“I hope so. I’ll do my best, too, though I’m not at all sure how much leverage I’ve got. Do you want me to stop calling you by your name? I mean, would you be in any danger from these Khandhars if they found out who you were?”
“Hell, no. That fellow calling himself Plantain, he’s my cousin Denver. Played with him most of the time when we was kids, and he liked to boss us other fellows around even then. A real Trotter, Denver.”
Foxe suddenly found he could eat no more of the clammy rice, so he lifted Quentin out and showed him the remnants of his meal. Yes, Quentin understood about rice and nosed over the rim of the metal plate, whiskers quivering. Foxe felt Mr Trotter stiffen away from him.
“I’m sorry,” said Foxe. “I forgot. Do you want me to put him away again? He’s got to eat sometime.”
“I ain’t superstitious,” said Mr Trotter. “And it’s your plate.”
“What’s this all about, anyway? The servants at the Palace and the guards here seem dead scared of him, but you aren’t and the Khandhars aren’t. I’ve guessed it’s something to do with that mark, because I’ve seen it on walls and places, but on him it’s only a Q upside-down.”
“Bridget! You don’ know what you is carrying round,” gasped Mr Trotter, lapsing deeper into Island patois. “Yeh, course the mark am there for accident. Much stronger this way than if you is putting it there of purpose. This am meaning he want it be put there.”
“Who?”
Mr Trotter made a curious wavering sign with his left hand.
“The Sunday Dwarf,” he breathed.
The calendar in the Pit was going to be marked only by meals. For the time being these arrived regularly, according to Foxe’s contract, but when that evening he tried to have the arc-lights dimmed for sleep he found that there were clear limits to his command. In the end he lay down like the others on a roll of sacking on the shadowless sand and hoped that his residual exhaustion from the last three days would drag him into oblivion.
It didn’t work. He could sleep for a while, a dull, unrestful doze, but then he would wake with his mind already active. It was as though a flywheel had been unable to stop and now, lacking the control of having to raise a work-load, was spinning faster and faster each time he slept until it was almost at the point where its own centrifugal stresses would tear it apart; then an alarm signal fizzed inside his mind and woke him to slow the flywheel down by thinking. At one moment, he would be asleep and the next awake, with his brain already in the middle of a train of thought … clumps … eight groups, four control … say five games to establish norm … allow for increasing expertise … later begin to exchange players between groups, but of course keep controls separate throughout … let them think it’s a test of magical powers … that gives them greater incentive to cheat and it’s the kind of thing Doctor O might be after … time games … if all four control groups score higher—improve their score faster … well, it might have significance … If they were rats … rats under unvarying light … All of a sudden Foxe dropped into darkness, to wake again after an unguessable interval and find he was thinking about drug-doses … Four groups experimental … could have four dose-levels … much less flexible when it comes to interchanging group-members … one level then—fairly high for quick results, but leave room to increase dose if tolerance builds up … Only once in the whole night did it cross Foxe’s mind that it was absurd that he should be applying this intensity of mental energy to a problem which he knew quite well was a nonsense. Carefully, trying not to rouse his body to the level of his mind’s activity, he turned on his other side, keeping his eyes screwed tight against the glare. It’s only natural, he thought. Trapped in a maze it doesn’t know, the mind tries to re-create familiar mazes. To-morrow I’ll wear a blindfold.
They were playing a trial run of clumps next morning when the pulleys of the gangway started their tortured creaking. Foxe pushed his stop-watch across to Mr Trotter.
“Can you manage by yourself for a bit?” he said.
“Sure.”
“The important thing is not to let a messenger from one group overhear the word you’re giving to another one. If two of them come together, see that one stops at the line.”
“OK.”
Mr Trotter was too languid and self-confident to make a good lab-worker—he’d need a lot of watching … Foxe waited for the gangway to touch the sand and at once began to scamper up. Half way he was met by legs, uniformed, supporting large buttocks, black against a dazzling lamp while the upper torso shaded into darkness.
“I can’t have anyone in the Pit just now,” said Foxe.
The man’s right arm moved up and out of sight, so that Foxe thought he was about to be struck. In fact he was being saluted.
“Prime Minister here, Doc,” said Louis. “He say you to come up.”
“Oh. Hell. OK. Thanks.”
Foxe followed Louis up into the delicious semi-dark above the lamps and found Doctor Trotter leaning on the rail of the gallery and gazing down into the arena. The upshot shadows gave his large face a look of whimsical malevolence, and there seemed to be no eyes in the sockets.
“What is happening, Doctor Foxe?”
Foxe looked down at the brilliant, shadowless circle, thinking how strangely the few feet difference distanced him from the scene below. A minute before he had been a participant, a creature in the maze; now he was leaning above it, explaining the activities below in much the same manner as he’d once explained the performance of his rats to Doctor Trotter.
“This is a trial run, sir,” he said. “It’s based on a game called clumps. Each group is trying to guess a word which only one of them knows; they ask him questions, which he can only answer by nodding or shaking his head.”
