by Tom Holt
Ah well, I thought; it was probably the same for Martin Luther and Lenin and Peter Tatchell; unless you’ve got a nerve like a ship’s hawser and skin thick enough to withstand a direct hit from a wire-guided missile, you aren’t likely to get far founding Movements. Eventually I persuaded them to have a go at recruiting the next lot down the line. It was several weeks before anyone said anything (apart from piss off, you noisy bugger); then one day, quite suddenly, the thin gormlesslooking character who stood next to me on the line – I have no idea what his name was – happened to mention that Left Shoes were with us, Left-Shoe Folds were about half-and-half, and Right Shoes were thinking about it. A terrible beauty was born.
Of course, I hadn’t been idle all this time. I’d been banging away fornlornly about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to the delivery crews who brought us the sheets of tissue paper, and seven out of ten of them were pledged to the cause, albeit with a high level of resigned pessimism; life, they reckoned, was all right but highly overrated, liberty was a nice idea but it’d probably never catch on, and the pursuit of happiness as practised by humans was probably a blood sport. Still, they reckoned, they had nothing better to do, and the worst that could happen was that we’d all be found out, rounded up and horribly tortured to death, so yeah, why not?
From that point on, the movement spread like butter straight from the fridge, until the day came when Packing was a hundred per cent solid, Cutting was right behind us (cowering), Stitching was prepared to give us all the moral support we could use so long as they didn’t have to get involved, and the Stockroom was practically singing the ‘Marseillaise’, albeit quietly under its breath. Admittedly, I got the distinct impression that most of my support was conditional on the whole project fizzling out within a month or so with nothing to show for it, but I tried not to let that bother me. They’d all be smirking on the other side of their faces when I led them forth into the Promised Land, even if it did turn out to be the Threatened Land by the time we actually got there.
That was an aspect of the matter that did worry me, I confess. Just suppose we did somehow contrive to get a whole load of elves out of the factory and into the world – what the hell were we supposed to do then, in an environment in which everything larger than a young earwig would have to be regarded as a dangerous predator? The idea, if you could call it that, was that we’d find an out-of-the-way corner somewhere, settle down, build an itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny settlement and grow our own food – mustard and cress, probably, and possibly dwarf spinach once we’d achieved the level of technological skill needed to build elf-sized chainsaws to harvest it with. In all honesty, since none of us really believed we’d make it that far, we didn’t dwell on the subject. The certainty of failure can be a great comfort, sometimes.
With all the support I could handle without succumbing to terminal depression, I was ready to initiate Phase One. This bit was going to be crucial, and for a very long time I couldn’t figure out how to go about it. I needed to weigh (a) an elf (b) a left-hand shoe.
Ah, you dirty great big bastards, you don’t know how lucky you are. You want to weigh something – piece of cake: just totter into the kitchen and drag out the trusty Salter, or lug your unseemly bulk up the stairs and fire up the bathroom scales. So easy. Nothing to it.
It’s all very different when you’re small, and the evil overlord who’s using you as slave labour hasn’t seen fit to equip your factory with any kind of weight-measuring device. You have to improvise; tricky enough at the best of times when you’re six inches tall, virtually impossible when you have no off-duty time to speak of and nothing much to improvise with. In fact, the escape project would’ve foundered there and then, if it hadn’t been for Spike.
I first came across Spike during my time in the stockroom. Maybe I should point out that Spike wasn’t her name, or if it was, it was only because of a monstrous coincidence of the kind that ought to be outlawed in all civilised nations because of the risk of extreme bewilderment. Spike was the name I attributed to her in the back of my mind, because she had the pointedest ears ever – twin stilettos sprouting upwards like the first crocus shoots of spring, the sort of thing you could envisage Count Vlad Dracul impaling his least favourite people on. Spike was short even by our standards, not much more than five and a half inches, and built like Sumo Barbie or My Little Bouncer, and her best friend (if she had one, which she didn’t) couldn’t have described her as cheerful; but she had a gift for engineering design that was outstanding even among the scientifically-inclined elves. Imagine a female Isambard Kingdom Brunel who’s shrunk in the wash and then been compressed under a pile of very heavy weights, and you’ll get the idea.
