Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  Number 2, mildly: “What were you doing in the recreation room?”

  “Showing this synthetic twin of mine how to shoot and fence.”

  So: this was the one he had supposed was ersatz. Then why (again the light flared, and he writhed in an agony that could not have been faked) were they torturingthis one?

  “For the last time, what do you people want with Number 6?”

  And, screaming: “I’mNumber 6, you sadist!I’m Number 6, you know I’m Number 6. I’m Number 6, I’m Number 6, I’m Number 6, I’m Number 6.” Until, mercifully, he fainted.

  He checked his watch. It was now fifteen minutes since he’d seen the three guards leaving the church, the limit he had set to this investigation, and half the reel still remained. Would he be cautious, then, or curious?

  There was this to be said for caution–that he could never, in any case, stay to see all seventeen instalments of the serial; even if he could, it might be that he would learn only so much from it as his jailers wished him to know. The film seemed carefully edited–but to what purpose, on whose behalf? There had been something (he had known this all along) too pat about this undertaking, as though it had all been prearranged–the false escape, the alarm, his discovery of the secret staircase, the open door to the film archives, the keys laid out on the table, the projector left running. But if they hadmeant him to see this, were they likely to interrupt him now?

  Curiosity, on the other hand, did not need apologies. It had become by now his dominant passion. He resisted it only to the extent that he adjusted the Fr/Sc dial toMAX . A blur of images skittered across the screen: his face, his other face, their dialogue a jabber of chipmunks; a woman (to him unknown); the three of them careening about Number 2’s office, bobbing up and down in chairs, gesturing, chirruping.

  Then, a procession of geometric images almost too rapid to be seen singly–squares, circles, crosses, star, and three wavy lines. Rhine cards–the abbreviated Scripture of the ESP fanatics, though howthese had come into it …

  Abruptly (half an inch was left on the reel) the tone of the film altered. He reduced the speed, backtracked, and saw:

  His two selves, standing silhouetted in a cottage doorway. About them the dead black of a moonless night. The camera-work, unlike that which had preceded it, was shaky, botched, as though this one scene had not been stage-managed for the benefit of a television crew.

  One of the two figures broke from the doorway (had they been fighting?) and ran across the lawn for several yards.

  And stopped.

  Directly before him stood one of the spheres. The street-lamp made of it a crescent of beige (“Rover” therefore) above the great, shadowed, pulsing mass. It advanced on the man who had run from the cottage; who, with terror, addressed it:

  “The Schizoid Man!”

  Rover rolled to a halt.

  The other man stepped from the doorway and addressed the same watchword, though with more assurance, to the sphere.

  It swayed and quivered, rolling toward the man in front of the cottage, then back to the other, like a wolf that stands at an equal distance above two equally attractive sheepfolds, unable to choose. The first man chose for him–he broke. He ran.

  The sphere, pursuing, hit a stone in its path, sailed a few feet into the air, settled with a quiver, and swerved down the same sidestreet where the man had disappeared. The camera held the shot of the deserted street: there was a scream.

  The reel ended with a final still: a tabletop, and on it a belt-buckle, a keyring with two keys, some nails, a cigarette lighter, a few odd-shaped tiny lumps of silvery metal, and a small silver disc of the type that surgeons use in repairing fractured skulls. Presumably, but for these few artifacts, the other remnants had proved digestible.

  Was it of any significance that he had never had a silver plate in his skull? (More precisely, that he did notremember anything of that sort?) Finally, could he neverprove he was who he believed himself to be? Finally, can anyone? Conviction is not a proof, for he was inclined to believe that it had been the Double they had tortured, not himself, and he (the Double) had certainly been persuaded that he was Number 6. It was just that, the strength of that conviction, that made him think the man was synthetic: for he did not think that he (himself) at root wouldinsist on being a mere number.

  But it made no difference, really, who he was, who he had been, what he remembered and what he had been made to forget: he was himself, and he knew the interior dimensions of that self. This was sufficient.

