Thomas M. Disch

by The Prisoner

  “Wall!” she shouted. “Wall!” She beat soundlessly with the end of the buttonhook against the unyielding white plane. Then, without a flicker of transition, the four walls, the ceiling, the floor, everything but the rectangle of blackness that had replaced the alcove, was transformed intosomething stranger than emptiness. Beneath him there was no longer the level floor but a rolling trembling mass of pinks and violets, veined with writhing tendrils of gray, flecked, like the ocean, with milk-white clusters of foam, that burst, that bubbled up afresh. The walls and ceiling too had metamorphosed into the same composite of animal and vegetable forms-vastly enlarged inner organs that slid among even vaster petals. Yet his feet, for all that they seemed set upon nothing but this heaving pink stew, gripped the floor as securely as before.

  An illusion, as usual.

  Number 1 continued to pound soundlessly upon the soundless swarm of shapes, continued to call out, hysterically: “Wall! Wall!”

  He caught hold of the hand that grasped the buttonhook. Her struggles were feeble as a child’s. She glared at him with the swift, all-engulfing hatred of an infant powerless despite the conviction of his own omnipotence.

  “Don’t youdare !” she screamed at him. “Don’t you—”

  With a dry snap her hand broke off at the wrist. Her mouth gaped, and she uttered a cry, a quick inward gasp, of horror and outraged modesty. She ceased, in any way, to struggle.

  At once the pulsing images about them receded, condensing into vivid squares, like single marble tiles set in the middle of each white plane.

  The hand on the white floor slowly spread open its fingers. They could both see, where the skin had been frayed at the knuckles by the buttonhook, the tangle of tubes and wires that had made it work.

  Her wrist, where the hand had broken off, gave out abuzz that resembled the “engaged” signal a telephone makes, but higher-pitched, a humming, like the humming of a children’s chorus, a great mass of voices, heard from a great distance, that rose, by swift octaves, out of the audible range.

  Chapter Twenty

  Much Adieus

  Granny held up the stump of her wrist and looked at it curiously. “For heaven’s sake!” she said. “Did youever ?”

  A second rectangle of blackness had formed opposite the first: the guillotine had been raised to admit a squad, two squads of guards. They entered with great purposefulness, but the scene that confronted them in the white room did not suggest any definite course of action. They coagulated in a circle about the detached hand, one finger of which still twitched erratically.

  One guard bent over and picked up the platinum buttonhook. He offered it first to Number 2, who declined it with a shake of his head, then to the old woman, who reached out for it, unthinkingly, with the same arm from which hand and buttonhook had just been removed.

  She tisked, bethought herself, accepted the buttonhook with the hand left to her, and placed it in her pocket, where it belonged.

  “Oh dear,” she said. “Oh, dear, itis a nuisance. And just when everything had been going sonicely . I do hope you willexcuse —” She tried to indicate the unmentionable object on the floor without in any crude waypointing to it.

  “I’m certain I don’t knowwho … In all this confusion—”

  She turned imploringly to the one man in the room who seemed to be a gentleman: “If you’d be so kind as to bring me thatchair ? My legs, you know, are not all that they were.”

  The guards, gathering courage, had picked up the hand from the floor, and were passing it about their circle.

  The doctor appeared at the threshold of the room, a white figure framed by the blackness, a painting on velvet. “That will bequite enough!” she said to the startled guards. Had she shaken a caduceus at them, she could not have presented a more fearful image of the authority of Medical Science. She pointed to the hand. “Put that back where you found it, and then leave this room so that we can …” Her powers of improvisation flagging, she looked to him for help.

  “So that we can discuss what must bedone now,” he said, with an authority (viceregal) to equal hers. “Quickly, please, this is a crisis!”

  When they were by themselves, it was the old woman who spoke first. “Would … a cup of tea … be too much trouble?” With the loss of her hand, she seemed to have reverted completely from her character as Number 1 to the less demanding role of Grandmother Bug. “With just adrop … of milk … and one lump …”

  “What happened?” Number 14 asked, trying to catch a look at the stump, which was veiled discreetly by a flounce of crepe.

  “A malfunction, it seems.”

  “Oh, but she’s not—” The doctor placed her hand above Granny’s sagging bosom, to be sure. “She has aheart ,” she said surely.

  “Or something.”

  “You canfeel it, beating.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  Granny, whimpering, sought to retain the interest of this pretty lady with white hair. “My dear, if you would just lend me yourarm a minute … it isn’t very far at all. And I’m feeling so—” She shook her head. “And, in short, my dear, not at allmyself .”

  “In a moment, Granny, we’ll have you in a nice warm bed.”

  “Will we?” he asked doubtfully.

  “Do you have another suggestion?”

  He looked at Granny, at the hand that the guard had replaced on the floor, at the doctor, at Granny. Even if shewere a robot, she commanded a degree of sympathy in her reduced state, and the doctor seemed persuaded that she was (at least partially) human.

