The face vanished and the tiny screen snowed out. The guard hit more keys, the terminal wheezed, and about nine inches of punched paper tape extruded from a slot in the computer. The guard ripped off the tape and dropped it into a file basket, then glared at Semple. “Get on through, unit. You keep Fat Ari waiting and you’ll find out what pigging trouble’s really about.”
The twelve women were now on the move again. Either the fat guard or the administrator had instructed the booths ahead how to process the woman with no barcode, or maybe the guards in these booths were more on the ball than their overweight colleague. Whatever the reason, the line passed three more checkpoints without any further trouble. After the third, things began to change. The rumble of deeply buried machinery was clearly audible and a smell of ozone overwhelmed the ammonia in the air. A couple of the women looked a little anxious, but Semple had an idea what was coming next. The corridor came to an end in an open space that led in turn to a much larger circular tunnel, the floor of which was a motorized walkway, a conveyor band that could move large numbers of people at something like twice the speed of a fast walk. Anubis was just the kind for Heinlein rolling roads. They were big favorites in the environments of many a control-obsessed paranoid megalo. The herding gene turned techno. Semple had seen other examples in the tangential communication that passed for Better Homes & Gardens in the Afterlife.
The women prisoners were temporarily halted in the open space while their escort produced a long length of light steel chain and shackled them to it by the straps on their left wrists, spacing them at intervals of about two feet. When the string was complete, they were moved toward the walkway itself. The area where riders actually stepped onto the moving walkway was dotted with signs, presumably the kind of regulations and instructions to passengers that the managers of transit systems everywhere are unable to resist. She noticed that the hieroglyphics on the signs had been defaced by amateur and universally obscene embellishments that paid particular regard to the genitalia of the various gods, humans, animals, and birds that made up the alphabet.
Actually stepping onto the moving walkway required a certain degree of skill and judgment, but Semple, by visualizing the effects in advance, accomplished the trick with ease and grace. The woman behind her, on the other hand, misjudged the necessary matching of pace and stumbled. Semple quickly grasped her arm to prevent her from falling and bringing down the whole string. The woman nervously smiled her thanks. She glanced around to see if the guards were looking in their direction and, discovering them otherwise occupied, whispered quickly to Semple. “I guess this pretty much settles it.
Semple didn’t understand. “What settles what?”
“It’s Fat Ari’s for us.”
“Is that good or bad?”
Now the woman looked as though she didn’t understand. “It is what it is. It’s Fat Ari’s.”
“I don’t know what Fat Ari’s is. I’m an outlander.”
“You mean you’ve never seen it on the telly?”
“Never seen what on the telly?”
The other prisoner spoke as though she were stating the obvious. “Fat Ari’s Slave Shopping Club.”
***
The hatch closed, the lights went out, and Jim was falling. What he thought was going to be his first alien encounter had suddenly turned into a dirty sucker punch. The rug had been literally jerked from under his feet, and someone or something was screaming at pain-threshold volume. He hoped the screaming was only the rush of air past his ears, but remembered that same extended scream a little too well, as well as falling through absolute blackness. It all said Paris, as though somehow his passing had been recorded on the magstrip of time. If he was dying all over again, it hardly seemed fair. Although he knew it was both naive and illogical, he had pretty much expected the aliens to be pleased to see him. After all the LSD he had taken during his life, all the Erich Von Daeniken books and magazine articles on the paranormal that he’d consumed, after all the times that he’d seen The Day the Earth Stood Still, all the episodes of Star Trek he’d soaked up in idle beer-drunk hotel afternoons, he felt he was definitely ready for the ETs, and he had imagined that, even if they didn’t greet him with open arms, they’d at least be ready for him. The last thing he’d expected was that they’d drop him into a goddamned black hole, and maybe even kill him all over again. To go back to the pods at this juncture was a thoroughly disgusting and depressing prospect.
When he continued to fall for what felt like a major slice of time without hitting anything, Jim started to rethink his situation. Perhaps he was in free fall. Perhaps the UFO was switching him between external and internal gravity. As if as a reward, or punishment for his deduction, a searing flash of static blinded him, leaving him in a kaleidoscope of dazzling afterimages. He fell heavily, maybe a foot or more, to a metal floor. The impact was bone-jarring, but did no damage. Jim groaned and rolled over. His shoulder hurt, his elbow was throbbing, his ego was bruised, and he was angry at the inhospitable reception. Slowly he climbed to his feet, wondering what the next indignity might be.
The air was breathable and warm, although it was a little too humid and smelled of something industrial. He slowly turned, half crouching in the stance of a circling wrestler, arms slightly in front of him, ready for anything. He spoke tentatively, more to observe what might happen than to actually communicate with anyone. “You know something? This is really not my idea of being piped aboard.”
As he spoke, the lights came up and the air changed. The atmosphere turned clammy, and the unidentified industrial smell was replaced by something more like battery acid. The light was, in every sense, unearthly. The blue glow looked like the interior of a iceberg. It seemed to have no direct source but somehow suffused the entire chamber with a soft luminescence. The nature of the light made it hard to judge distances; had Jim not been well versed in hallucination, he might have thought something was wrong with his eyes.
He seemed to be standing on the curved bottom of a ribbed metal cylinder, like the inside of some large storage tank, perhaps about twelve feet in diameter. The arching ribs of the cylinder and sections of the wall plates were engraved with lines of unreadable ideograms. Aside from the extraterrestrial script, it all seemed a little mundane, but Jim reserved judgment. Although the script meant nothing to him, the individual characters bore a distinct resemblance to the crop markings he had seen on the way to the Crossroads. He shook his head. “If you want to leave us notes in the cornfields, you really ought to learn to write English. Or send us a dictionary.”
Immediately the final phrase came back at him, loud and squeakily metallic, something between a mimic and an instant replay: “If you want to leave us notes in the cornfield, you really ought to learn to write English. Or leave us a dictionary.”
This mimicking voice had a Mickey Mouse pitch, like his own voice on helium. Jim blinked. A second level of alien bullshit? His mood was turning surly. He needed a drink. “What did you say?”
“What did I say?”
Jim sighed. “Don’t give me fucking Ray Charles.”
The disembodied squeak also sighed. “Fucking Ray Charles.”
Jim knew he was being mindfucked. “Yeah, I get it.”
“Yeah, you get it.”
“How long do we have to play this game?”
“Until you feel ready to step through the membrane.”
This actual reply to a question took Jim by surprise. “The membrane?”
“The membrane.”
Jim wasn’t sure if the parrot routine had started again. Without his saying a word, the voice answered him. “No, this isn’t the parrot routine. If you don’t like it where you are, pass through the membrane.”
“What membrane?”
“Look to the end of the chamber, schmuck.”