Semple didn’t like the sound of this. She also didn’t like the way Anubis was smiling. “Why should that be, my lord?”
“Because, our dream warden quite rightly informs us you yourself are now also a piece of our property.”
Semple’s confidence plummeted. “How does your Dream Warden deduce that, my lord?”
Anubis made a gesture indicating the answer was simplicity itself. “You came to our realm uninvited and without any prior understanding as to your status during the duration of your visit. You requested no letters of transit or any other kind of contractual preliminaries. You requested no audience and presented no credentials. You didn’t even come to us craving right of sanctuary or metaphysical asylum. Had you done any of these things, the situation might have been different. As it is-”
Semple clutched at any passing straw. “Suppose I were to petition for sanctuary right now?”
Anubis frowned and glanced at the Dream Warden. The cowl moved slightly as the Dream Warden shook his or her hidden head. Anubis turned back to Semple. “No, we are advised that you’ve been here far too long. The petition could not be made with acceptable sincerity. Maybe if you’d come to us immediately on your arrival something might have been worked out; instead, you chose to haunt low bars and get yourself arrested and nearly sold into slavery. It’s much too late now, Semple McPherson. You’re here and you’re ours.”
He paused as though considering some new point that he had only just thought of, but then shook his head as though dismissing it. “The only question that remains is, what do we do with you?”
***
Jim floated in an ocean of blue electricity. His body lay limp. He checked all of his available senses, and the consensus appeared to be that he was floating. He wasn’t going anywhere. He simply was and that was about it, in a blue limbo surrounded by crackling static. The situation bothered him. The thing about limbo was you never knew how long you were going to be there. Jim did realize, however, that he had engaged in violent confrontation with a bunch of aliens on their own turf, and that he had been shot with a ray gun for his pains. “I guess I should have taken the medical exam. I probably would have been better off in the long run.”
Thinking out loud at least reassured him that some kind of external universe existed in this new fine mess in which he found himself. He hadn’t become a prisoner of his own mind; the flashing static wasn’t merely the firing of his own synapses. Thinking out loud also got him an immediate answer.
“You should have taken the medical exam, shouldn’t you?” The voice was greatly blue-muffled, but he thought it might have been the voice of the doctor alien. It definitely wasn’t Bogart.
“So how long are you going to keep me here?”
Jim was suddenly on a soft padded floor, with a crisscross, nonslip texture. He was starting to realize that if you asked the UFO a question, you had a good chance of receiving an answer, even if it was nothing like the one you were expecting. After checking that he was still intact after the scuffle, that no parts of his body or mind were missing or mysteriously changed, he sat up very carefully, watchful for any fresh surprises. He was sure the extraterrestrials had by no means finished with him yet.
The interior of the chamber in which he found himself was a creation of irregular ovoids. Jim seemed to be in a domed half-ovoid blister or bubble, like an egg cut lengthwise and placed down on the flat cut, creating an ovoid floor about twenty-five feet across at its widest point. Two flat ovoid slabs of some plastic or rubberlike substance were apparently supposed to serve as benches. A much larger slab of the same stuff seemed to be an approximation of a bed. High in the upper dome, a collection of small ovoids floated in eccentric orbit around each other, not unlike the mobiles that had enjoyed a brief vogue on lifeside Earth, except that, where Earth mobiles had used wires and balance beams, this decorative arrangement had no visible means of support.
Even the door or entry port was yet another ovoid, conforming to the curve of the wall at the narrow end of the chamber, though it came with no visible handle, lock, or other external means of operation. Jim got to his feet and decided to conduct an experiment. He walked to the door, placed his hands flat against it, and pushed, gently at first and then applying increasing pressure. No matter how hard he pushed, it neither yielded nor budged. Maybe it wasn’t a door at all, just a decorative panel set in the wall. If that was the case, though, how did anyone get in and out?
Jim didn’t want to entertain the thought that he was actually sealed in this place, walled up like some futurist heretic. Instead, he took a step back and spoke to what he still thought of as the door. “Open, please?”
Nothing. He tried once more, instructing rather than asking. “Open the door, please.”
Again the result was negative, but Jim couldn’t help smiling at what he was doing. “Open the pod bay door, please, HAL.”
He didn’t really expect a result, and the door didn’t disappoint him. Jim turned away from it and sat down on the ovoid bed to take stock of this new situation. The flat surface yielded just the way a mattress would; at least some consideration had been given to the most basic of his creature comforts. Then again, he was still lacking an ovoid minibar or cocktail cabinet. Creature comfort had its limits.
“Could I get another martini in here?” No dice.
Jim was so focused on wondering what the next alien move might be that the true nature of the room escaped him for quite some time. When it did, though, realization dropped on him like a load of futuristic glass bricks. “Jesus H. Christ, it’s the fucking Jetsons.”
The aliens had locked him up in a Cadillac construct of 1950s science fiction. What he was coming to think of as his prison was nothing more than a set from one of the better, big-budget, atomic baroque space operas: Forbidden Planet or This Island Earth. It had to be either a created illusion or a controlled hallucination. He could scarcely believe that actual aliens would subscribe to some retro Captain Video school of interior design. The obvious scenario was that it had been custom-tailored for him, based on information gleaned directly from his own mind; either he was on the receiving end of another variation of alien rat-maze behaviorist testing, or they were dementedly attempting to put him at his ease.
“I wish this place had a goddamned window.”
Jim all but jumped out of his skin when a large section of wall simply melted away to reveal the black grandeur of the interplanetary starfields in all their celestial glory, with the planet Saturn and its rings dominating the foreground.
“Damn!”
The vision was so extraordinary that a moment of fear stunned him. The flying saucer was disintegrating. It had been struck by a meteor, blown up by a photon torpedo. Then he realized that he was viewing the raw vacuum of space through a clear viewing port, oval, but as large as the picture window in a suburban split-level.
“Sweet Mary Mother of God.”
Jim’s first glimpse of space from space filled him with a holy awe so total that it rivaled even his earliest acid trips. Tears came to his eyes. It was terrible in its magnificence. The sky was a deeper black than he had ever experienced or imagined. With no atmosphere to act as a distorting filter, the constellations blazed in unwinking brilliance. One of the Saturn’s moons-maybe Titan, Jim didn’t know for sure-was breaking across the giant ringed planet’s horizon. He didn’t care if the whole thing was real or illusion, and he didn’t care what the aliens had in store for him. Whatever they might do, it would be worth it to have seen this.