Specimens

"It must be. And also I think your voice doesn"t sound right. Have you got a cold or something?"

"I am feeling just slightly ill."

"Oh, I bet you"re not taking care of yourself. d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n. Do you have a fever?"

"No, I think no fever."

"How are the kids, are they getting it too?"

"They have gone to school."

"School? Oh, you mean that day camp. I"m surprised they agreed. Listen, Danny, you still don"t sound good. Anyway I"m going to run out and see you tonight."

"It"s not necessary, Nancy. Not tonight. I just need some rest."

A sigh came over the wire. "I"m tired too. Maybe I won"t come out tonight. Don"t forget you"re supposed to see the doctor anyway."

"Yes, I believe tomorrow the doctor will come."

"Come? To the house?" Nancy"s voice held a new note of alarm. "Dan, aren"t you able to get out?"

"Yes, yes, of course I am."

She was growing exasperated with him. "You did make an appointment with your Dr.

Shapiro, didn"t you?"

""Yes."" And his body"s eyes moved at once to something evidently seen earlier and not forgotten, though not at once properly connected with doctors. A name and a number jotted on the wall calendar in the s.p.a.ce for next Monday"s date. "For Monday."

""Danny, are you sure you don"t want me to come out tonight? Is there anything I could bring you?"

"Very good of you, Nancy, but - no. I"d rather just rest today. Perhaps tomorrow."

"Sure. You call me back if you need anything."

"I will."

"Give the kids a hug and a kiss for me."

"I will."

"Bye-bye, then."

"Bye-bye?"

"Oh, Dan, you take care. I love you, you oaf." The line went dead with a click. In a moment or so his hand hung the receiver up. Then it lifted it again and his other hand began slowly to punch out the number that had been jotted on the calendar. This time the number had been remembered, no need to turn and check it with another look.

When a girl"s voice answered, from the doctor"s office, the voice from Dan"s throat said: "This is Mr. Post. I wish to cancel my appointment with the doctor on next Monday."

That call completed, he was taken back to the sink and made to finish the dishes under control. Then he was marched into the bathroom and forced to stand studying his face in the mirror. Rather, he was made to study a face that was his and yet not his, because the expressions it wore, trying them on now like different hats, were all subtly wrong.

If Nancy saw him like this, she would know in a moment that something terrible had happened. Millie had known, from just one glance . . . so of course the controller didn"t want Nancy coming to the house tonight. But how could it hope to keep all of a man"s close friends and relatives away from him?

Now as he stood before the bathroom mirror his fingertips were made to brush repeatedly at his stubbly face, and to glide lightly over the scratches that marked his cheek, which still bore traces of dried blood despite his bath. Then the fingers went back to brushing the whiskers again. It wants me to shave, Dan realized. It wants me to look normal and presentable. How did it know that he was normally clean-shaven? But that was an obvious conclusion from the shortness of his stubble; wake up, Dan. So it must want a shave, he decided; but I think I"ll just play dumb. I just don"t think I"ll make things easy for the boss.

Control was suddenly given back to him, but he simply stood there, continuing to gaze into the mirror, trying to look dumb and puzzled. Let us see, he thought, what some pa.s.sive resistance can accomplish. After less than a minute of pa.s.sive resistance his body was taken over again, and the controller went back to making him stroke his cheeks.

After he had been given a second chance to understand, and still refused to do so, his instructor took a different tack. It moved his left arm so that the wrist came directly under the washbasin"s hot water tap, and then his right hand came across and turned the water on. Only just enough to let a very thin stream flow. The stream curved among the coa.r.s.e dark hairs on his immobile arm and dribbled off, embracing an area of skin no larger than a penny.

The water was at first no more than warm, but it I quickly grew uncomfortably hot.

Discomfort deepened I into pain, but the arm could not even quiver, much less I pull away. Dan tried with all his will to fight against control, but the struggle to master his own body was just as hopeless as before. His mind seemed to be floundering helplessly, with no way of coming to grips with its enemy. I His eyes were held riveted helplessly upon the suffering arm. He was not going to be able to scream or even faint, his throat was caught in a tight grip of silence, and his traitor legs held him mercilessly erect.

Already he was willing to give in, but there was no way to speak the words or even make a gesture of submission. The water trickled on while fine- steam rose. The thought that he might be compelled to stand like this all day and watch his flesh destroyed was unendurable.

The punishment continued as if for a predetermined period of time, which objectively could not have been very long. When his enemy released him, to let him s.n.a.t.c.h his arm back with a gasp, the only visible sign of his punishment was the one precise small spot of angry red. At once he moved to run cold water on the burn.

