And then the show began.
He was looking at a door in a partly darkened room, and there were
footsteps outside, a peremptory knocking. The door flew open,
and outlined against the light of the hall, he saw a man with a
twelve-gauge shotgun. The man shouted, "Now I've got you, you
wife-stealer!" He swung the shotgun around and pulled the trigger.
There was a terrible blast of sound and the flash of smokeless
powder--then blackness.
With a deliberate effort, Maitland unclenched his fists and tried to
slow his breathing. Some kind of emotional reaction test--what was the
countermove? He closed his eyes, but shortly the muscles around them
declared excruciatingly that they couldn't keep that up.
Now he was looking at a girl. She....
Maitland gritted his teeth and fought to use his brain; then he had it.
He thought of a fat slob of a bully who had beaten him up one day
after school. He remembered a talk he had heard by a politician who had
all the intelligent social responsibility of a rogue gorilla, but no
more. He brooded over the damnable stupidity and short-sightedness of
Swarts in standing by his silly rules and not telling him about this
new world.
Within a minute, he was in an ungovernable rage. His muscles tightened
against the restraining straps. He panted, sweat came out on his
forehead, and he began to curse. Swarts! How he hated....
The scene was suddenly a flock of sheep spread over a green hillside.
There was blood hammering in Maitland's temples. His face felt hot and
swollen and he writhed against the restraint of the straps.
The scene disappeared, the lenses of the projector retreated from his
eyes and Swarts was standing over him, white-lipped. Maitland swore at
him for a few seconds, then relaxed and smiled weakly. His head was
starting to ache from the effort of blinking.
"What year is this?" he asked.
"All right," Swarts said. "A.D. 2634."
Maitland's smile became a grin.
* * * * *
"I really haven't the time to waste talking irrelevancies," Swarts said
a while later. "Honestly. Maitland, I'm working against a time limit.
If you'll cooperate, I'll tell Ching to answer your questions."'
"Ching?"
"Ingrid Ching is the girl who has been bringing you your meals."
Maitland considered a moment, then nodded. Swarts lowered the projector
to his eyes again, and this time the engineer did not resist.
That evening, he could hardly wait for her to come. Too excited to sit
and watch the sunset, he paced interminably about the room, sometimes
whistling nervously, snapping his fingers, sitting down and jittering
one leg. After a while he noticed that he was whistling the same theme
over and over: a minute's thought identified it as that exuberant
mounting phrase which recurs in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth
Symphony.
He forgot about it and went on whistling. He was picturing himself
aboard a ship dropping in toward Mars, making planetfall at Syrtis
Major; he was seeing visions of Venus and the awesome beauty of Saturn.
In his mind, he circled the Moon, and viewed the Earth as a huge bright
globe against the constellations....
Finally the door slid aside and she appeared, carrying the usual tray
of food. She smiled at him, making dimples in her golden skin and
revealing a perfect set of teeth, and put the tray on the table.
"I think you are wonderful," she laughed. "You get everything you
want, even from Swarts, and I have not been able to get even a little
of what I want from him. I want to travel in time, go back to your 20th
Century. And I wanted to talk with you, and he would not let me." She
laughed again, hands on her rounded hips. "I have never seen him so
irritated as he was this noon."
Maitland urged her into the chair and sat down on the edge of the bed.
Eagerly he asked, "Why the devil do you want to go to the 20th Century?
Believe me, I've been there, and what I've seen of this world looks a
lot better."
She shrugged. "Swarts says that I want to go back to the Dark Age of
Technology because I have not adapted well to modern culture. Myself,
I think I have just a romantic nature. Far times and places look more
exciting...."
"How do you mean--" Maitland wrinkled his brow--"adapt to modern
culture? Don't tell me _you're_ from another time!"
"Oh, no! But my home is Aresund, a little fishing village at the head
of a fiord in what you would call Norway. So far north, we are much
behind the times. We live in the old way, from the sea, speak the old
tongue."
* * * * *
He looked at her golden features, such a felicitous blend of
Oriental and European characteristics, and hesitantly asked, "Maybe
I shouldn't.... This is a little personal, but ... you don't look
altogether like the Norwegians of my time."
His fear that she would be offended proved to be completely
unjustified. She merely laughed and said, "There has been much
history since 1950. Five hundred years ago, Europe was overrun by
Pan-Orientals. Today you could not find anywhere a 'pure' European
or Asiatic." She giggled. "Swarts' ancestors from your time must be
cursing in their graves. His family is Afrikander all the way back, but
one of his great-grandfathers was pure-blooded Bantu. His full name is
Lassisi Swarts."