‘Don’t you eat?’
‘I’ll show you that arrangement later. We are entirely self-contained here, Whiteley.’
‘You do seem kind of cut off,’ Whiteley muttered.
‘We are entirely cut off,’ Farthingdale said. ‘The big door upstairs is invariably kept locked, except on special occasions. We cannot get out of here even if we wanted to.’
‘You mean – you are trapped here?’
‘I’ve just explained so, haven’t I? Now then, we’ll go in through this door – and try to keep quiet, Whiteley, will you?’
‘Can I help it if my corsets creak?’
‘Your voice, man.’
Jutting his ragged beard, Farthingdale pushed open one of the doors and they entered a passage with twelve doors leading off it, as he had described. He paused before one of them and listened at it. Silence was so absolute that Whiteley could hear a faint, constant humming – an air circulator, maybe – and below that, fainter still, an unplaceable rustling sound. It reminded him of a black panther he had once seen at a zoo; its continual pacing almost noiseless. As Farthingdale opened the door, Whiteley instinctively stepped back.
When he tagged, on, however, there was nothing very frightening in the room, which was really little more than a cubicle. A young man wearing something like a track suit stood rooted to the centre of the room with his eyes wide open at them. Quite a good-looking young man, Whiteley thought, although his stare was highly disconcerting.
‘Get back on your bunk, Richards,’ Farthingdale said to him gently.
The young man climbed back onto a spongy mattress without deflecting his stare from Whiteley. The latter pulled a pig’s face back. Meanwhile, Farthingdale began to point out the furnishings of the room, which were sparse.
‘There’s a loudspeaker,’ he said, pointing above the bed. ‘I can speak to him from my office over that, if I wish. Beyond that door is his private toilet. Down into this hatch comes his food: two meals per day, carefully balanced diet.’
He swung the twin doors open to let Whiteley see the space beyond, adding, ‘All meals are prepared in quite a separate section above here, into which we have no access, and descended to this level by lift. Thus none of our time is wasted on cooking.’
And at a pinch, a fellow might be able to get out that way, Whiteley thought. He had noticed a similar hatch in Farthingdale’s room. He turned to the only other objects in the cubicle – four balls the size of baseballs which lay on a wide ledge above the higher end of an incline. The incline was gradual and stretched from one side of the cubicle to the other, at the foot of and on a level with the man on Richards’ bed.
‘What may these be?’ Whiteley asked, indicating the balls.
‘Show him, Richards,’ Farthingdale said, and tensed himself eagerly.
Richards switched his gaze away from Whiteley with obvious reluctance, fixing it instead on the balls. He looked like a man about to have a fit, his body rigid, his mouth pursed. For a long while, nothing moved in the little room. Whiteley started to open his mouth; and then one of the balls began to stir. The lightest ball – it looked as if it was made of papier mache – rolled about an inch, stopped, rolled again, teetered on the edge of the slope and then sped down it, coming to a stop against the wall at the bottom. Then it began to climb back up the slope, slowly, painfully, half way up, three quarters – then back to the bottom, as though suddenly exhausted.
Richards groaned and wiped his forehead. ‘I got it back up again once yesterday without any misfires,’ he gasped. He seemed to be apologising.
Whiteley grabbed the ball off the incline. It was light as a feather. ‘How …?’ he said blankly.
‘Boredom,’ Farthingdale said in triumph. ‘Well done, Richards, thank you. We’ll leave you now.’
He led the mystified Whiteley back into the corridor, closing the door behind him.
‘And that lad’s only been with us seven months,’ he said. ‘It’s a remarkably early start; he shows great promise. They sometimes take up to a year merely to adjust to the new conditions. All the men in the twelve rooms on this corridor are recent intake. Clayson, the one with longest service, has been here about eighteen months; he can move all four balls at once now, including the heaviest, the lead one.’
The missionary gleam burnt in his eyes again.
‘Move them, move the balls,’ Whiteley stumbled. ‘You mean, they move them just by staring at them, by mind power?’
