A. E. Van Vogt - Recruiting Station

VIP免费
2024-12-11 0 0 402.15KB 65 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
A. E. v~ V0GT
RECRUITING STATION
Si~ DIDN’T DARE! Suddenly, the night was a cold, enveloping thing. The edge of
the broad, black river gurgled evilly at her feet as if, now that she had changed
her mind—it hungered for her.
Her foot slipped on the wet, sloping ground; and her mind grew blurred
with the terrible senseless fear that things were reaching out of the night,
trying to drown her now against her will.
She fought up the bank—and slumped breathless onto the nearest park
bench, coldly furious with her fear. Dully, she watched the gaunt man come
along the pathway past the light standard. So sluggish was her brain that she
was not aware of surprise when she realized he was coming straight toward
her.
The purulent yellowish light made a crazy patch of his shadow across her
where she sat. His voice, when he spoke, was vaguely foreign in tone, yet
modulated, cultured. He said:
“Are you interested in the Calonian cause?”
Norma stared. There was no quickening in her brain, but suddenly she
began to laugh. It was funny, horribly, hysterically funny funny. To be
sitting here, trying to get up the nerve for another attempt at those deadly
waters, and then to have some crackbrain come along and— “You’re
deluding yourself, Miss Matheson,” the man went on coolly.
“You’re not the suicide type.”
“Nor the pickup type!” she answered automatically. “Beat it before—”
Abruptly, it penetrated that the man had called her by name. She
looked up sharply at the dark blank that was his face. His head against the
background of distant light nodded as if in reply to the question that quivered
in her thought.
“Yes, I know your name. I also know your history and your feari”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that a young scientist named Garson arrived in the city tonight to
deliver a series of lectures. Ten years ago, when you and he graduated from
the same university, he asked you to marry him, but it was a career you
wanted—and now you’ve been terrified that, in your extremity, you would go
to him for assistance and—”
“Stop!”
The man seemed to watch her as she sat there breathing heavily. He said at
last, quietly:
“I think I have proved that I am not simply a casual philanderer.”
“What other kind of philanderer is there?” Norma asked, sluggish again.
But she made no objection as he sank down on the far end of the bench. His
back was still to the light, his features night-developed.
“Ah,” he said, “you joke; you are bitter. But that is an improvement. You
feel now, perhaps, that if somebody has taken an interest in you, all is not
lost.”
Norma said dully: ‘People who are acquainted with the basic laws of
psychology are cursed with the memory of them even when disaster strikes
into their lives. All I’ve done the last ten years is—”
She stopped; then: “You’re very clever. Without more than arousing my
instinctive suspicions, you’ve insinuated yourself into the company of an
hysterical woman. What’s your purpose?”
“I intend to offer you a job.”
Norma’s laugh sounded so harsh in her own ears that she thought, startled:
“I am hysterical!”
Aloud, she said: “An apartment, jewels, a car of my own, I suppose?”
His reply was cool: “No! To put it frankly, you’re not pretty enough. Too
angular, mentally and physically. That’s been one of your troubles the last ten
years; a developing introversion of the mind which has influenced the shape of
your body unfavorably.”
The words shivered through the suddenly stiffened muscles of her body.
With an enormous effort, she forced herself to relax. She said: “I had that
coming to me. Insults are good for hysteria; so now what?”
“Are you interested in the Calonian cause?”
“There you go again,” she complained. “But yes, I’m for it. Birds of a
feather, you know.”
¶~I know very well indeed. In fact, in those words you named the reason
why I am here tonight, hiring a young woman who is up against it. Calonia,
too, is up against it and—” He stopped; in the darkness, he spread his shadow-
like hands. “You see: good publicity for our recruiting centers.”
Norma nodded. She did see, and, suddenly, she didn’t trust herself to speak;
her hand trembled as she took the key he held out.
“This key,” he said, “will lit the lock of the front door of the recruiting
station; it will also fit the lock of the door leading to the apartment above it.
The apartment is yours while you have the job. You can go there tonight if you
wish, or wait until morning if you fear this is merely a device
—now, I must give you a warning.”
“Warning?”
