“Richard and Nicole visited this place,” Max said. “Behind the archway there is a kind of atrium, and then a maze of red corridors.”
“What will we do here?” Robert asked. He was out of his element and completely content to follow Max’s lead.
“I haven’t decided exactly,” Max said. “I guess we’ll explore awhile and hope we find some octospiders.”
Much to Max’s surprise, beyond the station platform, in the middle of the atrium floor, was a large blue painted circle, out of which ran a thick blue line that turned right at the beginning of the maze of red corridors. “Richard and Nicole never mentioned a blue line,” Max said to Robert.
“It’s obviously an idiot-proof set of directions,” Robert said. He laughed nervously. “Following the thick blue line is as easy as following the yellow brick road.”
They walked into the first corridor. The blue line in the center of the floor stretched a hundred meters in front of them and then turned left at a distant intersection.
“You think we should follow the line, don’t you?” Max said to Robert.
“Why not?” Robert answered, taking a few steps along the corridor.
“It’s too obvious,” said Max, as much to himself as to his companion. He clutched his rifle and followed Robert. “Say”—he spoke again after they made their first left turn—”you don’t think this line was put here specifically for us, do you?”
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“No,” Robert replied, stopping for a moment. “How could anyone have known we were coming?”
“That’s just what I asked myself,” Max mumbled.
Max and Robert walked on in silence, making three more turns following the blue line before coming to an archway that rose a meter and a half above the floor. They bent down and entered a large room with dark red ceilings and walls. The thick blue line ended in a large blue circle that was in the middle of the room.
Less than a second after they were both standing in the blue circle, the lights in the room went out. A crude, silent motion picture, whose image was about one meter square, immediately appeared on the wall directly in front of Max and Robert. In the center of the image were Eponine and Eilie, both dressed in strange, smocklike yellow outfits. They were talking to each other and to some unknown person or thing who was off to the right, but of course Max and Robert could not hear anything they were saying. A few moments later, the two women moved a few meters to their right, past an octospider, and appeared beside a strange fat animal, vaguely resembling a cow, that had a flat white underbelly. Ellie held a snakelike pen against the white surface, squeezed it multiple times, and wrote the following message: Don’t worry. We’re fine. Both women smiled and the image abruptly terminated one second later.
As Max and Robert stood in the room thunderstruck, the ninety-second motion picture repeated twice in its entirety. By the time of the second repetition, the men had managed to collect themselves enough that they were able to pay careful attention to the details. Lights flooded the red room again when the movie was finished.
“Jesus Christ,” Max said, shaking his head.
Robert was joyful. “She’s alive!” he exclaimed. “Ellie is still alive.”
“If we can believe what we’ve seen,” Max said.
“Come on, Max,” Robert said several seconds later. “What possible reason could the octospiders have for making a film like that to deceive us? Wouldn’t it be much easier for them to do nothing?”
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“I don’t know,” Max replied. “But you answer a question for me. How did they know that the two of us, coming here together at this time, were worried about Ellie and Eponine? There are only two possible explanations. Either they have been watching everything we have been doing and saying since we entered their lair, or someone— ”
“—from our group has been providing information to the octospiders. Max, surely you don’t think for an instant that either Richard or Nicole—”
“No, of course not,” Max interrupted. “But I’m having a damn hard time understanding how we could have been observed so carefully. We have not seen any suggestion of eavesdropping devices. Unless some pretty sophisticated transmitters are planted on us, or in us, none of this makes any sense.”
“But how could they have done that without our knowledge?”
“Beats the shit out of me,” Max replied, bending down to walk through the archway. He stood up in the red corridor on the opposite side of the arch. “Now, unless I miss my guess, that damn subway will be waiting for us when we arrive at the station and we’ll be expected to return peacefully to the others. Everything is just too nice and neat.”
Max was correct. The subway was parked with its door open when Robert and he turned into the atrium from the maze of red corridors. Max stopped. He had a wild gleam in his eyes,
“I’m not going to board the damn train,” he said in a low voice.
“What are you going to do?” asked Robert, a little frightened.
“I’m going to go back into the maze,” Max said.
He clutched his rifle, spun around, and raced back into the corridor. Max turned away from the blue line and ran about fifty meters before the first octospider appeared in front of him. It was quickly joined by several more octos, which spread across the corridor from one side to the other. They began to move toward Max.
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Max stopped, looked at the advancing octospiders, and then glanced behind him. At the far end of the corridor another group of octospiders was moving in his direction.
“Wait just a damn minute,” Max shouted. “I have something to say. You guys must understand at least part of our language or you could never have figured out that we were coming here. . . . I’m not satisfied. I want proof that Eponine is alive.”
The octospiders, their heads rippling with color, were almost upon him. A wave of fear swept through Max and he fired the rifle in the air as a warning. No more than two seconds later he felt a sharp sting in the back of his neck. Max collapsed immediately on the floor.
Robert, whose indecision had kept him standing in the station, raced across the platform at the sound of the gunfire. When he arrived in the red corridor, he saw two octospiders lifting Max off the floor. Robert stood aside as the extraterrestrials carried Max into the subway and gently deposited him in the corner of the car. The octospiders then gestured at the open subway door and Robert climbed inside. Less than ten minutes later the two men had returned to the chamber underneath the rainbow dome.
3
ax did not awaken for ten hours. During that time both Robert and Nicole examined him thoroughly and found no evidence of any wound or injury. Meanwhile, Robert repeatedly told the story of their adventure, except of course what happened during the critical minute when Max was by himself in the red corridor.
Most of the questions from the family were about what Robert and Max had seen in the motion picture. Were there any indications of stress in Ellie or Eponine, suggesting that perhaps they might have been coerced into making the film? Did they appear to have lost any weight? Did they look rested?
“I believe we now know much more about the nature of our hosts,” Richard said near the end of the family’s second and more lengthy discussion of Robert’s story. “First and foremost, it is clear that the octospiders, or whatever species is in charge here, both observe us regularly and are able to understand our conversations. There is no other possible
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explanation for the fact that the film showed to Max and Robert featured Ellie and Eponine.
“Second, their technological level, at least where motion pictures are concerned, is either several hundred years behind ours, or, if Robert is right when he insists that there could not have been a projecting device either in the room or behind the wall, they are so far advanced that their technology appears like magic to us. Third—”
“But Uncle Richard,” Patrick interrupted. “Why didn’t the motion picture have sound? Wouldn’t it have been much easier for Eponine and Ellie just to say they were all right? Isn’t it more likely that the octospiders are deaf than it is that their technology has not developed beyond silent movies?”
“What an interesting idea, Patrick,” Richard replied. “That’s something we have never even considered. And of course they don’t need to hear to communicate.”
“Creatures that have spent most of their evolutionary lives deep in the ocean are often deaf,” Nicole offered. “Their primary sensory needs for survival are at other wavelengths, and with only a limited number of cells available for both the sensors and their processing, the ability to hear simply never develops.”