‘Certainly. Why do you sound so surprised? It’s psychokinesis. The idea has long been familiar to intelligent people. Indeed, it has been practised before – magic carpets, for instance, operated on the psychokinetic principle. But never before now has a consistent, scientific way of training psychokineticists been evolved. That, in a nutshell, is the function of Operation Tedium.’
Whiteley shook his head dumbly, following Farthingdale into the deserted circular hall again. ‘Do I take it,’ he said, ‘that you’re trying to tell me you’ve got about a hundred and forty people with strange mental powers trapped down in this vault wasting their lives away?’
‘Whiteley – I warn you we take a rather different view on the value of individual human existence from any view you’re likely to have. And the government allows us considerable latitude in a practical way on that point.’
Do I challenge what he means by that or don’t I? Whiteley wondered uneasily, disliking the peculiar stress Farthingdale laid on the words. He decided he would rather let it slide; if anything, the other’s manner was becoming more excitable.
‘Er – look, Farthingdale, how long do these people with strange powers have to stay down here?’ he inquired, with a vision of himself locked into one of the cubicles.
‘They have no strange powers when they arrive,’ Farthingdale said. ‘They are ordinary people, and they volunteer for five years of almost complete isolation. At the end of that time, they could be free if they wished. In fact – nobody goes; they stay on, as I stay on. As I told you, I’ve been here twenty years.’
‘Why?’ Whiteley asked. ‘How could you stand twenty-four hours of it?’
‘It’s subterranean here,’ Farthingdale explained, ‘sheltered, safe, warm. It’s a womb, Whiteley, a psychological trap. You can’t leave once the feeling of it has penetrated down into your soul. We’ve got our own way of life here, tucked away from the aggressions and irrelevancies of ordinary existence.’
The different species, Whiteley thought again. Twenty years down here! No wonder Farthingdale looked and acted the way he did. The wonder was he was no madder; but the depth of his madness had yet to be plumbed.
‘Come back into my office, Whiteley,’ Farthingdale said. ‘You need just a little while to take it all in.’
Whiteley followed meekly behind, asking hopelessly for a drink.
‘Only water here,’ was the reply. Farthingdale sat on the desk, rubbed his hands, swung his legs, blinked his eyes. ‘You shall meet all the fellows soon, Whiteley. You’ll like them – and I’m sure they’ll like you. Doesn’t Project Tedium fascinate you? It’s epoch-making to you, isn’t it?’
‘Spending years down here … suppose, once you’ve got the hang of the thing, you’d be afraid to face the outside world again,’ Whiteley said thoughtfully. ‘But what makes you sign up for such a consignment in the first place – or don’t you know what you’re letting yourself in for?’
‘You’re told you’re going to spend a well-tended five years in semi-solitary confinement. The pay’s good. The agent who first makes the contact picks his type carefully. To many of us it represents a challenge. I suppose most of us here are introverts, and the question “Have you enough internal resources to be able to bear your own company for half a decade?” seems to us important enough to be worth finding out the answer. The opportunity comes on a tray, you fall for it. And in five years you’ve changed; you could never again bear the grinding friction of the outside world. It’s getting too fast out there, Whiteley, too big, too noisy.’
Whiteley shook his head. ‘It’s a point of view,’ he said. ‘You should know. But to endure nothing but arid monotony …’
‘Not arid!’ Farthingdale said. ‘Far from arid! Monotonous certainly, but I showed you its first fruits in Richards’ room. The monotony is the secret; maybe now that you’re down here, you’ll take in the theory better.
‘As I was indicating on our drive over, much of man’s activity is merely a flight from boredom. The desire to travel, to explore, to go faster, further; the desire to excel; to beat someone up; the desire for a candy to chew on, or a ring to flash. You can attribute those desires to various causes – but behind those causes lies another, a basic thrust called boredom, or rather the flight from it. It encroaches into every sphere of human life.
‘Wars would never be fought if the citizens really had something to absorb them at home; they could never tear themselves away. You may think of hunger as a basic, but look at the vast variety of dishes and menus the nations have accumulated: it’s as much a desire for variety – a flight from ennui – as a simple desire to eat. Think of the complicated snobbery of wines, and tell me if that has anything to do with simple thirst.’
