The Perfect Host (52 page)

The corridor couldn’t be circular; it just
couldn’t
. And yet, if there were some way—If he could only … only—He snapped his fingers. All he had to do was mark the wall or the floor, and walk! If he could come back upon the mark again—

“Mark it how?” he asked himself aloud. This crazy surface wouldn’t take a mark. Moisture disappeared on it. The corpse stayed on it; he himself stayed on it, but the resilient surface couldn’t be scratched, wouldn’t stain.

Use the corpse as a mark, then. But—he couldn’t trust it. He found it tumbled about, and wearing a different tunic each time.

The answer occurred to him. It had undoubtedly been in his mind for minutes, but he could not face it. For a time he crouched there not thinking at all. Gradually, then, he let the terrifying thought emerge. He began to tremble.

He looked at the beckoning blacknesses. He clenched his fists and made a sobbing sound. He rose then, and carefully bent to the corpse, straightening the light old limbs, crossing the hands on the chest, smoothing the scarlet tunic. “Don’t go away,” he murmured.

He peeled his own belt apart and slipped the shining yellow garment off. Kneeling, he tucked it under the belt the corpse wore, tightening it down until there could be no chance of its coming free by itself. Then naked and terribly alone, he strode into the darkness.

The shadows folded themselves happily about him. He looked back. The golden radiance from his tunic poured upward from the red-clad corpse. And there was something wrong about the floor on which it lay.

He moved closer to the right wall, trailing his fingers lightly along it to guide him as he walked into deeper blackness. He looked back again. What he saw made him clutch convulsively at the leaning wall, in a sudden attack of vertigo.

The corpse, as clear and distant as something spotlighted on a stage, was just as he had left it. But between him and the corpse, the floor seemed to have bellied downward, and twisted as well, so that the dead man lay as if on a slanted deck. The slant seemed almost enough to make the body roll, though it did not.

Hulon moved sidewise along the wall, away from the dimming light. The floor where the corpse was seemed to be canting more and more as he moved, and the floor between him and the body seemed to fall downward away from the corpse and up again to him. And in a few minutes the distant picture apparently rotated up and out of sight, and he moved steadily forward into an unthinkable dark.

It must have been a half hour later when he began to whimper. He was hardly aware of it at first. He ground his teeth and walked. His inner conviction was that he had analyzed his situation correctly, and that there was, therefore, nothing to fear. But if he were wrong—
what might be lurking in this blackness? What horror might spring at him to rip and tear his soft unprotected flesh, or slide slimily over him, throwing fold after fold of cold wet coils about him?

He heard his own soft whimpering and stopped it abruptly.
You are alone here
, he told himself fervently.
There is nothing to fear
. He stopped, slid down to the floor, huddled up in a foetal posture, to rest. In the quiet, in a blackness so complete that he could see the ruddy flashes of his own pulse, he forced his mind to be still.

Something cold touched his bare hip. He writhed away and screamed, knowing in the same instant that it was one of the bubbles. His heart thumped so hard that he was panicked, suddenly, lest it make so much noise that he could not hear the approach of … of—
But I’m alone here
, he scoffed.

He fumbled for the bubble, touched it, lifted it and drank quickly. The highly nutrient solution soothed him in and out as he drank and spilled. He rested a moment more and then rose, stretched.
Soon I should see light
, he thought as he walked.
And if I am right, the light should be red, and the old man will be dressed in … in—
Aloud he began to chant softly as he walked, “Violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, green—”

Before him, so dimly that it could easily have been a trick over his hypersensitive, straining eyes, he began to see a loom of light. He quickened his pace. Soon, now, he would know.

His whole body strained toward the light, and he became increasingly conscious of the deeper darkness behind him. Almost hysterically he blanked out the ancestral fears which crowded at his bare back and shoulders, which increased as he increased his speed.

And now it was unmistakably light, and the light was red. Hulon laughed, and began to run. He could see the walls now, and again could know the shape of the corridor. Again he saw the floor sweeping down and away from him and then up to the hidden light-source. When the source finally burst upon his vision, he grunted and threw his arm over his eyes. He slowed to a panting walk, slitted his lids, until he could see again.