“Yes. The work we are doing is illegal. Actually, only the American
government can enlist American citizens and operate recruiting stations.
We exist on sufferance and sympathy, but at any time someone may lay a
charge; and the police will have to act.”
Norma nodded rapidly. “That’s no risk,” she said. “No judge would ever—
“The address is 322 Carlton Street,” he cut in smoothly. “And for your
information, my name is Dr. Lell.”
Norma had the distinct sense of being pushed along too swiftly for caution.
She hesitated, her mind on the street address. “Is that near Bessemer?”
It was his turn to hesitate. “I’m afraid,” he confessed, “I don’t know this
city very well, at least not in its twentieth century. . . that is,” he finished
suavely, “I was here many years ago, before the turn of the century.”
Norma wondered vaguely why he bothered to explain; she said, half-
accusingly: “You’re not a Calonian. You sound—French, maybe.”
“You’re not a Calonian, either!” he said, and stood up abruptly. She
watched him walk off into the night, a great gloom-wrapped figure that
vanished almost immediately.
She stopped short in the deserted night street. The sound that came was like
a whisper touching her brain; a machine whirring somewhere with almost
infinite softness. For the barest moment, her mind concentrated on the shadow
vibrations; and then, somehow, they seemed to fade like figments of her
imagination. Suddenly, there was only the street and the silent night.
The street was dimly lighted; and that brought doubt, sharp and tinged with
a faint fear. She strained her eyes and traced the numbers in the shadow of the
door: 322! That was it!
The place was dark. She peered at the signs that made up the window
display:
“FIGHT FOR THE BRAVE CALONIANS” “THE CALONIANS ABE FIGHTING
FREEDOM’S FIGHT—YOUR FIGHT!” “II’ YOU CAN PAY YOUR OWN WAY, IT WOULD BE
APPRECIATED; OTHERWISE WE’LL GET YOU OVER!”
There were other signs, but they were essentially the same, all terribly honest
and appealing, if you really thought about the desperate things that made up
their grim background.
Illegal, of course. But the man had admitted that, too. With sudden end of
doubt, she took the key from her purse.
There were two doorways, one on either side of the window. The one to the
right led into the recruiting room. The one on the lef t— The stairs were dimly
lighted, and the apartment at the top was quite empty of human beings. The
door had a bolt; she clicked it home, and then, wearily, headed for the
bedroom.
And it was as she lay in the bed that she grew aware again of the incredibly
faint whirring of a machine. The shadow of a shadow sound; and, queerly, it
seemed to reach into her brain: the very last second before
she drifted into sleep, the pulse of the vibration, remote as the park bench, was
a steady beat inside her.
All through the night that indescribably faint whirring was there. Only
occasionally did it seem to be in her head; she was aware of turning, twisting,
curling, straightening and, in the fractional awakedness that accompanied each
move, the tiniest vibrational tremors would sweep down along her nerves like
infinitesimal currents of energy.
Spears of sunlight piercing brilliantly through the window brought her
awake at last. She lay taut and strained for a moment, then relaxed, Puzzled.
There was not a sound from the maddening machine, only the noises of the
raucous, awakening street.
There was food in the refrigerator and in the little pantry. The weariness of
the night vanished swiftly before the revivifying power of breakfast. She
thought in gathering interest: what did he look like, this strange-voiced man of
night?
Relieved surprise flooded her when the key unlocked the door to the
recruiting room, for there had been in her mind a little edged fear that this was
all quite mad.
She shuddered the queer darkness out of her system. ‘W’hat was the matter
with her, anyway? The world was sunlit and cheerful, not the black and
gloomy abode of people with angular introversion of the mind.
She flushed at the memory of the words. There was no pleasure in knowing
that the man’s enormously clever analysis of her was true. Still stinging, she
examined the little room. There were four chairs, a bench, a long wooden
counter and newspaper clippings of the Calonian War on the otherwise bare
walls.
There was a back door to the place. Dimly curious, she tried the knob
—once! It was locked, but there was something about the feel of it— A
tingling shock of surprise went through her. The door, in spite of its
wooden appearance, was solid metal!
Momentarily, she felt chilled; finally she thought: “None of my business.
