Watchers of the Dark (5 page)

While Miss Schlupe curiously explored the compartment’s five compact rooms, Darzek opened his suitcase and took out a thick throw rug. He carefully arranged it in front of the transmitter.

“What’s it for?” Miss Schlupe asked.

“It’s a little thing I rigged up before I left. I got to thinking about the implications of life in a transmitter-orientated society, and I decided that I didn’t like some of them. Step on it.”

Miss Schlupe did so and leaped off hurriedly when a buzzer rasped.

“I couldn’t sleep if I thought anyone or anything could step into my room without knocking,” Darzek said.

“Is that possible?”

“It shouldn’t be, but I’m taking no chances.”

“What if they jump over it?”

“A person sneaking into a room is more likely to tiptoe than to jump.”

Miss Schlupe winced as a thump sounded over their heads and the compartment shuddered. “What was that?”

“Probably they’re loading another compartment. These spaceships are hollow hulks, except for their operation and service sections. The transmitter eliminates the need for corridors and stairs and elevators and such paraphernalia. Passenger compartments are taken aboard as they are engaged, and hooked up to power and ventilation connections. They load freight compartments the same way. We may have tons of freight above us, but that doesn’t matter in weightless space—and a spaceship never ventures where there’s significant gravity. We can be buried in the tail of the ship and still be only a step from the passenger lounge by transmitter.”

“How long does it take them to get us out of here if the transmitter doesn’t work?”

Darzek shook his head and dropped onto a chair. It gently shifted to accommodate him, thrust up a protrusion to support his back, spread out to provide a footrest. “Lovely,” he murmured. “I wonder if they call it ‘Interspacial Modern.’”

Every piece of furniture looked like a monstrous hassock, and certainly contained enough electronic gadgetry to stock a TV repair shop. The chairs could accommodate the posterior or anterior contours of any conceivable life form, at any desired height, and were probably adjustable in ways a human wouldn’t think either necessary or possible. The larger cylinders served as tables or desks, and kept records, recorded financial transactions, sent and received anything from a message to a full-course meal. Darzek would not have been surprised to learn that in private homes they also did the laundry and cared for the children.

Miss Schlupe seated herself beside him. “I miss my rocking chair,” she grumbled.

They followed the routine they had become inured to: they studied. Occasionally they practiced ordering food with the service transmitter, but they took most of their meals from the dwindling stock of Earth food. When they tired of study Darzek paced the floor, grappling futilely with the many questions Smith had left unanswered, and resisting the temptation to deplete his stock of cigarettes. Miss Schlupe got out her knitting, and read and reread the stack of confession magazines she’d brought along, accompanying her clicking needles with disapproving clucks of her tongue.

Smith had recommended that they remain in their compartment, but Darzek, to satisfy his curiosity, made one trip to the ship’s lounge. Several of the life forms he encountered there could not be believed even when seen, and this fact convinced him that galactic civilization was best taken in a long series of extremely small doses until one had built up an immunity to it.

They experienced no sensation of motion. A transmitter that transmitted itself, the ship moved through space on a series of enormous transmitting leaps, each laboriously calculated.
Area-transmitting,
Smith called it: it involved a leap to a destination area, carefully selected to avoid suns; as distinguished from
point-transmitting,
which was used only for limited distances within a solar system, and even then was rarely attempted without a transmitting receiver. The ship’s final transmitting leap would be to the general area of its destination. There it would revert to the clumsy status of an atomic-powered rocket in order to reach its assigned transfer station.

There were only an Earth day from Primores, the central sun of the galaxy, when Miss Schlupe finally spoke the thought that had been on both their minds since they started.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “I wish Smith had come along.”

“Smith was scared silly. Didn’t you notice?”

She stared at him. “How could you tell?”

“Various things. He was afraid of the Dark, no pun intended. He was afraid the Dark would somehow locate us and polish us off right under his indented nose. That’s why we were spirited away from Earth in a sealed compartment, and why we were then held incommunicado in sealed quarters, and why Smith made elaborate arrangements to put us on this ship without our passing through a transfer station. The crew on Smith’s ship didn’t know we were aboard. No one at Certification Group Headquarters—except Smith— knew we were there. And no one on this ship knows anything about us except that we’re here. Smith was scared silly that the Dark would find us.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Miss Schlupe said.

“It makes a great deal of sense. It shows us how omnipotent this menace is. What it’s done is so utterly unbelievable that rational people like Smith are convinced it can do anything.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me. If Smith feared for our safety, why did he kick us out on our own? Why didn’t he come with us?”

“He’s a prominent certification official. He was afraid it would compromise our mission if he were seen with us. He was afraid to take steps to protect us, because they would only attract attention to us, and the omnipotent Dark would promptly finish us off. An escort would attract attention. A special ship would attract attention, because nobody travels on special ships. A disguise might be recognized as such, and make the Dark’s agents wonder what we were trying to hide. Our only chance of safety is to be so inconspicuous as to be beneath suspicion.”

“All right. So we arrive at Primores, and this Biag-n, or whatever his name is, meets us, and everything is hunky-dory. But what if he doesn’t show?”

“He’s an agent of Supreme, so he’s probably a highly capable person. He knows the ship we’re on. He knows what we look like. We know what he looks like. Nothing has been left to chance. At least, I hope not. I’m looking forward to meeting this Mr. Biag-n. If he really knows the Dark from personal experience, I want some long overdue answers to about a thousand questions.”

