(If. in speaking of the passage of time, I do not use the normal words—hours, days, weeks, minutes, seconds—it is because in this situation they had no real meaning. I lived to a pattern of sleeping and waking, with a communal meal at the trough at each transition; how long this pattern rook to round itself out in terms of hours and minutes, I have no idea. Nor could I guess how many of these cycles I lived through at each stage of my development; by the time I was capable of thinking in terms of record-keeping, had more sophisticated thoughts of escape to hold my attention.)
At any rate, it was only after I had thoroughly explored myself that I could devote some attention to the world around me. And when at first I began to study the life of the compound I did so with no motive other than the use of my newly regained faculties of observation and memory. I he possibility of finding a way to live any existence other than my present one had not as yet occurred to me.
The compound was a rather large area, containing twenty-six rough wooden sheds, none of them very big. They contained one of three classes of thing: slaves, officials, or machinery. The sheds containing machinery were the most carefully and soundly constructed; those containing slaves were the most ramshackle. I was glad to be working on the counting machine when the long cold rains came, as at odd intervals they did, because the roof of the shed housing that machine did not leak. None of the machine-holding sheds leaked, and all of them had stout wooden floors.
In my work, I sat at a tall black stool. The machine was to my right, with a counter where I could set the slips of paper. These were handed to me through a large open window directly to my left, out of which I could see a good view of almost the entire compound, including the main gate, which was just beside this shed.
The compound had been beaten out of ground so jagged and rocky and inhospitable that nothing at all lived here under normal conditions except a kind of tenacious moss. The rocky outcroppings had been pulverized by sledges and the resultant pebbly dust used to fill crannies and holes, until at last a large square of mostly flat ground had been tom out of the environment. One side of this square was against a rocky vertical mountain face, but the other three sides, naturally open, had been enclosed by high wooden walk.
I still don’t know what mineral we were bringing out of that mountain. It was a pale gray stuff, lighter than the useless rock around it, and would sometimes chip off in layers, like shale. Picks were used to break this stuff free, and then it would be loaded by hand onto small deep carts with metal wheels. Slaves pushed these carts up the long tunnels to the compound, where officials added the slips of paper which eventually came to me. Other slaves emptied the carts by hand into large motorized trucks with treads rather than wheels, and the loaded trucks drove past my window and out the main gate and away.
Food and other material—and new slaves—arrived the same way, by truck or wagon, coming through the main gate and being unloaded very close to my window. The flow of traffic was really very light, but any movement at all was thrilling to a mind newly emerged from atrophy, so I watched the ore trucks and the supply trucks with fascination and a retentive memory. I came to know the pattern of the compound possibly better than anyone else within it.
Only once did anything break into that pattern, and that was the day the helicopter came. It was green and yellow, and it settled into the middle of the compound with a great whirling of wings, blowing dust up and seeming to have been lowered into our midst on the end of an invisible rope. There was an insignia in outline on its side: a hammer with a dog’s head. Hadn’t I seen that symbol before?
Three men emerged from the helicopter, young and well-dressed, and I understood at once that they were also officials, but of much more importance than the officials who lived in the compound and who now clustered around the new arrivals the way we slaves clustered at feeding times around our trough.
It was a tour of inspection. The little group of officials moved off in a body, and for the next long while, very nearly until my work period ended, the ordinary routine of the compound was disrupted and almost halted, so much so that the flow’ of papers containing numbers for me to punch onto the machine slowed to the barest trickle. The officials still at their normal work were affected by this break in the pattern, being increasingly short-tempered and agitated, and the slaves felt it too, growing restive and sullen and unwilling to work, some of them having to be beaten with sticks.
The inspection was very thorough, including the sheds, the mine itself, everything. Near the end of it they came at last around to me and my machine. It was the machine, of course, which interested them; one of the compound officials hastily explained its function and methodology—an explanation I was incapable of following—while the three visitors listened carefully and observantly, nodding their heads.
As they were starting out, one of the visitors glanced in my direction for the first time, and stopped in his tracks, staring at me. “Malone?” he said, as though pointing out to himself the existence of an impossibility. He stepped closer to me, saying my name again: “Malone?” But this time it was a question directed at me, wanting an explanation.
I was terrified. No one had looked upon me as an individual for so long that I now couldn’t possibly handle it. I stared at the compound officials, waiting for one of them to solve this problem for me.
The visitor called to one of his companions, “Elman, look! Could it be—”
The other one said, “Don’t be silly. Malone’s dead.” Then he looked at me himself and said, “He’s close, all right.”
“It’s uncanny,” said the first one.
Elman said, “His head is broader, and his eyes are different. Besides, Malone is dead. You know it as well as I do.”
I wanted to say that I wasn’t dead, but I was unable to make any sound at all. I merely stood there and stared at the faces of the officials I knew, and hoped they would solve this for me soon.
