Little People

by Tom Holt

  Which, of course, he wasn’t, neither of them. Now, when the most unpopular person in the community suddenly finds himself the centre of a Parisian-style salon, with folks standing in line to canvass his views on everything from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to Elfland Wanderers’ chances in the League –

  (Elf football is stunningly boring, in any case; competition implies conflict, conflict is just a fancy euphemism for violence, violence is not the elven way, so football matches in Elfland consist of twenty-two elves carefully avoiding the ball while discussing the aforementioned Heisenberg uncertainty principle)

  – he didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that something was going on. As it happened, he was a rocket scientist, like ninety per cent of all elves. He began to suspect.

  As you can probably appreciate, the position of a foreman in a slave-labour camp tends to be a little awkward, with more grey areas than a black-and-white movie. Management (in this case, Daddy George, who never visited the place and whose only contact with it was via a bewilderingly complex labyrinth of rerouted e-mails) doesn’t trust him as far as he’s sneezable through a blocked nostril, Sweetie-Pie’s fellow-workers, needless to say, trusted him rather less than that. His authority was underwritten, at least in theory, by an unspecified number of unidentified human heavies who’d be summoned and sent in with baseball bats at the first sign of insurrection or civil disobedience. But we’d never seen them, because nobody had ever dared do anything that might cause them to be summoned, and there were certain practical objections, such as how they’d be supposed to see us if they ever were called in, that cast more than a little doubt on their very existence; and we were all morally certain that prominent among the leading sceptics was Sweetie-Pie himself. Not that any of us would’ve been prepared to call his bluff on this point, at least not before the escape project got under way; but Sweetie-Pie had to face the fact that if he was too heavy-handed in his approach he could easily find himself backed into a corner where he’d have no option but to send for the storm troopers, and if it turned out that there weren’t any after all, he’d find himself in a distinctly awkward position, probably on top of something hot and sharp.

  On the other hand, he couldn’t very well do nothing at all, just in case we really were planning a rebellion or a mass breakout. Somehow, therefore, he had to get across the idea that he was onto us and closing in like wolves around a small, broken-winded piglet, while at the same time finding a way to avoid committing himself on the subject of precisely what he was closing in with. It was a pretty tactical problem, and anybody even slightly less miserable would probably have relished the challenge.

  He resolved it, eventually, by the time-honoured method of cornering one small, timid, feeble-minded conspirator and telling her that she (and she alone) had a slim chance of avoiding the hideous fate in store for the rest of the conspirators, provided that she gave him all the relevant names, times and places by way of corroborative evidence. Not that any further evidence was needed, he had enough already to have the whole workforce clapped in irons, but it saved time and paperwork if there was just the one signed confession instead of a cellarful of affidavits and witness statements that the prosecution would have to spend days piecing together. Her choice, he pointed out; if she didn’t want to cooperate he could easily find someone else, or simply not bother, but if she wanted to help she’d have to do it straight away, since he was on a fairly tight schedule –

  Can’t really blame her, of course, the treacherous bloody cow. Ask yourself what you’d have done in her shoes, and if your answer isn’t exactly the same as she did, award yourself three bonus points for outstanding moral fibre, and five thousand anti-points for stupidity, survival-instinct deficiency and lying to yourself. In the event, I gather, she lasted about three times as long as I’d have done before breaking down sobbing for mercy – a full fifteen seconds, though three of those seconds were taken up with a loud sneeze, and I don’t think that should be allowed to count.

  The first we knew about it was some time later. We were in the stockroom, weighing the elves who were going out with the first escape party. I wasn’t one of them, it goes without saying. No, I’d come over all noble and self-sacrificing and given away my reserved space to some pathetic loser or other. Me all over. Quite.

  Don’t get the idea that we hadn’t given any thought to what might happen if we got busted; far from it. But one thing we were relying on, not unreasonably if you ask me, was the element of lack of surprise. Remember, in our terms the factory was vast, the size of a small country, and all the rooms were enormous. This meant, we figured, that sneaking up on us without us seeing the bogeys coming a long way off was pretty much out of the question. Also, talking about seeing people, humans couldn’t see us, unless Daddy George had come up with another of his scientific marvels. Consequently, if they were coming to get us, we figured we’d have plenty of time to abandon whatever we were doing and run like blazes for the sort of cover in which it’s very difficult indeed for a full-size human to detect and evict a tiny invisible elf.

