The room was tilting absurdly to the left, walls, Griick, Wenzl, keeper, Emma and all. He clutched at the desk to stop it, but the desk treacherously sprang up and struck him a dull blow across the face. He heard Griick and the keeper shouting, and Emma’s voice piping in the background; then he lost interest and drifted away into grayness.
“LIE still,” said a fretfully reassuring voice.
The biped looked up and recognized the gigantic face of Prinzmetal, the surgeon. Prinzmetal’s large brown eyes were swimming over him; Prinzmetal’s soft mouth was twisted nervously.
Shock and strain, said Prinzmetal over his shoulder. The biped could make out two or three other persons standing farther back in the room. He was lying, he now realized, on the cot in the back room of his cage. He felt curiously limp and weak.
“It’s all right,” said Prinzmetal soothingly. “You lost consciousness a moment, that’s all. It could happen to any highly-strung creature. Lie still, Fritz, rest a little.” His face turned, receded.
Griick’s voice asked a question. Prinzmetal replied, “Nothing - he will be as good as new tomorrow.” Feet shuffled on the concrete floor. The biped heard, more dimly: “It’s a good thing it isn’t something organic, Herr Doktor. What do we know about the internal constitution of these beasts, after all? Nothing whatever!”
Wenzl’s voice spoke briefly and dryly. “When we get a chance to dissect one-”
They were gone. The biped lay quietly, staring at the discolored ceiling. He heard the door close; then there was silence except for a faint, far-off strain of music from somewhere outside. No sound came from the inner office, or from Emma’s room next door.
At length the biped got up. He relieved himself in the little bathroom, and drank some water. He realized that he was hungry.
His tray was on the folding table near the bed. The biped sat down and ate the brownish-gray stew, then picked up one of the two round lumps of dry greenish stuff which lay at the side of the tray - the “bonbons” Griick had made so much of. The biped put the thing cautiously in his mouth, then paused incredulously. The lump, which was almost as dry to the tongue as its appearance suggested, had a subtle, delicious flavor which was utterly different from anything the biped had ever tasted before. It was not sweet, not salt, not bitter, not acid. His eyes closed involuntarily as he sucked at it, causing it to grow slowly moister and dissolve in his mouth.
When it was gone he ate the other one, and then sat motionless, eyes still closed, savoring the wonder of this unexpected good thing that had happened to him. Tears welled in his eyes.
How was it possible that even in his captivity, and his despair, there should be such joy?
THE central building of the Berlin Zoo, built in 1971 by the architect Herbert Medius, was a delightful specimen of late 20th-century architecture but had several irremediable defects. For example, the garden-roof dining room, used on formal occasions by Griick and his staff, was roofed with a soaring transparent dome into which arcs of stained glass had been let, and at certain times of the year the long, varicolored streaks of light from this dome, instead of dripping diagonally down the lemonwood and ebony walls, lay directly on the diners’ tables and colored what was in their plates. The canvas curtains which were supposed to cover the dome’s interior had never worked properly and were now, as usual, awaiting repair. Consequently, although Herr Doktor Griick’s bauernwurst and mashed potatoes had the rich brown and white tones with which they had come from the kitchen, Prinzmetal’s boeuf au jus was a dark ruby, as if it had been plucked raw from the bleeding carcass; Rausch’s plate was deep blue; and Wenzl’s was a pure, poisonous green. The visitors, of course, Umrath of Europa-News, Purser Bang of the Space Service and the trustee Neumann, had been placed in uncolored areas, except that a wedge of the red light that stained Prinzmetal’s place occasionally glinted upon Neumann’s elbow when he lifted his fork.
Wenzl, as always, sat stiff and silent at his place.
His sardonic eye missed nothing, neither the strained reluctance with which Rausch lifted his gobbets of blue meat to his lips, nor the exaggerated motion of Prinzmetal’s arm which lifted each forkful for an instant out of the sullen red light before he took it into his mouth. But Wenzl looked upon his dinner and found it green: he carved it methodically with his knife in his green hand, forked it up green and ate it green.
Umrath, the Europa-News man, was square and redfaced, with shrewd little eyes and pale lashes. He said, “Not a bad dinner, this. Compliment the chef, Herr Doktor. If this is how you feed the animals down there, I must say they live well.”
“Feed the animals!” cried Griick merrily. “Ha, ha, my dear Umrath! No, indeed, we have our separate kitchen for that, I assure you! To feed more than five hundred different species, some of them not even Terrestrial, that is no joke, you can believe me! Take for instance the Brecht’s Bipeds. Their food must be rich in sulfur and in beryllium salts. If we put that on the table here, you would soon be three sick gentlemen!”
Wenzl would eat it and not turn a hair, said Neumann, the aging trustee. He was quiet and dark, with a weary but businesslike air about him.
“Ha! True!” cried Griick. “Our Wenzl is made of cast iron! But the bipeds, gentlemen, not so. They are delicate! They require constant care!” “And money,” put in Neumann dryly, picking with his fork at the meat on his plate, which he had hardly touched.
“It’s true,” said Griick soberly. “They are rarities, and they come from eighteen lightyears away. One doesn’t go eighteen lightyears for a picnic, eh, Purser Bang?”
There was a rustling sound from the corner, which distracted the diners’ attention for a moment. Heads turned. Out of the dimness scuttled something small and many-legged, with skin of a sparkling pale blue. It turned upon them the jeweled flash of its tiny red eyes, then was gone into a hole in the wainscoting. The diners looked after it without comment.
The spaceman nodded. He was tall and taciturn, lantern-jawed, and looked more like a doorkeeper than an intrepid adventurer. He cut precise cubes from the meat on his plate and chewed them thoroughly before swallowing.
“Why spend so much for bipeds, then, Griick?” Umrath demanded. “They’re amusing, I suppose, in their way, but are they worth it?”
“My dear Umrath,” said Griick, laying down his fork in turn, “I must tell you, the bipeds represent the dream of my life. Yes, I confess, it’s true that I dream! After all, we are alive to do something in the world, to achieve something! That is why, dear Umrath, I schemed and wrote letters for five years, and why I traded two Altairan altar birds and how much money to boot I had better not mention - ” he glanced at Neumann, who smiled faintly “- for our wonderful new biped Fritz. He is here, he is well, and he is a mature male. We already have our female biped Emma. No other zoo on Earth has more than one. Laugh at me if you will, but it shall be Griick, and his Berlin Zoo, who is remembered as the first man to breed bipeds in captivity!”
“Some say it can’t be done,” put in Umrath.
“Yes, I know it!” cried Griick gaily. “Never have bipeds been successfully bred in captivity, not even on Brecht’s Planet! And why not? Because until now no one has successfully reproduced the essential conditions of their natural environment!”
“And those conditions are -?” asked Neumann with weary courtesy.