And then, before she could turn away, the door opened, and a gaunt man
loomed on the threshold. He snapped harshly, almost into her face:
“Oh, yes, it is your business!”
It was not fear that made her back away. The deeps of her mind registered
the cold hardness of his voice, so different from the previous night. Vaguely
she was aware of the ugly sneer on his face. But there was no real emotion in
her brain, nothing but a blurred blankness.
It was not fear; it couldn’t be fear because all she had to do was run a few
yards, and she’d be out on a busy street. And besides she had never been afraid
of Negroes, and she wasn’t now.
That first impression was so sharp, so immensely surprising that the fast-
following second impression seemed like a trick of her eyes. For the man
wasn’t actually a Negro; he was—
She shook her head, trying to shake that trickiness out of her vision. But the
picture wouldn’t change. He wasn’t a Negro, he wasn’t white, he wasn’t—
anything!
Slowly her brain adjusted itself to his alienness. She saw that he had slant
eyes like a Chinaman, his skin, though dark in texture, was dry with a white
man’s dryness. The nose was sheer chiseled beauty, the most handsome, most
normal part of his face; his mouth was thin-lipped, commanding; his chin bold
and giving strength and power to the insolence of his steel-gray eyes. His sneer
deepened as her eyes grew wider and wider.
“Oh, no,” he said softly, “you’re not afraid of me, are you? Let me inform
you that my purpose is to make you afraid. Last night I had the purpose of
bringing you here. That required tact, understanding. My new purpose
requires, among other things, the realization on your part that you are in my
power beyond the control of your will or wish.
“I could have allowed you to discover gradually that this is not a Calonian
recruiting station. But I prefer to get these early squirmings of the slaves over as
soon as possible. The reaction to the power of the machine is always so similar and
unutterably boring.”
“I—don’t—understand!”
He answered coldly: “Let me be brief. You have been vaguely aware of a
machine. That machine has attuned the rhythm of your body to itself, and
through its actions I can control you against your desire. Naturally, I don’t
expect you to believe me. Like the other women, you will test its mind-
destroying power. Notice that I said women! We always hire women; for
purely psychological reasons they are safer than men. You will discover what I
mean if you should attempt to warn any applicant on the basis of what I have
told you.”
He finished swiftly: “Your duties are simple. There is a pad on the table
made up of sheets with simple questions printed on them. Ask those questions,
note the answers, then direct the applicants to me in the back room. I have—
er—a medical examination to give them.”
Out of all the things he had said, the one that briefly, searingly, dominated
her whole mind had no connection with her personal fate: “But,” she gasped,
“if these men are not being sent to Calonia, where—”
He hissed her words short: “Here comes a man. Now, remember!”
He stepped back, to one side out of sight in the dimness of the back room.
Behind her, there was the dismaying sound of the front door opening. A man’s
baritone voice blurred a greeting into her ears.
Her fingers shook as she wrote down the man’s answers to the dozen
questions. Name, address, next of kin— His face was a ruddy-cheeked blur
against the shapeless shifting pattern of her lacing thoughts.
“You can see,” she heard herself mumbling, “that these questions are only a
matter of identification. Now, if you’ll go into that back room—”
The sentence shattered into silence. She’d said it! The uncertainty in her
mind, the unwillingness to take a definite stand until she had thought
of some way out, had made her say the very thing she had intended to avoid
saying. The man said:
“What do I go in there for?”
She stared at him numbly. Her mind felt thick, useless. She needed time,
calm. She said: “It’s a simple medical exam, entirely for your own protection.”
Sickly, Norma watched his stocky form head briskly toward the rear door.
He knocked; and the door opened. Surprisingly, it stayed open— surprisingly,
because it was then, as the man disappeared from her line of vision, that she
saw the machine.
The end of it that she could see reared up immense and darkly gleaming
halfway to the ceiling, partially hiding a door that seemed to be a rear exit
from the building.
She forgot the door, forgot the men. Her mind fastened on the great engine
with abrupt intensity as swift memory came that this was the machine—
