Escape!

by Bova, Ben

  Chapter Fourteen

  To his surprise, Danny was something of a hero the next morning. He felt good enough to go to his reading class, even though his eye was still swollen, and really purple now. His arms and legs were stiff and sore. His ribs ached. But he went to class anyway.

  “Here comes the punching bag,” somebody said when he came into the classroom.

  “Look at that shinner!”

  “Tough luck, Danny. You showed a lot of guts.”

  “First time Lacey’s ever been knocked down.”

  “Goin’ to fight him again next month?”

  Danny let himself sink into one of the chairs. “Not me. Next fight I have is goin’ to be with somebody a lot easier than Lacey. Like maybe King Kong.”

  Mr. Cochran came in, looked a little surprised at seeing Danny there, and then put them all to work.

  Laurie was shaken up when she visited that week and saw Danny’s eye. But he laughed it off and made her feel better. By the time she came back, the following week, Danny’s face was just about back to normal.

  By that time, Danny had enough of Joe Tenny’s voice on tape to do the job he wanted to. One afternoon he went back to the language classroom. It was empty.

  The booths in the back of the room had big tape recorders in them. Danny worked for more than an hour, taking Tenny’s words off his pocket recorder and getting them onto the big machine’s tape in just the right way. Finally, he had it exactly as he wanted it to sound:

  “SPECS,” said Dr. Tenny’s voice, “I want you to turn off all the alarm systems right now.”

  It didn’t sound exactly right. Some of the words were louder than others. If you listened carefully, you could hear different background noises from one word to the next, because they had been recorded at different times. Danny hoped SPECS wouldn’t notice.

  He got his faked message onto the tape of his pocket recorder and erased the tape on the big machine. Then he headed back toward his room.

  “Tonight,” he told himself.

  It was nearly midnight when he tried it.

  “SPECS, you awake?”

  The TV screen at the foot of his bed instantly glowed to life, “I DO NOT SLEEP, MR. ROMANO.”

  Danny laughed nervously. “Yeah, I know. I was only kidding.”

  “I AM NOT PROGRAMED TO RECOGNIZE HUMOR, ALTHOUGH I UNDERSTAND THE BASIC THEORY INVOLVED IN IT. THERE ARE SEVERAL BOOKS IN MY MEMORY BANKS ON THE SUBJECT.”

  “Groovy. Look... Dr. Tenny wants to talk to you. Can you see him here in the room with me?”

  “THERE IS NO TV CAMERA IN YOUR ROOM, SO I CANNOT SEE WHO IS THERE.”

  “Well, you know Dr. Tenny’s in here, don’t you?”

  “MY SENSORS CANNOT TELL ME IF DR. TENNY IS WITH YOU OR IF YOU ARE ALONE.”

  “Okay, take my word for it. He’s here and he wants to tell you something.” Danny flicked the button of his pocket recorder.

  Dr. Tenny’s voice said, “SPECS, I want you to turn off all the alarm systems right now.”

  Danny found that he was holding his breath.

  “ALL THE ALARM SYSTEMS ARE SHUT DOWN.”

  Without another word, Danny dropped the recorder onto his bed and rushed out of his room.

  He made his way swiftly toward the fence. It was a warm night, and he knew every inch of the way, now that he had put in so many weeks on the clean-up crew. It was dark, cloudy, but Danny hurried through the trees and got to the fence in less than twenty minutes. He had taken an asthma pill just before calling SPECS, and had the bottle in his pants pocket.

  He got to the fence and without waiting a moment he jumped up onto it and started climbing.

  A strong hand grabbed at his belt and yanked him down to the ground.

  Danny felt as if a shock of electricity had ripped through him. He landed hard on his feet and spun around. Joe Tenny was standing there.

  “How... how’d you...?”

  Joe’s broad face was serious-looking. “You had me fooled. I thought you were really starting to work. But you still haven’t got it straight, have you?”

  “How’d you know? All the alarms are off!”

  Shaking his head, Joe answered, “Didn’t you ever stop to think that we’d have back-up alarms? When the main alarms go off, the back-ups come on. And SPECS automatically calls a half-dozen places, including my office. I happened to be working late tonight, otherwise the guards would’ve come out after you.”

