Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Alexander Bauer and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
[ Transcriber's Note:
This e-text was produced from the September 1960 issue of If. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible.
Text that was _italic_ in the original is marked with _.]
The Wedge
Finding his way out of this maze was only half the job.
By H. B. FYFE
When the concealed gong sounded, the man sitting on the floor sighed. Hecontinued, however, to slump loosely against the curving, pearly plasticof the wall, and took care not to glance toward the translucent ovals heknew to be observation panels.
He was a large man, but thin and bony-faced. His dirty gray coverallbore the name "Barnsley" upon grimy white tape over the heart. Except atthe shoulders, it looked too big for him. His hair was dark brown, butthe sandy ginger of his two-week beard seemed a better match for hisblue eyes.
Finally, he satisfied the softly insistent gong by standing up andgazing in turn at each of the three doors spaced around the cylindricalchamber. He deliberately adopted an expression of simple-mindedanticipation as he ambled over to the nearest one.
The door was round, about four feet in diameter, and set in a flattenedpart of the wall with its lower edge tangent with the floor. Rods abouttwo inches thick projected a hand's breadth at four, eight, and twelveo'clock. The markings around them suggested that each could be rotatedto three different positions. Barnsley squatted on his heels to studythese.
Noting that all the rods were set at the position he had learned tothink of as "one," he reached out to touch the door. It felt slightlywarm, so he allowed his fingertips to slide over the upper handle. Atentative tug produced no movement of the door.
"That's it, though," he mumbled quietly. "Well, now to do our little actwith the others!"
He moved to the second door, where all the rods were set at "two." Herehe fell to manipulating the rod handles, pausing now and then to shovehopefully against the door. Some twenty minutes later, he tried the sameroutine at the third door.
Eventually, he returned to his starting point and rotated the rods thereat random for a few minutes. Having, apparently by accident, arrangedthem in a sequence of one-two-three, he contrived to lean against thedoor at the crucial instant. As it gave beneath his weight, he grabbedthe two lower handles and pushed until the door rose to a horizontalposition level with its hinged top. It settled there with a loud click.
* * * * *
Barnsley stooped to crawl through into an arched passage of the samepearly plastic. He straightened up and walked along for about twentyfeet, flashing a white-toothed grin through his beard while mutteringcurses behind it. Presently, he arrived at a small, round bay, to beconfronted by three more doors.
"Bet there's a dozen of you three-eyed clods peeping at me," he growled."How'd you like me to poke a boot through the panel in front of you andkick you blubber-balls in all directions? Do you have a page in yourdata books for that?"
He forced himself to _feel_ sufficiently dull-witted to waste tenminutes opening one of the doors. The walls of the succeeding passagewere greenish, and the tunnel curved gently downward to the left.Besides being somewhat warmer, the air exuded a faint blend of heatedmachine oil and something like ripe fish. The next time Barnsley came toa set of doors, he found also a black plastic cube about two feet high.He squatted on his heels to examine it.
_I'd better look inside or they'll be disappointed_, he told himself.
From the corner of his eye, he watched the movement of shadows behindthe translucent panels in the walls. He could picture the observersthere: blubbery bipeds with three-jointed arms and legs ending inclusters of stubby but flexible tentacles. Their broad, spine-crestedheads would be thrust forward and each would have two of his threeprotruding eyes directed at Barnsley's slightest move. They had probablybeen staring at him in relays every second since picking up his scoutship in the neighboring star system.
That is, Barnsley thought, it must have been the next system whosefourth planet he had been photo-mapping for the Terran Colonial Service.He hoped he had not been wrong about that.
_Doesn't matter_, he consoled himself, _as long as the Service can traceme. These slobs certainly aren't friendly._
He reconsidered the scanty evidence of previous contact in this volumeof space, light-years from Terra's nearest colony. Two exploratory shipshad disappeared. There had been a garbled, fragmentary message picked upby the recorders of the colony's satellite beacon, which some expertsinterpreted as a hasty warning. As far as he knew, Barnsley was the onlyTerran to reach this planet alive.
To judge from his peculiar imprisonment, his captors had recovered fromtheir initial dismay at encountering another intelligent race--at leastto the extent of desiring a specimen for study. In Barnsley's opinion,that put him more or less ahead of the game.
"They're gonna learn a lot!" he muttered, grinning vindictively.
He finished worrying the cover off the black box. Inside was a plasticsphere of water and several varieties of food his captors probablyconsidered edible. The latter ranged from a leafy stalk bearing a numberof small pods to a crumbling mass resembling moldy cheese. Barnsleyhesitated.
"I haven't had the guts to try this one yet," he reminded himself,picking out what looked like a cluster of long, white roots.
The roots squirmed feebly in his grasp. Barnsley returned them to thebox instantly.
Having selected, instead, a fruit that could have been a purplecucumber, he put it with the water container into a pocket of hiscoverall and closed the box.