  Once again he reversed the reel. Again he watched the sphere start off after its victim, hit the rock, bound up, and settle, quivering.

  There–in those three seconds of film, and not in any vortex of speculation and ravelled deceit–lay thesignificance of the thing; even if they had set up this private screening for some involuted reason of their own, they had betrayed their hand.

  It was enough to make him laugh.

  It remained for him to cover his tracks. He returned to the outer room and replaced all but three of the canisters (6-SCHIZ, 6-MHR, 6-FIN) in their drawer. He removed other canisters from other drawers at random, opened them, and piled their reels of film in the middle of the floor. Threw the empty canisters into a corner, except for two (marked 2-POLITand 14-LESB); in these he placed the reels from 6-MHRand 6-FIN.The film of 6-SCHIZwas placed at the top of the pyre.

  Using the safety matches on the table, he set it alight. With luck and good ventilation the blaze might reach the file drawers he had left gaping open; it might even work through the walls and into other rooms or through the ceiling to the church. With this in mind, he propped open the door to the corridor.

  He remembered another time–when? long ago, years and years–like this: a room of gutted files and the first flickering as the heaped documents began to catch; himself standing, as now, on the threshold to–where had that happened? Ostrava? Or that other town across the border, a suburb of Krakow: Skawina? Wadowice? Well, that was the past–eventually, even without assistance, one forgot the names, the dates, the faces. There were just a few bright images here and there, like the sweepings from an editing room floor.

  He paused at the foot of the spiral staircase. A voice said: “What the hell?” And a second voice, the goitres: “Someone has smashed the damnedbulbs !”

  The squeak of the Rubens closing, and the slow clanking descent of the two men in darkness.

  Carefully, distributing his weight among all four limbs, he twined his way up the spiral of the stairs, pressing close against the central support-pole. At the twelfth step he stopped: the footsteps were now very near, the voices only slightly farther away:

  “Hey, do you smell—”

  “Smoke!”

  The footsteps quickened to a staccato. He reached up blindly, caught a trouser cuff, and pulled. There was almost no resistance. A scream, a thud. An obscenity silenced by a second thud, and the irregular cascade of limbs and torso down to the foot of the staircase. No, not to the foot: three more muffled bumps. There, he had reached the bottom.

  “Eighty-Three?” the goitres called down into the well of darkness. “Are you … did you trip?”

  The air was tinged with smoke that tickled his nose and throat. His heartbeat not much louder or faster than usual.

  “Maybe I should … go … and warn …” The tone conveyed, like a Reuters photograph coded into binary blacks and whites, the image of his leg lifted at the knee, hesitating whether to place the foot on the tread above or the tread below, poised between two fears.

  The foot came down on the lower tread. The goitres was more afraid, at last, of the consequences of neglected duty. He moved down into the thickening smoke by fits and starts, still calling on Number 83, who, in reply, had begun to groan.

  Either his eyes were now adjusting to the darkness or some faint glimmer from the fire was lighting the stairwell, for when the foot, shod in white buckskin, came into view he could just discern it.

  The goitres had not developed momentu
m equal to his companion’s: when his leg was pulled out from under him, he fell solidly on his behind. He caught hold of the central pole, resisting the hand that would pull him farther down. He began to scream.

  The buckskin shoe came off in his hands. Throwing it aside, he clambered up the steps to the goitres’ level. A hand clawed at his trousers.

  The goitres’ face was a gray oval above a lighter gray triangle of shirt-front. He struck him across the side of his head in a manner intended more to startle than to cause real pain. He felt no malice toward their pawns. God knew what kind of men they might have been once!

  The body tumbled slowly, moaning, from tread to tread.

  He raced to the top of the staircase, where the smoke with no egress, was thickest. He tried to push the painting to one side, but it stuck firmly in place. Regretfully, he kicked his way through the lower left-hand corner (the viewer’s left as he faces it).

