Pauline Ashwell: Hunted Head

She said, “Right. Open it.”

Marius turned to the wall behind him—the one through which she had fallen, now a solid mass of gadgetry —made a few adjustments, and depressed a switch.

Part of the wall was replaced by an oblong of grey nothingness, high and wide enough for a man to go through.

Marius stepped aside. Sandy approached and peered at the greyness. This was uninformative. She extended her hand and poked it cautiously. No sensation resulted, but the end of her finger disappeared.

Summoning all her nerve, she leaned forward and pushed her face into the nothingness. This time she felt the faintest possible resistance; then she was looking into the laboratory.

How shabby the place was—stains; chips; comers picked out with indurated grime… Footsteps sounded from beyond the partition. She drew back hurriedly.

In front of her, the mass of gadgetry reappeared.

“The interface was set for one passage only,” Marius observed. “Now you have used it you will not be able to go through unless I activate it again. I will do so if you wish it.”

That, Sandy thought, was not an offer; it was a threat.

If there was one thing she hated, it was being manipulated… Moreover, she was damned sure the switching on of the “interface” through which she had fallen had been no accident. He had just seen a chance to get her here without a lot of discussion, and jumped at it.

On the other hand if she walked out now she would never know what this was all about, and the itch of unsatisfied curiosity would be worse than letting him get away with it…

Just how stupid a risk would she be taking, if she stayed? Or, to put it another way, what did Marius want from her?

Between her ninth and twelfth years, Sandy had been fostered by a family whose eldest son was addicted to fantasy. During most meals he read steadily the second-hand paperback of the moment; but once in a while he would recite the plot of the latest one, instead. Like the rest of the family Sandy tended to tune out after a minute or two, but she had grasped that the protagonist of about half these epics got lured/seduced/kidnapped/accidentally transported into some other universe, where his/her task was to save civilisation/locate some talisman/rescue, restore or replace the local ruler; on account of special skills/experience/bloodlines/ availability.

None of these seemed to fit. However it was a good bet that Marius did want her to do something here. The alternative, that she had been chosen as a victim of unspeakable rites or a guinea-pig in unspeakable experiments, didn’t make sense. She might not have any family, but that didn’t mean she could be whisked away and no questions asked. Plenty of people would be looking for her in the next few days, to collect her lab and locker keys and check the inventory of equipment issued to her and get her signature on various documents and asked if she had any textbooks to sell. The chairman knew Marius had been looking for her, and already mistrusted him. Elizabeth Wong apparently hadn’t suffered at his hands, unless failure to publish meant suffering…

“Don’t bother,” she said.

Nothing showed on Marius’s face, but he gave a tiny nod, as though some calculation had been proved correct.

“Outside this room, we shall wear isolation suits.” He pressed a button beside the narrower of the doors. It opened and an arm slid out, two one-piece garments hung limply from it. They were made of what looked like plastic, opaque and white except for a transparent part at the top. There was a long slit down the middle of each of them; the thickened edges curled back in a way Sandy found unpleasant.

“They can be worn over clothes,” Marius murmured, “but they are more comfortable without.” He took down the smaller of the suits and gave it to Sandy; then he pressed another button and a screen whirred out of the wall, cutting the space in two.

Sandy examined it suspiciously. It seemed to be quite opaque, but suppose it was transparent from the other side, so that Marius could watch her undressing—?

On the other hand, why should he bother? She dragged off her sweater and jeans; hesitated for a moment about her underclothes, then removed those also.

She climbed into the suit with a certain amount of reluctance, but it felt much better than it looked, like silk rather than polythene. The transparent part at the top was stiffened and stayed away from her face; there was a thickened inset just opposite her mouth, which appeared to be a microphone—she whispered and felt it vibrate.

“The central opening will close if you smooth it together,” said Marius from the other side of the screen.

Sandy stroked the edges of the slit together and wondered, a moment later, how she was going to breathe.

“The fabric is permeable to air molecules,” Marius mentioned. “Also to sweat. Are you—ready?”

“I’m decent, if that’s what you mean.”

“Good.” The screen slid away into the wall.

Marius looked bigger than ever. Sandy’s suit hung around her in baggy folds, but his, apart from some kind of built-in athletic protector, fitted him like skin.

“Excuse me,” he said, and laid his hands on her shoulders. The fabric of her suit shrank inwards and settled gently against her flesh. Involuntarily Sandy sucked in her stomach and wished she had kept her bra on.

“The suit will adapt itself to give support, if you stroke it in the appropriate places.” Tactfully, Marius turned his back and fiddled with things on one of the high-tech walls. Sandy experimented and found that it was true. Where did you get stuff like this? J. C. Penney’s didn’t stock it, that was certain. She had a hunch Bonwit Teller’s didn’t, either—or Nieman Marcus, come to that.

“Are you ready?” said Marius. Sandy nodded. He pressed something, and the door in the opposite wall slid aside. She looked.

Sandy realized she had been thinking of the room they had left as though it belonged somewhere inside the University. No way could this place have been fitted in… She was standing on the edge of a central space, from which broad hallways—or highways, except that they had ceilings—stretched in four directions, more or less forever. Or on second thoughts, one pair went on until perspective narrowed them to vanishing point; the other pair were only about ten times the length of the campus, and ended blindly.

All four were flanked by a series of bays; from the nearest of these (and no doubt from the others, but she couldn’t see that far) passages and doors opened off, indicating other spaces beyond.

The floor had a funny feel to it. Trying to identify it, Sandy shifted from one foot to the other. Nothing she could define—

Marius had come through while she was not looking. Damn. She had meant to watch… She turned to him, or on him.

“Where the hell are we now?”

Marius said firmly, “You will understand more easily when you have seen more of it.”

He held out a small gadget. It clicked. A moment later a spidery vehicle with two seats perched among its four wheels rolled out of a nearby bay and came to a halt in front of them. Marius handed her into a seat and heaved himself into the one beside her.

His manner reminded Sandy of somebody. After a minute or so she chased down the memory; first day at college, she and a dozen others had been shown round by an administrative assistant who obviously knew every possible question and intended to deal with them in the order and the way that long experience had shown to be most rapidly understood. But she was not a fresher any longer; she had been a stranger in enough different surroundings not to be bemused even here.

She said abruptly, “This is the future. Isn’t it?”