“Why didn’t you let it go?”
“I considered it. It didn’t seem wise under the circumstances. You see, it attacked my survey crew during what turned out to be final tests—tests that confirmed it should be possible to stabilize the anomaly and use it.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before? That’s wonderful news.”
“For my people, maybe,” Luqithur replied, now relieved that the news had taken heat off him. “But I feel sorry for the diplomats who’re going to have to negotiate with these people. That was the primary reason for my decision, to make tilings easier for them.
“I was briefed by the foreign ministry when we first started the project. I know the general plan for contact. It doesn’t involve telling the Earthians how long we were on their planet. We’ll just tell them we discovered the anomaly from space, which we actually did, though a long time ago, and not about any of our activities on the ground.”
“I see,” Feevish replied. It was he who was now abashed. Luqithur was right, of course. With contact coming relatively soon after the incident their prisoner’s story would have been credible and other Earthians would have believed it. This was better.
But Feevish was still curious. “You said that was one reason. What are the others?”
“So that the Earthian will not escape punishment for killing one of my surveyors,” Luquither answered grimly. “We couldn’t very well ask the Earthians to do it, not that it’s likely they would have.”
“Oh? You didn’t tell me about that,” Feevish replied. Luqithur’s casual treatment of so gruesome a subject left Feevish even more convinced the other was on the brink of barbarism himself.
Calhoun followed the bug-eyed monster through a huge round door and suddenly the fragile hypothesis he had been so carefully nursing collapsed. Stark reality, far beyond his ability to control, furnished him with new, but unpleasant, answers.
Before, he had not understood why the alien had insisted he don the floor-length robe and the thick face mask. Now, as he gazed out on this hellish landscape he realized he had spent those long and agonizing weeks aboard an alien ship, not on Earth.
Now, many things were clear to him, especially the futility of all the escape plans he had contrived.
But the enigma he faced was undiminished. When first he was captured he thought the aliens were simply too busy to torture or kill him and that this was why he had been left alone, paralyzed and miserable, for days at a time.
Later, when hunger and thirst threatened to drive him mad he had begun to believe that was the alien concept of diabolical torture; that they might be secretly watching him suffer. At the time, he struggled to appreciate this supposed cerebral style of sadism, persuading himself that it might be worthwhile trying on some of his own enemies if he got out of this alive. It had struck him as so perverse that it was enviable.
Now he realized it almost certainly hadn’t been deliberate, intentional torture, but only simple ignorance and neglect, by aliens who quite naturally had their own priorities and their own preferred methods of doing things.
Coincidences had deceived him. To Calhoun their expedient pumping of water through his paralyzed lips until he threw up seemed designed only to keep him alive and prolong his agony. When they began force-feeding him those mushy, disgusting, foul-tasting pastes and then turned him loose in a small, doorless cell he reasoned he must so amuse them that they were saving him for some special occasion.
Until he looked “outside” at this surrealistic scene, that might have been something out of Dante’s Inferno, he had believed his travail merely prelude to a main event. He had considered the supposition proven when only minutes ago the cell door had opened and the alien on the other side made a startlingly human-like gesture. Its pudgy index finger curled in a motion for Calhoun to follow it down the corridor. Calhoun was convinced he was walking that last mile.
I still might be, he thought. Now though, he doubted it was imminent. The alien had not seemed to move with any urgency. There was no waiting crowd, there were no guards, and he could see no stadium.
He relaxed a little and gawked around. What amazed him most was that he had been transported here with absolutely no sensation of motion over all these weeks. He knew it had been a long journey because his beard had grown full and bushy.
But leisurely sightseeing apparently did not fit in with the aliens’ plans. For the first time, one of them displayed impatience with Calhoun by prodding him along.
Calhoun did, noting that this alien and all the others he could see no longer wore face masks. There was something different between the human and the alien habitats. Here, Calhoun needed the helmet and cloak and these creatures didn’t, but on Earth it was the other way around. He concluded this world was home to them.
He intended to collect much more information on his surroundings from now on. He was disappointed. The aliens immediately placed him in what turned out to be a conveyance despite its lack of wheels. He was whisked off, to his everlasting disgust, to another cell. He had still not learned his fate.
For a long time after that Calhoun was alone. The cell had water, which tasted foul to him, but he was not fed. Now, though, he did not worry. He thought they would eventually get around to this. Letting him starve to death would defeat whatever purpose they had in bringing him here.
Having time to spare, Orville now speculated endlessly. He discovered that every possibility which occurred to him contained some flaw, except for punishment. That hypothesis made the most sense. He was imprisoned. He was not comfortable. He might easily spend the rest of his natural life in this cell. That was punishment.
In time he became reconciled, if not comfortable, with that theory, but it seemed that this guess too, was wrong.
The alien explained, in English far more perfect than his own, the day it popped into his cell to talk to him.
“It is time for you to leave,” it said. “Put on your helmet and your garment, and follow me.”
Calhoun did it. Somehow the time did not seem right for questions. He would wait and see what happened next. He knew too little now to formulate any strategy.
They walked and walked, down long corridors and past many other aliens. These greeted the sight with mixed responses. Some stopped what they were doing and gawked. Most did not, and simply ignored the swaddled human.
In time, a door loomed ahead, clearly an outside one, since it was made of transparent material and traffic could be seen moving past on the street in front of it.
Calhoun reached it and stopped; it did not open and he did not know what else to do.
The alien shouted at it and it opened. It was a powered door, quite appropriate for a prison.
“Leave,” said the alien. It gestured. “You can no longer stay here.”
“You’re releasing me?”
“Within limits, yes.”
Now Calhoun was really frightened. He had a feeling that what had gone before was only a preliminary but that now his punishment had begun in earnest. The time for serious questions had come.
“I don’t understand,” he protested. “I know this is not Earth. How am I going to get home?”
“Any way you can, if you can. I doubt that will trouble you for long,” the alien replied.
Calhoun hesitated, trying to think. He realized he didn’t really know what to ask, so he chose what seemed an innocuous question. “Where can I go?”
“Anywhere you like,” the alien replied, somewhat impatiently.
“Do you mean that?” Calhoun really smelled a rat. “Including Earth?”
“If you can find the means, yes.”