Damon Knight: Beyond the Barrier

Oddly repelled, Naismith said, “Then all this has been just to drive me into a position where I’d have to do what you wanted?”

“Yes,” She smiled again, and again Naismith felt a wave of repulsion.

“But why me?”

“Because you’re a Shefth. Look—” She fumbled in her handbag. “Catch this.” Her hand came up; something small and white hurtled toward him.

Naismith’s left hand went out, caught the thing in mid-air, batted it violently away. It bounced on the grass and came to rest.

“You see?” she asked, a little shakily, staring at him with her luminous amber eyes. “That’s why. Your reflexes are twice as fast as any—normal human being’s.” She stopped. “But I’ve said enough. Just one more word, Professor Naismith! Struggle against us. That’s what we want. The more you struggle, the more ready you’ll be. Now good-by.”

She turned away. Taut with anger, Naismith stepped after her, took her by the arm.

Her bare flesh burned cold into his palm. She was as cold as a lizard—or a corpse.

Naismith let go hastily. Her amber eyes stared coldly into his as she said again, “Good-by, Professor Naismith.” Then she turned, and this time Naismith did not try to stop her. He watched until she disappeared around a curve of the flame-tree-bordered path.

After a moment his eye was caught by a glint of white on the lawn a few yards away. He went to it, stooped and picked it up. It was the object Miss Lall had tossed at him: a chrome tube like an oversized lipstick. He removed the cap gingerly: there was a brown substance inside, the end apparently worn by use. On his thumb it left a brown smear, which would not come off, although he rubbed it vigorously with his handker-chief.

Turning the tube around, he saw lettering stamped into its side:

“WESTMORE CHARACTER SKINTONE No. 3: DARK SUNTAN.”

Naismith went home in a mood of suppressed fury. He pulled the machine down from the closet shelf again, set it on his kitchenette table, and stared at it while he ate a sandwich and drank coffee. The food satisfied his hunger, but his attention was not on it. He looked at the sleek, gleaming metal case as if by sheer force of staring he could penetrate its secrets. The metal was blue, like blued steel, but with iridescent glints of color. When he looked closely, he could just make out the fine parallel lines of the machining. That was what, gave it the iridescence, apparently. He examined the three oval inlays, tried again to turn or depress them, tried to force his fingernail into the cracks around them, but the separation was too fine. He turned the machine over, looking again for any joint, but there was none: except for the three inlays, the case was all one piece.

A prickle of uneasiness went up his spine. A machine is incomplete without controls. This had none. Therefore it was incomplete: the controls were elsewhere.

Someone, out there, invisible… sitting in a room, watching Naismith every moment… with his finger on a button?

Naismith’s fists clenched. The thing was dangerous, lethal; the fact that it came from Churan was proof enough that it was meant to work against him. And yet it was the only solid piece of evidence he had.

What else was there? He cast his mind back over the conversation with Miss Lall: all of it seemed subtly unpleasant now. Like an electric current, that cold touch of her arm had run back over all his memories of her.

After a moment he got up and took his notepad from the desk. Sitting again at the kitchenette table, he turned to the page where he had already listed what he knew about Lall and Churan, and wrote underneath: “Shefth. Mutated ortholidan (sp.?). Not Terrestrial species.”

Under that again, he scrawled, “Am I?” And immediately crossed it out with two heavy black lines.

He stood up, paced back and forth twice across the small room, then went with sudden decision to the visiphone and punched a number. To the university switchboard operator who answered, he said, “Professor Sturges, please.”

“I’ll see if he’s available.” The screen went gray, then blinked to life again. A pale young man peered myopically out of the screen. “Bio office.”

“I’d like to talk to Professor Sturges, please.”

“Okay, I’ll get him.” He disappeared from the screen, and Naismith heard his distant voice calling, “Hey, Harry—run down and tell Prof Sturges there’s a visi for him.”

After another wait, Sturges’ cropped gray head and sallow, intelligent face came on the screen. Sturges held the Chair of Xenology; he was a quiet man, said to be well thought of in his field; Naismith had only met him once or twice, at faculty luncheons.

“Sturges, I need some information in your line, if you will.”

“Of course, but aren’t you—” Sturges blinked at him with faint suspicion.

“It’s all been cleared up. I’ll explain when I see you,” said Naismith quickly. “Meanwhile, what I chiefly want to know is this: according to my understanding, no intelligent humanoid race has ever been discovered off Earth. Is that correct?”

“Quite correct,” Sturges replied, still in reserve. “In fact, no intelligent race at all. One or two are about as smart as a chimpanzee, according to the Europeans. Why?”

“A student of mine asked me to criticize an imaginative story of his,” Naismith said, improvising. “Now this may be a little harder. Does the word ‘Shefth’ mean anything to you?”

Sturges repeated it without interest, then shook his head slowly. “No.”

“Zug?”

“No.”

“Have you ever heard of an organism called an ortholidan?”

“Never,” said Sturges succinctly. “Is that all?”

Naismith hesitated. “Yes, that’s it. Thank you.”

“Any time,” said Sturges distantly, and broke the connection.

Naismith sat looking at the blank screen. He had been on the point of asking Sturges, “Could a living human being be as cold to the touch as a lizard?”

But he knew the answer. Reptiles and amphibia are cold to the touch because they have no self-regulating temperature mechanism. The temperature of warm-blooded animals varies between narrow limits; if it rises or falls beyond those limits, generally speaking, the animal dies.

But a cold-blooded animal’s body temperature is always within a degree or two of the temperature of the air. And it had been cool and overcast this morning on the campus, when he met the Lall creature….

Naismith stood up, his muscles murderously taut. These people, whatever they were, knew more about him than he did himself. And that was intolerable.

“A Shefth,” he said aloud. The word still meant nothing to him, called up no image.

Where had he been, what unimaginable things had he done, during the thirty-one years that were blank in his memory?

Where on Earth… or off it?

Naismith thought frozenly, “Everything depends on what action I take at this moment.” With every nerve alert, he could sense the gathering danger around him as if it were a visible, geometric web.

Suddenly he remembered the card the assistant registrar had given him, and took it out of his pocket. According to the schedule, Lall had no classes this afternoon. Her address was given as 1034 Colorado Avenue, Apt. C30, Santa Monica.

The tube took Naismith to within a block of the address he wanted—one of the old gray-stone apartment complexes, built during the Cold War, with deep shelters and storage vaults underneath. The “C30” in Lall’s address, he knew, meant that she lived in the third sub-basement of the converted shelters.

The foyer with its peeling plastic walls was empty. Naismith took the elevator down into a narrow corridor, poorly lighted, with numbered red doors at intervals. The ceiling was oppressively low; the floor was scuffed gray tile.