‘That reminds me …’ Whiteley began, but was outtalked.
‘You mentioned sex as a basic thrust,’ Farthingdale continued, ‘Yet many sexual activities are nothing more than a flight from boredom. How many women – and men – marry just because they can no longer endure the humdrum tedium of their homes? What are art and music – and alchohol and drugs – but flights from the overpowering wet blanket of everyday life? Why, what makes a tiny child risk its neck to get up and walk? What drives a baby to sit up when it was more comfortable lying down?’
‘Stop! Let me guess,’ Whiteley said brightly. ‘Could be boredom, huh?’
‘Boredom!’ Farthingdale agreed. ‘It’s the prime mover. What else forces the full-grown foetus to leave the biggest bore of all, the womb? And it’s that condition, that rich and fruitful condition, Whiteley, we’ve recreated here. We’ve channelled right back to basics.’
‘And it’s just that that sets the balls rolling?’
‘Just that! Contact with the basic powers of mind, unhampered by externals. When you come here, you’re given nothing else to do. At first, maybe for months, you dodge the idea, you don’t believe it. But there is nothing else to concentrate on, so you try it out – just for the hell of it. Eventually they all get round to trying it out. In no time, the balls seem to start rolling on their own. From then on, there’s no limit. You’re interested.’
They sat silent. Whiteley’s mind seemed to have come up against a wall. He could not accept the theory Farthingdale had set out – somewhere there was a snag in it: the creatures down here would surely die without some kind of safety valve. Yet he could not reject the theory. He remembered how he had come with Farthingdale in the first place because he did not want a dull evening alone in the flat. And that in turn triggered another wisp of memory. ‘The shower!’ he said. ‘You set it on again by psychokinesis.’
The irises in Farthingdale’s eyes winked yellow like a cat’s. His smile was a humourless, quirk of the lips. ‘It was easier than blinking,’ he said. ‘You’re quite clear about everything now, Whiteley?’
Some curious quality in his tone made Whiteley pause. The beard was trembling. The grey-white hands were trembling. The little man’s whole frame trembled, as if with some suppressed ague.
‘Sure, I understand, Farthingdale,’ he said. ‘What’s the matter with you? Are you ill?’
Instead of answering, the other turned towards the microphone. In a flash, Whiteley realised that it had been live during their entire conversation. The Project must have been listening to every word they uttered.
‘Did you hear all that, men?’ Farthingdale rasped into the mike. His voice was hardly recognisable. ‘Our visitor understands us now. If you’ll come out of your rooms, I’ll bring him to meet you.’
He stood up, still shaking.
‘Come into the hall, Whiteley,’ he said. ‘They’ll give you a demonstration of some of their powers.’
He opened the door. Whiteley was slow; he still did not grasp what was the matter with Farthingdale. But out in the circular hall, the members of Project Tedium were already gathering, moving like fast ghosts out of their cubby-holes. On their faces worked the same ghastly grimace that animated Farthingdale’s. And suddenly, as he stepped hesitantly out to meet them, Whiteley recognised what it was that had them: blood lust.
They were going to murder him.
In no time, he had darted back into Farthingdale’s room, slammed the door and wedged the desk tight against it, sending the mike flying.
‘Keep back, you mad swine!’ he howled in its general direction. ‘I’ve got a gun and I’ll shoot every one of you!’
As he shouted, he was flinging open the little hatch doors and cramming his shoulders through the opening. It was a tight fit, but he could make it; then he banged his head.
Cursing, he raised his hands and pushed. A non-budging steel lid blocked the bottom of the miniature lift shaft. This was just an office; doubtless Farthingdale’s meals descended into his private room elsewhere – so this useless shaft had been sealed off. Whiteley was trapped.
