by The Prisoner
“In fact, even as I talk to you now, even as you listen, the process has begun. Like Ishtar disrobing on her progress through the seven gates, you, in the amniotic void of that tank, have surrendered your senses, one by one, till now it is only the sound of my voice that ties you to reality. When my voice ceases you will exist in an elemental state. You have read, I’m sure, about these experiments, and you know how people, under sensory deprivation, become malleable as refined gold. The mind cannot tolerate a vacuum, and when the senses no longer are pumping data in, it begins to fill up from the springs of its own unconscious. Fantasy takes over, but not the fantasy of dreaming, for there is no distinction now between dreaming and waking. It is the conscious mind that dreams, the ego. And it is, at these moments, intensely suggestible.
“A picture is worth a thousand words, so let me illustrate my lecture with a slide or two. We need not bother, today, with lasers and such as that. Your own imagination, starving for images, will do our work for us.
“What shall it be? Since this is not yet the metamorphosis proper, let’s choose something pretty. A marble egg. There was a marble egg on the desk in the study of your London flat. It was rose-colored. It rested in an egg-cup of white china. You can see it now, that marble egg, the swirling veins of gray, the mottled rose that shifts, as you turn it in your hand, to pink, to a deeper rose, with here and there an arabesque of milky white. That egg has sat onyour desk for years, growing steadily more invisible as it grew more customary, but now you see it, don’t you, more clearly than you’ve ever seen it before? It is morereal now than it has ever been, even though youknow , because I’m telling you, that it is only animaginary egg of unreal marble that rests in an entirely subjective egg-cup. When we set to work in earnest, I will no longer be able to remind you of that paradox.
“Now, to demonstrate the final, and crucial, mechanism. Hold the marble egg up to the light. Its loveliness increases. A little higher, and the light will be ideal.
“You did, didn’t you? You held it up, because that is something you would have done without compunction back here, in the real world. The action did not contradict any principle or taste. But now, observe: Put the egg in your mouth. Do as I say, Number 2,put it in your mouth .
“Did you do that? Unless you have a peculiar taste for sucking marble, you did not. Such an action lies outside your character, the range of what you allow yourself tobe . You’d be amazed at how easily that range can be moved back and forth.
“We humans are, at root, Number 2, very simple creatures. Like the computers we’ve fashioned in our image, we operate on a binary code of pleasure and pain, a switch markedON and another markedOFF . Finally, everything can be reduced to one or the other, everything we’ve learned, everything we loathe or love, everything that forms our image of what and who we are.
“At this moment, Number 2, we have control of those switches. There are two wires fixed to your scalp, one for pain, unimaginable pain, and one for pleasure, unspeakable pleasure.
“Observe, now, what these switches do. Again I will insist that you put the marble egg in your mouth. Again you refuse. Again I insist–put the egg in your mouth. I do more than insist, I threaten.
“Put the egg in your mouth!
“You have not, and so I touch, gently, the switch of pain.
“I release it, and suggest, onlysuggest that you wouldlike to put the marble egg in your mouth. It is, after all, in keeping with your character to do so.
“Can you feel it there now, the larger end lodged in the soft flesh beneath the tongue, the smaller end touching the roof of your mouth, a small cold ovoid of marble, in your mouth? You do feel it there, and now I touch, briefly, this switch for pleasure.
“And, oh the bliss! You realize that it isgood to have that marble egg just where it is, in your mouth. Can you feel the goodness of it there? Can you? And I touch, again, the switch.
“If I should touch it once or twice more, you would never again be able to look at, or even imagine, a marble egg without a maniacal craving to place it in your mouth.
“That is how the human machine works. What it can be made to do depends on where we decide to drive it. The bulk of my work has consisted in drawing up that road-map. The transformation from 6 to 2 will be so imperceptible that you will never, I think, be able to detect a single bend in the road, but by the time you have arrived at your final destination, at complete Twoness, you would not be able to recognize yourself in what you have become, anymore than that new self, that perfect figure 2, will be able to see himself in you, the ‘you’ who hears this.
“And it will be a terrible loss, I think. Because I did loveyou. I loved the person that you are and that you will so soon cease to be. I doubt very much that I could love the person you’re going to become. For though I know that you don’t love me now, youmight some day, and this other person we are forming from your clay will not be able to love anything but One, the idea of One’s Oneness. You, who listen to me and whom I love, will have been lost to me, and to yourself.
“Goodbye, Number 6. Forgive me for my part in this. If I’d refused to play it out to the end, they would have sent an understudy on in my place. Like every other traitor, I am a coward and a pragmatist. If you were able to understand what it means to be like this, you wouldn’t be here now, and I would never have loved you.
“The light is blinking above the monitor. Number 1 is impatient with my speech-making, and no doubt you are, too. We will have to begin in earnest. You can, while there is still a moment, remove the marble egg from your mouth.”
Chapter Eighteen
The Marble Egg
He looked at the imaginary marble egg. It was rose-colored and streaked with grays and whites. His own fingers had lent it the warmth of their flesh.
Never once had he put the marble egg in his mouth, nor, though he had steeled himself against both, had he felt the least tingle of pleasure, the slightest twinge of pain.