  “Back-up alarms,” Danny muttered.

  “Come on,” said Joe, “let’s get back to your room. Or are you going to try to jump me again?”

  Shoulders sagging, chin on his chest, Danny went with Dr. Tenny. When they got back to his room, Danny trudged wearily to his bed and sat on it.

  “So what’s my punishment going to be?”

  “Punishment?” Joe made a sour face. “You still don’t understand how this place works.”

  Danny looked up at him.

  “You’re punishing yourself,” Joe explained. “You’ve been here about a month and you’ve gone no place. You’ve just wasted your time. As far as I’m concerned, tomorrow’s just like your first day here. You haven’t learned a thing yet. All you’ve done is added several weeks to the time you’ll be staying here.”

  “I’m never getting out,” Danny muttered.

  “Not at this rate.”

  “You’ll never let me out. We’re all in here to stay.”

  “Wrong! Ask Alan Peterson. He’s leaving next week. And he was a lot tougher than you when he first came in here. Nearly knifed me his first week.”

  Danny said nothing.

  “Okay,” said Joe. “Think it over.... And you’d better give me the tape recorder.”

  It was still on the bed, where Danny had left it. He picked it up and tossed it to Joe.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Danny sat slumped on the bed for a long time after Joe left, staring at the black-and-white tiled floor.

  A month wasted.

  He looked up at the TV screen. “SPECS,” he called.

  The screen began to glow, “YES, MR. ROMANO.”

  “You didn’t tell me about the back-up alarms,” Danny said, with just the beginnings of a tremble in his voice.

  “YOU DID NOT ASK ABOUT THE BACK-UP ALARMS.”

  “You let me walk out there and get caught like a baby.”

  “THE BACK-UP SYSTEMS GO ON AUTOMATICALLY WHEN THE MAIN ALARM SYSTEMS GO OFF. I HAVE NO CONTROL OVER THEM.”

  Danny got up and faced the screen. “You lied to me,” he said, his voice rising. “You let me go out there and get caught again. You lied to me!”

  “IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO TELL A LIE, IN THE SENSE....”

  “Liar!” Danny crossed the room in three quick steps and grabbed the desk chair.

  “Liar!” he screamed, and threw the chair into the TV screen. It bounced off harmlessly.

  Danny picked up the chair and smashed it across the screen. Again and again. The hard plastic of the screen didn’t even scratch, but the chair broke up, legs splintering and falling, seat cracking apart, until all Danny had in his hands was the broken ends of the chair’s back.

  “I AM CALLING THE MEDICAL STAFF,” said SPECS calmly, “YOU ARE BEHAVING IN AN HYSTERICAL MANNER.”

  “Dirty rotten liar!” Danny threw the broken pieces of the chair at the screen and cursed at SPECS.

  Then he turned around, kicked the side of his desk, then knocked over his bookcase. The halfdozen books he had in it spilled out onto the floor. Danny reached down and took one, tore it to bits, and then ran to the door.

  A couple of medics were hurrying up the hall toward his room. Danny ran the other way. But the door at the far end of the hall was closed and locked. SPECS had locked all the doors now.

  “Come on son, calm down now,” said one of the medics. They were both big and young, dressed in white suits. One of them carried a small black kit in his hand.

  Danny swore at them and tried to leap past them. They grabbed
him. He struggled as hard as he could. Then he felt a needle being jabbed into his arm. Danny cursed and hollered and tried to squirm away from them. But everything was starting to get fuzzy. Soon he slid into sleep.

  He awoke in his own room. Early morning sunlight was coming through the window. The broken pieces of the chair were still scattered across the floor, mixed with the pages from the torn book. The bookcase was still face down. He was still in the same clothes he had been wearing the night before, except that his shoes had been taken off.

  Danny sat up. His head felt a little whoozy.

  One of the doctors entered the room without knocking. He checked Danny over quickly and then said, “You’ll be okay for classes this morning. Have a good breakfast first.”

  As the doctor left, the TV screen lit up. Joe Tenny’s face appeared on it.