‘Problem,’ said Spike, ‘call that a problem?’ According to Spike, we wouldn’t recognise a problem if it bit us on the nose. All we had to do in order to ascertain the weight of an elf, a shoe or any bloody thing was to construct a simple balance – two plastic coffee cups, a ruler and some string, poised over a makeshift fulcrum, such as the top ridge of a Sellotape dispenser – and put the thing we wanted to weigh in one side and the requisite number of items of known weight needed to achieve equilibrium in the other. Easy peasy.
Yes, we argued, but. It was all very well to chatter blithely about multiple items of known weight, but how were we supposed to go about knowing the weight of the multiple items without a set of scales to weigh them with?
Spike wasn’t impressed with this line of argument.
All we needed, she said, was one thing whose weight we knew; everything else we could calculate, with a bit of hard work and application. Just one thing, and everything else would follow.
First, we retorted, catch your thing. Spike’s response to that was distinctly crude, so we set up a subcommittee; and after a good deal of furtive searching, we struck gold, in the form of a packet of chocolate digestives.
They were old chocolate digestives; veteran bordering on vintage. My guess was that they’d been stashed away by one of the previous (human) occupants of the building so as to avoid having to share them with his or her voracious colleagues come morning-coffee time, and for some reason never retrieved. The important thing was that on the cellophane wrapper were the words net weight 454g.
Those choccy bickies were our Rosetta stone. The packet contained thirty biscuits. Four hundred and fifty-four divided by thirty is (as any elf will tell you in the time it takes to pick your nose) fifteen point one three recurring, so one biscuit weighed fifteen grammes, close enough for jazz, allowing for crumbs and absorption of atmospheric moisture. Next step was to lug one biscuit across the stockroom floor into the office, where we’d set up our improvised scales, hoist it into the plastic cup and load the other cup with paper clips until the two cups balanced. It took twenty-nine paper clips to level up one biscuit; therefore, one paper clip weighed 0.51724137931 grammes, or half a gramme for ready money. (Not that the elves were satisfied with that kind of thinking. Oh no. If it didn’t have ten digits after the decimal point, they wouldn’t sully their minds with it. It may be worth pointing out that I got very, very tired of elves during this phase of the operation.)
Of course, you can’t get an elf in a plastic cup, let alone a shoe; so we had to start from scratch and build a whole new, bigger set of scales before we could go any further. In the end we had to settle on shoebox lids, which turned the enterprise into labour-intensive heavy engineering and held up progress for over a fortnight. Even after we’d finished the thing, we were stymied by the discovery that we simply didn’t have enough paper clips to counterbalance a left-hand moccasin, which meant we had to fool around weighing the things we did have – run-out biros, eyelets, shoelaces, reels of cotton – in terms of paper clips on the little scales before we were in a position to go back and rebuild the big scales (which we’d had to dismantle in the interests of security) and do the shoe. Since all these things had to be done during the part of the morning break when the supervisors (who weren’t in on the plot, needless to say) wer
e off writing up their dockets or having a wee, you can probably see why it too such a very long time.
But, like a touring glacier or a Virgin Atlantic jumbo, we got there in the end, which means that I’m uniquely qualified to tell you that one standard size 11 gentleman’s left light-tan moccasin weighs the same as 672.5568 paper clips (or three duff biros, nine eyelets, one shoelace, three reels of white hand-sewing nylon thread and 226 paper clips); or (as you’ll have figured out already, no doubt) 347.873 grammes; or, rather more relevantly as far as we were concerned, 1.391 average-sized male elves, or one male elf and fifty paper clips, give or take a tenth of a paper clip.
