Ordeal by Terror. Lloyd Biggle jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ the wall by the door.

      “Don’t forget to wind that thing,” he said as he got the time from Adelle’s watch. “If you do, we easily could get confused about what day it is. We may anyway. Too bad you didn’t have the foresight to buy a watch with a calendar.”

      “Too bad you were too cheap to even buy a sundial.”

      Dolan grinned. “That’d really be useful down here. Mondor could use your watch to calculate where the sun ought to be, and then he could check your watch by the sundial.”

      Carrying the disassembled bed, they marched into the test room. The opening closed after them with an almost inaudible hiss, leaving them in the dim glow of the recessed ceiling light. Numerals began flashing on the three walls where the inverted score boards were located.

      The series was longer than before, and it flashed only once.

      “The degenerate fiends!” Dolan exclaimed. “Now that we know how the thing works, they figure once is enough. Did either of you catch it?”

      “I missed the beginning,” Mondor said.

      “Six, seven, nine, one, zero, four, five,” Adelle recited. She punched the appropriate buttons as she spoke. With the same quiet hiss a door dropped open on the side opposite to the one they had entered.

      Dolan gouged a “1” on a test room wall. He circled it. “Eventually we’ll find out how many there are. How’d you manage to remember that number so easily?”

      “I’ve been typing numbers for three weeks,” Adelle said. “I couldn’t help it.”

      They picked up the bed parts and marched out. The door swished shut behind them. Again they assembled the bed, and Dolan investigated the ceiling with the same futile result.

      “They could have fastened the thing shut,” he called down to them when the third check failed to find anything. “It wouldn’t take much effort to bolt the trap’s frame to the joists when the trap isn’t in use. That’d keep us from climbing out and prevent the goons from falling through it accidentally. If they’ve done that, we couldn’t pry it down with a crowbar.”

      He swung to the floor and began to carve their names on the wall.

      Mondor watched him with a frown. “I should have drawn a map,” he said.

      “You’d need a sheet of paper twelve feet square, and the end result would look like a warren dug by drunken rabbits,” Dolan told him.

      “Even so—” Mondor got out a pocket notebook. “There’s no harm in trying. I might accumulate enough information to help us decide which turns to take when they’re generous enough to give us a choice.” He drew a small square, marked it T for Test Room, and represented the alley with a straight line.

      Dolan finished gouging the wall and stepped back to inspect his lettering. “Let’s rest,” he said. “There’s no hurry to get where we’re going if we aren’t going anywhere.”

      Not until Adelle sat down did she realize how utterly exhausted she was. She had been so preoccupied with her growing hunger and thirst that she failed to notice her fatigue. The long hours of aimless wandering had left the men just as tired. Dolan’s arrows became progressively less ornate as the day wore on, and now he was producing straight lines with carelessly drawn points at the ends.

      He sat down beside Adelle; Mondor had seated himself on the opposite side of the alley. Adelle glanced at them before she closed her eyes. Dolan sat slumped back wearily, eyes closed, one hand cupping his hairy chin. Mondor, whose face showed faint signs of needing a shave, was bent forward, elbows on knees, and he seemed to be contemplating the toes of his shoes. This was what the bright optimism and determination of the morning had come to.

      They rested in silence for a time, and Adelle tried unsuccessfully to sleep. Then Dolan asked suddenly, “Would it be a valid psychological test to observe the effects of hunger and thirst on humans?”

      “I’m sure it’s already been done,” Mondor said.

      “Then psychological tests on humans aren’t unusual?”

      “They’re performed frequently, and they produce extremely valuable information. Reaction times, for example. How long does it take you to get your foot on the brake when you’re driving and see danger ahead? That’s a valid psychological test, and the data tell us things like how much distance we should maintain between us and the car ahead at different speeds. But no reputable scientist would experiment on humans without their consent.”

      “What stupid people would let them do it at all?”

      “Haven’t there been any ads for test volunteers since you hit Ann Arbor? Scientists frequently pay students to take part in experiments. If someone wanted to perform hunger tests, he wouldn’t have any trouble finding volunteers. What are a few days without food to an impoverished college student—especially if he’s paid well for it and fed afterward. The effect of hunger and thirst on the ability to think and remember would be a valid test subject.”

      “As with the number in the test room?”

      “Yes. Yes, I suppose that could be one of the ways they’re measuring us. They might check us again at this time tomorrow and see whether another twenty-four hours of thirst and hunger has had any effect on Adelle’s ability to remember that many numerals.”

      “‘Sadistic ghouls’ is a better description of them than ‘putrid vermin,’ Dolan said. “What other experiments are they likely to inflict on us?”

      “I have no idea. All I had was an introductory course in psychology.”

      “Adelle?”

      “I managed to skip psychology,” she said. “I thought I already knew all about it.”

      “A college graduate,” Dolan said bitterly, “is someone who is overeducated in everything except what he needs to know.”

      “And a writer,” Mondor returned, “is someone who doesn’t know enough about anything for it to be useful. Maybe we should ask Adelle to apply her English Literature degree.”

      “No way,” Adelle said firmly. “Nothing about this place belongs to either literature or life. It lacks verisimilitude.”

      “It also lacks drinking fountains, rest rooms, and burger joints,” Dolan said.

      “Those things would go a long way toward giving it verisimilitude,” Adelle conceded.

      A gong sounded. The unexpectedness of it, the totally unreal impact of a reverberating tone with the deep quality of Big Ben, startled all of them and brought Mondor halfway to his feet.

      “Interesting,” Dolan remarked. “But for whom does it toll?”

      With dual swishes, a wall raised out of the floor a short distance away, blocking off the alley, and a section of the wall nearby disappeared into the floor. Through the new opening, an intersecting alley was visible.

      They exchanged glances. “Obviously they want us to go that way,” Dolan said. “Shall we?”

      “Our alternative is to СКАЧАТЬ