He understood what she had done for him, and she had explained, in great detail, what he would now have to do for himself.
It was autumn, a brisk, tangy, delightful autumn day, and he was strolling through the park. He nodded in a cordial, absent-minded way to Number 189, the former sweeper at the railway station, who was working now for the Department of Parks. He had promoted him just last week to his new position. Number 189 acknowledged this gesture with shy, solemn respect, then returned to his work weeding hawkbit from the ordered files of the chrysanthemums.
He stopped beside the bench where the old woman was bent over her embroidery hoop. “Goodafternoon , Granny.”
She heard him the very first time and looked up with twinkles from her eyes and from the wire-frame spectacles. “Why, good afternoon, Number 2!”
“Hard atwork , I see.”
“Work? Oh yes, there’s never a free moment forme !” With a little chuckle at her own little joke, she held the hoop up so that he might admire her handiwork.
“That’s veryhandsome ,” he said, stooping to study the meticulously stitched orchids. “And very true to life.”
“Thank you! I do love roses so–don’t you?”
“Roses, well … yes. Do you ever embroider … other kinds of flowers?”
“No, just roses, Number 2. Roses have always been my favorite flower, since I was just a little snip of a thing. Red roses and white roses. I can never decide which I like better.”
“It’s very expert work that you do, Granny. This stitch here, for example.” He pointed to one of the writhing tendrils.
“That’s a scroll stitch,” she confided in a low voice. “And this”–touching the dark mauve of the corolla with the tip of the needle–“is a dorando stitch.”
“A dorando stitch, well, well, well.” In a tone that implied that this piece of information had appreciably expanded his intellectual horizon. Patting the veined, knobby hand that held the hoop, he doled out some further sugar lumps of approbation, until all the wrinkles of her face had been brought
into play by a grin of proud, senile accomplishment.
It wasclammy , he thought, leaving her. He rubbed hisfingertips against the palm of his hand, as though that brief touch had drawn away all the warmth of his own flesh.
At the terrace restaurant he chose a seat at the table where Number 83, the male model, was playing dominoes with Number 29, the man with the goitres.
“How’s it going, men?” he asked cordially.
“Great!” said the male model, with a smile that would have made anyone ready to buy the same toothpaste. “Just great, Number 2!”
“Pretty well,” the goitres grumbled.
He shot one of his own smiles back at Number 83, not so broad but more confidential. “It’s not hard to tell which of you is winning.”
Even Number 29 had to laugh at that.
He watched their game for ten minutes, offering comments on the weather, kibbitzing when it was the goitres’ turn, analyzing Number 83’s performance, last Wednesday afternoon, at the big soccer match.
The waitress who brought his coffee was the red-faced woman who’d been working at the cafe by the railway station the day he’d arrived.
“Where is Number 127?” he asked with some concern.
“Oh, her!” the waitress said, with an ant’s scorn for the grasshoppers of this world. “She’ssick again.”
“Has she been sick often?”
“For the last three days. It’s theflu , she says.” As she pronounced the word, “flu” became a synonym for malingering.
“Give her my regards, would you, the next time she calls in? Tell her how much we all look forward to her recovery.”
The waitress sighed her consent and returned to a sinkof dirty pots, feeling somehow enriched. “It’s amazing,” she told herself, as she rolled up her sleeves, “how you canalways tell a gentlemen.” There was an element of sadness in this thought, for she knew that in the ordinary scheme of things such gentlemen were not for the likes of her, but even so, as long as she could bring him his cup of coffee in the afternoon, as long as there was one smile that he smiled just for her, there was some comfort to be had, there was apoint in scrubbing all these pots.
The game of dominoes ended, and Numbers 83 and 29 rose from the table.
“Four o’clock already!” he said.
He stood to shake their hands, a handshake that made each of them realize his own special importance to the Village and to Number 2, and to what they represented. With a bemused smile, like a proud father seeing his sons set off to their work in the mines, he watched them go toward the church.
He took a deep breath of the salt air, swinging his arms up and out to stretch his tensed pectorals. His fourth set, and already he’d built up a good sweat. He took a straddle-legged position on the shingle for his next exercise. Despite all his new responsibilities, he always found the time for his morning workout and a mile’s run along the beach.
At the eastern end of the crescent of shingle, near the cliff he’d scaled on that other morning (how long ago!) he saw a figure emerge out of the rocks of the cliff. A woman dressed for swimming. It was proscribed to swim at that end of the beach, where the currents were dangerous, and it was uncommon to see anyone swimming at all this late in the year or this early in the morning.
“Hallo!” he called to her.
Instead of replying by word or gesture, she ran into the dark, cliff-shadowed water.
He pressed the alarm signal on his wrist-band.
“Wait.” Sprinting across the wet, shifting pebbles. “Wait a moment! Stop!”
