Still, things were looking up a little. Not counting the fact that she was tired of seeing herself reflected in the cell’s walls no matter where she looked; if anything could make her crazy, she thought, it was those mirrors. Not counting the fact that Jimmy Lin had formed the annoying habit of following her around, brushing against her in a pretty unmistakable way; but at least now she had clothing.
But none of it was good enough.
Time was passing, and it was all wasted time. Pat Adcock had little practice in time-wasting. She was used to a world in which she always had something to do, usually more to do than she had time to do it in: work to get done, plans to make, social obligations to fulfill, amusements to seek. Here she had nothing. She even missed the annoying everyday flow of sales messages on her comscreen and the solicitations of street panhandlers. Pictures from her childhood flashed through her mind, the images of pacing polar bears and sullenly squatting gorillas from Sunday zoo trips with Uncle Cubby or her parents. The parallels hurt. “We’re zoo animals. We have nothing to do” she complained. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Dannerman shook his head. “No, you’re wrong there. Everything makes sense to somebody.”
“Even this?”
“Even anything. People used to talk about senseless crimes- like murdering some eighty-year-old guy on welfare to steal his shoes; they think it makes no sense to kill somebody for so little. But to the guy who did it, it made perfect sense. He wanted the shoes.”
“Thank you for the lecture, Dr. Dannerman,” Jimmy Lin said.
Dannerman said stubbornly, “I’m only saying that all this must make some kind of sense to Dopey and the others, from their point of view. All we have to do is figure out what their point of view is.”
“It sounds like you’re taking their side, Dannerman,” Martin rumbled.
“Oh, hell, why are people always telling me that I’m taking the bad guys’ side?”
“What people?” Martin asked, puzzled.
“Different people.” He didn’t elaborate. There was something there he didn’t want to discuss, Pat was sure, though she couldn’t imagine what. “Anyway,” he said, “I’m just trying to understand what’s happening. Probably they want to know more about us before they reveal themselves.”
Pat asked, “How much do they have to know? Isn’t that why Dopey was hanging out in Starlab all that time, eavesdropping on Earth?”
Martin said heavily, “Maybe that is not enough for them. I am remembering what the old sailing-ship explorers used to do when they encountered new indigenes. They would kidnap a few and take them aboard their ships to look them over. Your Christopher Columbus-“ he began, and then stopped, scowling. They all heard it: a distant sound, almost like a shriek, faint and far away. “What the hell was that?” he demanded.
No one answered until Rosaleen shrugged. “If this is a zoo,” she said, “we may not be the only animals on exhibit.”
“It sounded human to me,” Jimmy said uneasily. Dannerman said nothing, but he was frowning. Pat thought she knew why. The scream had sounded human to her, too. In fact, it had sounded a lot like the voice of Dan Dannerman.
The scream didn’t come again. They listened; they tried to be as quiet as possible so that they might hear, but there wasn’t much to hear. Dannerman reported that he had heard, might have heard, a faint hum that could have been distant machinery. Pat herself thought she caught a whisper of speech-of a voice of some kind, anyway. When she reported it Dannerman shook his head. “I didn’t hear anything like that. Did it sound human?”
“How can I tell? I thought it sounded as though it were asking for something.”
To her displeasure, Jimmy Lin took that to be a cue. He moved closer to her. “Perhaps it was asking for something which I too would like,” he said, one hand casually resting on her shoulder.
The man was making her uncomfortable. She shrugged herself free. “Knock it off, Lin.”
“But why?” he asked reasonably. “I am aware that such things are better conducted in privacy. I would prefer it so myself, but what can we do? Modesty is pointless here.”
“The point,” she said, “is that I don’t want to make love with you, Jimmy. If you’re looking for a comfort woman, look somewhere else.”
“Hey!” Rosaleen said good-naturedly. “Where do you want him to look, exactly? I’ve been out of the comfort business for forty years.”
“But what else is there to do?” Jimmy Lin asked in a tone of reasonableness. “It is a perfectly natural thing, and also good for you. My honored ancestor said it all in his book. He said it was unhealthful to go for very long without sex, and all my life I have done my best to follow his advice.”
Rosaleen said pleasantly, “If you need to masturbate no one will prevent you. If not, perhaps you won’t mind if we change the subject.”
He glowered at her. “To what?”
She hesitated before she spoke. “I’ve been thinking about those messages from space. You see, I think most of us took those pictures of aliens as some kind of a joke, perhaps some satellite controller with time hanging heavy on his hands. Very well, that was a mistake. Now we know better about that, but what about the rest of the message?”
“What rest?”
“The original pictures. The scarecrow creature crushing the universe at the time of the Big Crunch. What do you suppose that means?”
Dannerman said, “I asked one of the astronomers the same thing. He thought it meant that we were being warned against something that was supposed to happen after the universe has finished expanding, and fallen back and contracted again.”
At least, Pat thought, they were on a subject she knew something about. But she frowned. “That kind of speculation doesn’t make any sense. Nothing could happen after the Big Crunch. It’s like wondering what the universe was like before the Big Bang. The answer is there wasn’t any. That sort of thing isn’t science, it’s metaphysics.”
Rosaleen shook her head. “You know more about that than I do, Pat, but even I know that some quite good scientists have speculated about the subject.”
“Arm-waving. Smoke and mirrors,” Pat said dismissively.
“But perhaps for the aliens it isn’t.”
Pat shrugged. It was true that cosmologists had built any number of pretty speculations about the origins and end of the universe-she had spent many boring hours learning about them in graduate school-but they had always seemed idle daydreaming to her.
Martin shared that opinion. He said impatiently, “There is no point in thinking about such things. The trouble is simply this: We have been kidnapped. That is not a speculation, it is a fact. Governments have considered such things an act of war.”
Jimmy said, “Fine. Now, if you’ll just let them know about it at the Pentagon, I’m sure they’ll have a rescue fleet here right away.”
Martin glared at him. “You are very good at sarcasm, Lin. Less good at taking action. We should do something.”
Rosaleen attempted to defuse the antagonism. “Very well,” she said, “since no one else seems interested in trying to interpret the meaning of those messages, I agree that Martin is right. We should do something else. What is available to us? When we were discussing what people in prison on Earth do I am afraid I distracted us with my reminiscences of life in the old Soviet Union. So let us try again. Is there some action that is possible for us to take?”
Jimmy said sourly, glancing at Dannerman, “Why don’t you ask the expert?”
Pat frowned. “What do you mean, expert?” But Dannerman seemed unsurprised. He was already answering the Chinanaut.
“First thing,” he said, “if I had any specific ideas, I don’t think I’d say them out loud. Remember Dopey hears everything that goes on. But if you want general principles I don’t see any harm in discussing them-just in the abstract, of course.”
“Of course,” Rosaleen said impatiently. “Well?”
“What prisoners do depends on what they want to accomplish. If their primary goal is to escape, they do things like digging tunnels, they hide themselves in bags of waste, they get weapons, or make them, and force a guard to take them outside. Or they take hostages for the same purpose. Or they go on a hunger strike-of course that only works if the people on the outside care whether they live or die.”
Martin demanded, “Which would you recommend?”
“What I would recommend,” Dannerman said, “is that we don’t talk about this any more.”
“Fine,” said Jimmy Lin caustically. “Your advice is that we do nothing, then. Is that why you spooks couldn’t even catch the guys who kidnapped the press secretary?”
Dannerman opened his mouth angrily, then glanced at Pat and closed it again. He didn’t answer. He simply turned his back and walked over to survey the food store.