The enemy felt the same physical sensations that he felt - when it wanted to feel them, not otherwise. Or else it was subjectively indifferent to his pain. Bad news, either way. But what had just happened tended to confirm something that was good news, and potentially far more important: The enemy could not directly control his mind. If it could, it would have had no need to punish him to alter his behavior.

Good news, but not, at the moment, of much help. The eyes he met now in the mirror were his own, but changed a little for the worse from what his own eyes used to be.

"All right." It was a weary, empty voice, his own but changed a little, like the eyes.

"You win. I"ll show you how to shave."

He let the chilling easing water run a little longer on the small burn. Then, angry with himself for caving in so easily before what was actually a minor pain (but it had not been minor when he thought he might be made to watch his flesh literally boiled away no, not then) he walked to the upstairs bath and got out his electric razor. At once control was briefly re-imposed, evidently so controller could give the device a little study before letting him use it. What did it fear that he might do? Kill himself?

Of course! Stanton, the previous owner of the house. He was probably the one who had left the sledgehammer and crowbar in the bas.e.m.e.nt. What was it Ventris had said of him? Nervous breakdown, something like that, and then he did away with himself.

And Nancy had been sorry for unknowingly bringing up the subject as a joke.

Had there perhaps been small burn marks somewhere on Stanton"s body? And how, exactly, had Stanton died?

Control went away, to let him use the razor for himself, and he began to shave. If Stanton had brought the new tools to the bas.e.m.e.nt, had it been with some idea of his own in mind? Or had he been acting under compulsion? Had he then found a way to kill himself, and thus escape this slavery? Or had he been tried as a tool and then discarded, his mind perhaps unable to bear the strain of mad visions and demonic puppetry? Dan found he couldn"t think it all through, not yet anyway. Right now he still had about all he could do to bear up under the strains himself. He finished his shave, looked at the results in the mirror, and then began without much thought to wash away the traces of dried blood remaining from the scratches that his daughter"s nails had left. Suddenly the memory of that recent struggle became too overpowering. For just a moment he failed to refuse to think about it, and mat moment"s failure was too much. His image in the mirror went blurred and then it vanished in his tears.

The controller gave him a couple of minutes (had Stanton been denied even that much relief, an ultimately poor economy from the controller"s point of view?) and then shut off his tears as if by a turned valve, and in the middle of a ragged sob it took over his lungs and throat to form a deep, calm breath. It casually wiped his eyes and finished the little clean-up job on his scratched cheek. Then, tightening or loosening his facial muscles one by one in small increments, it little by little expunged the frozen look of suffering from his face.

The puppet face in the mirror was not that of the real Dan Post, not quite yet. But already it was getting closer.

EIGHT.

Wednesday morning"s mail still lay unopened on Nancy"s desk, though lunchtime was approaching. The little red book was in her hands, and she was staring at it. Her neat mind, used to sorting out problems into their proper compartments as a first step in solution, was stalled on this one. If this had come in as a question from the public, she would have had to reply that there was no Curator of Strange Old Diaries, not at this museum anyway. Try the Historical Society.

Of course her real problem was not just the book itself, but the book and Dan. But consider just the book, which was all she had in hand to study at the moment. The first question that came naturally to mind on reading it was whether or not the woman who wrote it was insane.

Consider the first entry, dated May (or perhaps March, the writing was quite poor) 10, 1857. In it the woman who kept the diary lamented over the arrival ""last night" of "more pa.s.sengers"" who, she was sure, were likely to be "bound to the devil, some of their number if not all." And in a June entry (the woman had used the diary only sporadically, evidently as an outlet for her troubled mind) it was specified that "he" (in context, only the devil could be meant) dwelt "right under the house."

The mention of "pa.s.sengers" would seem to connect the book, and therefore the house, with the Underground Railroad, in confirmation of the local folklore that the real estate agent Ventris had once mentioned. Only two names were mentioned in the book.

There was pa.s.sing mention in a couple of places of a man named Schmiegel (that seemed to be the spelling) and his family; Nancy got the impression that Schmiegel was some kind of a tenant farmer or renter of land from "James", the husband of the diarist.

And James was the key to it all. The woman mentioned several times the great lengths she was going to, trying to keep the diary from falling into his hands - how after every entry she crept up into the attic and hid the book behind the chimney there. The strain on her had undoubtedly been terrible, whatever its real causes may have been.

The entries in the diary became progressively more incoherent, and the writing worse, until at last it was almost completely illegible.

