It was impossible to tell whether the Rosgollan was the same one that had come to them aboard the ship. This was about of a size with that other, but its features and body were partially concealed by the blur of light that attended these people wherever they went.
“We shall go to the others,” said the Rosgollan in its soft unspeaking voice.
The golden glow suddenly enswaddled them all; Bernard felt a moment of womblike warmth, and then the light dropped away, and the ship vanished.
They were inside one of the alien houses. The Rosgollan said, “Be comfortable. The interrogation is about to begin.”
“Interrogation?” Laurance asked. “What kind of interrogation? What are you planning to do with us, anyway?”
“You will come to no harm, Commander Laurance,” was the soft reply.
Bernard tugged at Laurance’s arm. “Better just relax and take things as they come,” he whispered. “Arguing with these people won’t do a bit of good.”
Despite himself, he smiled. Rising defiantly to tell the Rosgollans off was something like an ancient Roman defying a fusion bomb by shouting at it, ” Civis Romanus sum! Hands off! I am a Roman citizen!” The bomb would pay little attention; neither, Bernard suspected, would these Rosgollans. But he felt a fundamental surety that these beings of light would not be capable of bringing about any harm.
The Earthmen made themselves comfortable. There was no furniture in the room, only soft red cushions, on which they sat. Although the cushions were marvelously comfortable, and seemed to invite reclining, Bernard and the others remained sitting tensely upright.
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, there were three more Rosgollans in the room. Looking from one to the next, Bernard could see no discernible difference; they were as identical as though all had been stamped from the same mold.
“The interrogation will now begin,” came the serene word from one (or was it all?) of them.
“Don’t answer a thing!” Laurance snapped suddenly. “We don’t want to give them any vital information. Remember, we’re prisoners here, no matter how well they happen to treat us!”
Despite Laurance’s outburst, the interrogation began. There was nothing Laurance could do to prevent it. Not a word was spoken, not even in their peculiar mental voice; but, beyond doubt, there was a flow of information. The Rosgollans were simply drawing what they wanted to know, without troubling to ask.
The interrogation seemed to last only an instant, though Bernard was not sure: perhaps it took hours, but the hours were shrunken to a point in time. He could not tell. But he felt the outflow of information.
The four Rosgollans drew everything from him: his childhood, his disastrous first marriage, his academic career, his interests and crochets, his second marriage, his unlamented divorce. All this they took from him in an instant, examined, discarded as being personal and therefore of only incidental interest.
In the next layer they drew from him the summons from the Technarch, the journey to the Norglan colony, the unsatisfactory meeting with the Norglans, the bungled voyage home.
Then it was over. The tendril of thought the Rosgollans had inserted into the brains of the Earthmen snapped back. Bernard blinked, stunned a little by the snapping of the contact. He felt drained, hollow, exhausted. He felt as though his brain had been drawn forth, examined very carefully, and put back into place.
And the Rosgollans were laughing.
There was no sound in the room, and, as ever, the faces of the strange beings were veiled in impenetrable light. But the impression of laughter hung in the air. Bernard felt his face grow red, without quite knowing why he felt shame. There had been nothing in his mind of which he was ashamed. He had lived his life, sought the ends he thought desirable, cheated no man, wronged no one intentionally. But the Rosgollans were laughing.
Laughing at me, he wondered? Or at someone else here? Or at all of us, at all the human race?
The unheard laughter died away. The Rosgollans came close to each other; their fields of light seemed to coalesce strangely.
“You’re laughing at us!” Laurance cried belligerently. “Laughing, you damned superior beings!”
Bernard touched his arm again. “Laurance…”
The alien reply was gentle and perhaps a trifle self-reproachful. “Yes, we are amused. We ask your forgiveness, Earthmen, but we are amused!”
Again the laughter rang out silently. Bernard realized that these Rosgollans were not quite the noble and mature beings he had been regarding them as. They could laugh at the struggles of a younger race. It was a patronizing laugh. Bernard frowned uncertainly, trying to fit the laughter into the culture-pattern he was constructing for the Rosgollans. Angels did not patronize, he thought. And until this moment he had regarded them almost as angelic, with their auras of light and their serenity of motion and their seemingly boundless powers of mind. But angels would not laugh at mortals that way.
“We will leave you alone a while,” the Rosgollans said. The light vanished. The earthmen turned to look at each other dazedly.
“So that’s what it’s like to be interrogated,” Dominici said. “I could feel them prowling around in my head—and I couldn’t shut them out. Imagine it—fingers stroking your bare brain!” He shuddered at the memory.
“So now we’re pets,” said Laurance bitterly. “I guess the Rosgollans will come from all over the universe to play with us.”
“Why are they doing all this?” Hernandez demanded. “Why did they have to drag us down here and toy with us?”
“More important,” said Dominici. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“We aren’t,” said Bernard in a flat voice. “Not unless the Rosgollans decide to let us go. We aren’t exactly masters of our own fate.”
“You’re turning into a defeatist, Bernard,” Dominici said warningly. “Ever since the moment these things first grabbed hold of the ship, you’ve been taking the blackest possible interpretation of everything.”
“I’m just looking at things realistically. There’s nothing to be gained by deluding ourselves. We’re in a mess. How are we going to escape, Dominici? You answer that. Where’s the Ship?”
“Why—uh…”
Dominici paused. With a cold frown on his face, he walked to the door of the room. The door obediently drew back as he approached, and he stepped out, into the open. The others followed him through the obliging doorway and into the outdoors.
Green hills rolled to the horizon in gentle undulations.
Fleecy clouds broke the harsh metallic blueness of the sky.
There was no sign of the ship.
None at all.
Bernard shrugged meaningfully. “You see, we might be anywhere on this planet. Anywhere at all. Five, ten, even fifteen thousand miles from the ship. Am I being defeatist? How are we going to get back? By transmat? Teleportation? On foot? Which direction do we go? I’m not trying to be pessimistic. I just don’t think we’ve got any way of getting free.”
“So we’re prisoners, then,” Dominici said bitterly. “Prisoners of these—these super-beings!”
“Even if we could reach the ship,” said Havig, “they would only bring us back, the same way they brought us here originally. Bernard’s right. We are totally at their mercy. We cannot alter that.”
“Why don’t you pray?” Stone asked.
Havig merely shrugged. “I have never ceased praying. But I fear we have fallen into a situation which God has designed for us, and from which He will not free us until His purpose is attained.”
Bernard knelt in the meadow just outside the building. He snatched up a stalk of saw-edged grass with a snapping motion of his hand, taking a perverse pleasure in the slight sting of the grass cutting into his skin.