The Square Pegs, Ray Bradbury

The Square Pegs

Lisabeth stopped screaming because she was tired. Also, there was this room to consider. There was a vast vibration, like being plunged about in the loud interior of a bell. The room was filled with sighs and murmurs of travel. She was in a rocket.

Suddenly she recalled the explosion, the plummeting, the Moon riding by in cool space, the Earth gone. Lisabeth turned to a round window deep and blue as a mountain well.

It was filled to its brim with evil swift life, movement, vast space monsters lurking with fiery arms, hurrying to some unscheduled destruction. A meteor school flashed by, blinking insane dot-dash codes.

She put her hand out after them.

Then she heard the voices. Sighing, whispering voices.

Quietly, she moved to an iron barred door and peered without a sound through the little window of the locked frame.
“Lisabeth’s stopped screaming,” a tired woman’s voice said. It was Helen.

“Thank heaven,” a man’s voice sighed. “I’ll be raving myself before we reach Asteroid Thirty-six.”

A second woman’s voice said, irritably, “Are you sure this will work? Is it the best thing for Lisabeth?”

“She’ll be better off than she was on Earth,” cried the man.
“We might have asked her if she wanted to take this trip, at least, John.”

John swore. “You can’t ask an insane sister what she wants!”
“Insane? Don’t use that word!”

“Insane she is,” John said, bluntly. “For honesty’s sake, call a spade a spade. There was no question of asking her to come on this trip. We simply had to make her do it, that’s all.”
Listening to them talk, Lisabeth’s white fingers trembled on the caged room wall. They were like voices from some warm dream, far away, on a telephone, talking in another language.

“The sooner we get her there and settled on Asteroid Thirty-six, the sooner I can get back to New York,” the man was saying in this incomprehensible telephone talk she was eavesdropping on. “After all, when you have a woman thinking she’s Catherine the Great—”

“I am, I am, I am!” screamed Lisabeth out of her window into their midst. “I am Catherine!” It was as if she had shot a lightning bolt into the room. The three people almost flew apart. Now Lisabeth raved and cried and clung drunkenly to the cell bars and shouted out her belief in herself. “I am, oh, I am!” she sobbed.

“Good heavens,” said Alice.
“Oh, Lisabeth!”

The man, with a look of startled concern, came to the window and looked in with the false understanding of a person looking down upon a wounded rabbit. “Lisabeth we’re sorry. We understand. You are Catherine, Lisabeth.”

“Then call me Catherine!” screamed the wild thing in the room.
“Of course, Catherine,” insisted the man, swiftly. “Catherine, your Highness, we await your commands.”

This only made the pale thing writhing against the door the wilder. “You don’t believe, you don’t really believe. I can tell by your awful faces, I can tell by your eyes and your mouths. Oh, you don’t really believe.

I want to kill you!” She blazed her hatred out at them so the man fell away from the door. “You’re lying, and I know it’s a lie. But I am Catherine and you’ll never in all your years understand!”

“No,” said the man, turning. He went and sat down and put his hands to his face. “I guess we don’t understand.”
“Good grief,” said Alice.

Lisabeth slipped to the red velvet floor and lay there, sobbing away her great unhappiness. The room moved on in space, the voices outside the room murmured and argued and talked on and on through the next half hour.

They placed a food tray inside her door an hour later. It was a simple tray with simple bowls of cereal and milk and hot buns on it. Lisabeth did not move from where she lay. There was one regal thing in the room—this red velvet on which she sprawled in silent rebellion.

She would not eat their nasty food for it was most probably poisoned. And it did not come in monogrammed dishes with monogrammed napkins on a regally monogrammed tray for Catherine, Empress of All the Russias! Therefore she would not eat.

“Catherine! Eat your food, Catherine.”
Lisabeth said nothing. They could go on insisting. She wanted only to die now. Nobody understood. There was an evil plan to oust her from her throne. These dark, wicked people were part of the plan.
The voices murmured again.

“I have important business in New York, too, just as important as yours. Alice,” said the man. “The Amusement Park for one; those rides have to be installed next week, and the gambling equipment I bought in Reno, that has to be shipped East by next Saturday. If I’m not there to do it, who’ll attend to the job?”

Murmur, murmur, dream soft, listen, far away voices.

Alice said, “Here it is autumn and the big fashion show tomorrow and here I am going off in space to some ridiculous planet for heaven knows what reason. I don’t see why one of us couldn’t have committed her.”
“We’re her brother and sisters, that’s why,” the man snapped.

