“That we shall discover!” said Griick. “Trust me, gentlemen, I have made already a collection of writings about Brecht’s Planet and especially the bipeds. There is no larger one in the Galacticum, not even excepting the Berlin Archive!” He beamed. “And between ourselves, gentlemen, Purser Bang has a connection with a group on Brecht’s Planet who are able to make physiological studies of the bipeds! Depend on it, they will give us valuable information - by way of Purser Bang, our good friend!” He reached over and patted Bang’s sleeve affectionately. The spaceman half-smiled, blinked and went on eating.
“Well then, here’s to the bipeds!” said Umrath, lifting his wineglass.
Griick, Prinzmetal, Rausch and Bang drank; Neumann merely raised his glass and set it down again. Wenzl, coldly upright, went on methodically cutting and eating his green meat.
“All the same,” said Neumann after a moment, “it seems to me that a good deal depends on Fritz.”
V
IN the morning of this eleventh day in the store, the young man climbed down as usual, very early, when the great vault was almost empty. Once or twice someone glanced at him curiously as he passed down the aisles, but he kept walking, and no one spoke to him. The clerks were busy behind the walls of glass cases, inserting new merchandise, clicking the metal doors open and shut; the cleaners in their graystriped uniforms were pushing their whining machines along the floor. Voices echoed lonesomely under the distant ceiling.
The young man quenched his thirst at the drinking fountain between the grocery and the art gallery. Then he went into the produce section, with its mountains of fruit under glass, for his breakfast. By this time the outside^ doors had been opened, the music was playing, and people were beginning to stream down the aisles. The young man spent seventy pfennigs for a transparent bag of oranges and a package of bananas. Alternately eating the bananas and sucking the oranges, he wandered through the store. When he finished a piece of fruit, he tucked the peel neatly into the bag under his arm.
Once, on the evening of his second day, the young man had ventured out into the avenue again, but the crowds, the noise and the lights had disturbed him and he had gone back into the store almost immediately, afraid he would be outside when it closed its doors. To be inside was much better. Here there was also noise, but it was of a different quality, not so alarming. The light i was even and cool, and did not hurt his eyes. And besides, in the ; store he found all he needed - food, drink, entertainment. Sometimes he became lost, the store was so large. But he could always find his way again by following the moving rocket-trails of light on the ceiling.
Whenever he saw one of the blueuniformed men, he looked straight ahead until he was past. He had learned that the men in blue would not pursue him unless he climbed the grille or took something from a case without paying, and now he always made sure to pay. As for the grille, he climbed it every night, not being able to find any other way up. Twice more he had been noticed, and the men in blue had run and shouted, ringing their bells; but no one could climb after him. So he was not really very afraid of the blueuniformed men. But he did not like to be near them, all the same.
There were still some discomforts in his new body that constantly worried him and occasionally even alarmed him by their intensity. There was something his mouth and throat wanted to do, for example. He kept trying different kinds of food and drink, and the feeling always went away, but it came back afterward. Dark, curly hair was sprouting all over his cheeks and chin, and it made his face itch. Nevertheless, he was getting along much better than he had at first. He had found out that taking his clothes and shoes off at night made them easier to bear the next day. When his underclothes had become dirty yesterday, he had bought new ones out of a machine, and he discovered now that the smooth, clean fabric was unexpectedly pleasant against his bald skin.
Without watching where his feet were leading him, he had wandered into the women’s clothing section. In the middle of the central open space, a crowd had gathered around a platform. The young man went nearer. On the platform a perspiring darkskinned man was energetically looping a wide ribbon of violet cloth around a blonde young woman who stood passively, arms raised, and stared out into space.
Both man and woman had the bright, unreal colors and the curious black outlines of the cinema he had seen on his first day, and he realized that this was another illusion. The man and woman were not really there.
The cloth took shape, became a dress. The darkskinned man ran a piece of metal up the woman’s side, pinching out the cloth into a ridge and tightening the dress to her body. Then he did the same thing to the other side, touched the dress swiftly here and there, cut a slit halfway down the back and began to work the finished dress up over the woman’s head. Underneath, her body was shapely and cream-skinned in two brief garments of dark blue lace. Looking at her made the young man feel peculiar, and one of his discomforts suddenly became much more acute.
THE young man did not like it.
As he turned to work his way out of the crowd, he came face to face with a darkhaired, paleskinned young woman who first looked startled, then smiled happily. “Martin!” she said, taking his arm.
The young man moved away nervously. “I don’t know you, madam,” he said.
“What?” The woman’s face changed. The young man kept on moving away. She took a step after him. “Martin Naumchik-” Thoroughly alarmed, the young man turned and dived into the nearest hole in the crowd. He worked his way around the platform, turning his head frequently to see if he was being followed. Above him, the darkskinned man was turning the dress inside out. When he finished, he poised it over the young woman’s shoulders, then began to work it down over her body. Both seemed to revolve as he circled them. No matter how far around he got, he could never see their backs.
The young man left the crowd cautiously on the opposite side, and looked around. The dark haired woman was not in sight. Nevertheless, he took a complicated route out of that part of the store, glancing back many times.
Crossing the elevator plaza, he saw people looking at him, and realized he had been shaking his head unconsciously as he walked. The encounter with the darkhaired woman had taken him completely by surprise. It had somehow never occurred to him before that as a human being he now had not only a name and clothing, personal possessions and so on, but also friends and acquaintances. The idea frightened the young man. What could he possibly say to these people? What would they expect of him?
The comfort and safety of his refuge in the store began to seem illusory. For a moment he thought wistfully of his clean, bare little cubicle in the Hamburg Zoo. But the memory was already so faded and distant that it could not occupy his attention long. The reality was this gigantic, glittering room with its unending murmur of voices, its exciting smells, its clicking elevators, its rocket-trails of red, green, amber, blue that traveled in pulses across the ceiling.
The best thing might be to go away, change his name perhaps, find a place to live in some other city where he was not known. But he had no confidence that he could manage such a trip properly. Were there stores such as this in other cities than Berlin? He was humiliated to realize that he did not know. He had lived in Hamburg for twelve years, but had no idea what lay beyond the Zoo grounds. Other cities were only names to him.
AN hour later, up in the third-floor lunchroom, he was still thinking about it over buns and coffee. It was his first experiment with coffee. The flavor was unexpected and rather unpleasant, but he liked its sweetness and warmth.