Dr. S, warily: “But you know, Jim, that’s a rather peculiar smile you’re wearing. Also…well, you’re not making too much sense either. I mean, we’ve had our little problems, and—”
Goodwin: “I know, and I’m sorry. But I’m okay now, I assure you. And to tell the truth, I don’t think there’s too much time left. But if you’re really not interested, well—”
Dr. S, with a wry chuckle: “Hmmm! So then, maybe you’re the real psychiatrist here, eh? But okay, I’m hooked, and of course I’ll listen to you. So go ahead, explain away. Tell me about…everything.”
Goodwin: “It’s a long story but I’ll cut it short as I can. The reason I wasn’t able to do it before was because I couldn’t understand how anyone—how any intelligent thing, or things—could be so terrifyingly, cold-bloodedly, calculatingly merciless. Nothing in my experience, in the skies, on the earth or in the oceans has ever come anywhere near it for what I took to be sheer unfeeling cruelty. But it happened to me, and it happened to poor Sue Rafferty. And it was so horrifically unnatural that my mind was shutting down every time I started to think back on it.
“Okay, let me get started:
“That flash of light from the anomaly had KO’d me, knocked me out cold. Sue too, as it later turned out. So it seems more than likely I dreamed that stuff about looking down on the universe…it’s something I’m not sure about. I mean, how could I possibly have done something as weird as that? But one thing is for sure: I felt that I’d been moved—conveyed, transported—oh, a very, very long way. It was just a feeling I had, that distance was somehow meaningless now….
“Anyway, Sue was awake first.
“I came to when I heard her calling out to me. We were in a couple of purplish-blue bubbles with semi-opaque walls; she was next door, standing with her hands spread on the adjoining wall and looking through at me. The walls distorted things; they had these ripples of blue light moving over them. Whatever was outside our rooms—more of these bubbles, with vague shapes moving around inside them—it all seemed to melt away into a hazy distance. I was on my back, on a flat, circular table with five thin legs. When I stood up I could see a similar table in Sue’s bubble. We were both stark naked; our pressure suits and clothing lay in twin heaps against the walls of our respective bubbles, in fact our cells.
“Once I was on my feet, I felt heavy; Earth-heavy, which I wasn’t used to. I went toward Sue, touched the wall. It gave a little under my hand but finally resisted me. A force-field of some sort; it had to be. We were naked as babes, as I’ve said, but in this situation…well hell, that didn’t matter at all.
Sue’s voice was faint, as if she was in another room—which of course she was—but I know you get my meaning.
“‘Jim, where are we?’ she said. I could tell she was scared witless. For all that it was warm she stood there shivering but without making a move to cover her parts. Hey, who am I to talk about being scared? I was naked too and I hadn’t given a single thought to putting some clothes on. I tried to speak to Sue but when she saw my lips moving she shook her head, said, ‘No!’ And finally it dawned on me that she wasn’t just speaking but shouting at me!
“So I shouted back and she heard me. ‘Clothes,’ I told her, and I made for my stuff where it was heaped against the wall. I figured that being clothed would at least provide us with something of dignity. But:
“‘No!’ Sue shouted again as I reached for my drawers.
“And bang—I was zapped! There was some kind of isolation field around my clothing. It hummed and sparked, made traceries of fire and knocked me off my feet. Damn, that stung! It numbed me from my fingertips to my armpits! But at least I knew why Sue was naked now, and why I was going to stay that way, too….
“Time passed, quite a bit of time. We got sore throats from shouting at each other, asking pointless questions. And finally we slept…
“When I woke up again, that was when the horror started.
“It was Sue’s screams that woke me. And believe me, she was screaming! Coming loud and clear even through the bubble walls, it drilled into my nerves, shook me awake and tumbled me off my table bed so that I hit the floor in a heap. And I hobbled over to the wall and looked in on her cell.
“In there with Sue were three of the vague shapes we’d seen before in the bubble rooms outside our own. But they weren’t so vague now. As a kid I had been fascinated by all kinds of rocks from fossils to meteorites. It was a sure bet I would be either a paleontologist or a spaceman; and we know how that worked out. But looking at these creatures in Sue’s cell, I suddenly remembered my favorite fossil, the one I prized over all the others in my small collection: a trilobite some five inches long, nose to tail. Except these things had too many lobes—four in fact—and they were ten feet long; six-feet of it on the deck, held up by God knows how many crab legs, and the front lobe upright, standing four foot tall, with six many-jointed, armlike appendages, three to a side, and swiveling crab eyes on stalks under a chitin cowl. They were as shiny black as my fossil and scurried when they moved, their many legs seeming to flicker, shifting them to, fro, sideways, backwards, mobile as hell and a lot more nightmarish! Picture clever cockroach-crabs, with upright, mantis-like front ends—you’ll know what I was looking at. But as for what they were doing to Sue…
“Two of them held her pinned down on the table; it’s possible they’d come upon her while she was asleep, or I would have heard her screaming before I did. Anyway, they’d put some kind of clamps on her ankles and wrists, an adhesive material, as I later discovered, which stuck to the table and held her fairly motionless. And then…and th-th-then….”
Dr. S, concernedly: “Jim, if you want to stop now…”
Goodwin, after clearing his throat: “No, it’s okay. I’ll be okay now. Where was I? Oh, yeah:
“So the third member of this trio, he wheeled in a machine. But first he stepped out through the wall, as easy as you like, then returned pushing this machine that floated some six inches off the floor. And by the way, that floor was made of some sort of tough rubber, crisscrossed with thin strips of white metal.
“Anyway, this machine is all glass and silver metal. A very intricate thing…and God, a very devilish one, too! A screen appeared on the joining wall—the wall between Sue’s cell and mine—which was just as clear on my side as it must have been on hers. And when these things had positioned this bloody awful machine beside Sue’s table, they swung certain of its extensible adjuncts out over her body. One of these was quite obviously some kind of X-ray camera, because a full-size picture of Sue’s innards appeared on the screen. Her outline and all of her organs were clearly visible: her heart hammering like mad, stomach heaving, lungs fluttering…she was panting. And yet she kept on screaming, cursing and yelling at these bastards, too, until one of them brought what I figured to be a remote control device over to the wall, looked at the screen, and b-b-began to operate the thing…which operated the machine at Sue’s table.
“And on the screen I saw the machine extend a fork-tongued probe of shining silver metal down into poor Sue’s mouth! Stabbing through into the back of her neck, it straddled her spinal column and pinned her head to the table. A trickle of blood appeared on the table where twin prongs had poked through the skin at the back of her neck.
“But the terrible thing is, she was still conscious! All of Sue’s organs were still working: her heart pounding, her bowels churning. If she could have gone on screaming, she’d still have been doing that, too! But as it was it was me—I was doing the screaming now—hammering on that soft, impenetrable wall, trying to dig my hands into it, then stepping back and hurling myself at it without doing any good at all; until finally my legs turned to jelly. I flopped to the floor then and just sat there watching the rest of it—unable to drag my eyes away—watching not only the blurred, indefinite activity of the horseshoe-crab aliens at Sue’s table but also the hideous reality of what they were doing on the crystal-clear wall-screen: her suffering as the roach-like bastard with the remote continued to ogle the screen while proceeding with her t-t-torture!