Ordeal by Terror. Lloyd Biggle jr.
one white square on each of the scoreboards—the square for the third inning—showed a brightly illuminated numeral three.
As Adelle stood looking bewilderedly from one scoreboard to another, the lighted squares went dark, and the white squares for the sixth inning showed brightly illuminated numeral sixes. They were followed by numeral nines in the ninth inning squares. Then the threes came on again and went out; the sixes, out; the nines, out. Pause. Threes, out; sixes, out; nines, out.
“I can do even better than that,” Adelle announced caustically. “Twelve, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one, twenty-four.”
The pattern kept repeating: threes, out; sixes, out; nines, out.
She walked over to one wall and looked up at the scoreboard. The numbered black squares in the lower row looked like control buttons similar to those found on many electronic devices. Adelle reached up and punched them in turn as the numerals in the upper row lighted: three, six, nine.
The ceiling light went out. The lighted numerals faded. For a moment she stood blinking in darkness. Then, with a sustained swish, a section of wall below one of the the horizontal supports slowly sank into the floor. Beyond it was a well-lighted passageway the same width as the room, with gray metal walls and a high ceiling of translucent squares that glowed with light. It was an explosion of illumination, and Adelle had to shade her eyes as she sprang through the opening.
She heard another sustained swish. The doorway was closing after her.
When her eyes became adjusted to the flood of light, she looked about her. The metal walls were similar to those of the room she had just emerged from. At the foot of each wall, at regular intervals, steel brackets were bolted to the unpainted cement floor. At longer intervals, grooves on opposite sides of the corridor ran all the way to the top of the walls, and they were connected by inch-wide strips of black rubber or plastic material that crossed the cement floor from one side of the corridor to the other.
None of this signified anything at all to her. “So where am I?” she demanded. “And why?”
She thought she heard a subdued murmur of talk coming from somewhere. She called out, “Is anyone here?”
A response echoed along the passageway, faint but understandable. “Is that you, Adelle?” It was Craig Dolan. She called back sarcastically, “No. It’s Dracula’s mother.”
“You could be, at that. Come and join us.”
She walked toward the distant end of the corridor. Before she reached it, she saw an opening on the left that led into an even longer corridor, identical to the other except for length. She called, got another response, and turned. At the end of that corridor she found yet another opening on the left; and, after a short distance, another. A dozen more steps, and she stopped to stare through an opening on her right. She was looking into a narrow kitchen where Dolan and Mondor sat at a small table. Dolan was tilting a can of beer. Mondor, who had his back to her, clutched a can of his own with both hands and leaned forward as though praying over it.
After the long succession of identical blank walls, this was too much detail to take in with one glance. Adelle found herself speechless.
Dolan set his can down, carefully wiped foam from his beard with a paper towel he was using for a napkin, and grinned at her. “So they suckered you, too.”
Mondor spoke gloomily without looking around. “We figured you’d be along. Pull up a chair.” He waved at one that stood against the wall.
Still too astonished to speak, Adelle slumped into it. Suddenly she turned toward the stove and sniffed.
“I’m broiling some steaks,” Dolan explained. “I found a package of three in the refrigerator, which is why we thought someone would be joining us. They look pretty good.”
Whatever the peculiarities of their situation, Dolan seemed expansive, perfectly relaxed, a man who had been caught up in adversity all of his life and took it for granted. He sipped beer again, wiped his beard, and grinned across the table at Mondor.
Mondor had not looked up since Adelle arrived. He remained hunched over the clutched can, lips set in a firm line, hair disheveled, his manner that of a mourner at a funeral he would have preferred not to attend.
Adelle remarked disbelievingly, “The pure food addict and vegetarian is drinking beer and eating steak?”
“When a great mathematician gets bamboozled by a kindergarten trick, it breaks his spirit,” Dolan said, grinning again. Mondor grunted. Dolan went on, “Madam told him the firm had bought a computer for him to use. She invited him to help unpack it. Naturally he couldn’t resist a computer, so he blunderingly galloped to her assistance and fell through the floor. After that brilliant display of stupidity, it wasn’t difficult to convince him that brain cells need meat occasionally to keep their clutches from slipping. Anyway, there aren’t enough vegetables to make up a meal. He drew the line at the beer, though—that’s Red Pop he’s drinking.”
Mondor grunted again and raised his can.
“Stupidity’s the word,” Adelle agreed. “What would Z-R Publications want with another computer when it has him? What bamboozled you?”
“Madam asked me to help a goon unload their panel truck. Reasonable request, considering what she’s been paying me. I carried some boxes down to the basement, put them on a shelf, and suddenly I wasn’t there any more.”
“You should have been suspicious. Madam may be half blind, but the goons aren’t, and they’d know you couldn’t perform manual labor without getting your beard tangled in it. How long ago did this happen?”
“About four o’clock. Mondor took his dive about four-thirty—he says. What time is it now?”
Adelle looked at her watch. “Almost five-thirty.”
“What’s your excuse for being stupid?” Mondor demanded.
“Madam sent me to the basement to get a folder on tires. I marched up to a filing cabinet, opened one of the drawers, and the floor dropped away.”
Dolan nodded gravely and drained his beer can. “Sounds almost reasonable. You couldn’t expect Madam to tiptoe down the basement stairs for a folder, and it wouldn’t have been polite—or politic—to tell the boss to shove it when she asked you to perform a simple errand.”
“Face it,” Mondor said bitterly. “All three of us were conned from the moment we were hired—first by the money they were paying us, second by the stupid work we were pretending to do to earn it, and third by the flimflam they pulled to get us down here. If they’d told you to go look at a computer and help unpack the thing, you’d have gone. My thirty-five dollar calculator is far too sophisticated for the work I’ve been doing, but it didn’t surprise me in the least that a screwy outfit like Z-R Publications would invest in a computer for me.” He raised his can and drank deeply. Then he turned to Adelle. “How long did it take you to solve the psychological test?”
“Psychological test?” she echoed blankly.
“Didn’t they dump you into a room with rows of numbers and response buttons?”
“Oh, that. Is that what it was? I was curious about the buttons, so I pushed three of them, and a door opened.”
Mondor turned his chair sideways and regarded her with astonishment. “You were curious about the buttons, so you pushed three of them. In order to get out of there, you had to push the numbers they were flashing in the correct sequence. Didn’t you figure that out?”
“I didn’t figure anything out. I just pushed the buttons under the lighted numbers without thinking.”
Mondor tossed his head back and roared with laughter. “You’ve wrecked their experiment! You’ve utterly demolished it! You’ve shattered all of their scientific calibrations! You were supposed to figure it out!”
“Why?” Adelle asked.
“Good question.