  “Got it out of your system?”

  Danny glared at him.

  Joe grinned. “Okay, you had your little temper tantrum. You’re going to have to fix the chair by yourself, in the wood shop. We’ll give you a new book to replace the one you tore up, but you ought to do something to earn it. Maybe you can work Saturday morning in the laundry room.”

  Danny frowned, but he nodded slowly.

  “Okay,” said Joe. “See you in class.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It can’t be escape-proof, Danny told himself. There’s got to be a way out.

  Yeah, he answered himself. But you ain’t going to find it in a day or two.

  Alan Peterson left the next week, but not before Danny asked him if he had ever tried to escape.

  Alan smiled at the question. “Yes, I tried it a few times. Then I got smart. I’ll walk out the front gate. Joe Tenny helped to get me a job outside. You can do the same thing, Danny. It’s the only sure-fire way to escape.”

  The day Alan left, Danny asked Ralph Malzone about escaping.

  Ralph said, “Sure, I tried it four—five times. No go. SPECS is too smart. Can’t even carry a knife without SPECS knowing it.”

  Danny asked all the guys in his classes, everybody he knew. He even asked Lacey.

  Lacey grinned at him. “Why would I want to get out? I got it good here. Better than back home. Sure, they’ll throw me out someday. But not until I got a good job and a good place to live waitin’ for me outside. And until then, man, I’m the champ around here.”

  Danny dropped his class in Italian. But his reading got better quickly. He found that he could follow the words printed on SPECS’ TV screens easily now. And he was almost the best guy in the arithmetic class.

  Joe Tenny told Danny he should take another class. Danny picked science. It wasn’t really easy, but it was fun. They didn’t just sit around and read, they did lab work.

  One morning Danny cleared out the lab by mixing two chemicals that gave off bright yellow smoke. It smelled horrible. The teacher yelled for everybody to get out of the lab. All the kids boiled out of the building completely and ran onto the lawn.

  The kids all laughed and pounded Danny’s back. The teacher glowered at him. Danny tucked away in his mind the formula he had used to make the smoke. Might come in handy some time, he told himself.

  The weeks slipped by quickly. Laurie came every week, sometimes twice a week. Joe gave permission for them to walk around on the “outside” lawn, on the other side of the administration building, where the bus pulled up. There was a fence between them and the highway. And SPECS’ cameras watched them. Danny knew.

  Danny played baseball most afternoons. Then the boys switched to football as the air grew cooler and the trees started to change color.

  Thanksgiving weekend there were no classes at all, and the boys set up a whole schedule of football games.

  The first snow came early in December. Before he really thought much about it, Danny found himself helping some of the guys to decorate a big Christmas tree in the cafeteria.

  His own room had changed, over the months. The bookcase was nearly filled now. Many of the books were about airplanes and space flight. His desk was always covered with papers, most of them from his arithmetic class. He had “bought” pictures and other decorations for his walls from the student-run store in the basement of the cafeteria building.

  Thumbtacked to the wall over Danny’s desk was a Polaroid picture of Laurie. She was wearing a yellow dress, Danny’s favorite, and standing in front of the restaurant where she worked. She was smiling into the camera, but her eyes looked more worried than happy.

  Danny worked at many different jobs. He helped the cooks in the big, nearly all-automated kitchen behind the cafeteria. He worked on the air-conditioning machines on the roofs of buildings, and on the heaters in the basements. He went back to working with the clean-up crew for a while, getting a deep tan during the hottest months of the summer.

  All the time he was looking, learning, searching for the weak link, the soft spot in the Center’s escape-proof network of machines and alarms. There’s got to be something, he kept telling himself.

  Danny even worked for a week in SPECS’ own quarters; a big, quiet, chilled-down room in the basement of the administration building. The computer was made of row after row of huge consoles, like oversized refrigerators: big, square boxes of gleaming metal. Some of them had windows on their fronts, and Danny could see reels of tape spinning so fast that they became nothing but a blur.

  If I could knock SPECS out altogether.... But how?

  The answer came when the boys turned on the lights of the Christmas tree in the cafeteria.

