With a smile he stepped in. A soft light was turned on and he found himself in a tiny cubbyhole with just room for the single seat it provided and on which he seated himself. There was no window.
The machine carried him along smoothly for perhaps five minutes, stopped and the door opened before him. He issued into another blue-domed hall. A small one this time, containing a rubber seat like that in his cell, but with an extended arm on which rested a complex apparatus of some kind. The seat faced a white screen like those in movie theaters.
He seated himself and at once a series of words appeared in dark green on the screen. "Dominance was not complete," it said. "Communication?" Then below, in smaller type, as though it were the body of a newspaper column. "Lassans service man. Flier writing information through communication excellent. Dinner bed, book. No smoking. Yours very truly."
As he gazed in astonishment at this cryptic collection of words it was erased and its place was taken by a picture which he recognized as a likeness of himself in his present metallic state. A talking picture, which made a few remarks in the same incomprehensible gibberish the ape-man had used, then sat down in a chair like that in which he now rested, and proceeded to write on the widespread arm with a stylus which was attached to it. The screen went blank.... Evidently he was supposed to communicate something by writing.
The stylus was a metal pencil, and the material of the arm, though not apparently metallic, must be, he argued from the fact that it seemed to have electric connections attached. As he examined it, the blue lights flickered at him impatiently. "The white knight," he wrote in a fit of impish perversity, "is climbing up the poker." Instantly the words flashed on the screen.
Pause. "IS CLIMBING" declared the screen, in capitals; then below it appeared a fairly creditable picture of a knight in armor followed by a not very creditable picture of a poker. Sherman began to comprehend. Whoever it was behind this business had managed a correspondence course of a sort in English, but had failed to learn the verbs and he was being asked to explain.
For answer he produced a crude drawing of a monkey climbing a stick and demonstrated the action by getting up and going through the motions of climbing. Immediately the screen flashed a picture of the knight in armor ascending the poker by the same means, but it had hardly appeared before it was wiped out to be replaced by a flickering of blue lights and an angry buzz. His interlocutor had seen the absurdity of the sentence and was demanding a more serious approach to the problem. For answer Sherman wrote, "Where am I and who are you?"
A longer pause. "Dominance not complete," said the screen. Then came the picture of the first page of a child's ABC book with "A was an Archer who shot at a frog" below the usual childish picture. Then came the word "think." With the best will in the world Sherman was puzzled to illustrate this idea, but by tapping his forehead and drawing a crude diagram of the brain as he remembered it from books, he managed to give some satisfaction.
The process went on for three or four hours as nearly as Sherman could judge the time, ending with a flash of the word "Exit" in red from the screen and a dimming of the blue-dome light. He turned toward the door and found the car that had brought him, ready for the return journey. As it rumbled back to his cell he ruminated on the fact that none of the men (or whatever it was) behind this place had yet made themselves visible, for it was incredible that beings of the type of the metallic ape-man who occupied the next cell to his should have intelligence enough to operate such obviously highly-developed machinery.