_Maybe they won't remember that I took the same thing once before_, hethought. _Oh, hell, of course they will! But why be too consistent?_
He opened one of the doors and walked along a bluish passage thattwisted to the left, chewing on the purple fruit as he went. It wastougher than it looked and nearly tasteless. At the next junction, heunscrewed the cap of the water sphere, drained it slowly, and flippedthe empty container at one of the oval panels. A dim shadow blurred outof sight, as if someone had stepped hastily backward.
"Why not?" growled Barnsley. "It's time they were shaken up a little!"
* * * * *
Pretending to have seen something where the container had struck thewall, he ran over and began to feel along the edge of the panel. Whenhis fingertips encountered only the slightest of seams, he doubled hisfists and pounded. He thought he could detect a faint scurrying on theother side of the wall.
Barnsley laughed aloud. He raised one foot almost waist-high and drovethe heel of his boot through the translucent observation panel. Seizingthe splintered edges of the hole, he tugged and heaved until he had tornout enough of the thin wall to step through to the other side. He foundhimself entering a room not much larger than the passage behind him.
To his left, there was a flicker of blue from a crack in the wall. Thecrack widened momentarily, emitting a gabble of mushy voices. The bluecloth was twitched away by a cluster of stubby tentacles, whereupon thecrack closed to an almost imperceptible line. Barnsley fingered hisbeard to hide a grin and turned the other way.
He stumbled into a number of low stools surmounted by spongy, sphericalcushions. One of these he tore off for a pillow before going on. At theend of the little room, he sought for another crack, kicked the panela bit to loosen it, and succeeded in sliding back a section of wall.The passage revealed was about the si
ze of those he had been forcedto explore during the past two weeks, but it had an unfinished,behind-the-scenes crudeness in appearance. Barnsley pottered alongfor about fifteen minutes, during which time the walls resounded withdistant running and he encountered several obviously improvisedbarriers.
He kicked his way through one, squeezed through an opening that had notbeen closed quite in time, restrained a wicked impulse to cross somewiring that must have been electrical, and at last allowed himself to bediverted into a passage leading back to his original cell. He amusedhimself by trying to picture the disruption he had caused to thehoneycomb of passageways.
"There!" he grinned to himself. "That should keep them from bothering mefor a few hours. Maybe one or two of them will get in trouble over it--Ihope!"
He arranged his stolen cushion where the wall met the floor and laydown.
A thought struck him. He sat up to examine the cushion suspiciously.It appeared to be an equivalent to foam rubber. He prodded and twisteduntil convinced that no wires or other unexpected objects were concealedinside. Not till then did he resume his relaxed position.
Presently one of his hands located and pinched a tiny switch buriedin the lobe of his left ear. Barnsley concentrated upon keeping hisfeatures blank as a rushing sound seemed to grow in his ear. He yawnedcasually, moving one hand from behind his head to cover his mouth.
Having practiced many times before a mirror, he did not think that anypossible watcher would have noticed how his thumb slipped briefly insidehis mouth to give one eyetooth a slight twist.
A strong humming inundated his hearing. It continued for perhaps twominutes, paused, and began again. Barnsley waited through two repetitionsbefore he "yawned" again and sleepily rolled over to hide his face in hisfolded arms.
"Did you get it all?" he murmured.
"Clear as a bell," replied a tiny voice in his left ear. "Was that yourwhole day's recording?"
"I guess so," said Barnsley. "To tell the truth, I lose track a bitafter two weeks without a watch. Who's this? Sanchez?"
"That's right. You seem to come in on my watch pretty nearly everytwenty-four hours. Okay, I'll tape a slowed-down version of your blastfor the boys in the back room. You're doing fine."
* * * * *
"Not for much longer," Barnsley told him. "When do I get out of here?"
"Any day," Sanchez reassured him. "It was some job to learn an alienlanguage with just your recordings and some of your educated guesses togo on. We've had a regular mob sweating on it night and day."
"How is it coming?"
"It turns out they're nothing to worry about. The fleet is close enoughnow to pick up their surface broadcasting. Believe me, your stupid acthas them thoroughly confused. They hold debates over whether you couldpossibly be intelligent enough to belong in a spaceship."
"Meanwhile, I'm slowly starving," said Barnsley.
"Just hang on for a couple of days. Now that we know where they are,they're in for a shock. One of these mornings, they're going to hearvoices from all over their skies, demanding to know what kind of savagesthey are to have kidnapped you--and in their own language!"
Barnsley grinned into his improvised pillow as Sanchez signed off.Things would really work out after all. He was set for an immenselylucrative position; whether as ambassador, trade consultant, or colonialgovernor depended upon how well the experts bluffed the blubber-heads.Well, it seemed only his due for the risks he had taken.
"Omigosh!" he grunted, sitting up as he pictured the horde of TerranColonial experts descending upon the planet. "I'll be the only one herethat hasn't learned to speak the language!"
END