  It was a big tree, scraping the ceiling. Joe Tenny had brought in a station wagon full of lights for it.

  Danny and the other boys spent a whole afternoon on ladders, stringing the lights across its broad branches. Then they plugged in all the lines and turned on the lights.

  The whole cafeteria went dark.

  The boys started to groan, but the cafeteria lights went on again in a moment. The tree stayed unlit, though.

  SPECS’ voice came through the loudspeakers in the ceiling: “YOU HAVE OVERLOADED THE ELECTRICAL LINES FOR THE CAFETERIA. YOU CANNOT PLUG THE TREE LIGHTS INTO THE CAFETERIA’S REGULAR ELECTRICAL LINES. PLEASE SET UP A SPECIAL LINE DIRECTLY FROM THE POWER STATION FOR THE TREE.”

  Some of the boys nodded as if they knew what SPECS was talking about. But Danny stood off by himself, staring at the unlit tree.

  Electric power! That’s the key to this whole place! If I can knock out all the electric power, everything shuts down. All the alarms, all the cameras, SPECS, everything!

  Chapter Seventeen

  The Saturday before Christmas, Joe Tenny knocked on Danny’s door. “You doing anything special tonight?” he asked.

  Danny was sitting at his desk. He looked up from the book he was reading. It was a book about electrical power generators.

  “No, nothing special,” he answered.

  Joe grinned. “Want a night outside? I’ve got a little party cooking over at my house. Thought you might like to join the fun.”

  “Outside? You mean out of the Center?”

  With a nod, Joe said, “It might look like I spend all my time here, but I do have a home with a wife and kids.”

  “Sure, I’ll come with you.”

  “Good. Pick you up around four-thirty. Don’t eat too much lunch, you’re going to get some home-cooking tonight. Greek style. I’m part Greek, you know.”

  Danny laughed.

  Joe’s house was a surprise to Danny. He had expected something like a governor’s mansion, like he’d seen on TV. But as Joe drove his battered old Cadillac toward the city, they zipped right through the fanciest suburbs, where the biggest and plushest houses were. Finally, Joe pulled into a driveway in one of the oldest sections of the suburbs, practically in the city itself.

  “Here we are.”

  It was already dark, and Danny couldn’t see too much of the house. It was big, but not fancy-looking. It needed a paint job. There were four cars already parked on the street in front of the
house. Another car was pulled off to one side of the driveway. The hood was off and there was no motor inside it.

  “My oldest son’s big project,” Joe said as they got out of his car. “He’s going to rebuild the engine. I’ve been waiting since last spring for him to finish the job.”

  Inside, the party was already going on. In quick order, Danny met Mrs. Tenny, Joe’s two sons, a huge dog named Monster, and six or seven guests. He lost count and couldn’t remember all the names. More people kept arriving every few minutes.

  Joe’s older son, John, took Danny in tow. He was Danny’s age, maybe a year older. But he was a full head taller than Danny, with shoulders twice his size. About half the guests were teenagers, John’s friends. John made sure that Danny met them all, especially the girls. They were pretty and friendly. Danny found himself wishing that Laurie was with him... and then began to feel guilty because he was enjoying himself without her.

  There were more than twenty people at dinner. The regular dining room table couldn’t hold them all, so Joe and his sons brought in the kitchen table while Danny helped one of the guests set up a card table. Everybody helped push all three tables into one long row, and then spread tablecloths over them.

  They ate and laughed and talked for hours, grownups and kids together. Then they moved into the living room. Joe turned on some records and they danced.

  Most of the adults quickly dropped out of the dancing but Joe and a few others kept going as long and as hard as the teenagers did. Then they switched to older, slower music, and some of the other grownups got up again.

  Then somebody put on Greek music. Everyone joined hands in a long line that snaked through the living room, the front hall, the dining room and kitchen, and back into the living room. Danny couldn’t get his feet to make the right steps. But he saw that hardly anybody else could, either. Everyone was laughing and stumbling along, with the reedy Greek music screeching in their ears. The man leading the line, though, was very good. He was short and plump, with a round face and a little black mustache. He went through the complex steps of the Greek dance without a hitch.