Ah. Now you’re beginning to grasp the essence of my plan. The idea was quite simple, like all those wonderful ideas that seem so good at the time. My nasty experience with the doorway suggested to me that there was some kind of field, scientific or magical or what the hell you care to call it, that stopped elves from leaving the building – you’ll remember that when I tried to cross the threshold I went out like a light, fell down and nutted myself, suffering a nasty bump on the head and an even nastier dent in my self-esteem. At first, this seemed to me to be an insoluble hindrance to the whole escape project, especially when I thought back to all the useful stuff I’d had downloaded into my mind the first time I crossed the line into Elfland and was given the inside story of how Daddy George trapped my real father. I pieced it all together into a patchwork of factlings, checked out the basic science with a dozen or so more than usually eggheaded elves, and reached the conclusion that Daddy George had contrived a barrier that effectively stripped elves of all the useful attributes they brought with them from the other side (as a result of the time/space thing I muddled you to sleep with earlier in this story) and cut them down to the extremely small size we were all forced to endure inside the factory. How this barrier worked, we never could work out – we guessed it had something to do with the heavy dose of raw voltage that had shrunk me and all the rest of them at one time or another – but one thing we were able to do (something much more useful, in context) was calculate to within the nearest five hundred volts how much power it would take to run that kind of field all the way round a whopping great factory.
I can’t remember the actual figures off the top of my head, but the gist of it was: a lot. A whole lot. A very large, chunky whole lot indeed. Here was where my expert knowledge of Daddy George came in so very useful; because electricity, as you’ve probably found out at some point in your life, costs money, and the more you use, the more money you have to spend. And if there was one thing Daddy George hated doing, it was spending money.
So, I argued, the chances were that the field didn’t actually extend the whole way round the building; Daddy George, crown prince of cheapskates, would only have booby-trapped the parts of the building through which elves might reasonably be expected to try and go. Doors, windows, skylights, maybe even the drains; but I was prepared to bet that that was probably the full extent of his defences. Which was where my plan slotted in.
You’ll remember me telling you that once the shoes had been boxed and the lids had been fitted, the shoe-replete box trundled on down the conveyor and disappeared down a chute. I sent a scouting party to investigate this, and they reported back that this account was substantially correct. The belt, they said, vanished into a hole in the wall; a hole, moreover, curtained with a trailing fringe of rubber strips (like an airport carousel, though they didn’t make the comparison, never having heard of such things) that brushed all round the box before it disappeared, with the obvious objective of dislodging any recklessly brave elf who fancied riding a shoebox to freedom.
That rang very true indeed; it was just like Daddy George to devise a system whereby a few strips of old rubber mat did the same job as a fiendishly expensive hi-tech force field. In my mind’s eye I could practically see him grinning all over his face and rubbing his hands together at the thought of all the money he’d be saving that way.
Fine so far; the idea was basically so sound that no elf had even tried to get out that way, thereby proving Daddy George’s point. Well, then; if his rubber-strip idea worked so wonderfully well, was it likely that he’d waste good money fitting the loading bay gates with a costly and superfluous elf-zapper unit? Catch him doing that? No way.
But: supposing that instead of elves clinging to the tops of the boxes and getting duly swatted by the rubber strips, we had elves riding inside the boxes, like snails in shells or the crews of so many cardboard Panzers? All they’d have to do would be to bide still and quiet inside their cartons until they were sure they’d been loaded off the belt and into the lorries, and the lorries had driven through the factory gates and outside the compound. Then all they’d have to do would be to climb out and wait patiently until the lorry got to where it was going and the driver rolled up the tailgate whereupon they could sneak invisibly past him, hurl themselves off the lorry and run like buggery for the nearest safe cover. After that, of course, they’d be on their own, but that was one threadbare and fraying rope bridge across a vertiginous sheer-sided canyon that we could cross when we came to it.
Next problem: how to get the elf into the box. Packing was the obvious place to do it; instead of a shoe, insert an elf. It’d have to be the left shoe, of course, because the left shoe went in first, with a fold of tissue paper to cover it and then the right shoe and its cover. Substitute an elf for the left shoe and he’d be out of sight if the box lid happened to slide off after it’d gone through the chute, or if some nosy scumbag of a human lifted the lid to inspect the contents.