  Squirmed out through this hole, hopped down from the altar to the diapered floor. He turned back to make certain he had not damaged any of the finer passages. No, the rip did not extend beyond the dark jumble of rocks. A competent restorer would have no great problem with that. From the newly-made fissure in these rocks smoke curled forth in black, baroque designs. He thought of the harrowing of hell and left the church, still unobserved, whistling a tune he hadn’t remembered for years, another shard dislodged from the proper strata of memory, while inside the velveteen voice continued to promise some kind of salvation to anyone (“you”) who would surrender his insignificant identity to a Higher Power, which remained unspecified.

  Chapter Nine

  In the Cage

  According to the general report of the Villagers, the fugitives had succeeded in their escape–but by the expedient of suicide. When the sphere capsized their raft, they had been far enough from the shore so that their weighted bodies sank to a good depth; there was ample time to drown before the divers could recover them. Number 2 maintained that this was an entirely legendary acount, that in fact the fugitives had been caught warm and struggling and were presently undergoing rehabilitation.

  “That’s too bad,” he had said.

  “You would have preferred for them to be dead?” Number 2 asked.

  “No, I’m not a romantic, and I don’t expect death to solve any problems. It’s too bad that they didn’t escape.”

  “I’m surprised that, being there for the beginning, you didn’t stay to see the finish. Where did you go, by the way?”

  “An escape is as private a matter as lovemaking. As I’m not a voyeur, I went home. You mean to say there are actually minutes of the day your cameras aren’t watching me?”

  “Oh, I have the report somewhere, but asking you is easier. It’s tedious study, cataloguing your habits, Number 6. You rise at seven, put on water for tea, shower, dress, drink your tea. Then, at seven-fifteen, you run to the beach for a quarter-hour of calisthenics. Then–should I go on?”

  “I’ll admit it isn’t an inspiring theme. Now, if I were living somewhere else, I might put on a better show, with more variety.”

  “Which reminds me–when areyou going to attemptyour escape?”

  “Soon, Number 2, soon.”

  “This inaction isn’t like you.”

  “On the other hand, I’m not impetuous. When I do make my break, I expect to get through to the other side.”

  “To freedom, eh?”

  “To freedom.”

  Number 2 chuckled. “Ah, it’s little moments like this that make it all seem worth the effort. Don’t abandon your ideals too easily, Number 6. Hold them up proudly, and show your pluck.”

  He paused to study his listener’s response to this key word from Number 48’s therapy. “Doesn’t that word … ring any bells for you?”

  “Should it? Was it the theme of one of your recitations?”

  Number 2 sighed. A stalemate. “No, not that I recall, Number 6, but I’ll see if I can’t dig something up.”

  He made the promised escape two weeks later, a month from the day of his arrival. It had been carefully planned, the detail-work accomplished during the hours of curfew and the necessary apparatus cached at the eastern perimeter of the beach. The sheer rockface that bounded the beach all along its length pressed forward here into the sea. One could continue beyond this point only by taking to the water (and he knew that the bay was well-patrolled, that any escape by this route was almost guaranteed to fail) or by scaling the rocks, an action certain to call oneself to the attention of the Guardian that shepherded that sector of the plateau above.

  The advantage of this position was its isolation. Villagers seldom ventured here, for the water was rough, the shingle more than usually coarse, and the prospect seaward without any picturesque merit. It was also, because of the cul de sac formed by the cliff, the outermost point from the Village to which one could advance without being turned back by the Guardians.

  He stood, that morning, at the base of the cliff, surveying for the last time the line of ascent he had marked out.

  7:20 am.

  The sea heaved and shattered against the cliff. The cliff’s shadow slid eastward by imperceptible degrees across the wet shingle. A muck of oil that had been steadily encroaching on the beach these past two weeks (a freighter must have foundered nearby during the storm) writhed amorphously at the water’s edge, prismed, bubbled.

  He climbed quickly to the first ledge, unravelling as he advanced nylon cord from a thick spool. The other end of the cord was knotted about his bundle of equipment.

  The second stage was the most dangerous, though it did not take him to any very dizzying height, for here he had to move out along rocks drenched by the breaking surf. Twice his shoes slipped on the wet sandstone, and twice as he sought for a handhold the projecting rock tore loose, like a child’s rotted milk-tooth, to vanish into the white turbulence below.

