Дэймон Найт - Orbit 8

Carpenter approached the Box. He wondered what Keller was doing at this moment, what he was thinking. Perhaps he was asleep. He tried to imagine what six months in isolation would do to him, but it was unimaginable. Like trying to imagine death, he thought. Surely no man could endure such isolation and remain sane? What sort of man would volunteer for something like that anyway, something that would very likely destroy him? A disappointed man? An idealistic man? He remembered what he had told Elleston: “There’s always somebody.”

He ran his fingers along the seam of the Box’s door. The man had volunteered, but there still remained a moral question. The full burden of it lay upon the scientists who had devised the experiment, but Carpenter carried some of it on his own shoulders. Ought Keller to be held to his voluntary decision, a decision almost certainly made without full knowledge of the consequences? Absently, experimentally, Carpenter took a coin from his pocket and tried it in one of the bolts that secured the door’s time lock. He twisted and the countersunk bolt turned easily. He gave it several turns. He watched the bolt as it threaded smoothly away from the covering plate and felt suddenly dizzy. What was he doing? If he freed Keller, he possibly freed a man with no desire to be free. And he certainly lost a job that paid good, regular wages. Carpenter screwed the bolt back firmly and dropped the coin into his pocket.

He went back to his seat by the wall and noticed for the first time, with some irony, that Horden had at last replaced the chair. The new one was larger and fully upholstered. Carpenter settled himself into it comfortably. He had only been watching the Box for a few minutes when a stranger in a white lab coat arrived, accompanied by a tired-looking, disgruntled Elleston.

“Are you Carpenter?” the stranger asked. “Will you come with me?”

Carpenter looked questioningly at Elleston, who merely shrugged and took Carpenter’s place in the chair. Carpenter followed the stranger along quiet corridors to an office practically identical to Horden’s. Instead of an impossible object, however, there was a print of Brueghel’s “Massacre of the Innocents” on the wall. The stranger sat behind the desk and Carpenter sat opposite.

“Cigarette?” The stranger offered him a box in which cigarettes and cigars lay partitioned and segregated. Carpenter declined and the stranger took a small cigar and lit it from a desk lighter that reminded Carpenter of a miniature version of the Box. It was shiny chromium. The strangertapped its top and a lid opened automatically.

Automatically a second, smaller box rose from within the first. Its lid, in turn, opened to reveal a third box which rose up, its uppermost surface glowing like a hot plate. The stranger touched it to his cigar, smiling. “Chinese boxes. It’s a favorite toy of mine. My name is Maynard. Horden has asked me to speak to you, to explain why we have to fire you.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’ve shown yourself to be disturbed by certain aspects of the work,” Maynard said. “It would be dangerous to let you remain.”

“Dangerous in what way?”

“Dangerous to the experiment and possibly dangerous to you. It would be a pity, for instance, if you got it into your head to try and release Keller.”

“Why should I do that?”

“Not everybody has the mentality of a prison warden, Carpenter, which is in effect what you’re expected to be. For certain people—I’d say for practically everybody these days—it goes against the grain. That is why Horden had to lie to you. He has standing orders to conceal the nature of the work whenever possible.” Maynard looked at Carpenter through a haze of cigar smoke. “You see, we live in a liberal society, a society educated in the politics of freedom and human rights. It’s not always possible to find people who will accept the role this particular job calls for.” He smiled. “It’s true of the job situation as a whole these days. Education is more than assimilating facts. It’s acquiring a whole system of behavioral rules and values. At the present period of history people have been educated to expect a better deal than society can manage to give them. Hence unemployment and unrest. There are too many well-qualified people going after too few really worthwhile jobs.

“You look surprised, but I should have thought you’d have realized this yourself, Carpenter. You’re no fool. You’re smart. Not so many years ago you wouldn’t have been chasing dead-end jobs. You’d have held some senior management post. Now, however, there are too many people like you. And everybody can’t be in management.”

Carpenter nodded. “Perhaps I did realize it all along. But it’s not an easy thing to accept.”

Maynard took a packet from his desk and gave it to Carpenter. “Here’s a month’s pay. What’s the matter? You don’t look too happy.”

“It’s just one thing that still puzzles me about the Box. You said in that article that Keller was going to be isolated for eighteen months, that he’d be taken care of by various gadgets inside the box and also that he’d have no way of curtailing the experiment himself. When Horden gave me the job, he said it involved watching for anything ‘untoward,’ but it seems to me you’ve got the untoward pretty well sewn up. What’s the point of hiring people to watch a foolproof system? Is it just making jobs for the unemployed?”

“No. It’s an essential safety measure. You see, there is one way Keller can curtail the experiment although not directly through an act of his own will. It’s a way he didn’t even know about. We don’t monitor his life functions, but they’re linked directly to the time lock. If, for some reason, they become critical or indeed, stop, then the door automatically opens.”

Carpenter felt sick. “You mean the only way he could escape would be by committing suicide. Is that likely?”

“By no means likely, but possible. There are so many unknown factors in this experiment and we have to cover every eventuality. Almost certainly he’ll fantasize and some of the fantasies may involve symbolic suicide. From that it’s only a small step to the real thing.”

Carpenter swore at Maynard, dragging up the most considered, unsubtle epithet he could think of. “There’s another reason you employ people to watch that Box,” he said. “You’re the prison wardens, Maynard, you and your kind, but you need someone to take over your role. You hope it will absolve you of responsibility but it won’t. And I think you know it won’t.”

He stood and went to the door. Behind him he heard a voice squawk from Maynard’s intercom. It was Horden and he sounded overexcited. There was another voice in the background, possibly Elleston’s. Carpenter didn’t pause to hear what they were saying. He was afraid he knew and he hated himself because he knew he could have prevented it. He left the building, walking past the basalt fountain and across the campus to the highway. Above him the sky was grey and cold like the underside of a great steel lid.

I suppose it was because I had attended a film just before going on duty. I have the late tick—what we occasionally call the “graveyard” tick—and that makes it possible for me to visit the one cinema our little village boasts before I go on. Since a new film comes not more than fortnightly, I don’t indulge myself in this way often.

The fog had been extraordinarily thick. We have a great deal of fog in every month of the year; still, that night was exceptional. I remember stepping in through the doors of the station house and having it roll past me in great billows as though it were being blown from behind me; and that is strange, because now that this terrible business at the manor house is over, or nearly over, that is the first moment I can recall clearly. It’s as if all my previous life were nothing more than a preparation for holding the dying girl in my arms out there on the moors, or looking into the man’s horror-ravaged face. When I try to recall anything else, service experiences from the four years I spent in the Glousters for example, or something that has happened during the time I’ve lived here in the village (Stoke-on-Wold is what we call it), nothing seems to have taken place at all.