It solved itself. Elman and the one who had seen me first and the one who had been no pan of it at all, the three of them turned around and walked out of the shed. I had never seen any of them before, of that I was positive, and I was pleased when, a short while later, they got back into their helicopter and were drawn up once again into the sky.
Much later, after sleep periods and work periods, it occurred to me the particular mistake they had made. That was the day I found the note.
XVII
I no longer spent my sleep periods entirely in unconsciousness, but woke at intervals, to lie a while in thought amid the still limbs and soft breathings of the others, and then uneasily to drop off once again.
There were two reasons for this. Most obvious, I did not now spend my waking hours in exhaustive labor, but sat in comfort on the stool by the number machine. But there was also the constant pain in my left wrist, which refused to finish healing itself and which now and again twinged me out of slumber. The doctor kept the stump wrapped in cloth and when, from time to time, I was taken to him for the bandage to be changed, the same hot musky bloody smell always bloomed out as the cloth was removed. The doctor appeared to treat me with a competence unlit by interest, yet I hid confidence in him and believed he would eventually make my wrist well again.
In the meantime, the pain was a constant background hum to my existence. It might be that it was this continuing pain which kept my brain awake and forced me back into being when I had already—like the other fourteen, snuffling and sleeping around me—ceased, in any way that matters, to be alive.
The periods of wakefulness in the shed, while all around me the others slept, seemed the worst parts of my life at that time, though ultimately they must have been the best for me. But they were so empty, so boring. During the work periods, though I had little myself to do, there was at least the activity outside my window with which to distract myself, while in the steep periods there was just nothing at all. Around me lay the thin, white, wire-muscled bodies, all entwined together in the endless search for warmth. Under me was the straw,
over me the wooden walls and roof of the shed, with long streaks of daylight showing the broad cracks where water came through when it rained.
It was in these restless periods that I did my most constructive thinking, the major part of the reconstruction of my personality and memory. And it was in such an interval that I connected at last the fact of my dead brother Gar with the incident of the visitor who had called me Malone and claimed that I was dead.
The visitor could not have meant me, even though he had used my last name, because he and I had never met before, of that I was certain. But if the last name were right, and if I looked quite similar to the person he’d been thinking of, and if the person he’d been thinking of was truly dead, the conclusion was belatedly obvious: He had mistaken me for Gar. And that meant he had known Gar! Might even know for certain what had happened to him, and why.
If only I’d thought it all out so clearly at the time, I could have asked him.
Usually I tried to keep perfectly still while awake in the shed, since movement disturbed the others and made them groan and twist about, but the agitation of this series of thoughts was too much for me. I shifted this way and that, disturbing them and not caring, and though they thrashed and muttered with their eyes squeezing shut I nevertheless still heard the sound of paper crackling just beneath my ear.
In my moving around, my head had come to rest directly atop the paper, which had been rucked down into the straw just barely below the surface. Turning my head, I could see it there, so close as to be out of focus. I picked it out and found it to be a small white scrap of notepaper, folded over once. Opening it, I read the three words shakily written on the inside:
WE MUST UNITE
Unite? The concept seemed to me then as mysterious as the sender. I looked around, trying to think who could have sent such a note and what he might have intended. Surely it had come from another slave, but what had he wanted, and why had he chosen such an unlikely method of communication? It would have been simpler merely to arrange to sleep beside me, and whisper his message to me while the others slept.
Of course, the problem was even more complex than that, because the note had clearly not been directed exclusively at me. The writer had tucked it away in the straw with the apparent hope that someone would see it. And, of course, someone had.
It had been left there recently, that was one thing I could know; we had had rain just two sleep periods ago, a very bad rain which would surely have left evidences of itself on the note. So it was recent, and it was an attempt at communication from someone who, like myself, was not entirely sunken into vacantness.
But there was no one like that among the fourteen. And where would a slave have found pencil and paper? And what did the note mean? Above all, what was I to do about it? (And there was still the revelation about the visitor and Gar to distract my mind.) I couldn’t think. Clutching the paper, falling now and then into uneasy dozes, I spent the rest of that sleep period in frustrated attempts at concentration.
It was later, during the following work period, that I thought of the answer to a part of the problem. I was positive the note had been written by a slave, but just as positive he was none of the slaves with whom I slept in the shed, and while sitting at the number machine I finally thought of the explanation. The slave population was divided into three groups, or shifts, who slept in the same sheds one after the other; the note must have come from a member of one of the other groups!
As to the meaning of his message, that too came clear to me. There were better ways to live than as a slave at this mine, but the officials would not permit us to make any change. Still, there were more slaves than officials, so that if we were to unite together and insist on changing our way of life, possibly we would get what we wanted.