Unconsciously her body, her ears, her mind, strained for the whirring
sound that she had heard in the night. But there was nothing, not the tiniest of
tiny noises, not the vaguest stir of vibration, not a rustle, not a whisper. The
machine crouched there, hugging the floor with its solidness, its clinging metal
strength; and it was utterly dead, utterly motionless.
The doctor’s smooth, persuasive voice came to her: “I hope you don’t mind
going out the back door, Mr. Barton. We ask applicants to use it because—
well, our recruiting station here is illegal. As you probably know, we exist on
sufferance and sympathy, but we don’t want to be too blatant about the success
we’re having in getting young men to fight for our cause.
Norma waited. As soon as the man was gone she would force a showdown
on this whole fantastic affair. If this was some distorted scheme of
Calonia’s enemies, she wouki go to the police and— The thought twisted
into a curious swirling chaos of wonder. The
machine— Incredibly, the machine was coming alive, a monstrous, gorgeous,
swift
aliveness. It glowed with a soft, swelling white light; and then burst into
enormous flame. A breaker of writhing tongues of fire, blue and red and green
and yellow, stormed over that first glow, blotting it from view instantaneously.
The fire sprayed and flashed like an intricately designed fountain, with a wild
and violent beauty, a glittering blaze of unearthly glory.
And then—just like that—the flame faded. Briefly, grimly stubborn in its
fight for life, the swarming, sparkling energy clung to the metal.
It was gone. The machine lay there, a dull, gleaming mass of metallic
deadness, inert, motionless. The doctor appeared in the doorway.
“Sound chap!” he said, satisfaction in his tone. “Heart requires a bit of
glandular adjustment to eradicate the effects of bad diet. Lungs will react
swiftly to gas-immunization injections, and our surgeons should be able to
patch that body up from almost anything except an atomic storm.”
Norma licked dry lips. “What are you talking about?” she asked wildly.
“W-what happened to that man?”
She was aware of him staring at her blandly. His voice was cool, faintly
amused: “Why—he went out the back door.”
“He did not. He—”
She realized the uselessness of words. Cold with the confusion of her
thought, she emerged from behind the counter. She brushed past him, and
then, as she reached the threshold of the door leading into the rear room, her
knees wobbled. She grabbed at the door jamb for support, and knew that she
didn’t dare go near that machine. With an effort, she said:
“Will you go over there and open it?”
He did so, smiling. The door squealed slightly as it opened. When he closed
it, it creaked audibly, and the automatic lock clicked loudly.
There had been no such sound. Norma felt the deepening whiteness in her
cheeks. She asked, chilled:
“What is this machine?”
“Owned by the local electric company, I believe,” he answered suavely, and
his voice mocked her. “We just have permission to use the room, of course.”
“That’s not possible,” she said thickly. “Electric companies don’t have
machines in the back rooms of shabby buildings.”
He shrugged. “Really,” he said indifferently, “this is beginning to bore me.
I have already told you that this is a very special machine. You have seen
some of its powers, yet your mind persists in being practical after a twentieth
century fashion. I will repeat merely that you are a slave of the machine, and
that it will do you no good to go to the police, entirely aside from the fact that I
saved you from drowning yourself, and gratitude alone should make you
realize that you owe everything to me; nothing to the world you were prepared
to desert. However, that is too much to expect. You will learn by experience.”
Quite calmly, Norma walked across the room. She opened the door, and
then, startled that he had made no move to stop her, turned to stare at him. He
was still standing where she had left him. He was smiling.
“You must be quite mad,” she said after a moment. “Perhaps you had some
idea that your little trick, whatever it was, would put the fear of the unknown
into me. Let me dispel that right now. I’m going to the police—this very
minute.”
The picture that remained in her mind as she climbed aboard the bus was of
him standing there, tall and casual and terrible in his contemptuous derision.
The chill of that memory slowly mutilated the steady tenor of her forced calm.
The sense of nightmare vanished as she climbed off the streetcar in front of
the imposing police building. Sunshine splashed vigorously on the
pavement, cars honked; the life of the city swirled lustily around her, and