  At the next ledge, forty feet above the beach, he paused for breath and dried the soles of his shoes with a handkerchief.

  A gull leaped from a cranny in the rocks below and rode the updraft on a long arc, wings taut. As it sliced the air inches from his face, it screamed. A flicker of sentient black beads. And gone.

  He had never seen another gull along the beach, nor in the town any birds but sparrows and pigeons. Had he been a believer in omens, he would have supposed this a good one.

  7:24.

  Without a pause at the third ledge, he scrambled up the last ten feet to stand, panting, on the ratchel, in sunlight. Grass stretched on before him to the south and west, a pastoral vacancy that reverberated with the crash of the waves on the sea-wall.

  Where the cliff’s overhang allowed him to draw up his equipment without danger of snagging it in the rocks, he drew the cord tight, tighter. It accepted the strain (as it had in his earlier tests) and the bundle rose, with a slow pendulous swing, from the beach far below.

  Then (7:31): it lay spread out before him in the grass–a sack of food, twenty-odd lengths of curved aluminum tubing, and an adjustable spanner. Still no sign of a Guardian. He needed five minutes to assemble the cage, five minutes, and then let them bowl their whole armada at him. If, that is, there was any truth in Euclid’s geometry.

  He grabbed the spanner and set to work.

  The sphere (it was baby-blue with a few lavender spots of acne) stopped short some thirty feet ahead. Always before at its appearance he had headed back like an obedient sheep to the Village.

  “Budge me,” he said. “Just try.”

  The oblate hemisphere of the cage was planted in the earth four feet behind him; not much farther behind the cage–the cliff’s edge.

  He would allow the thing five minutes to make a charge. Then, if it proved too patient or too wise, he would set off without that particular satisfaction.

  To taunt the sphere (did they have some kind of robotic–and woundable–ego programmed into them?) he cast small rocks at it, which bounced harmlessly off its hide. (Plastic? Probably.) The sphere quivered, just a
s (he hoped) a bull, its rage building, would paw at the dust.

  He dashed to the right, to the left, without, however, straying more than a few feet from his cage at any time. (El Cordobes, clowning close beside the barreras.) The sphere echoed his movements uncertainly, approached to twenty feet, to fifteen feet. He flung the largest of the rocks. Where it struck another lavender blotch slowly spread across the baby-blue. Then, if it had been a bull, it would have bellowed; it charged. He threw himself behind the cage.

  Too late, as though it realized its error, it tried to slow. Too late: it struck the cage broadside, deforming at the impact. (The cage held.) The sphere’s momentum carried it up across the arched tubing and, cresting the small dome, still up, and out.

  He turned on to his back to watch it sail forth, blue against blue, into the vacant air, and drop (had it been alive, it would have screamed) toward the roaring confrontation of sea and cliff, of sea and cliff, and, now, sphere.

  There was an explosion. One could just trace its outlines amid the continuing tumult. So, the things were mortal. He hadn’t expected that.

  The assembled cage stood a bit over three feet high, with a diameter at its base of seven feet. The 35 pounds of tubing, pilfered from the terrace restaurant (they had supported the umbrellas over the tables, the awning above the band-stand), described lines of longitude and latitude with diagonal struts to reinforce major points of stress. Though not as sturdy as a geodesic dome, this design required fewer joints and was therefore easier to assemble. Even so, its construction had occupied four hours of each night for the last two weeks.

  For easier carrying it could be disassembled into three pieces, but he could also carry it, as he did now, tortoise-fashion, on his shoulders. He walked at a steady pace, for the slightest break in his stride tended to make the carapace tilt and snag a foot in the grass. His arms ached from the cruciform attitude required to keep it balanced, but caution was to be preferred to comfort. The next sphere might appear in an hour or in the next minute: until he was certain he had reached safe ground (and he didn’t know yet whether he could, whether the Village was established on the mainland), he could not afford to let down his defenses.