I could understand the theory, and even found myself excited by it, but I couldn’t begin to visualize its application. The other fourteen in my shed were already united, to one another, bonded together in work, in exhaustion, in the search for warmth, in brute mindlessness. I had no desire to re-unite myself with them, nor could I see any way to get them to unite with me. It had taken the amputation of my hand to shock me back to self-awareness; an equivalent shock would be necessary for each of the other fourteen, and I could see no way to supply it.
Yet there might be a way. Perhaps he who had sent me this message also had some idea how to carry it out. For that reason, I kept his note with me all that work period, and used the back of it next sleep period to send him my reply. Out of din and saliva I made my ink, a blade of straw became my pen, and laboriously, slowly, one small line at a time, having to wait and wait for each stroke to dry before going on to the next, I wrote my one word answer:
HOW
I had intended to put a question mark at the end, but the process was so long and tiresome I decided the message would have to be comprehensible as if was, and I tucked it away into the straw as close as possible to where I had originally found it.
At the next sleep period, it was gone. I was elated; contact had been established! I couldn’t sleep at all.
I never heard from the note writer again.
XVIII
This abortive communication left me very depressed and saddened at the time, but in many ways it was an excellent thing to have happened. In the first place, it got me to think in terms of change, of revolt, ultimately of escape. In the second place, it reminded me that I must depend upon nothing and no one other than myself.
Still, it was a hard lesson, and for some time after I had given up searching for another white slip of paper I sunk into an apathy very like the endless stupor of my companions. Except that, far inside me, I continued—against my will—to think.
There was no incident or event which drove me out of this apathy. It merely faded; slowly, my thinking grew steadily stronger and more purposeful, and a day came when I was looking at the compound outside my work-shed window with an eye escape-oriented for every detail that might be useful, and it occurred to me that my depression was gone and had been gone for quite some time. I smiled, and an official, arriving then with a sheet of numbers for me, said ironically, “What makes you so happy?” It was one of the few times in that place that anyone ever spoke directly to me.
I didn’t answer, as I knew no answer was expected. I merely stopped smiling, took the sheet of paper, and turned at once to the machine. Bur even as I punched the buttons which told the machine these new numbers I continued to think about myself, and about the changes within me, and about my escape, which I now knew must be coming soon.
No one escaped from the compound, of course. Most of the slaves were so steeped in vacancy they no longer remembered themselves or their past lives or the possibility of a world outside the wooden walls. The only slaves not kept stunned by the grind of their labor were a few cripples like me. And because of this, because there was no such thing as escape and never had been any such thing as escape, the officials were very lax, very sloppy.
Still, there was the wail, very high, smooth on the inside, impossible to get over. The only way out was the gate near my workshed. The trucks came in there, on their treads, to be filled with ore from the mine. Trucks and wagons came in carrying food and other supplies or fresh slaves. From time to time someone on a hairhorse would come in, bearing papers of importance for the officials, and sometimes a group of officials would leave for a while in the back of a truck, looking happier than usual.
I intended to escape. In order to escape, it was necessary first to get on the other side of the compound wall. The only way to do that was to leave by the main gate. And the only way to leave by the main gate was somehow to become a part of the normal traffic which left by the main gate. A truck, or a wagon. Somehow, leave on a truck or a wagon.
I studied these vehicles from my window. The ore carriers I had the most opportunity to study, these being the most frequent arrivals, and finally I saw just how it could be done.
The ore carriers, as I said, were on treads. They had
a large flat-faced cab in front, in which the driver and his assistant sat, and an ample high-sided metal open-topped storage area in the rear, where the ore was loaded. Between these two, there was a narrow empty space, no more than a foot wide, with the back wall of the cab on one side and the front wall of the storage area on the other. Tread mountings shielded it from view on the remaining two sides. A man inside there could not be seen.
Once the discovery was made, all that was left was timing. I understood by now the normal ebb and flow of my job, knew those points when a long stretch of time would go by before I was given any more numbers to punch. All I had to do was wait till such a time began just as an ore carrier was preparing to leave and at a moment when no official was looking directly toward my shed or the truck. I knew I would have only the one chance, so I permitted several possible opportunities to go by, and waited for that one perfect juxtaposition of factors.
It did come. I looked out my window, scanned this way and that, and saw that everything was perfect. Without hesitation, I performed the action I had rehearsed so often in my mind, raising both feet, sliding them out the window, leaping out onto the ground with both arms wide to help me keep my balance—the lack of a left hand bothered me there, made me tend to lean too heavily to the right—and running across the short stretch of open ground between the shed and the truck.
It was harder to climb over the treads than I’d anticipated also because of the lost hand, and when I reached the top and looked inside I saw what I couldn’t possibly have known in advance, that this space between cab and trailer had no floor.
Of course not, of course not! Now that I saw it I could understand the reason for it. This truck was meant to be flexible, because of the rough country it was built to traverse, so only the treads—and a few cables underneath, down at the bottom—connected the two parts.
Tomorrow's Crimes Page 16