brought wave on wave of returning confidence.
The answer, now that she thought of it, was simplicity itself. Hypnotism!
That was what had made her see a great, black, unused engine burst into
mysterious flames.
And no hypnotist could force his will on a determined, definitely opposed
mind.
Burning inwardly with abrupt anger at the way she had been tricked, she
lifted her foot to step on the curb—and amazed shock stung into her brain.
The foot, instead of lifting springily, dragged; her muscles almost refused to
carry the weight. She grew aware of a man less than a dozen feet from her,
staring at her with popping eyes.
“Good heavens!” he gasped audibly. “I must be seeing things.”
He walked off rapidly; and the part of her thoughts that registered his odd
actions simply tucked them away. She felt too dulled, mentally and physically,
even for curiosity.
With faltering steps she moved across the sidewalk. It was as if something
was tearing at her strength. holding her with invisible but immense forces. The
machine!—she thought—and panic blazed through her.
Will power kept her going. She reached the top of the steps and approached
the big doors. It was then the first sick fear came that she couldn’t make it; and
as she strained feebly against the stone-wall-like resistance of the door, a very
fever of dismay grew hot and terrible inside her. What had happened to her?
How could a machine reach over a distance, and strike unerringly at one
particular individual with such enormous, vitality-draining power?
A shadow leaned over her. The booming voice of a policeman who had just
come up the steps was the most glorious sound she had ever heard.
“Too much for you, eh, madam? Here, I’ll push that door for you.”
“Thank you,” she said; and her voice sounded so harsh and dry and weak
and unnatural in her own ears that a new terror flared: in a few minutes she
wouldn’t be able to speak above a whisper.
“A slave of the machine,” he had said; and she knew with a clear and
burning logic that if she was ever to conquer, it was now. She must get into this
building. She must see someone in authority, and she must tell him—must—
must— Somehow, she pumped strength into her brain and courage into her
heart, and forced her legs to carry her across the threshold into the big modem
building with its mirrored anteroom and its fine marble corridors. Inside, she
knew suddenly that she had reached her limit.
She stood there on the hard floor, and felt her whole body shaking from the
enormous effort it took simply to stay erect. Her knees felt dissolved and cold,
like ice turning to strengthless liquid. She grew aware that the big policeman
was hovering uncertainly beside her.
“Anything I can do, mother?” he asked heartily.
“Mother!” she echoed mentally with a queer sense of insanity. Her mind
skittered off after the word. Did he really say that, or had she dreamed it?
Why, she wasn’t a mother. She wasn’t even married. She— She fought the
thought off. She’d have to pull herself together, or there
was madness here. No chance now of getting to an inspector or an officer. This
big constable must be her confidant, her hope to defeat the mighty power
that was striking at her across miles of city, an incredibly evil, terrible
power whose ultimate purpose she could not begin to imagine. She— There
it was again, her mind pushing off into obscure, action-destroying,
defeating thoughts! She turned to the policeman, started to part her lips in
speech; and it was then she saw the mirror.
She saw a tall, thin, old, old woman standing beside the fresh-checked bulk
of a blue-garbed policeman. It was such an abnormal trick of vision that it
fascinated her. In some way, the mirror was missing her image, and reflecting
instead the form of an old woman who must be close behind and slightly to one
side of her. Queerest thing she had ever seen.
She half-lifted her red-gloved hand toward the policeman, to draw his
attention to the distortion. Simultaneously, the red-gloved hand of the old
woman in the mirror reached toward the policeman. Her own raised hand
stiffened in midair; so did the old woman’s. Funny.
Puzzled, she drew her gaze from the mirror, and stared with briefly blank
vision at that rigidly uplifted hand. A tiny, uneven bit of her wrist was visible
between the end of the glove and the end of sleeve of her serge suit. Her skin
wasn’t really as dark as—that!
Two things happened then. A tall man came softly through the door— Dr.
Lell—and the big policeman’s hand touched her shoulder.
“Really, madam, at your age, you shouldn’t come here. A phone call would
serve—”
And Dr. Lell was saying: “My poor old grandmother—”