  A voice in a peculiar bass register, as though a tape were being played at too slow a speed, addressed them from the whiteness all around: “I wish to announce that in the event of the demise” (slowing still more, to the croaking of a giant frog) “of Nummboor Onnne thaat mmmeaszhoorzz haave” (and speeding, rising quickly from frog, to bass, to tenor, to soprano) “been taken to assure the certain annihilation of this Village and of—” It ended in a squeal of slate, a squeak of flute.

  “That seems to decide it.” Number 14 stooped, with a sigh, to retrieve the hand on the floor. “I had better see if Ican reassemble this. Damn! Now you’ll have to run off before we’ve had a single moment to ourselves.”

  “I will? As quickly as all that?”

  “We wouldn’t want the world, or whatever, to blow up onour account.”

  “The old girl is still on her feet. She seems to be in noimmediate danger of dying.”

  “Well, until I know how she’s been … put together,I wouldn’t give a prognosis. Besides, she could come out of shock at any moment, and you should be gone before she starts feeling ‘like herself’ again. That funny little mute servant of yours is waiting outside with your car.”

  “Quicker and quicker.”

  “Oh, I’ve had him on hand since you were decanted from the tank.”

  “I must thank you for that, you know.”

  “I was waiting to be thanked.”

  “Thank you, Number 14, for your sabotage.”

  “You’re welcome. Do you know, this whole last month while you’ve been Number 2–and such a dreadful scout-master of a Number 2 you were!–I was horribly afraid that I hadn’t disconnected the right wires. In the past I was always able to rely on Number 28 for such things. I feared that you had metamorphosed in earnest. Your acting was that good that I could never be certain.”

  “And I was never certain at what point I’d been taken from the tank. Those dreams were every bit as real as you said they would be. Much realer thanthis .”

  She regarded the nothingness about them thoughtfully. “Who’s to say this is real? It doesn’t have theearmarks of reality. I’m sure that so long as you remain in the Village,you’ll remain in some doubt. But once you’ve been in London a week or so everything will begin to look firmer and more trustworthy.”

  “Including yourself?”

  “I won’t be there, Number … I don’t know what number to call you anymore!”

  “Then w
hy—”

  “Do favors for you, if I won’t be there to reap a benefit? Because, as I’ve said so often, Ilove you. But I know you don’t believe that, even now. Leave the Village. Prove to yourself that you’refree . Then, if for any reason you shouldwant to see me again, I’ll still be here. Waiting.”

  “Like bait in a trap?”

  “You forget that you’re still Number 2, officially. You can come and go as you like.”

  “Not once Granny’s been restored to her old self.”

  “Well, it has to be done. I believe what that recording said. It’s altogether feasible. A trigger of that kind, that’s released by death, can be installed these days, at any large hospital, as easily as a car radio. If it were only a matter of the Village, I might say to hell with it, but Number 1 would have wanted a much larger blaze of glory than that. I feel I should do what I can. But as to Granny’s wanting to be revenged on you, I think I’ve had enough practice fiddling the dials in people’s heads that I can persuade her that things happened somewhat differently than they did. She’ll believe that she’s sent you off on some nebulous but absolutely essentialmission . So, if youdo begin to feel nostalgic …”

  “IfI do, I’ll come back. But it’s a damned smallif to rest any hope on.”

  “Then I’ll have learned not to gamble so recklessly next time. You do think better of me now, don’t you, than you did at first? Allow me that much.”

  “Oh, I’d allow a lot more than that. Even then, though, the problem remains just how much you may have fiddled my dials.”

  “It can’t be helped, my dear. That problem always remains, once you start this kind of thing going. Dr Johnson had the best solution: go kick a stone, and let the stone prove to your foot that they’reboth real.”

  She turned over Granny’s hand palm-upward and ran her fingernail across the exposed tubes and wires. “At least inmost cases that’s the best solution,” she added with a small sad smile that was intended only for herself. She steered the old woman by one bony rudder of shoulder toward the black threshold.

  Granny turned around in the doorway, a spark of intelligence rekindling in her eyes. “I remember now! I remember what it was I had to say!”

  Neither of them would ask her what it was she had remembered.

  “Young man,” she said, in her loftiest voice, “you make awretched cup of tea!”

  Contents

  PART I: ARRIVAL

  One:

  The Connaught

  Two:

  A Round Trip to Cheltenham

  Three:

  The Village

  Four:

  The Villagers

  Five:

  Something White

  Six:

  Something Blue

  PART II: ESCAPE & CAPTURE

  Seven:

  The Delivery of the Keys

  Eight:

  Twice Six

  Nine:

  In the Cage

  Ten:

  At the Office

  Eleven:

  On the Retina

  PART III: NUMBER GAMES

  Twelve:

  The Nomination Committee

  Thirteen:

  Number 41

  Fourteen:

  Number 14

  Fifteen:

  Measure for Measure

  Sixteen:

  Act V, and After

  PART IV: COUNTDOWN

  Seventeen:

  The Conversion

  Eighteen:

  The Marble Egg

  Nineteen:

  The White Room

  Twenty:

  Much Adieus