reflection, and the color of that reflection made his eyes ache. It was red.

Hulon approached the corpse slowly and looked down at it. Was this the death he was to meet?

No. Death was here, all right, but there was no question in his mind that the death he sought was his own, not that of anyone else.
This was someone else who had found it. This was, if he chose to make it so, evidence that death visited this corridor from time to time.

He knelt and put the back of his hand against the still forehead. It was cold. Hulon stood up, stood back. Who had laid out the corpse?

Well, who had put Hulon there? These were pointless questions. He hesitated a moment longer, and then resolutely turned his back on the corpse and strode on. Before him was the same open blackness. Behind him the glimmer of reflected light dwindled, and blackness paced him. “—Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, look back. One, two, three—”

The light was changing again. When had the pure yellow taken on that orange cast?

He determined not to think. He would watch ahead and behind. He would notice the light. He would drink when he was thirsty and, if he must, he would sleep. If he were to deduce the nature of the death that was here, he wanted more evidence. If he were to find what was at the end of the corridor, he must walk to it. Meanwhile he would not think.

The orange color was deepening, somehow—reddening. He watched as he walked, walked, turned, walked, walked, turned. And at about the moment he recognized it as a yellowless red, a true red, he saw another gleam of light ahead. He was not sure how much later this was—two hours, three—he knew only that he had been walking a long time

He slowed his pace and approached the glimmer cautiously. Last time it had been a corpse. This time—

He grunted. This time it was a corpse, too. An old man, and again he sensed death. This one was worse to look on than the other. It, too, wore a short tunic, glowing with reflected light which, insanely, was not the same color as the light which struck it. It was pure blue. That was not the horrible thing, though. What horrified Hulon was the pose of the corpse.

It was not neatly laid out like the other. It was tumbled rudely on the floor, not quite in the middle of the corridor, as if it had been
thrown there. The tunic was up around its chest and one arm was crumpled underneath in a way impossible unless it had been broken.

For years Hulon had felt that the flesh, once dead, was of little importance, and had regarded the rituals of burial and the somber traditions of
de mortuis nil nisi bonum
mere carry-overs of barbarism. In spite of this he found himself filled with horror and pity at the sight of this poor tumbled thing. He knelt by it, turned it on its back. An eye stared. He closed it gently, gently folded the hands and straightened the legs, and smoothed the tunic.

He stood up, feeling, somehow, better than he had. “You take it easy now, feller,” he said. “ ’Bye now.” He began to walk, walk, turn again. At the first look back the corpse was a corpse; at the second, a dim blue. At the third there was only the respectful, persistent, stalking darkness. After that, only the unchanging, hypnotic triangle in which he walked between shadows.

In due time his tunic was violet, and when he saw the third dead man, the one in yellow, his tunic had turned blue.

The yellow-clad corpse was harder for him to see, somehow. Perhaps it was weariness, perhaps it was the undefining blue which streamed around him, but it took him some moments to discover, as he rolled and pulled the corpse, straightening it out, that it, too, had a broken arm. This one was heaped and tossed, worse even than the last one had been.

He stood over the body, after he had finished, and tried to think. A bubble wandered drunkenly over to him and began to nudge the dead man. Hulon kicked it so hard he hurt his knee. It splashed its liquid all over the corpse’s face and neck.

“Sorry,” said Hulon abjectly. He turned away and began plodding down the corridor, counting aloud “—Nine, ten, eleven—” By the third time he got to “fifteen” and looked back, the darkness had swallowed up the third corpse.

It was a long time later when he came on the next rumpled, disordered corpse. He did not touch this one. He moved close enough so that his light—yellow now, after an interminable shift through the greens—would immediately fall on the fourth corpse. It was dressed
in red, and had an unnatural arm. Hulon breathed slowly, deeply, through flared nostrils. His eyes were dull and he ached with weariness, and the soles of his feet tingled infuriatingly from their constant contact with the strange irresolute surface of the floor.

If I could sleep for a while
, he thought desperately.

A bubble pirouetted into the wall and bounced. He went to it and picked it up in widespread hands. This time he was careful and drank deeply of it. He shook his hands and wiped them on his tunic, and sat down by the wall to rest, and to think if he could. The taste of the bubble liquid was good in his throat. He could feel strength pouring back into his abused tissues. The light seemed to grow brighter, though he knew that it was his clearing eyes that caused it. He pulled his feet in and rested his chin on his knees, and at last thought returned to him.