Outside, they were taking their time, letting him grow thoroughly frightened. They were making a noise, a sort of wordless vocal shudder. Whiteley gave a wordless, physical shudder and pulled out his gun. The only other escape routes lay through that mob; he could either burst up the stairs and try battering on the strong-room door – in the hope someone would open it before the wolves got him – or he could dash into, say, Richards’ room, and try his luck in the hatchway there.
Of the two forlorn alternatives, the latter had to be ruled out. Undoubtedly no escape would be open that way – or Richards might have tried it in his early weeks of boredom. It had to be the stairs.
Whiteley was as wet with sweat as if he had been back in his shower. A charge through that mob did not seem the most inviting thing he had ever done. He circled restlessly round the room, looking for a weapon for his free hand. As he did so, he shouted hoarsely through the microphone, telling them that if they molested him they would all be shot.
In the end, he kicked the chair to pieces and selected the longest spar from its component parts; then he pulled back the desk and flung the door open.
A dozen faces turned to his; nearly all were bearded. No move was made to rush him, although a sussuration of welcome rose as he appeared. It seemed they were playing into his hands; they had crowded so much to one side of the circular hall that a way to the stairs was left free.
Whiteley took it. He splurged past the grey ghosts, who made no move to stop him, took the stairs four at a time, and commenced to hammer frantically on the big door with the butt of his automatic. The members of Project Tedium began to flow quietly up the stairs behind him.
‘Let me out of here!’ Whiteley bellowed. ‘Let me out!’
‘They’ll never hear you!’ It was Farthingdale. Now hardly distinguishable from the pack of similar faces round him. he stood on the top step but one. ‘And if they did hear, they wouldn’t come, Whiteley. This is all organised with the consent of the authorities. We have this little game just once a year; you’re honoured to be this year’s subject.
‘Remember Ollie Grant? He was your first, wasn’t he – the first person whose accidental death was convenient to you. You never killed for tangible, material gain, and you never repeated your methods – so you managed to get away with it. In fact, you made a mistake in only one sense – your last victim was a government agent.’
‘You can’t prove a thing,’ Whiteley yelled, ‘and neither can anyone else – because there’s nothing to prove, nothing more than everyone knows.’
Whiteley was still hammering wildly. ‘The authorities won’t allow this,’ he shouted. ‘They’ll fry every one of you!’
‘For what? An accident? You volunteered
for dangerous work, Whiteley; the form you signed included a waiver, a very inclusive one.’
‘That’s a lie,’ he shouted. ‘I never signed any such thing!’
Then, suddenly, he remembered – a form to be signed. The clerk had given him two copies, then shook his head and apologised as he went over to the files and pulled out what looked like another one. ‘This has to be signed in triplicate,’ he said. ‘Good thing I remembered – you’d have had to make another trip.’ It was one of those humid, sticky days. The clerk put a paper over the printed matter for Whiteley’s sweating hands to rest on so that the form wouldn’t be smeared.
‘I never volunteered to be murdered … that isn’t legal … the whole thing’s illegal …’
‘Who said anything about murder?’ laughed Farthingdale. ‘This is our annual catharsis. We’ve more power than you think. You see, even we get bored down here. We have to have a safety valve, to discharge emotion …’
‘It’s murder!’ Whiteley repeated.
‘The supreme purge of repressed feelings … you have had experience with that, Whiteley. So have others. Our annual subjects are very carefully selected – like you, Whiteley, they are people whom the law cannot touch, whatever it may suspect. They all sign waivers, to protect the government in the event of accidents – and I must admit that accidents have happened.’
A chorus of mocking agreement echoed him.
At last, Whiteley turned to face them; this, he saw, was going to be the end.
‘I’ll have the satisfaction of getting you, Farthingdale,’ he said. Baring his teeth, Whiteley raised the automatic, pointed it at Farthingdale’s heart, and fired.
Nothing happened.
He flicked another bullet into the chamber, squeezed again. Still nothing. And another. Nothing. And another and another …
There was a giggle in the chorus now.
‘Did you think we couldn’t stop a simple detonation?’ Farthingdale called. ‘You fool, we can block fission and fusion processes – that’s the ultimate goal of our training!’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 96