By Tuesday they were all in a state of anxiety and scarcely-contained
rage. Their surveillance was casual, often non-existent, yet not once
had they been able to block the wall of their prison or open the great
door of the laboratory. Circumstances, chance, fate, whatever you wanted
to call it, something had stopped them every time.
There were three giants in the lab today. Sometimes there would be one
of them, sometimes as many as five; but always there would be the one
who had first removed them from the box, who seemed to be the head
scientist, giving orders, bullying the others in the queer emotional way
of these creatures. Today there were three. As usual, when they had let
the humans out, the lab was clean and orderly. The sloppy scientists had
very efficient janitors, thought Adam. By this time the place was a
shambles.
Out in the lab, there rose the honking sound of pain and anger--some of
the noises they made, especially the commands, were recognizable now to
the people--and a sharp slap. Then Mrs. Full hurried into the box,
carrying a number of two-foot-square slabs under her arm.
"What happened, ma'am?"
"Hello, Adam. The criminal Watkins played a few bars of a real song on
that device, and the brutes hit him." She laid down the slabs. "Our
harmonies enrage them, I think perhaps cause them actual pain. They held
the sides of their heads where ears ought to be, and shook themselves
and made those hideous noises."
"They hit me when I sang the other day," said Adam, "remember?"
"That's right. Look here." She sat down, pulled one of the thick slabs
onto her lap. "I found these under a shelf out there. One of the
creatures knocked them off and I picked them up. I wondered why they had
been up there, when so many stacks of them just sit around on the
floor."
"I never saw any like these, ma'am. They have that little ridge on the
edge there, and the border of different colored stuff around 'em."
"Watch what happens when I push the ridge upward, Adam. It's like an
automatic button." She pressed it and the slab, at first gay orange,
turned pale blue; on it appeared three lines of squiggly characters,
like a cross between Arabic writing and Egyptian hieroglyphics.
"A magic slate," said Adam. "That's neat!"
"You haven't seen anything yet," she told him, and pushed the ridge
again. The writing disappeared, and out of the slab leered a bull
gorilla, paws on chest, eyeing Adam with beady, ridge-browed
malevolence. It took a second for sanity to convince him that it was
only a picture: three-dimensional, on a two-dimensional sheet of
plastic, but so real he half-expected the beast to charge out at him.
"What about that?" she asked.
He hit his thigh with a fist. It was a photograph, he imagined, but made
by an illusory process so far ahead of anything humanity could produce
that it seemed he might glimpse whatever was behind the gorilla if he
put his eyes down to the side of the slate. "Gosh!" he said, feeling it
a little naive but afraid to swear in front of her. "Isn't that
something!"
"It's a book," she said, "an album of photographs. Look here."
The next picture was an equally miraculous one of half a dozen monkeys
sitting on a tree trunk. Adam looked at it, then at the farthest trunk
in their box of a room. Undeniably it was the same one.
Under the picture was a line of squiggles that probably spelled out the
scientists' equivalent of "monkeys."
"They were here, in this place," said Adam. "The giants must have
experimented on them too." He turned his eyes up to the woman and saw
that she was white and drawn. "What happened to them?" he asked. "There
aren't any monkeys here now."
"Exactly," she said. She put on the next picture, and after a moment the
next.
Dogs greeted his eyes, so real he could almost hear them pant; a cow
gazed stolidly at him; a cheetah sat on a mound of straw with clown's
head cocked inquisitively; two cockatoos perched in rigid still life on
the silver rod of the prison box.
"What happened to them?" he asked again.
"The experiments ended," she said.
Then there flashed out a thing like a blue sponge with legs, a thing
which sat in the cat's-cradle they had speculated so much about. From
its center two ruby eyes blazed with three-dimensional fire. _That_
never came from Earth! Mars or Venus could have produced it, maybe, or a
planet so far from Earth that it bore no name. He said as much, his
voice quavering.
She stared at him. Moistening her lips, she said, "If that was here, in
this box, then _where are we_?"