The woman, out to thigh-depth, veered right, toward where the cliff thrust out from the shore to meet the ocean head-on. At the moment he entered the water himself, the undertow pulled her down, dragging her–and several tons of crushed stone–toward the whitecaps. He caught a glimpse of blond hair (and it was, as he had thought, the waitress, Number 127, who had been calling in ill with “flu”) ten feet farther out, which vanished behind the curl of a breaking wave. He sighted her again, past the line of the surf, swimming toward the deadly roiling beauty of the cliff. He struck out in pursuit, breasting the line of the surf, gaining quickly at first, until, nearer the cliff, the varying currents mocked both their efforts, flinging them toward each other, and tearing them apart.
He caught hold of an arm. She jerked free of his grip with a convulsive strength. Screamed: “Go—” Gagged by the salt water.
A handful, then, of the blond hair. Towing her by this rope, he swam seaward against the current drawing them toward the cliff. Twisting around, she wrapped her arms about his kicking legs. They sank, interlocked, beneath the frothing surface into the stronger and stranger eddies below. Her arms were a vice of rigid, hysterical strength.
His first blow was not forceful enough. With the second she went limp.
He towed her unbuoyant body upward and surfaced,gasping. By luck the nether currents had carried them farther from the face of the cliff, and he could swim back toward the shore, even disadvantaged by the dead weight of her body, without being drawn back into the area of danger.
The patrol was inflating a life raft as he pulled her up on to the beach. He lay on his stomach; while the gentler water of the shore played about his ankles, he watched a medical aide administer artificial respiration to Number 127. The guards waited respectfully until he had recovered his breath.
“Is she all right?” he asked.
“She will be,” the aide assured him, drawing his lips away from hers to speak.
“Send out all the launches,” he said, to the leader of the patrol.
“That’s been done sir.” He nodded distastefully at the woman. A mixture of vomit and brine spilled from her unconscious lips. “Was she swimming out to meet someone?”
“Possibly. Any boat that attempted to enter the bay would be dealt with in the usual way. What I suspect is that the crew of one of our own patrol boats has been—”
He was interrupted by the scream of the medical aide. He had leaped back from his patient, scrabbling across the loose stones. Blood streamed from the deep cut in his lower lip.
The waitress was struggling up to her elbows. Threads of vomit still clung to the corners of her mouth and trembled as she spoke: “You needn’t … bother … Number 2. I wasn’t … swimming out … to meet … anyone.”
“What were you doing, Number 127?”
But she did not have to answer him, for their eyes had already completed the conversation. Hers had said:Suicide –and his replied that he had known. Hers said:If I had the strength, I’d try and kill you again –his told her that she’d had her chance, and failed.
“Youpig !” she said aloud, though her eyes had said this too, and with even more force. She tried to smooth back the bedraggled hair, but the hand was smeared with her vomit. She began to cry.
“Number 2?” the medical aide asked.
“Bring her to the hospital. Number 14 will look after her now. It’s all in a day’s work.” He turned away.
“Number 6!” she screamed, forgetting in her pain that he was no longer Number 6. “You were theonly one, and you—” She choked as more brine welled up into her throat. By the time she had emptied herself on the wet rocks, she had realized the hopelessness of what she had been about to say.
“Sir, you don’t have to walk back to the Village. Take our jeep.”
“Thank you, Number 263, but I haven’t had my morning run yet. Be careful with that woman. She’ll probably attempt some kind of violence.”
He began to trot westward, following the long shadow that glided ahead of him across the glistening pebbles, the lumps of tar, the strands of kelp, the quaking, clustered foam.
Behind him he heard her final, and definitive, curse, then her screams as she struggled with the guards.
He ran on, concentrating on his breathing. It was shallow, even, relaxed.
Entering his cottage, he found yesterday’s domino-players, Numbers 83 and 29, sprawled in the Chippendale chairs, half-asleep. Automatic
ally his hand switched on the Muzak control, and the room filled with the waltzing ghosts of a thousand animated cartoons. The goitres snorted himself to alertness, and the male model stretched himself, cat-like, and produced a very sleepy smile that would never have sold anything.
“An unexpected pleasure, gentlemen,” he said.
In unison: “Good morning, Number 2.”
“Tea? Coffee?”
“We’ve had our breakfast, thank you,” said Number 29.
“You’ll excuse me if I go into my bedroom to change out of these wet clothes. I won’t be a minute. Here–I’ll leave the door open, and you can tell me what it is that brings you to me at this unusual hour. There’s no serious trouble, I hope …?”
“No sir.”
“Did you hear about my little adventure at the beach this morning?”
The two men exchanged a look. The younger answered. “Yes, we did, Number 2.”
“Quite a stroke of luck that I was on the spot. I think the poor girl thought she was going toswim away!” From the bedroom, a hearty laugh. Then, as though contritely: “Of course, it’s not a laughing matter. Even if it turns out that no one else was involved, an incident like this should be a lesson to all of us. If she’d gone into the water just a few minutes later, who would have seen her? Who would have brought her back? No one! Do you realize what that would have meant?”
“That she would have drowned,” Number 83 said, affecting to yawn.
“Does that seem such a light matter to you?” he asked sharply, entering the living room in his everyday costume of slacks, turtleneck and jacket. “Gentlemen, an attempted suicide is a graver threat to this Village than an attempted escape. A fugitive can be brought back; a corpse cannot be.”