Four old dead men
. He fixed his mind on this and let everything else disappear from his mind. Then he took them in order.

The first was dressed in red, the second in blue, the third, yellow—and the fourth was red again. There was something about these colors that niggled at him. It wasn’t the specific colors; it was the order in which they appeared. There was some sort of regimentation to the colors he had seen.

He put the thought of the dead men’s clothes aside, because, at the moment, he could go no further with it. He closed his eyes and concentrated. The color of his own garment—yellow-green when he awoke here; pure yellow when he found the first corpse; then yellow-orange; orange; orange-red; pure red. The word “primaries” occurred to him. He caught it and held it.
Yellow is to red as red is to blue as
—He shook himself violently. Either he was near something important or he was delirious.

He looked at the corpse. An unremarkable old man, except for his age, which was extreme. What mad system was behind this business of corpses with broken arms? What point was proved, what evidence given, by a collection of ancient and similar cadavers which were somehow associated with the primary colors and broken arms and—and what else was it? Oh yes; they were huddled, dumped out on the floor. Except for the first one, of course.

Colors. A luminous garment—he racked his brains now—which changed from yellow-green to yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, green and yellow again. Spectral.

The light had been yellow when he saw the corpse in red; red when he saw the corpse in blue; and—yes, and blue when he saw the corpse in yellow. And the one he looked at now was the same as the first; the light was yellow and the corpse was dressed in red.

Same as the first! The idea smote him—and he immediately discarded it. There are some things one may not doubt. If this were the same corpse over again, then one of two things was happening; the corpse was being shifted—snatched from the corridor behind him and rushed up and dumped ahead, and being changed in the meantime, to boot—or this corridor was circular. The first hypothesis was ridiculous in terms of the test he was undergoing; the people who controlled it were certainly not going to indulge in fantastic and harmless complications just to annoy him pointlessly. The second—that the corridor was circular—could be believed only if he disbelieved everything his sense of balance and direction and orientation told him. He
knew
he had been walking on a level surface, and in a straight line. Every sense involved told him he had.

And, yet—

He crawled to the corpse and knelt beside it. It
was
very like the one before. And the broken arm, and—suddenly he remembered the vicious kick he had given that bubble, and how it had splashed on the last corpse—or was it the last but one? He couldn’t remember, and it wasn’t important. He sniffed at his fingers. The refreshing, meaty odor of the bubble-liquid was still on his hands from the last time he had drunk. He bent low over the corpse’s still, twisted face.

Unmistakably, the odor was there.

He scrambled back to the wall and huddled there. He clung to a single conviction, that whatever was there, whether he could understand it or not, was here by design, for a specific purpose which involved him. And he knew now, beyond the slightest doubt, that the colors had confused him utterly. It had taken him four encounters to realize it, and he was almost certain that he could expect no
more “evidence.” Now, of all times, was the occasion for him to apply the philosophical analysis of which he had been so proud. It seemed a paltry tool indeed.

Could this corridor be circular?

It seemed impossible. Even though he had walked a long way between corpses, he was sure he would have been conscious of the arc. One or another of the walls would have continually crowded him.

With a conscious effort he opened his imaginative faculty. He had read fantasies in which antigravity and gravity-controlling devices had been used. Suppose his corridor really was circular—but vertically, like an automobile tire? And suppose, at its hub, was an artificial gravity device. Would he not then walk in a straight line, turning neither to right nor left, and then come back to his starting point? Such a fantastic device would have to compensate for the Earth constant, of course, but if he could imagine a gravity generator, a gravity insulator was no problem.

He opened his mouth to shout his conclusion—and checked himself.
Wait
. This was only a hypothesis, and it did not answer the two questions. It made ridiculous the first one: “What is at the end of the corridor?” and did not answer the second at all: “What death will you meet there?”

No: He must think of something which covered everything—the shape and size of the corridor, the changing colors, the nutrient bubbles, the corpses. The
corpse
.

He stared at the body of the old, old man. “You could tell me—” he muttered. “Think—
think!”