“Well, now that we’re talking about it, I don’t understand it all. About Lisabeth and where we’re taking her. What is this Asteroid Thirty-six?”
“A civilization.”
“It’s an insane asylum, I thought.”

“Nonsense, it’s not.” He struck a cigarette into fire, puffing. “We discovered, a century ago, that the asteroids were inhabited, inside. They’re really a series of small planets, inside of which people breathe and walk around.”

“And they’ll cure Lisabeth?”
“No, they won’t cure her at all.”

“Then, why are we taking her there?” Helen was mixing a drink with a brisk shaking of her hands, the ice rattling in the container. She poured and drank. “Why?”
“Because she will be happy there, because it will be the environment for her.”

“Won’t she ever come back to Earth?”
“Never.”
“But how silly. I thought she’d be cured and come home.”
He crushed out one cigarette, snapped another into light, smoked it hungrily, lines under his eyes, his hands trembling.

“Don’t ask questions. I’ve got some radioing to do back to New York.” He walked across the cabin and fussed with some equipment. There was a buzzing and a bell sound. He shouted, “Hello, New York! Hang it.

Get me through to Sam Norman on Eighth Avenue, Apartment C.” He waited. Finally. “Hello, Sam. My, but that was a slow connection. Look, Sam, about that equipment—What equipment? The gambling equipment, where’s your brain!”

“While you have the contact through to Earth—” said Helen.
“What? Sam—What?” He turned to glare at Helen.

“While you’ve the contact through,” said Helen, holding his elbow urgently, “let me call my beauty operator, I want an appointment for Monday. My hair’s a mess.”

“I’m trying to talk to Sam Norman,” John objected. To Sam he said. “What did you say?” To Helen: “Go away.”

“But I want to talk—”
“You can when I’m finished!” He talked with Sam for five minutes, very loud, and then hung up.

“Oh.” Helen gasped.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tiredly. “Call Earth back yourself and get your fool hairdresser.” He lighted another cigarette while she dialed and called into the speaker.
He looked at Alice who was emptying her fourth cocktail glass. “Alice, you know, Lisabeth’s not really insane.”

Helen, who was calling Earth, said “Shh!” then turned to her brother blankly. “Not insane?” To the space phone: “Hold on a minute, there.” To her brother: “What do you mean, not insane?”
“It’s relative.

She is insane to us. She wants to be Catherine of Russia. That’s illogical, to us. To her it is logical in the extreme. We are now taking her to a planet where it will be logic itself.”

He got up, walked to the door and looked in at the lovely pale recumbent Catherine the Great. He put his hand to the bars, the cigarette tremoring out nervous smoke. He spoke quietly:
“Some times, I envy her.

I’ll envy her even more every hour. She’ll stay and be happy. And we? We’ll go back, back to New York, back to big roulettes and big dice.” He looked at Helen. “Back to hairdressers and men.” He looked at Alice, “Back to cocktails and straight gin.”

“I don’t like insults,” cried Alice.
“I wasn’t insulting anybody,” he replied.

“Just a moment!” said Helen. “New York?”
John sat wearily down. “Anyway, it’s all relative. These asteroids are amazing places; all kinds of cultures. You know that.”

Lisabeth leaned against the cell door which swayed ever so quietly outward. It was unlocked. Her gaze dropped to the catch and her eyes widened. Escape. These talking fools, who didn’t understand, were trying to kill her.

She might run out of the cell quickly, across the room and into the other little room, where there were all kinds of weird mechanisms. If she managed to reach that room, she could smash and tangle wires and boxes with her hands!

“I don’t even know what insanity is,” said Alice, far away.

“It’s a rebellion. Against the mores or ethical setup in a society. That’s what it is,” said the man.

Lisabeth opened the door slowly, gathering herself.
Helen was still on the phone, her back turned.

Lisabeth ran, laughing. The three people looked up and cried out as she darted by them. She was across the room and into the automatic pilot room in an instant, lightly. There was a hammer and she snatched it up, shouting against all of them, and crashed it down upon the wires and the mechanisms.

There were explosions, dancing lights, the shuddering of the ship in space, a revolving, a flying free. The man rushed into the room as she hammered and rehammered the controls into dented masses of fusing metal!
“Lisabeth!” a woman screamed.

“Lisabeth!”