Boaz placed the tape recorder in the middle of the stretcher. The purpose of the engine resulting was to dilute and dilute and dilute the vibrations from the tare recorder. The vibrations, before they reached the stone floor, had to struggle through the dead canvas of the stretcher, down the stretcher handles, through the ironing boards, and finally through the fiber pads on the feet of the ironing boards.
The dilution was a safety measure. It guaranteed that no harmonium would get a lethal overdose of music.
Boaz now put the tape in the recorder and turned the recorder on. Throughout the concert, he would stand guard by the apparatus. His duty was to see that no creature crept too close to the apparatus. His duty, when a creature crept too close, was to peel the creature from the wall or floor, scold it, and paste it up again a hundred yards or more away.
“If you ain’t got no more sense than that,” he would say in his thoughts to the foolhardy harmonium, “you’re going to wind up out here in left field ever’ time. Think it over.”
Actually, a creature placed a hundred yards from the tape recorder still got plenty of music to eat.
The walls of the caves were so extraordinarily conductive, in fact, that harmoniums on cave walls miles away got whiffs of Boaz’s concerts through the stone.
Unk, who had been following the tracks deeper and deeper into the caves, could tell from the way the harmoniums were behaving that Boaz was staging a concert. He had reached a warm level where the harmoniums were thick. Their regular pattern of alternating yellow and aquamarine diamonds was breaking up – was degenerating into jagged clumps, pinwheels, and lightning bolts. The music was making them do it.
Unk laid his pack down, then laid himself down to rest.
Unk dreamed about colors other than yellow and aquamarine.
Then he dreamed that his good friend Stony Stevenson was waiting for him around the next bend. His mind became lively with the things he and Stony would say when they met. Unk’s mind still had no face to go with the name of Stony Stevenson, but that didn’t matter much.
“What a pair,” Unk said to himself. By that he meant that he and Stony, working together, would be invincible.
“I tell you,” Unk said to himself with satisfaction, “that is one pair they want to keep apart at all costs. If old Stony and old Unk ever get together again, they better watch out. When old Stony and old Unk get together, anything can happen, and it usually does.”
Old Unk chuckled.
The people who were supposedly afraid of Unk’s and Stony’s getting together were the people in the big, beautiful buildings up above. Unk’s imagination had done a lot in three years with the glimpses he’d had of the supposed buildings – of what were in fact solid, dead, dumb-cold crystals. Unk’s imagination was now certain that the masters of all creation lived in those buildings. They were Unk’s and Boaz’s and maybe Stony’s jailers. They were experimenting with Unk and Boaz in the caves. They wrote the messages in harmoniums. The harmoniums didn’t have anything to do with the messages.
Unk knew all those things for sure.
Unk knew a lot of other things for sure. He even knew how the buildings up above were furnished. The furniture didn’t have any legs on it. It just floated in air, suspended by magnetism.
And the people never worked at all, and they never worried about a thing.
Unk hated them.
He hated the harmoniums, too. He peeled a harmonium from the wall and tore it in two. It shriveled at once – turned orange.
Unk flipped the two-piece corpse at the ceiling. And, looking up at the ceiling, he saw a new message written there. The message was disintegrating, because of the music. But it was still legible.
The message told Unk in five words how to escape surely, easily, and swiftly from the caves. He was bound to admit, when given the solution to the puzzle that he had failed to solve in three years, that the puzzle was simple and fair.
Unk scuttled down through the caves until he came upon Boaz’s concert for the harmoniums. Unk was wild and bug-eyed with big news. He could not speak in a vacuum, so he hauled Boaz to the space ship.
There, in the inert atmosphere of the cabin, Unk told Boaz of the message that meant escape from the caves.
It was now Boaz’s turn to react numbly. Boaz had thrilled to the slightest illusion of intelligence on the part of the harmoniums – but now, having heard the news that he was about to be freed from his prison, Boaz was strangely reserved.
“That – that explains that other message,” said Boaz softly.
“What other message?” asked Unk.
Boaz held up his hands to represent a message that had appeared on the wall outside his home four Earthling days before. “Said, ‘BOAZ, DON’T GO!’” said Boaz. He looked down self-consciously. “‘WE LOVE YOU, BOAZ.’ That’s what it said.”
Boaz ‘dropped his hands to his side, turned away as though turning away from unbearable beauty. “I saw that,” he said, “and I had to smile. I looked at them sweet, gentle fellers on the wall there, and I says to myself, ‘Boys – how’s old Boaz ever going to go anywhere? Old Boaz, he going to be stuck here for quite some time yet!’”
“It’s a trap!” said Unk.
“It’s a what?” said Boaz.
“A trap!” said Unk. “A trick to keep us here!”
The comic book called Tweety and Sylvester was open on the table before Boaz. Boaz didn’t answer Unk right away. He leafed through the ragged book instead. “I expect,” he said at last.
Unk thought about the crazy appeal in the name of love. He did something he hadn’t done for a long time. He laughed. He thought it was an hysterical ending for the nightmare – that the brainless membranes on the walls should speak of love.
Boaz suddenly grabbed Unk, rattled poor Unk’s dry bones. “I’d appreciate it, Unk,” said Boaz tautly, “if you’d just let me think whatever I’m going to think about that message about how they love me. I mean – ” he said, “you know – ” he said, “it don’t necessarily have to make sense to you. I mean – ” he said, “you know – ” he said, “there ain’t really any call for you to say anything about it, one way or the other. I mean,” he said, “you know – ” he said, “these animals ain’t necessarily your dish. You don’t necessarily have to like ‘em, or understand ‘em, or say anything about ‘em. I mean – ” said Boaz, “you know – ” said Boaz, “the message wasn’t addressed to you. It’s me they said they loved. That lets you out.”
He let Unk go, turned attention to the comic book again. His broad, brown, slab-muscled back amazed Unk. Living apart from Boaz, Unk had flattered himself into thinking he was a physical match for Boaz. He saw now what a pathetic delusion this had been.
The muscles in Boaz’s back slid over one another in slow patterns that were counterpoint to the quick movements of his page-turning fingers. “You know so much about traps and things,” said Boaz. “How you know there ain’t some worse trap waiting for us if we go flying out of here?”
Before Unk could answer him, Boaz remembered that he had left the tape recorder playing and unguarded.
“Ain’t nobody watching out for ‘em at all!” he cried. He left Unk, ran to rescue the harmoniums.
While Boaz was gone, Unk made plans for turning the space ship upside. down. That was the solution to the puzzle of how to get out. That was what the harmoniums on the ceiling had said:
UNK, TURN SHIP UPSIDE DOWN.
The theory of turning the space ship over was sound, of course. The ship’s sensing equipment was on its bottom. When turned over, the ship would be able to apply the same easy grace and intelligence to getting out of the caves that it had used in getting into-them.
Thanks to a power winch and the feeble tug of gravity in the caves of Mercury, Unk had the ship turned over by the time Boaz got back. All that remained to be done for the trip out was to press the on button. The upside-down ship would then blunder against the cave floor, give up, retreat from the floor under the impression that the floor was a ceiling.
It would go up the system of chimneys under the impression that it was going down. And it would inevitably find the way out, under the impression that it was seeking the deepest possible hole.
The hole it would eventually find itself in would be the bottomless, sideless pit of space eternal.