Their voices went on, but the sense of them jangled in her brain as she
jerked frantically to pull the glove off a hand wrinkled and shriveled by
incredible age— Blackness pierced with agonized splinters of light reached
mercifully into her brain. Her very last thought was that it must have happened just
before she stepped onto the curb, when the man had stared at her pop-eyed and
thought himself crazy. He must have seen the change taking place.
The pain faded; the blackness turned gray, then white. She was conscious of
a car engine purring, and of forward movement. She opened her eyes—and her
brain reeled from a surge of awful memory.
“Don’t be afraid!” said Dr. Lell, and his voice was as soothing and gentle as it
had been hard and satirical at the recruiting station. “You are again yourself; in
fact, approximately ten years younger.”
He removed one hand from the steering wheel and flashed a mirror before her
eyes. The brief glimpse she had of her image made her grab
at the silvered glass as if it were the most precious thing in all the world.
One long, hungry look she took; and then her arm, holding the mirror,
collapsed from sheer, stupendous relief. She lay back against the cushions,
tears sticky on her cheeks, weak and sick from dreadful reaction. At last she
said steadily:
“Thanks for telling me right away. Otherwise I should have gone mad.”
“That, of course, was why I told you,” he said; and his voice was still soft,
still calm. And she felt soothed, in spite of the dark terror just past, in spite of
the intellectual realization that this diabolical man used words and tones and
human emotions as coldly as Pan himself piping his reed, sounding what stop
he pleased. That quiet, deep voice went on:
“You see, you are now a valuable member of our twentieth-century staff,
with a vested interest in the success of our purpose. You thoroughly un-
derstand the system of rewards and punishments for good or bad service. You
will have food, a roof over your head, money to spend—and eternal youth!
Woman, look at your face again, look hard, and rejoice for your good fortune!
Weep for those who have nothing but old age and death as their future! Look
hard, I say!”
It was like gazing at a marvelous photograph out of the past, except that she
had been somewhat prettier in the actuality, her face more rounded, not so
sharp, more girlish. She was twenty again, but different, more mature, leaner.
She heard his voice go on dispassionately, a distant background to her own
thoughts, feeding, feeding at the image in the mirror. He said:
“As you can see, you are not truly yourself as you were at twenty. This is
because we could only manipulate the time tensions which influenced your
thirty-year-old body according to the rigid mathematical laws governing the
energies and forces involved. We could not undo the harm wrought these last
rather prim, introvert years of your life because you have already lived them,
and nothing can change that.”
It came to her that he was talking to give her time to recover from the
deadliest shock that had ever stabbed into a human brain. And for the first time
she thought, not of herself, but of the incredible things implied by every action
that had occurred, every word spoken.
“Who . . - are . . - you?”
He was silent; the car twisted in and out of the clamorous traffic; and she
watched his face now, that lean, strange, dark, finely chiseled, evil face with its
glittering dark eyes. For the moment she felt no repulsion, only a gathering
storm of fascination at the way that strong chin tilted unconsciously as he said
in a cold, proud, ringing voice:
“We are masters of time. We live at the farthest frontier of time itself, and
all the ages belong to us. No words could begin to describe the vastness of our
empire or the futility of opposing us. We—”
He stopped. Some of the fire faded from his dark eyes. His brows knit,
摘要：

A.E.v~V0GTRECRUITINGSTATIONSi~DIDN’TDARE!Suddenly,thenightwasacold,envelopingthing.Theedgeofthebroad,blackrivergurgledevillyatherfeetasif,nowthatshehadchangedhermind—ithungeredforher.Herfootslippedonthewet,slopingground;andhermindgrewblurredwiththeterriblesenselessfearthatthingswerereachingoutofthen...

展开>> 收起<<
A. E. Van Vogt - Recruiting Station.pdf

共65页,预览13页

还剩页未读， 继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

相关推荐

更多
立即下载
分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：65 页 大小：402.15KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-11

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务

作者详情

相关内容

更多

热门标签

人际关系 配电装置 动力学连接体 力的合成 高考理综 全宋诗作者索引 公务员考试
/ 65
评分 收藏
分享
立即下载 VIP免费下载
客服
关注