Sometimes, in the dark of night, I lie in bed and wonder what I’d do if I were suddenly kidnapped by aliens, thrown into a wet glass prison, and fed nothing but fungus. It haunts me. Luckily, 1957’s “The Cage” by A. Bertram Chandler puts my fears to paper, and I can face them head on.

How would you prove your worth to aliens who believe you belong in a cage at their zoo?

About half of this short story would fit right into a season of The Twilight Zone. I think so, anyway. Its final answer to that question is one of those “Oh, right!” moments, because it takes our own human nature and throws it right back into our faces.

The rest is, well, let’s just say one fourth of “The Cage” is dedicated to a fight over marriage straight out of a 1960s Beach Party flick. It serves a purpose, I guess, to highlight just how quickly a futuristic space-faring society can fall back to basics. But I think Chandler could have arrived there another way.

The story focuses on the crew of the Lode Star, after their ship crash lands and explodes on an unexplored planet where it’s forever drizzling and weird fungus eats away all their clothes and technology. They lose everything, and turn to eating some of that fungus themselves to survive.

A few of them are later scooped up and whisked away by alien interlopers, who think they’re nothing more than wild animals. The captured humans are then tossed into cages at what appears to be an otherworldly zoo. That’s where the fun begins.

The aliens here aren’t just malicious extraterrestrial zoo keepers. They keep the humans as comfortable as they believe they can. They’re placed in a habitat that matches what the aliens think is their home – hot, constantly raining, and fed nutritious goop fungus every single day. It’s not about what’s actually good for their captives, but that’s the real catch: the aliens act as a mirror of how we ourselves size up and treat other creatures.

“And we, were the situations reversed, would take some convincing that three six-legged beer barrels were men and brothers…”

– First Mate Hawkins

So how, as lowly human beings, do you get out of a situation like that? The human captives can’t make fire. It’s constantly raining and moist inside their habitat. They talk, but the aliens likely think they’re just making sounds. They have an idea to craft baskets to prove their smarts, but you know what else makes baskets? Birds.

It’s only at the very end, where human nature emerges for all to see, that those ill-fated passengers of the Lode Star find their freedom.

If you’d like to check out “The Cage” for yourself, it’s available in a number of anthologies, as well as over at Archive.org, found inside the original 1957 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction where it was first published. I think it holds up, mostly. Is it a bit dated? Yeah, but I’d still read it for that ending. Search YouTube for audio narrations, and you’ll find those too. Good luck, and enjoy the fungus!