Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

“Actually he was only a little bit stupid, but he was a lot naive, and tremendously charismatic: a dangerous combination. After a month, every time Katya gave an order, everyone looked at Piotr to see what he would say. After two months, he was the leader in everything but name, and Katya was agonizing over whether she should challenge him directly. In the end, she decided to let democracy take its course. And three months after Piotr joined the group, he asked for formal leadership; received it; and as his first act, proposed that we burn Square-Mile-on-Volga.”

“Did you resist him?”

“We argued with him, certainly. We asked what advantage there was in incinerating the prisoners we hoped to save. He said that we would free them first. We asked what would prevent the Guardians from hunting them down and killing them in the woods. He said we would hide them. We asked if he intended to conceal ten thousand refugees in his dorm room. He said there would be so many that some must get through, and that was better than they could hope for at Volga. We explained that, even if the plan succeeded, the resulting investigation would be so thorough that it would surely uncover us. He said that we had to decide whether we were an underground or a social club, and that we might as well go ahead and be discovered, if we were not going to make any difference.

“And then, as I kept arguing, Katya suddenly changed sides, and said she thought it could be done, if only she were allowed to plan it herself. Everyone agreed to this at once, and I was shouted down. After the meeting she told me she had supported Piotr because she knew he would win, and if she planned it herself, the damage might be minimized.

“I begged her to forget him, forget our group, go back to her family, let us self-destruct, and then start over. She would be safe; no one would believe that the daughter of Harold Anderson was a dissident, no matter how many clues seemed to point toward it. But I knew before I said the words that she would not hear them. For almost two weeks no one saw her, not even me; and when she came back, she had made her plan.”

Katya had camped in the woods and watched the Square Mile through binoculars. The Square Miles, you understand, were franchises; the guards were brought in by the dozens, trained in a few days, and retained for an average of less than six months. It was a uniquely American approach to holocaust, a sort of McGulag. The guards were bored, unskilled, and lazy. Most of them were under eighteen, except for a few senior citizens hired under that Golden Guards program they used to run all those smug commercials about. The camp’s security relied on quantity, not quality. Katya knew that if she looked closely enough, she would find some little hole she could thread her way into.

“It had taken her a week, but she’d found it. A farmer who lived near the camp came by, she said, every Wednesday and Saturday to pick up manure for his crops. He did it at night, and surreptitiously, and was always waved past the station without being searched; Katya thought he might be related to one of the guards. He drove an old truck with a small trailer which could hold two people, at a very tight squeeze. Further, as the manure did not smell human, she suspected it came from the stables, which would be up on the hill where the Guardians’ homes were. If so, we could burn out the Guardians without endangering the barracks, and in the confusion we might get a few people out.

“It was not a plan I found convincing. There were too many loose ends, and no lists of contingencies. The plan for getting people out was vague and halfhearted, more a hope than a plan. I knew she didn’t think we could succeed. But there were no objections. The only question was who should go.

“In the end, over Katya’s protests, Piotr and one of his closest supporters were chosen. As Katya was walking out, Piotr laid his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘An excellent plan, truly, Katya. You see, sometimes your input is very important!’

“It was too much for her. She turned to him and said, ‘Do you know why I didn’t want you to go? Why I didn’t want to expose you to that danger?’

“He thought about it for a moment, nodded solemnly, and said, ‘You don’t think I should take the risk. Because I’m needed here.’

“‘No, you incredible idiot,’ she said. ‘Because I want you to live long enough to see the rest of us die because of your stupidity.’ And she walked away, leaving him gaping in disbelief that there was someone on the planet who did not admire him.

“‘He’ll get himself captured, give information, and we’ll all be shot,’ I said.

“‘No, he won’t,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘He won’t get anywhere near that trailer. If he went on Wednesday, he wouldn’t do any damage, because the farmer picks up his dung on Tuesday; and besides, he won’t go, because on Tuesday I’m going to do it myself. Are you coming?’

“I was coming. At four A.M. the next Tuesday we arrived at the farm, wearing stolen Guardian uniforms, and carrying rifles, cans of kerosene, a flamethrower, and—strapped to our thighs-—two flasks of eggshell-thin ceramic, made to curve around the skin so that a casual search might miss them. We forced the latch on the trailer and folded ourselves into four feet by five feet by three feet of corrugated aluminum: a coffin built for two. We would have to wait there the whole day; but it was safer than trying to break in during the daylight.

“The fellow hauled his manure in plastic bags, but the trailer still smelled. Our chips had no scent-suppression functions—that great consolation of modern life had not been invented yet—but after a while I did start to get used to it. In the year since we’d met, I had been too busy to think about anything but our work. Besides, we had seen each other for only an hour or so at a time, usually with others present. Now we were alone, hour after hour, pressed together in that tiny trailer bed. And as I began to smell the manure less, and her more, the warmth of her arm against mine began to wear away the control I’d maintained for the last two years, so slowly I barely knew what was happening.

“At last I turned my head toward Katya, not even sure yet what I meant to say or do. But she knew what I was thinking better than I did. ‘The way I look at it,’ she said, ‘we have two choices. Assuming that we’ll be in the remembering business past this evening, we can remember some awkward, unsatisfying groping in a trailer the size of a coffin, with the smell of shit in our nostrils and the chance of getting shot hanging over our heads, the main effect of which will be to make us feel embarrassed and frustrated for the last few hours of our lives. Or you can go on imagining the six children and the white house with the picket fence and the incredible sex and whatever the hell else it is that’s kept you going these past two years. If it were me I’d go for the fence thing, but I’ll leave it up to you.’

“And then, before I could reply, she raised her head, and said through the communicators we’d socketed: Or we could have what’s behind door number three. A moment later I, too, heard the farmer’s footsteps as he came up the walk to his truck.

“Luckily, he did not check the trailer. We felt the truck begin to move; we traveled in silence; then, all too soon, the truck stopped again. The farmer called to the guard, barely slowing, and we were pressed against the doors of the trailer as the truck started up the hill. It leveled, then stopped. The accordion creak of the parking brake; the car door; then the farmer’s footsteps. A knife-blade of light cleft the trailer door.

“I was ready, and knocked him out with the butt of my rifle— not, I hoped, too hard. We put him back in the car and pushed it out of the sight of the guard towers. Then we went into the stables and slopped kerosene over everything that looked flammable. The horses were thoroughly spooked by this time, and when we released them they galloped away, alerting the guards. We heard a siren and saw floodlights through the window, but, to our relief, there were no shots. Soon we could hear people running and shouting all around us.