The part that held Nancy back from going to work was decipherable, though, after she had puzzled over it for a while. It was part of the entry for October 12, 1857, which discussed at greater length than ever before James"s "hideous bondage" - apparently to the devil himself, "- it began with his smelling strange odors, as our fathers might have ascribed to Brimstone from the Pit. And he was afflicted with terrible dreams, of Indians and their savage rites carried out in unknown tongues, and of a devilish beast or creature that they worshipped. I have no one to tell these things, nor would anyone any longer believe that Satan comes to take possession of a Christian soul, such as James was when first we came here and he rebuilt this house ".

There was more, but that was the heart of it. Smelling strange odors, and afflicted with terrible dreams, and then h.e.l.l somehow took over, and more victims were bound to the devil. Nancy shook her head, put on a self-deprecating smile to see how it might feel, and put the book down. She took up and opened the first envelope of her mail, and skimmed twice through the letter inside without being able to understand what it was about. Hopeless.

Red book in hand, she headed down the corridor to look for Dr. Baer.

As soon as Dan had finished his morning ch.o.r.es his master took him on another tour of the windows on the second floor, to make its first real, daylight survey of the surrounding neighborhood. A pa.s.sing aircraft was even more interesting than last night"s, that had been visible by its lights alone. Another sight that for some reason drew the controller"s prolonged attention was that of a nursing home located about a block and a half to the northwest; there a trio of white-headed elders were visible through some intervening tree branches as they sat quietly on a porch.

As usual, the greatest amount of activity was to be seen on the east side of the house, looking toward Main Street. Here Dan"s eyes were kept turned for the most part on the vehicular traffic, but were diverted to examine male pedestrians whenever any of these came into view.

After a quarter of an hour or so of observing the outside world and its people, his eyes were turned downward to consider his own dress, T-shirt and wash pants. It seemed to Dan that he could almost hear the controller"s following thought: Not quite right for going out.

It walked him to his room and got a sport shirt from a hanger in the closet, and then gave him back control of his arms. The small burn on his left wrist still sent its warning signals along his nerves. Without hesitation, he put on the shirt. It looked as if they were going out.

Maybe they were, but first it took the time to scrutinize the contents of his pockets carefully, paying particular attention to what it found in his billfold. The money - about thirty dollars - was rather cursorily examined, but the credit cards were quite intriguing, judging by the amount of time that he was made to spend looking at them and feeling their embossed surfaces. Intriguing also were his driver"s license, and his insurance and social security cards. The photographs of his children were of interest too, perhaps purely technological. His controlled fingers bent the pictures lightly and rubbed them, then held them up close before his eyes as if to study the grain of the print. He carried no photograph of Nancy. So far he had only the framed eight-by-ten of her at his bedside ... he seemed to recall that it was now lying face down on the night table, probably brushed against and knocked over when the enemy had dropped him into bed for his first night of enslaved rest, or by his out-flung hand in some subsequent tossing as he slept.

When its inspection of his pockets was over, it walked him downstairs and to the front door. He felt a faint satisfaction as his prediction that they were going out was proved correct. Then, much to his surprise, just as they reached the door it let him go.

He was wary. Obviously he was being tested. He knew that control could be clamped on again with electric speed, and he believed that punishment would follow his least attempt to thwart the enemy"s will. Still . . . suppose, just suppose, that it would let him get into his car and drive. Let a police car come near him when he was driving, and he would ram it. Let a traffic light be red when he approached, and he would sail right through. He would get himself under the close scrutiny of the authorities; he would get himself locked up where he could do no further harm, and then he would try somehow to reveal the truth. Maybe the enemy would have effective countermeasures to employ, but Dan told himself that it was worth the risk. He had to see if it would let him drive.

Dan stepped out of the house and pulled the front door shut behind him. Ordinarily he would now have got out his key and double-locked the door, but on impulse he decided to deviate from normal behavior on this point. Dan walked on, slowly, and felt a small sense of success when his deviation apparently went undetected. His steps were not directed. It was waiting to see what he would do.

He strolled around to the garage and got his keys out and took the padlock off, and with the requisite lift-and-tug swung open the old doors. It then allowed him to open the car door, and get in on the driver"s side, but that was all. Transition to total control was very smooth this time, as if the enemy"s use of his body, that had at first been an unfamiliar implement, was improving rapidly with practice.

