Fedris nodded. “Lack of controls.”
“Exactly,” the director agreed. “With rats, say, it would be easy. You can have two—or a hundred— families of rats, each family with identical heredity, each in an identical environment. Then you can vary one factor in one family and watch the results. And when you get results you can trust them, because the other family is your control, showing what happens when you don’t vary the factor.”
Fedris looked at him wonderingly. “Do you mean to say—?”
The director nodded. “On Magellanic 47 we’re carrying on that same sort of work, not with rats, but with human beings. The cages are half-mile clearings with identical weather, terrain, plants, animals — everything identical down to the tiniest detail. The bars of the cages are the thorn trees, which our botanists developed specially for the purpose. The inmates of the cages—the human experimental animals—are identical twins—though centuplets would be closer to the right word. Identical upbringings are assured for each group by the use of robot nurses and mentors, set to perform always the same unvarying routine. These robots are removed when the members of the group are sufficiently mature for our purposes. All our observations are, of course, competely secret—and also intermittent, which had the unfortunate result of letting Elven do some serious damage before he was caught.
“Do you see the setup now? In the thorn forest in which Elven was wrecked there were approximately one hundred identical clear-ings set at identical intervals. Each clearing looked exactly like the other, and each contained one Sefora, one Tulya, one Alfors, and one Kors. Elven thought he was going in a circle, but actually he was going hi a straight line. Each evening it was a different clearing he came to. Each night he met a new Sefora.
“Each group he encountered was identical except for one factor— the factor we were varying—and that
had the effect of making it a bit more grisly for him. You see, in those groups we happened to be running an experiment to determine the causes of human behavior patterns toward strangers. We’d made slight variations in their environment and robot-education, with the result that the first group he met was submissive toward strangers; the second was violently hostile; the third as violently friendly; the fourth highly suspicious. Too bad he didn’t meet the fourth group first—though, of course, they’d have been unable to manage him except that he was half mad with supernatural terror.”
The director finished his wine and smiled at Fedris. “So you see it all was the sheerest accident. No one was more surprised than I when, in taking a routine observation, I found that my ‘animals’ had this gibbering and trussed-up intruder. And you could have knocked me over with a molecule when I found out it was Elven.”
Fedris whistled his wonder. “I can sympathize with the poor devil,” he said, “and I can understand, too, why your project is hush-hush.”
The director nodded. “Yes, experimenting with human beings is a rather hard notion for most people to take. Still it’s better than running all mankind as one big experiment without controls. And we’re extremely kind to our ‘animals’. As soon as our experiment with each is finished, it’s our policy to graduate them, with suitable reeducation, into the sos.”
“Still-” said Fedris doubtfully.
“You think it’s a bit like some of the ideas of the Wild Ones?”
“A bit,” Fedris admitted.
“Sometimes I think so too,” the director admitted with a smile, and poured his guest more wine.
While deep in the thorn forest on Magellanic 47, green shoots and tendrils closed round a locket containing a white tablet, encapsulating all the Wild Ones save Elven in a green and tiny tomb.
Coming Attraction
THE COUPE with the fishhooks welded to the fender shouldered up over the curb like the nose of a nightmare. The girl in its path stood frozen, her face probably stiff with fright under her mask. For once my reflexes weren’t shy. I took a fast step toward her, grabbed her elbow, yanked her back. Her black skirt swirled out.
The big coupe shot by, its turbine humming. I glimpsed three faces. Something ripped. I felt the hot exhaust on my ankles as the big coupe swerved back into the street. A thick cloud like a black flower blossomed from its jouncing rear end, while from the fishhooks flew a black shimmering rag.
“Did they get you?” I asked the girl.
She had twisted around to look where the side of her skirt was torn away. She was wearing nylon tights. “The hooks didn’t touch me,” she said shakily. “I guess I’m lucky.”
I heard voices around us:
“Those kids! What’ll they think up next?”
“They’re a menace. They ought to be arrested.”
Sirens screamed at a rising pitch as two motor-police, their rocket-assist jets full on, came whizzing toward us after the coupe. But the black flower had become an inky fog obscuring the whole street. The motor-police switched from rocket assists to rocket brakes and swerved to a stop near the smoke cloud.
“Are you English?” the girl asked me. “You have an English accent.”
Her voice came shudderingly from behind the sleek black satin mask. I fancied her teeth must be chattering. Eyes that were perhaps blue searched my face from behind the black gauze covering the eyeholes of the mask. I told her she’d guessed right. She stood close to me. “Will you come to my place tonight?” she asked rapidly. “I can’t thank you now. And there’s something else you can help me about.”
My arm, still lightly circling her waist, felt her body trembling. I was answering the plea in that as much as in her voice when I said, “Certainly.” She gave me an address south of Inferno, an apartment number and a time. She asked me my name and I told her.
“Hey, you!”
I turned obediently to the policeman’s shout. He shooed away the small clucking crowd of masked women and barefaced men. Coughing from the smoke that the black coupe had thrown out, he asked for my papers. I handed him the essential ones.
He looked at them and then at me. “British Barter? How long will you be in New York?”
Suppressing the urge to say, “For as short a time as possible,” I told hun I’d be here for a week or so.
“May need you as a witness,” he explained. “Those kids can’t use smoke on us. When they do that, we pull them in.”
He seemed to think the smoke was the bad thing. “They tried to kill the lady,” I pointed out.
He shook his head wisely. “They always pretend they’re going to, but actually they just want to snag skirts. I’ve picked up rippers with as many as fifty skirt-snags tacked up hi their rooms. Of course, sometimes they come a little too close.”
I explained that if I hadn’t yanked her out of the way, she’d have been bit by more than hooks. But he interrupted, “If she’d thought it was a real murder attempt, she’d have stayed here.”
I looked around. It was true. She was gone.
“She was fearfully frightened,” I told hun.
“Who wouldn’t be? Those kids would have scared old Stalin himself.”
“I mean frightened of more than ‘kids.’ They didn’t look like ‘kids.’”
“What did they look like?”
I tried without much success to describe the three faces. A vague impression of viciousness and effeminacy doesn’t mean much.
“Well, I could be wrong,” he said finally. “Do you know the girl? Where she lives?”
“No,” I half lied.
The other policeman hung up his radiophone and ambled toward us, kicking at the tendrils of dissipating smoke. The black cloud no longer hid the dingy fagades with their five-year-old radiation flash-burns, and I could begin to make out the distant stump of the Empire State Building, thrusting up out of Inferno like a mangled finger.