“I still think Smith should have come with us.”

“I think so, too, but there was no arguing with him. Like I said, he was scared silly.”

They cleared away all traces of their occupancy, dumping the last of their Earth food into the disposal, and they were packed and waiting when the signal came to disembark. Each of them clutching a suitcase, they stepped through to Primores Transfer Station Twelve, Arrival Level.

And into a surrealist’s private zoo.

For all of Smith’s talk about the galaxy’s divergent life forms, nothing he said had quite prepared them for this. Long before their minds had decided to accept what their astonished eyes saw, the sounds and odors had overwhelmed them. Several ships were unloading simultaneously, and from the curving row of transmitters came striding things, leaping things, scurrying things, crawling things, slithering things, even
bouncing
things, all pouring nonchalantly into the milling press of the Arrival Level. Some carried luggage, some towed it floating above them or rolling along the floor. A few were carried by it, riding haughtily on purring, streamlined valises.

Darzek, keeping a firm grip on his own suitcase, nudged Miss Schlupe out of the central flow of passengers and into a quiet eddy, where they both stood staring.

“The mere thought of it would have driven Noah nuts,” Darzek observed. “I never realized what a relative thing beauty is. Take that snail, for example. Not that one, the one with legs and no shell. Its shape is unimaginably ugly and its colors are indescribably beautiful. Smith was right. We didn’t need a disguise. I couldn’t even imagine a shape that would be conspicuous in this mélange. Is that an octopus with wings?”

“How will this Biag-n character locate us in this mob?”

“We’ll be conspicuous enough to anyone who knows what we look like. No chance of confusing us with that insect, for example—are the flowers part of its head, or is it wearing a hat? Biag-n should be conspicuous, too. Just keep an eye open for Tweedledum in skirts.”

They drifted in widening circles, adroitly dodging through the main currents of traffic and pausing frequently. The room began to thin out.

“Somebody goofed,” Miss Schlupe announced firmly.

“It would seem so. However, we must allow for the inevitable mix-up and the unavoidable delay. This is Transfer Station Twelve; our friend may be dashing from station to station looking for us. Let’s keep circulating.”

They began another circuit of the room. More ships had docked, and the arrival gates debouched a fresh surge of passengers. “It may be that he’s here, but doesn’t think the moment propitious,” Darzek said. “He may want to check carefully to see if anyone is spying on him.”

“Spying with what?” Miss Schlupe demanded irritably. “Some of these things don’t have eyes. Some are even luckier —they don’t have noses.”

Darzek looked at her quickly and thought he detected a tinge of green in her normally ruddy complexion.

“I don’t mind the way they look,” she went on, “and I could probably get used to all this hissing and squealing and honking, but the
smells!”

“It does seem that we’ve stumbled upon an unlimited market for perfumes and deodorants,” Darzek agreed. “We can’t be certain, though. Maybe what we smell
is
perfume and deodorant!”

They joined the newcomers and again drifted slowly across the room toward the numbered transmitter gates that linked the transfer station with the planets of the Primores system. Before they reached them they turned aside, made a half-circuit of the room, and began the trip anew.

“Somebody goofed,” Miss Schlupe said again.

“I was wondering if for some reason or other they might have found it necessary to send a substitute, but none of these hallucinations seems to be looking for us. They’re all intent on going somewhere else, and it’s just occurred to me that we’d better do the same, before someone gets the idea that we’re behaving abnormally.”

“Sure. Where will we go?”

“Schluppy, you have a remarkable gift for placing your finger on the precise nub of the problem. Let’s give it one more try.”

They joined another surge of newcomers, but Darzek felt certain, now, that they were wasting their time. They were not going to be met—by anyone.

As he spoke a huge ball bounced past, landed on a chair at an unoccupied table, and deflated noisily into an untidy heap. Darzek blinked and rubbed his eyes.

Miss Schlupe snickered. “That looked like fun.” Then she glanced behind her and blanched. Seated at the next table was something that resembled a large sausage, with arms and legs. It was eating, with reverberating gusto, something that looked like small sausages.

There were
almost
humans everywhere, creatures whom some distorting mirror trick of evolution had left with blurred features or gruesomely unbalanced proportions. There were also incomprehensibly hideous monsters with disconcertingly human features.

“Do we look just as odd to them?” Miss Schlupe asked.

“I doubt it. If they’ve been participating in scenes like this all their lives, I don’t see how anything could look odd to them. Shall we order?”

“How can anyone eat, with all these smells?”

“If we sit here very long without ordering, we’ll start being conspicuous again.”

“All right. I just hope we don’t get sausages. I’d feel guilty eating them, with one sitting next to me.”

Darzek opened a service panel and carefully touched out his order on the rows of numbered and colored slides, mumbling the formula that Smith had taught to them: All food well cooked (neither raw, half raw, nor burned); meat moderately aged (neither fresh nor spoiled) and of the third type (which was vaguely similar to beef—Smith had discouraged him from trying anything else); vegetables of the first type; all food prepared in chewable form, in pieces no larger than human mouth-size; a small portion of each (they seemed huge, to Darzek) with service of the second type. The dishes would be shallow rectangular bowls, and there would be a small ladle, modified on one side to facilitate pouring liquids into mouths of various shapes, and a set of automated tongs for the solid food. Darzek had been unable to find a drink that appealed to him, so he ordered water. That, too, would be served in a shallow bowl.