For several minutes the body of Dan Post sat in the left front seat of Dan Post"s car, carefully looking over all of the controls and indicators. Dan"s hands were kept immobile at his sides, and his feet were not allowed to get too near the pedals on the floor. Then his body got out of the car and carefully closed it up again, using the key to lock the door rather than the simpler but unlearned expedient of pushing down the b.u.t.ton before it was slammed shut. The garage doors were closed up neatly, and the padlock fastened on them as before. By this time Dan was afraid; what now, back to the hot water tap?

But evidently his master did not mind that he had wanted to drive the car. Maybe it appreciated being shown something so interesting. Anyway he was not being taken back indoors but out for a stroll, on the gra.s.s border of Benham Road. After a moment"s hesitation there, looking to left and right, his body was steered left, toward Main.

Nice sunny day. Dan"s neighbor on the east, he of the four-bedroom ranch, whose name Dan could not manage to recall, was out doing something in his yard. Dan"s face smiled a controlled greeting, and his right hand went up in an awkward-feeling, uncharacteristic wave. The neighbor returned the wave uncertainly and with the briefest answering smile.

Dan"s body continued walking along the gra.s.sy border of the road, heading east toward Main a block away. For whatever reason, the power in charge suddenly gave him back control of his upper body while it kept his legs strolling along in the direction it had chosen. Getting fancy now, like some skilled musician grown accustomed to an instrument.

When he had reached the corner of Main and Benham it turned him southward for a block, walking the sidewalk slowly between the suburban lawns on his right and the four lanes of traffic on his left. It kept his eyes busy observing the traffic, with time out to read the road signs and also to scan the activity of the cars and people moving about the shopping center on the other side of the highway. After about a block of this it walked Dan over to the curb and rea.s.sumed complete control. When a lull in traffic came it marched his body briskly across the busy road.

The small elation he had felt on being able to leave his door unlocked was by now buried out of sight in deepening gloom. The thing seemed to be learning with disheartening speed. Whatever ignorance of the modern world had hampered it at the start, when it first seized him, was fast being replaced by knowledge.

It continued to show an interest in aircraft - here came another one now, and he was made to stop on the east side of the street and gaze at it. And it was unsure of itself with regard to electric lights and electric razors and automobiles. And telephones, though that had been quickly learned. On the other hand, it spoke English, though its choice of words and its accent were rather odd.

Nothing physical had come charging out at him when he broke down the bas.e.m.e.nt wall. But something had come out, all the same. Some intelligence. Some power, that perhaps had slept there for a hundred years or so, cut off from the world. Why had it come out now? A random choice, or - what?

Before Dan Post, it had tried to use Stanton to break down the wall for it. And what Stanton had experienced had made him choose death instead. Or for some reason he had been found wanting, and had simply been thrown away . . .

It walked him about the shopping center, avoiding moving autos skillfully and looking into the various store fronts. It did not stop long to gawk at anything, and it was hard for Dan to tell just which of the stores it found most interesting. It hesitated briefly in front of the supermarket, and then it marched him in and they began to shop.

To Dan it seemed that his body"s behavior in the food store was somewhat peculiar, and the faint hope began to rise in him that he and the master were going to draw suspicious attention. It made him peer a little too carefully at everything and everyone.

It made him stand quietly studying the cash register from a little distance, until it seemed to him that the checkout girl might well take him for a potential bandit, and notify the manager, but her brown eyes were far away, on some deep dream or problem of her own. And the enemy at first ignored the shopping carts, then made him retrace his steps to get and use one. But soon Dan realized that he was wrong to pin any hopes on these small peculiarities which no one else seemed to notice. The world was full of people behaving far more oddly than he was, and being suffered to go their ways unmolested and unnoticed.

Sure enough, his slight awkwardness in parcelling out money for his modest bag of groceries drew no one"s attention at all. He realized as the girl was bagging his purchases that he had bought nothing but duplicates of containers that were already in his kitchen cabinets or refrigerator, and on their way to being depleted.

Outside the store, his body paused to watch and then imitate a man buying a newspaper from a vending machine. Then his feet were steered casually but safely back across Main . Not right back to the house, though. When his feet reached the corner of Main and Benham, they kept right on walking north. It seemed that there was going to be a little tour of the neighborhood.

The chief goal of the tour proved to be a close inspection of the nursing home that he had been made to stare at earlier from his upstairs windows. Now his body almost loitered on the sidewalk right in front of the place. He strolled with a slow pace that was almost a mockery of the inmates" shuffling, and eyed with an almost hungry gaze a nonagenarian curled in a chair on the old wooden porch.