He saw a tumbled corpse, and it was dressed in blue. Red light and a blue tunic, and he was right! He was right!

He sprinted toward the spraddled, dead figure which, distantly, seemed to be clinging to the wall—a wall which leaned and twisted and joined the leaning and twisting floor under his feet. This gave him no more vertigo, for now he understood it, and his vision was no longer in conflict with the sense of balance and orientation which told him with all the authority of thirty years of refined experience that the floor was level and flat.

He pounded up to the corpse, which was, when he reached it, lying on the level floor on which he stood. He grinned at it. “Thanks, fella,” he chuckled. He took the luminous red tunic and slipped it out of the blue belt of the garment the corpse wore. He slipped it over his head and fastened it. Then he filled his lungs and shouted.

“Come get me! I have the answers!”

His voice was lapped up greedily in the echoless place. Stiffly he waited. Then, shockingly, the light went out.

Hulon stood stiffly in the total dark.
I’ve shot my bolt
, he thought defiantly.
There can’t be any other answer
.

Barely to be heard over his tense breathing, there was a small, steady hiss. An acrid mist swirled into his nostrils. He tried not to breathe, but it made him gasp, and when he did that there was a loud singing in his ears and he fell heavily, quite conscious, quite unable to move.

The hiss ceased. Silence. Then the hum of a suction fan. The acrid smell disappeared. He lay limply, half on his side, for minutes.

A blaze of yellow light hurt his eyes. Somewhere the wall had opened. There were people around him. A girl—the same one he had spoken with first, but her hair was chestnut now. And the gray-faced man, who asked “Can you hear me, Hulon?”

“Yes,” said Hulon clearly.

“You’re ready to give the answers?”

“Yes.”

The man knelt beside him. “The vapor you just breathed will kill you in two minutes,” he said calmly. “I have a hypodermic here which can keep that from happening. After I give you that—if I do—you will die within two hours. There is further treatment, of course. It’s the one you came here for. It will kill you within … oh, say twelve
or fourteen hundred years if it isn’t renewed. Now: give me the answers, and if they are correct, you’ll get the hypo. Give me your reasoning and if that’s acceptable you get the final treatment. Do you understand? You will die now, or in two hours, or not at all.”

“I understand,” said Hulon steadily. It was odd, being able to speak but not to move.

“What is at the end of the corridor?”

“I am,” said Hulon. It—has no end.”

“What death was waiting for you?”

Hulon said carefully, “Aside from anything you might do to me, there was only one kind of death here, as long as it was warm and I was fed. Old age.”

The hypodermic bit into his shoulder. “Oh, good boy, good boy!” said the girl.

They helped him up when he said his legs were beginning to tingle, and turned him toward an irregular opening in one wall. He noticed that the surface of the wall seemed violently agitated at the edges of the doorway. He was half carried into a short tunnel with a steel door at the other end. This door swung open at their approach, and they stepped down into what appeared to be a comfortably furnished doctor’s office. Hulon was put into an easy-chair near the desk. The gray-faced man sat on the swivel-chair and the girl perched on the edge of the desk. She smiled at him, and he smiled back.

“Look,” said the man, pointing to a box on his desk. It looked like a small speaker. He flipped a switch on its side. “This is a microphone. There are a lot of people listening. If they like what they hear, you’re in. There’s a green light and a red light—see? I don’t have to explain that much further, eh? Except to tell you that all votes are integrated and it’ll take a two-thirds majority to make either light come on. Shall we go ahead?”

“I have something less than two hours,” said Hulon wryly. “P’raps we’d better.”

The doctor grinned. “Right. Just tell it in your own way; what you figured out about that corridor, and how.”

“Well,” said Hulon carefully, “the easiest thing to figure out was that it was endless—that is, it turned back on itself in some way. I
figured that it has some sort of gravity mechanism under the floor. That right?”

The girl nodded. “How did you think of that?”

