Damon Knight - Beyond the Barrier

Then there was a change. It happened so gradually that Naismith was not aware of it at first. The crowds in the lounges and game rooms grew less. Crew members in their gray and black uniforms were more in evidence, and moved more pur-posefully. Once Naismith saw a stumbling, slack-jawed man being helped out of a room by two crewmen: he looked drunken or perhaps drugged. Rentro’s commentary was dis-dainfully cool, as usual, but Naismith caught a worried expression on his face.

A day or so later, there was no mistaking the difference.

Few people were in the lounges or on the promenades. Rentro ventured out briefly, then went back to his cabin; his next entry in the journal was made there, and so were all those that followed. His expression grew daily more strained: he looked, Naismith thought, like a badly frightened man. Once he made a long speech into the machine, which Naismith would have given much to interpret, but he could only catch a word here and there, no matter how often he played it over—“carrying,”

“danger,” “contagion.”

A day later, the entry was brief, and Naismith was able to make it out: “We are returning to Earth.”

The rest of the journal consisted of brief entries, only the date and a few perfunctory words, with two exceptions. In the first, Rentro spoke at some length, seriously and soberly, from time to time consulting a tablet he held in his hand: it occurred to Naismith that he was making his will.

The second time, after announcing the date and repeating a phrase he had used several times before, Rentro suddenly and horrifyingly lost his composure. With a distorted, writhing face, he shouted something into the machine—four words, of which Naismith could make out only one. It was “Greenskins”—

the contemporary name for Lall’s people.

Two days after that, the journal stopped. It simply ended, without any clue to what had happened next.

Naismith searched the adjoining suites, then and on the following day, and found three more such personal journals.

When he had run them all off he was no wiser: all told essentially the same story, and all ended abruptly, at varying times, before the ship reached Earth.

For the time being, he gave it up. Naismith had been two weeks alone in the ship, enduring its green silences, and the solitude was beginning to wear on him. He began to think of going back to the aliens. He had explored the ship as thoroughly as he could, in the limits of the time he had spent, and without going near the red trails left by Lall and Churan.

It occurred to him for the first time that this precaution might have been unnecessary.

Suppose the aliens had begun to use the time machine to search for him as soon as they had found him missing. Almost certainly they would have begun by searching their own lounge and the corridor outside it, for a month or so into the future.

If they had done that, and found him, there would never have been any necessity to search elsewhere in the ship. Accordingly, if Naismith was in fact going to be found in the aliens’ suite or near it, he could roam anywhere he pleased until that time, elsewhere in the ship, without any fear of discovery.

It was a curious sensation, following the fading red trail on the carpet. Here and there still fainter trails branched off.

Doubtless the aliens had first explored the ship at random, as he himself had done; these early trails led nowhere. But the strong red trail, recently renewed, meant that there were places in the ship the aliens wanted to revisit. What were they?

The path led through empty galleries and lounges, down a broad corridor, up a stair… Naismith’s own knowledge of the ship soon failed him; he no longer knew where he was except in a general sense.

He passed through an anteroom into a vast, echoing natatorium surrounded by balconies. Cushions and reclining chairs were strewn beside the pool; the tank itself was filled with clear water. There was no debris on the bottom, not a particle of dust visible on the surface. Remembering the colorful crowds he had seen in Rentro’s journal, Naismith was oppressed by the sense of their almost-living presence—as if they had only stepped into the next room for a moment….

Beyond the natatorium was a row of dressing rooms, and beyond that, unexpectedly, a small gymnasium. Here, for the first time, there was evidence of an alien presence. The parallel bars, horses, trampolines had been pushed aside, and three small black-metal boxes lay in the middle of the polished floor.

One had a line of transparencies and dials on its upper face.

Remembering the machine the aliens had used on him in their Los Angeles apartment, Naismith was careful not to approach them. He skirted the room cautiously, looking for a continua-tion of the red trail, but there was none: it ended here.

He turned. And Churan was standing in the doorway, with a black, lensed machine on a tripod beside him.

With shock tingling through his nervous system, Naismith took a step forward; the machine swiveled slightly on its mounting to follow him. He stopped.

“Don’t do it, Naismith,” Churan said tensely. “This is a force gun, locked onto you as its target. If I press the release—” he showed Naismith a tiny control box in his hand—

“or if you move too suddenly, the gun will fire.”

Naismith forced himself to relax. “Why the armament?” he asked contemptuously.

“We have decided it is safer. If you have no plan to attack us, it will make no difference to you. Now follow, please, and make no sudden moves for your own safety.”

He backed away, and the machine rolled back beside him, its glittering lenses swiveling to stare at Naismith, almost with an air of intelligence: as if the machine were alive, watching him….

I should have looked for the arsenal, Naismith thought, with a sick feeling of defeat. But perhaps it would not have made any difference—they would have found me there before I could take anything…

Churan backed out into the middle of the corridor and stopped. The headband with its metal box lay on the carpet.

“Pick it up,” he ordered curtly.

Naismith moved forward as slowly as he dared. “Where are Lall and the child?” he asked, temporizing.

“Safe,” Churan spat. “Pick up the headband!”

Naismith stooped, got the thing in his fingers. Tell me, Churan,” he said, “why all this caution? Why can’t you just go forward in time and see if everything turns out all right?”

Churan’s amber eyes gleamed. “We did that, Mr. Naismith.

The results—were ambiguous. We decided to take no chances with you. Put on the headband.”

Naismith raised the headband, weighing it in his hands. He swayed slightly, watching the feral head of the machine turn, almost imperceptibly, on its oiled socket. What was the principle involved? Heat? If he could somehow manage to reduce his body temperature—

Churan glared. “Put it on!”

Naismith’s body tensed. For reasons he could not clearly understand, the thing he held was intensely abhorrent. It might be better to jump, take his chances—

“I warn you!” said Churan, holding the control box in squat fingers.

Naismith’s lips pulled back in a grimace. He raised the headband, slowly fitted it over his skull.

The last thing he saw, before darkness crashed around him, was Churan’s triumphant smile.

His head ached. He was sitting on the floor, holding his head in his hands to quiet the throbbing pain. He looked around, moving with exaggerated caution, for the slightest motion made his head feel as if it were about to split.

The headband lay across the room, bent out of shape. Churan was staring at him, breathing hard; sweat was beaded on his narrow forehead.