G.o.d, why couldn"t it have made him dawdle suspiciously before a playground or a school? Then the police might soon be on their way to check him out, or at least some curious neighbors would have taken notice and might be watching to see what he did next. Now his eyes were probing eagerly at a man standing on the porch, man ancient and withered, who supported himself with a k.n.o.bbed cane and chewed his toothless gums.

Why was the specimen collector browsing here? Well, among the occupants of the crystal cases (he had them all plainly in front of his mind"s eye, and would until the day he died) there were fair samplings of most human age groups as well as several races.

But, for whatever reason, a representative of senility was missing. Maybe the senile humans did not keep well, would not stay fresh more than a century or so, in that peculiar root cell underneath his house . . .

When one of Dan"s arms began to tire, holding the bag of groceries, the controller obligingly shifted it to the other. No gratuitous torture for the good slave. Dan was marched once around the block that the nursing home (which fifty years ago had been someone"s impressive residence) stood on, and then hiked back to his own house. The little game of leaving the front door only half-locked had been fruitless; there were no burglars inside to complicate the controller"s problems.

Once inside, Dan was released for a program of personal maintenance and lunch. At least he began to occupy himself with these matters, and was not overruled. Good. Time spent on familiar physical routine was probably the only time in which he was going to be able to think.

. . . what lasts for a thousand years or more, sealed up in a vault, and has an excellent memory? Some kind of an advanced computer, was the only answer that came to mind.

If it had been built a thousand years ago or more, it hadn"t been built on Earth. The silo was a s.p.a.ceship, or part of one at least. It was what Earthmen, when they were on the other end of the operation, called an unmanned probe, a machine programmed to gather knowledge and specimens from some alien planet. Except that whoever or whatever had sent this one evidently thought in terms of millennia rather than mere years or decades as the proper length for this sort of mission.

Perhaps the probe beneath his house was sending data home by radio. Or, perhaps more likely, by some other means as unimaginable to twentieth-century man as radio would be to men of the Stone Age. But it was gathering and preserving specimens physically, too, which strongly implied that someday, at some pre-programmed time perhaps, or when its storage s.p.a.ce was full, it was going to take them home with it.

Wherever home might be - maybe thousands of years away among the stars. Dan shivered in the July day.

Great care was obviously being taken with the specimens. They were not simply being kept from decay. Their bodies moved, as if they only slept inside their boxes. In some sense, he was certain, Sam and Millie and the others were still alive. But, looking at it coldly, were they, could they be, restorable to full human function?

He didn"t know. He couldn"t guess. The level of science that held life so suspended for hundreds and thousands of years was so far beyond the levels of the twentieth century that it might as well be magic after all.

With such powers arrayed against him, what chance was there that he would ever get his children back? He only knew that he must make every effort, give his own life up if it would help.

When he had finished cleaning up after a very informal lunch - cheese sandwich and pickles, and a gla.s.s of milk - it took him over again and sat him down in the living room to study the newspaper it had purchased. As he read under control, he soon found that his eyes were skipping across the columns and up and down the page faster than his own mind could keep up, ahead of the ability of his brain to make sense of what they saw. With a sinking feeling Dan understood that the enemy could read English considerably faster than he could. And he was not, by ordinary human standards, a slow reader.

Interrupting this speed were fairly frequent delays of two or three seconds each, caused by words belonging to modern science or technology. Phrases such as "nuclear power station" or "solid state" or "energy crunch." And it was science and technology that got the enemy"s closest attention, by far, though every article, cartoon, and advertis.e.m.e.nt in the paper received at least a glance.

Politics got the merest skimming; Dan"s controller cared not much for the humanities, nor for news of the endemic warfare that Earth still wore round her equator like an eruptive rash. The photograph of a tank, part of an armored column ravaging some Middle Eastern land, received close scrutiny, though. So did the faces of the victims of a j.a.panese earthquake, however, and there was nothing of science or technology apparent there.

His controller never bothered to look at a clock or watch (Dan"s own wrist.w.a.tch had been lying on his dresser in his bedroom since last night) so it was hard for Dan to judge the pa.s.sage of time while he was under control. But sometime toward the middle of the afternoon the newspaper reading was completed, down to a scanning of yesterday"s race results. Then Dan"s hands were made to thumb back through the pages to the television log.

Obviously the controller had managed to make the connections between the program listings in the paper and the squarish, gla.s.s-fronted box that stood in a corner of the living room. After a minute or two spent in examination of its controls it got the thing turned on and tuned in and sat Dan down in front of it, close enough to reach out handily for frequent channel-switching.