For one white-hot instant, this urgent need took control of his body. For this instant, the contractions of the constrictor’s huge muscles were blocked, and Bergen struck savagely at its head with his mangled right arm. His left hand, caught in the loops of the snake’s body, nevertheless contracted in a grip that tore a section of tough hide from the underlying muscles.
A savage yell of defiance burst from Bergen, and for just a fleeting instant the snake’s gaze held a look of blankness—such as might appear in the eyes of a constrictor in the jungles of Earth, when the victim it has selected turns out to be an adult male gorilla.
The instant passed. The energy was gone, and in place of defiance, Bergen felt a wave of exhaustion. There was a final, horrible, increasingly distant sense of crushing pressure, and then dizziness. For an instant something took place that Bergen could not quite recall afterward.
And then he was lying on his back, looking at a gray ceiling overhead.
* * *
Very cautiously, Bergen drew up his right hand and looked at it. It was unharmed. He felt of his left shoulder. His left shoulder was unharmed. He sat up. A slight dizziness passed as he swung his feet to the floor.
The memory of the past few instants came back, and Bergen could vividly see the head of the constrictor twist and wrench as the big loops settled around him—
Bergen sprang to his feet and swore savagely. Full consciousness had now returned.
“Damn it,” he said, forcing the mental picture of the constrictor out of his mind by focusing his attention on the immediate cause of the trouble—the people who gave these tests.
A buzzer sounded its peremptory warning. Bergen again became conscious of his surroundings. He noted the gray bulkheads, gray steel deck, and gray ceiling overhead. There were three short rows of steel cots in the room, and above each cot was a long wide bulge in the ceiling. With a sense of relief, Bergen noted that the other cots were empty—had been empty when he’d gained consciousness. That meant that, though he had failed at the end, he had at least outlasted the other candidates.
A small speaker nearby said, “Bergen to Evaluation. Candidate Daniel Bergen report to Test Evaluation Office.”
“Coming,” said Bergen. He braced himself for the walk through the Special Effects storeroom. He drew a deep breath, opened the air-tight hatch, and stepped into a shadowy space jammed with apes, alligators, imitation dead trees, grizzly bears, hollow lichened boulders, simulated rotten logs covered with moss, rolled-up bolts of spider web with spiders attached, one dozen wharf rats packed head-to-tail in a crate, and other unattractive odds and ends that loomed, half-recognizable, through the gloom. Bergen was grumbling to himself as he reached the hatch leading to the corridor. Then he straightened up, assumed an alert, resolute look, and stepped out into the corridor.
A brisk walk brought Bergen to a hatch marked: “Test Evaluation, Colonel Sanders.” Bergen knocked, heard the colonel’s crisp “Come in,” and stepped inside. He was in a small compartment lined with filing cabinets and electronic equipment, and with wires and odd headsets dangling from the ceiling. A spare athletic individual with colonel’s leaves, a shock of crew-cut hair and a look of cool objectivity eyed Bergen from behind a bare-topped desk. Bergen reported his presence. The colonel motioned him to an olive-colored drum that doubled as a chair.
Bergen thoughtfully eyed the drum, which was labeled: “RATTLESNAKES, 1 doz. (assorted).” He made sure the lid was on tight, and gingerly sat down. He looked at the colonel. The colonel looked back coolly. A period of time passed. Bergen forced himself to wait.
The colonel cleared his throat, clasped his hands behind the back of his neck and leaned back in his chair. His eyes came to a sharp focus. He said accusingly, “That was a stupid stunt, Bergen.”
“Sir?” said Bergen, pathetically uncertain which particular stunt the colonel had in mind.
“Why didn’t you just put both hands out in front and dive straight down his throat?”
Bergen cast around mentally, then said, “Oh, you mean the constrictor, sir?”
The colonel snorted, and Bergen felt an overpowering sense of stupidity. Whenever he entered this room his I.Q. seemed to drop off twenty or thirty points. He would recover his lost intelligence when he returned to the corridor, and then he would really see how dull he had been.