“A game?”
“I can control a game, you see. I can devise it with set limits. And then I can make it to the players’ advantage to cheat, and I can measure how much the drug affects the tendency to cheat. You could say it’s a small-scale model of your people’s tendency to break the laws you make.”
“But if they know you are expecting them to cheat … ?”
“I hope they won’t get that far. I’m setting it up so that it looks like some sort of experiment with intelligence, but I’m going to let them guess that it’s really to do with psychic abilities, telepathy and telekinesis and so on. When we start taking the drugs …”
“You are going to take this drug yourself, Doctor?”
“Yes. I thought …”
“What if it makes you virtuous?”
Doctor Trotter exploded into one of his monstrous laughs; it seemed not so much to pierce the darkness as to impregnate it, a booming mass of sound hovering above the arena. The scene changed at the signal. Foxe had noticed a girl half-running from the tables back to her group, and had been thinking he’d have to see they all moved at a regulation speed, when she stopped dead at the sound. Heads, hitherto intent over the game, looked up.
“Now that,” said Foxe coldly, “is a good example of how to spoil an experiment. The whole timing of this section of the game isn’t any longer comparable with other sections …”
“Games,” said Doctor Trotter. “I am not very interested in games. When will they start taking the drug?”
“As soon as I’ve got enough data on their performance without it. About five days, with luck.”
“I am not a patient man, Doctor.”
“You don’t imagine I want to hang around here longer than I have to?”
“Do you normally talk to Prime Ministers in that tone of voice? Or is it because I am a black man?”
The tiger-purr was deliberate now, inciting Foxe towards punishable rudeness. He drew a breath and spoke as neutrally as he was able.
“We are looking for a significant change in behaviour. To do that we have to establish what normal behaviour consists of.”
“We know that already—not how they behave in children’s games, but how they behave in real life. Our interrogation records are very thorough. We know what these people are, and what they have done, in great detail. Their normal behaviour is shown in contexts of stress and violence, not in the relaxation of childish pastimes. What you must do is set up a similar context here and study their reactions. Suppose, for instance, they were allowed to think that violence might achieve something—their freedom, for instance—you could then study how far the drug affects their readiness to attempt to escape. What are your objections to that?”
Foxe managed not to sigh. It was, mutatis mutandis, a typical layman’s suggestion.
“Well,” he said. “A sedative would have the same effect. Then it’s something you could only do once, and that’s statistically useless—in this field you prove things by showing that they happen with measurable frequency. And however detailed these records of yours are, I don’t imagine they were compiled with this idea in mind. It might take me months—years even—to extract statistics from them which could be compared with anything I can lay on in here.”
“How can you know that? You have not listened to them. I insist that you will at least do that before you dismiss their usefulness—in fact I shall give orders for them to be brought in here—the guard-cell at the mouth of the tunnel would be suitable. Your assistant down there is clearly capable of supervising these games, once you have told him what to do, and that will give you time to listen to the records. Is there anything else?”
“I don’t think so,” said Foxe dully. “Oh, yes—my assistant—I believe he’s a relation of yours—he oughtn’t to be here. He was drunk and he talked a little indiscreetly to me, and a girl who overheard him was bribed to tell the police so that someone else could have his job.”
Doctor Trotter turned from the rail, benign and patronising.
“I read the files, Doctor. Cousin Paul is being punished for running an important hotel badly. My justice is more even-handed than you think.”
He nodded and strolled away. Foxe moved to the top of the gangway but didn’t at once go down it; instead he stood there, trying to master his shudders and swallow away the taste of vomit in his mouth. The usual taut anger that built inside him when anyone interfered with his work was now mixed with fear. Why me? he thought; and then, Why anyone? There was something more here than what Dreiser had called caprice, something more than mere boredom of superfluous power playing a kind of patience, with human cards, shuffling and reshuffling the pack to see how long it took for the card that was Foxe to emerge at the very bottom. Certainly there was that—Foxe guessed that long ago Doctor Trotter had started to play the same game with Captain Angiah, and had now nearly got it out—but there was something more, which the one word “Game,” breathed with questioning contempt, had expressed. This was not a game. The mad and evil tyrant genuinely wanted to make his subjects good, and thereby make himself a kind of god. This was a serious political aim, such as another government might have proposed about agricultural reform or educational expansion. Foxe was unable to explain to himself why it should seem more monstrous than any catalogue of tortures and degradations, but he found his shudders gone and was able to walk down the steps. As he came into the glare Mr Trotter made a performance of demonstrating how neatly all the papers were stacked on the tables.
An anomaly began to emerge. Group D won that game, and the next, and the next—each time by a whole round or more. After the third win, while the other groups were still playing, Foxe went to check on them. Each group seemed to have elected itself a leader without argument or discussion, and Group D had chosen Vine, a wiry little man, older than most of the others and very black; he had once been trained in physical education and something about his bearing, a characteristic combination of stiffness and alertness, helped Foxe to distinguish him among the so far half-sorted faces. The five players in Group D squatted in an arc on the sand, heads bowed, silent and relaxed. They all looked up as Foxe settled in front of them.
