it was cut off abruptly.
With a real effort he stifled the impulse to touch the key again. Perhaps it would mean instant return, but perhaps it might bring about any of a dozen other transformations. “Check your premises before you act on them,” he seemed to hear Cal’s voice saying, an axiom that had brought Terry up abruptly more than once in mutual experimental work.
Terry moved well back from the edge of the slab of stone and turned to survey the building behind him again. Just as he focused fully on it, a crack appeared in the solid gray wall and expanded rapidly in a doorway. The voice that issued from the doorway spoke a strange and unintelligible language, but it was not sufficiently outlandish that Terry could not recognize the basic quality of the sound, the slightly unreal and artificial nature of even the best of electro-acoustical instruments.
“Hello, I guess,” he said tentatively, surveying the door without moving.
There was a very brief pause, then the voice spoke up again—somewhat more intelligible this time, though still hollowly artificial. “Grata be you, Citizen Galactica. Thy numero est needful unto me.”
Terry stood for a moment in his turn, pondering the evident greeting and request. You might call it English. Archaic, or anyhow approximately archaic English, with a few tags that pointed toward Latin. But the response wanted was obviously a number, so he called off the one that was most immediately in his consciousness: his ham operator’s call letters.
Finally the mechanical voice clacked once and sputtered: “Numeros no-numeros. Numeros offered stand not within my ordering, young sire. Prithee, step within yon door. So doing, thou’lt hight a . . . a . . . glowing board, upon which thou’lt place thy right hand. Thy meantime . . . temporary . . . status will be offered thee till this confusion clears.”
A plaintive note seemed to creep into the voice after Terry said a cheerful, “All right, if you say so.” The volume decreased for all the world (But what world? Terry wondered, with a momentary surge of panic) as if the machine were thinking aloud. “So few opportunities to render service in accord with my instructions. Yet beseems that when a service can be rendered the charge is gai unusual. . . .”
Terry advanced somewhat hesitantly through the door. He noted with another, sharper impulse of apprehension that it began closing almost immediately behind him. The “glowing board” of which the coder had spoken stood just to his right as he entered. Though there was a generalized light in the room, the glowing board was the only brightly lighted object visible.
“An it please thee, approach the . . . the scanning panel,” urged the voice.
Sol It was a scanning panel, now that the machine had located the proper term in English. It was just a solid-looking pane of luminous, milky quartz, or something very like quartz, nearly eighteen inches square.
As he approached it, it rose from its position near the floor to a level appropriate to his own height. A person of another era might have been awed by such phenomena, but Terry was used to various forms of automation, and it didn’t startle him. Something new in scanning plates, he thought, recalling one that he had investigated not long ago. That one had been a fiber-optic gadget that had successfully identified his written name sixteen times in a row by cross comparison with a blurred random image printed on the check stubs that went with it.
Terry somewhat diffidently offered his hand to the plate’s inspection. Shortly a symbol appeared on the scanning plate, and in the far wall a corridor outlined itself in light. Across the top of the doorway the same symbol appeared simultaneously.
“Subject classed but not identified. Prithee . . . please . . . proceed along left-hand corridor to orientation room displaying symbol.”
Terry did as instructed. He wondered at the voice’s strange English, yet he felt real admiration for the designer of such a well-functioning device, and he began to have the curious itch that he always called the “take-it-apart” feeling. Any complex mechanism aroused his desire to know the internal structure and operation that produced the results.
He stepped into the “orientation room.” It was bare, except for a single piece of furniture: a padded slab which was still adjusting itself to his proper height.
“The citizen is requested to lie prone on the couch.”
Terry did so, more out of curiosity than a desire to be obliging, he told himself, as he fought to keep on believing that this was just an elaborate gag. He was immediately aware of a swirl of color that turned into a driving bombardment of all the sensory channels simultaneously. It seemed to go on and on, although in reality he was aware that it ended in a matter of seconds.
“My apologies for the inconvenience.” The voice was stiff now, and speaking in a clipped machine-like language which Terry understood. He recognized it as his language. It had searched into its files for the specific type of English he used.
And in the same instant he realized, too, with an almost physical blow of recognition, that this was for real; that there was no longer any possible way he could convince himself otherwise.
Through a sea of conflicting emotions that threatened to overwhelm him, Terry heard the voice continuing. “You have now received a basic orientation as Galactic Citizen. The status of your orientation is and will remain General Citizen until such time as your numeric classification data are located and a more suitable orientation can be arranged. I could not determine your citizenship ratings from the available data in your memory banks since they have obviously been badly scrambled by some traumatic incident. You don’t even seem to recall basic galactic symbolism. However, therapy will necessarily be postponed for a more opportune time.
“This is the standard citizen’s survival orientation recording. You will now please scan the current orientation for familiarity and checking.”
Terry forced himself back from the sea of confusion and with an abrupt mental gesture discarded it. If this was real—since this was real, he told himself sternly—he’d better confront it. “You will now please scan . . .” the voice had said, and he wrenched his attention to the problem of just what, and with what tools, he was supposed to “scan,” and precisely what was meant by the word “scan,” anyhow. To his amazement he found that his own mind was presenting him with an orderly flood of information that seemed to flow on and on.
Surprise was almost immediately replaced with an intense startled interest as he realized that he was now thinking totally in terms of the galactic speech pattern. English, his very own tongue, he could recall perfectly after a slight initial flurry of puzzlement—as if it were a possession he had mislaid on a high shelf. It wasn’t where he would have looked for it, and yet it was all there. The difference was that it was now his secondary tongue.
Quite an orientation, he decided. And perhaps the voice—the computer, he noted instantly—was right; that he was a galactic citizen and that some traumatic incident . . .
“No!” His whole being surged into the single word that exploded, in English, from his lips. In his brain the new patterns seemed to retreat before the explosion, to coalesce into a separateness, then tentatively to return to the forefront to continue a hesitant, and then more positive presentation of information; and slowly Terry relaxed and again became intent.
There were whole new sets of behavior patterns, strange and familiar at the same time; there were abilities and knowingnesses . . . and that little section marked “survival data”—it came to him with a shock of pleasure that he had learned such odd abilities as staying underwater for twenty minutes (or a very little longer, if necessary) at a time. He gulped. And now