“Well?” snapped the colonel.
“Sir?”
“‘Sir?'” mimicked the colonel. His face reddened, and he roared, “Answer the question!”
Bergen looked at him blankly.
The colonel sat up and leaned forward on the desk. “Why,” he said, “didn’t you just put your hands over your head and jump down the constrictor’s throat? You’d have accomplished exactly the same thing, and with a great saving of energy.” The colonel had the air of a person putting forth a reasonable suggestion.
“Well,” said Bergen, trying dully to synchronize his reactions with those of the colonel, “my purpose, sir, wasn’t to get killed.”
The colonel nodded, and leaned back. “But so far as the simulation was concerned, that’s exactly what you accomplished, isn’t it?”
Bergen could now see he had walked into a trap. Gloomily he said, “Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“Sir?”
“Tell me, why did you get killed?”
“I guess I did the wrong thing.”
“What wrong thing?”
Bergen hesitated.
The colonel waited.
Bergen shook his head. “If I’d dropped off that limb, sir, I’d have smashed right to the bottom of the forest floor. That was certain death. I don’t see that I had much choice.”
The colonel shook his head. “You made a series of mistakes. To begin with, you looked directly into the constrictor’s dorsal eye. That was the first error, and a serious one. When you stand at attention during an inspection, do you look into the eyes of the inspecting officer?”
“No, sir.”
“What do you do?”
“I look straight ahead.”
“Why?”
“Well . . . it’s regulations.”
The colonel nodded. “It’s regulations. But there’s a reason why it’s regulations. If you look into the eyes of the inspecting officer, you make, as it were, personal contact with him. He will notice it, and of necessity he will have to respond. An inspection is an impersonal matter, and he will reprimand you. And yet, you had no hesitancy about looking into the dorsal eye of that constrictor. Did you think that because the constrictor came from another planet, it wouldn’t sense you were looking at it?”
“Well, I—” Bergen paused.
“Yes?” prompted the colonel.
Bergen finished lamely, “I guess I just didn’t think about it at the time, sir.”
The colonel nodded. “That was your basic error, underlying all the other errors. You didn’t think about it. The next thing you didn’t think about was looking away. The constrictor looked away, you looked away, then the constrictor looked back, and promptly noticed the change in the position of your eyes. Next, you didn’t think about the snake’s motion. You saw it glide forward, knew it was moving a lot farther than it had before, knew it had seen you, and yet you didn’t change your position.”
Bergen stared at him, blinked, and shook his head in weary disgust. “Yes. Now I see it.”
“You’ve been talking,” said the colonel, “as if your only alternative was to jump off the limb. Not so. The snake had to get into position to strike. While it was doing that, you could have moved, and at least gained time.”
“I see it now, sir.”
“But you didn’t see it when it counted.”
“No, sir. I didn’t.”
“All right. You made a number of mistakes. First, you stared the snake in the eye, then when it looked away, you looked away; both of these things the snake noticed and correctly interpreted. Next, you stayed where you were till it was all set to get you. Then, in addition, you still stayed where you were when there was an instant left to act.”
“Well, sir, I admit I was wrong before. But there was still some chance the snake wouldn’t do anything. Whereas, if I dropped off the limb—”
“You’d have caught a vine about nine feet below,” said the colonel.
Bergen slowly brought his jaw shut.
“Pretty stupid, wasn’t it?” said the colonel.
Bergen drew a deep breath. “Yes, sir, I guess it was, at that.”
The colonel sat back. “Most of us are accustomed to think of ourselves as intelligent people. We move through life in our accustomed orbits, expect things always to remain basically as they are now, have repeated opportunities to rehearse our behavior patterns for the few standard situations we meet, and nevertheless we fall into one mess after another—because we don’t really think. If things turn out badly for us, our reaction is to complain that the situation wasn’t set up right in the first place.”