The weight issue: now, maybe I was being paranoid about this aspect, but I could foresee problems if we just did a straight swap. Because elves weigh less than shoes, the packed boxes would come up light – not enough, perhaps to notice in the case of a single box, but we weren’t contemplating single boxes, we were talking about a whole lorryload of them. None of us had a clue how many boxes went into each lorry, naturally enough (since none of us had ever been in the loading bay, or seen inside the cargo compartment of a shoe lorry), but say each lorryload comprised a thousand boxes. With a weight shortfall of something like 25 grammes per box, that made for a differential of 25 kilos – half a hundredweight – per fully-laden consignment. Would anybody notice a variation of that order? We didn’t have the faintest idea, but it seemed reasonable to assume that if we turned a blind eye to it, chances were that someone would indeed notice and it’d be the factor that got us all found out and caught. Better, I figured, to take the extra time and effort, and get it as near gramme-perfect as we possibly could.
(Bear in mind also that the calculations so lovingly reproduced above posited an average-sized elf of standard sectional density. You and I both know that where individuals are concerned, the average is pretty well useless; build up a statistical definition of an average person and I’ll bet you good money that half your sample will be shorter and lighter than the mythical Mr Average, while the other half will be taller and heavier. Weigh each individual elf, male and female, skeletally thin and grossly overweight, and make up the deviation from the norm with paper clips, packets of staples, typewriter rubbers and shagged-out pencil sharpeners. The easiest and quickest way to do the job is properly, because then you won’t have to do it all over again. And so forth.)
All done in a sort of dream, needless to say, because the only way to rationalise this whole experience – being only six inches tall and trapped for life in a shoe factory with a whole lot of snotty elves – was to keep telling myself that really it was all just a dream (a thoroughly unpleasant dream, and that’s the very last time I eat Canadian cheddar as a bedtime snack), that what seemed like months in the factory was just a few minutes of feverish REM sleep, and that any minute now I’d wake up and forget the whole thing by the time I’d pasted my toothbrush. As an explanation it made much more sense than the alternative – Occam’s razor, and all that jazz - so, if it was all just a nightmare, it didn’t actually matter what I did o
r what happened to me. If the scheme failed, so what? If I got caught and horribly tortured, it’d only be dream pain, and when I woke up I wouldn’t be mutilated and crippled for life. Besides, it’d probably work, because in a dream the laws of physics are about as binding as speed limits to a cabinet minister. Nothing to worry about. All in the mind. If it’s all going to be wiped from your memory as soon as you open your eyes, can it truly be said to have happened, existentially speaking?
All in all, it was going remarkably smoothly, apart from the obstacles and the disasters; too smoothly, of course. It’s fair to say that the only well-oiled machines you’re likely to encounter as you stroll through life are guillotines and out-of-control chainsaws falling on you out of tall trees.
Meet Sweetie-Pie. I don’t for one moment believe that that was his real name – well, even his real name wasn’t his real name, because his real name would’ve been something elvish on the other side of the line; suffice it to say that the only place in any dimension or continuum where Sweetie-Pie was called that was probably the inside of my head. Doesn’t matter in the slightest.
Sweetie-Pie was foreman of the cutting room, and I called him Sweetie-Pie because, out of the several thousand miserable, unpleasant, unlovely bastard elves crowded together under our communal roof, he was beyond challenge or question the worst. I didn’t like him much, and neither did anyone else.
Obviously, conscripting him into the escape committee was about as sensible as buying prime time advertising on FM radio, so we didn’t; we made a point of keeping him well away from anywhere we happened to be when we were doing escape stuff. In retrospect, of course, that was our fundamental mistake. In order to distract his attention, you see, we sent elves to engage him in conversation, tell him miserable stories (jokes just weren’t in fashion in the factory), show him faded and crumpled postcards of large hotels in Barcelona that we’d excavated from long-forgotten desk drawers, and generally make him feel loved and wanted.