“That was the only way it could have worked. It didn’t appear to curve to right or left. And at first I guessed that it was a vertical circle, like an automobile tire. But that idea fell down after I tied my tunic to the dead man and walked away from it, and saw the way the corridor twisted. The color of the light was the real tip-off. As I moved through the corridor, it went right around the spectrum. Every time I ran into the corpse, I found that his clothes were a different color—and his colors changed around the spectrum, too. When I was a kid in school we learned the colors by their initials: V, B, G, Y, O, R. Well, if you consider those as six ‘points’ on the band, you’ll see that the color of the dead man’s clothes were always two ‘points’ behind. On top of that, I saw that every time I bumped into the dead man I was one third of the way through the spectrum. So I had three ‘thirds’ to put together: I met the corpse a third of the way through the spectrum—the corpse’s clothes were a third of the spectrum behind the color of mine—and the triangular cross section of the corridor. There’s only one explanation that fits all these things, along with the fact that that poor old fellow was tumbled all over himself each time I came on him. And it’s sort of … hard to describe.

“Try,” said the doctor.

“Well,” said Hulon, “a while back my relief at the theater, Frank, showed me something that kept me tickled for hours. He’d read about it in a magazine or somewhere. He took a strip of scrap film about eighteen inches long and put the ends together. He turned one end over and spliced ’em. Now, if you trace that strip, or mark it with a grease pencil, right up the center, you find that the doggone thing only has one side!”

The doctor nodded, and the girl said: “A Möbius strip.”

“That what they call it?” said Hulon. “Well, I figured this corridor must be something like that. On that strip, a single continuous line touched both sides. All I had to do was figure out an object built
so that a continuous line would cover all three of three sides, and I’d have it. So I sat down and thought it out.

“If you take a piece of clay and make a long … uh … sausage out of it, and then form it so it has a triangular cross section; and then if you bring the ends together and rotate one one hundred twenty degrees and stick ’em together, you’d have a figure like that. It would have only one side, like the … what was it?… Möbius strip.”

“Nice reasoning,” said the doctor. “You’re quite right. Incidentally, it would have only one edge, too.”

“It would? I never thought of that. Anyway, I visualized a figure like that, and then imagined one that was hollow, and myself inside it. Now, as for the light, my guess is that it moved through the spectrum one third of the way each time I went around the circle, and all the way through the spectrum when I’d been around three times—that is, when I reached the place where the same ‘wall’ was a floor again. I think the walls of the corridor were a floor, one after the other, I mean.”

“That’s pretty clear. The corridor is what a topologist calls a non-simply-connected continuous trifacial. Now, what’s your guess about gravity?”

“I can only say
what
was done,” said Hulon, frowning. “Not
how
. But it seems to me that the whole corridor was somehow insulated from Earth’s gravity, and that my feet in some way controlled an artificial gravity in the place. In other words, wherever I walked was ‘down’. And that effect only worked lengthwise along any side that was a ‘floor’ at the moment. I mean, if I had turned and tried walking up the wall, it wouldn’t have worked, even though that wall did become a floor later, when I came on it endwise. That’s what tumbled the dead man around like that every time I got him laid out. He’d lie nice and still until a wall beside him became a floor, and the floor on which he lay became a wall. Then he’d simply fall away onto what was now a floor.”

“Good!” said the doctor heartily. “And have you any idea why you always found him dressed in a different color?”

“Not really. Unless it was just a characteristic of the material to
reflect yellow in blue light, red in yellow light, and blue in red light. I don’t know how that could be, but I don’t know how controlled gravity could be either.”

“All right! You’re doing fine. One more question, and we’ll have the vote. Why do you suppose we set up the test just the way we did?”

“Why I … I imagine so you could test about everything there is to test in a man,” said Hulon. “To see if he can analyze things he observes—even things that are against all his previous experience.”

“That’s right,” smiled the doctor. “Including how badly he can be scared, and still think straight.” He bent to the speaker. “Vote,” he said shortly.

There was a tense pause, and then the green light flickered, went out, lit—and stayed alight.

The doctor clapped his hands together delightedly, and the girl skipped down from the desk and kissed Hulon’s cheek.