“You’re doing well,” he said. “I just want to check you’ve got the rules right. The person who knew the word was only nodding or shaking his head? He wasn’t making any other sign?”
“Sure, sure,” said Vine.
“Um,” said Foxe. “Take the word ‘Shoes’ in the last game—can you remember how that went?”
Three of the group looked at Vine. He glanced across the arena to Group B, which included Plantain. The fifth member of the group, a girl, bowed her head.
“This is Cedar’s word,” said Vine in a low voice. “We begin to ask him two, three questions—can’t remember those—then Cactus say ‘Shoes.’”
“What about ‘Helicopter?’”
“My word,” whispered Vine. “They ask a whole lot of questions—is it food, is it houses, is it people—not getting anywhere. Then Cactus say ‘Bird’ and I shake my head. Then she say ‘But it fly’ and I nod. Next somebody say ‘Aeroplane’ and next Cedar say ‘Helicopter’.”
“I see,” said Foxe. The girl still wouldn’t look at him—he remembered her now, mainly for her quite inappropriate name. Mushroom would have been better. She was grey-skinned, sleepy-eyed, shy-spoken; her skin looked loose on her, as though it was used to being filled with blubbery flesh; her other distinguishing feature was that she had scored bottom marks on Foxe’s improvised IQ test.
“Was it like that with most of the other words?” he asked. “A sudden intuitive guess?”
“Yeh, but Plantain don’t like we talk about her,” whispered Vine.
The other men’s glances flickered towards Cactus and away.
“OK,” said Foxe, rising. “Look, Group C’s finished—you weren’t that far ahead. Thanks.”
Funny, he thought as he went back to the tables. If they thought Cactus had telepathic powers which they wanted to conceal they could have told her to ask the wrong questions. They were quite bright enough for that. He wondered how she did it—hypersensitive hearing, perhaps. Anyway, he told himself, we’ve got our nutter. You always get at least one.
For variety they switched to psychokinetics—a blindfold player trying to toss the metal plates they ate off into a target area, while the rest of his group, silent, willed him to throw in the right direction. The Khandhars took this game too with unnerving seriousness, so that Foxe began to feel that even rats, and certainly monkeys, would have shown more reaction to their fellows’ antics; but these people played as though the game were part of their life’s purpose—in fact Foxe began to worry whether they were too high-minded to cheat at all, and was brooding on possible incentives when a voice hissed out of the darkness above.
“Got a load of stuff for you here, Doc. You coming up?”
The usual anger burned, useless.
“OK, lower the steps,” he called.
He found Louis waiting at the top of the gangway, smiling uneasily, a child not sure whether he is going to get away with some blatant misdeed.
“Now listen,” said Foxe, “the Prime Minister doesn’t want my experiment interrupted. Not at all. If I tell him you keep calling down to me, he will have you punished. Do you understand that?”
“Yeh, yeh,” said Louis, cringing a little but still smiling. “It’s just he send all these tapes and we don’t know where to put them.”
“In the guard cell, he said. I’ll listen to some of them later. Now …”
“Doc, while you up here, you tell us the rules you playing? We can’t bet on the game less you tell us the rules, uh?”
“You’re betting on my game?”
“Sure,” said Louis, gesturing along the gallery to where the other guards, five or so, leaned on the rail discussing the scene below with jerky intent mutters. “I’m a fellow will bet on anything. I got a pair of cocks up the town will beat all the birds in the Islands.”
Foxe hesitated, trapped by a sudden notion. There is n
o sharper observer than a man with money on a game, and the people below wouldn’t know they were being watched in this way. He couldn’t think of an immediate use for this odd lab facility, but it was too potentially valuable to refuse.
“OK,” he said, beginning to walk along the gallery towards the other men. “It’s very straightforward.”
“Yeh, bit too simple,” said Louis, following him, jovial with success.
“I could complicate it a bit, I suppose,” said Foxe.
“Fine, fine. Hey, man, why you not fix these bastards to fight, like the cockfighting?”
For emphasis he slapped Foxe’s ribs with the back of his hand.
“Watch it,” said Foxe. “A bit lower and you’d have got my rat.”
The warning was a blast of frost, shrivelling the tendrils of comradeship. Foxe heard the indrawn sigh of shock.
“It’s all right,” he said. “He’s been asleep all morning. Now about this game …”
They had reached the lounging guards, who listened, discussed the rules and suggested a few variations which would make their gambling more amusing, until Louis re-introduced his suggestion about the cockfight. At once all interest in the game below vanished. Foxe found himself saying over and over, “I’ll think about it,” when he knew quite well that his mind had closed like an anemone at the first touch of the idea. In the end he dropped his hand into his jacket pocket and said, sharply, “Louis.”
The enthusiastic mutter stilled. A tick appeared at the corner of Louis’s mouth, and the nearest of the guards made the same sign with his left hand that Foxe had seen Mr Trotter use.
Walking Dead Page 15
