Damon Knight - Beyond the Barrier

Something that had been bothering Naismith came abruptly into focus, and he swung around, with one foot up on the bench, facing Churan. “Tell me this,” he said. “Why not simply go back, learn what you need to know—then put it all on one disk—meet yourselves arriving, and cut out all the trouble?”

Churan sighed. “As I told you before, it would pinch out the loop. You cannot use time in that way.”

After a moment Lall and Churan yawned together like two frogs, showing the dark greenish roofs of their mouths: the effect was grotesquely unpleasant. “We are tired,” Lall said.

“It is late.” She rose, followed by Churan, and led the way to the room opening off the far end of the lounge, opposite the one she and Churan had used. The child trailed after them, dragging its doll by one arm.

The door was closed, but opened at Lall’s touch. She stood aside. “This will be your sleeping room, Mr. Naismith. I think you will find all you need.”

The three stood waiting. Naismith glanced in; there was a low bed, a footstool, some ambiguous half-real draperies on the wall. He made no move to. enter. “Thank you,” he said.

“You will sleep here?” Lall asked plaintively.

“When I am ready. Good night.”

“But at least you will inspect the room, to see if everything is to your liking?” Churan demanded.

Lall turned her head and said something to him in their own hissing, guttural speech. She turned back. “Just as you wish, then, Mr. Naismith. We will talk again in the morning.”

The three aliens crossed the lounge and entered their own room. The door slid shut after them.

Naismith paused a moment, listening: he could hear Lall and Churan moving about in their room, talking sleepily together, with occasional bursts of acrimony. There was no point in waiting any longer. Naismith moved noiselessly out into the corridor. The drifting red trail guided his feet; at the first turning, he deliberately left it. He went down a flight of stairs, stepped through a narrow doorway, and found himself in darkness relieved only by spectral, phosphorescent glows from the outlines of machinery here and there. He kept moving down the narrow aisle, under a low ceiling, not pausing to examine any of the machines he passed. For the moment all he wanted was to put distance between himself and the three aliens.

After a quarter of an hour, even the phosphorescent markings thinned out and ceased. He was groping in total darkness, thoroughly lost in the interior of the great ship.

Satisfied that he was secure for the moment, Naismith sat down in the darkness and considered his position. In spite of its immense, almost overwhelming implications, the problem was basically that of buyer against seller. Each party had something the other wanted, and each was determined to give as little as possible. Naismith’s first objective was to keep the aliens from coercing him: that was now accomplished, since he was out of their reach. His next objective must be to im-prove his bargaining position. That meant, above all, increasing his knowledge: for it was knowledge that Lall and Churan held out as bait, and knowledge again that gave them a tactical superiority. His course, therefore, was clear. He must begin by exploring the ship, no matter how many weeks or even months—

The thought broke off. A breath of danger was passing down the narrow corridor, making his skin prickle and his nostrils widen. He stared blindly into the darkness: was the shadow-egg, invisible and intangible, passing there?

Whatever it was, in a moment it was gone. Naismith rose and once more began feeling his way down the corridor.

Hours later, he found a narrow passage leading off at right angles, and crossed the waist of the ship, emerging finally in a huge deserted salon. Here the moving overhead lights followed him again, but there were no red trails on the floor, and he guessed that Lall and Churan had never been in this area.

In the days that followed, Naismith prowled the empty ship alone. Its gigantic scale never ceased to oppress and astonish him: it was impossible to imagine what kind of people could have built a vessel like this, equipped it so massively and elaborately, and then left it to be mounded over on the Colorado plain.

Wherever he went, the lights winked on ahead, winked off behind. There must be some way of illuminating whole rooms at once, but Naismith had not found it. He moved in a moving circle of pale light, while all around him was green silence.

There were cyclopean galleries and choirs, around which he crawled like a fly; there were baths, gymnasia, theaters, game rooms, machine rooms, all empty with an inexpressible emptiness, hollow, not-quite-echoing….

Never once did he catch a glimpse of the aliens or their shadow-egg, although he felt sure they were trying to find him.

Everywhere he went, there were enigmatic, silent machines, including some that he guessed were television instruments, but he could not make them function. Here and there he saw symbols printed on the walls; they were in an alphabet resembling the Cyrillic, but with many added characters. Nowhere could he find a deck plan of the ship, a directory, a travel booklet, anything that would give him the least clue to the object of his search.

At last, on the fourth day, entirely by accident, he found it.

He was in a room filled with the omnipresent balloon-like armchairs and with tall, angular devices, chest high, on which square greenish plates of metal were arranged in two slanting, overlapping rows, forming an inverted V. They might have been magazine racks, with the thick metal plates substituting for magazines. As the thought came, Naismith put his hand casually on one of them, and the thing flapped open with a clatter. Crouched, ready to fight or run, he stared at it.

The rank of overlapping plates had opened, exposing the whole face of one of the plates: and where a blank square of greenish metal should have been, he saw a moving, brilliantly colored picture.

Naismith’s breathing quickened. He hardly heard the voice which spoke casually and incomprehensibly from the machine.

This was it; he had found it: this was the library, The picture he was watching showed a woman in an oddly cut red garment, posturing before a background of vaguely Oriental domes that gleamed in bright sunshine. The picture changed; now he was looking at a passageway between earth-colored buildings, down which men in white robes walked with heads bowed. It might almost have been a street scene in ancient Turkey or Egypt, except that the men were leading bright blue, hairless beasts of burden….

The picture changed again. Now, under a gigantic orange sun, stick-thin brown creatures with many legs were building a scaffold of wooden rods. Naismith understood that he was being shown an interstellar travelogue: ports of call at which this very ship had touched, perhaps… He watched until the pictures stopped, then closed the machine, opened it at a different place.

A new picture sprang into being: this time he saw two men, with thin, bearded faces, demonstrating some sort of physical apparatus. There was a thing that looked a little like a Crookes tube, and what might have been a series of accumulators. He could not understand a word of the spoken commentary, though the language sounded hauntingly familiar. The subject, at least, was apparently unrelated to the previous one. The arrangement, then, was either random or alphabetical, with a strong probability of the latter… all he had to do was to find the key to it.

That took him two more days. Then his progress was rapid.

The written language was a much modified English, phoneti-cized, with a simplified grammar and many vocabulary changes.

The spoken language was more difficult to follow, slurred and elided that it was almost impossible to follow, but Naismith found he could neglect it by concentrating on reference codes which produced displays of printed books, page by page. By the end of his fourth day in the library, he had an accurate conception of the world these star-travelers had inhabited.