  Not much wrong with that line of reasoning, though I do say it myself, and that’s probably why Sweetie-Pie didn’t try the direct approach (that and a distinct lack of human security guards, if you ask me). Instead - well, you have to give him credit for a little genuine ingenuity, because his solution was pretty damned smart.

  One minute we were standing there watching the balance swaying gently towards equilibrium, with an elf on one side and a saucerload of miscellaneous stationery on the other. The next, the air suddenly grew unnervingly thick, and it started monsooning shiny metallic paint, great splodgy dollops of the stuff falling out of the air and flooding us, like incie-wincie spiders when the rain set in. Once the paint hit you, that was it; you went out like a light. In my case, I vaguely remember thinking, So this is what it’s like to get rained on by a cloud with a silver lining. Fortunately, before I could take that theme any further, I blacked out.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I don’t think I was out for very long; just long enough for the paint to have dried into that gooey-sticky state where it’s at its most objectionable. I was still on the stockroom floor, and my fellow conspirators were all around me as I woke up, lying where they’d dropped – like the closing moments of a Tarentino film set in Toytown.

  Clever old Sweetie-Pie. He’d sprayed paint all over us through the sprinkler system. It struck me as a smart effort at the time, but it was only much later that I found out just how clever the strategy was.

  When I came round and remembered what had happened, I immediately assumed – I think we all did – that the purpose behind the paint job was to make us all visible, so that the human security thugs would be able to see and arrest us. This wasn’t even remotely the case – partly because the paint didn’t make us even the tiniest bit visible (as far as humans were concerned, any paint that hit an elf vanished instantly; I guess that with a computer linked to a bunch of CCTV cameras, you could’ve used the patterns caused by disappearances of paint blobs to chart where we were when the sprinklers started up, but that wouldn’t have been any practical help, since there was plenty of time to move a yard or so after the paint landed and before we blacked out) and partly because there weren’t actually any guards to see us even if the paint thing had worked. The simple fact of the matter was that we hadn’t been caught at all, but that Sweetie-Pie had cunningly tricked us into believing we’d been caught – just as good as the real thing, and in many respects even better. If you’re convinced you haven’t got a hope in hell of escaping, you don’t bother trying. That was the security policy on which the whole enterprise was based – typical Daddy George: why spend money when you can cheat?

  But of course, we didn’t know . . . And while we were still twitching and groaning and rubbing our eyes and feeling - well, pretty much the way I always feel after I’ve just woken up, but I’m the archetypal Not A Morning Person – there was Sweetie-Pie, stomping up and d
own between the slumped carcases and shouting in the very finest traditions of law enforcement through the ages; and the gist of what he was shouting was, You’re nicked.

  With hindsight, it’s worth considering the situation from his point of view. He’d just unmasked a conspiracy, but he still didn’t know what we’d all been conspiring to do (except in the most general terms; I don’t suppose he thought we were all skulking furtively about in order to plan his surprise birthday party) and as for what he was supposed to do with us next, I’m fairly sure he didn’t have a clue. Having us all savagely executed wasn’t remotely feasible, but if he didn’t have us savagely executed, that’d be as good as admitting his severe lack of resources. On balance, therefore, I think he did the only thing he could do, in the circumstances.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘On your feet. Line up. Come on, let’s be having you.’

  We did as we were told, albeit slowly and awkwardly, thanks to the semi-plastic paint we were all wearing. Nobody even considered running away. Why bother? They’d only be caught and dragged back again, and in the meanwhile they could fall over and bruise their knees.

  ‘OK,’ said Sweetie-Pie, facing the rows of dejected elves like a sergeant major. ‘This conspiracy of yours. How do I go about joining?’

  Like I said, the only thing he could do: he couldn’t hold us, he couldn’t let us go, and once we realised this it was a fair bet that he’d be severely dealt with, if not by us then by Daddy George, for letting us escape. It took him a while to get this across to the more suspicious members of the conspiracy, a faction that made up about a hundred per cent of the membership; but once we’d got our heads around it, I have to admit that it made pretty good sense. We were all sitting a bit upset about the nasty shock, of course, not to mention the silver paint, but in the end we had to acknowledge that it was about the only method open to him of getting our undivided attention.

  That was when it started to get depressing.

  We explained our plan to Sweetie-Pie. He listened carefully, nodding from time to time to show he was paying attention, a properly serious expression smeared on his face like peanut butter on a slice of toast. When we’d finished, he nodded.

  ‘You’re out of your skulls,’ he said.

  Understandably, I pressed him for details.

  ‘Won’t work,’ he replied, ‘simple as that. One, the dampening field goes all the way round. You try and get out in a shoebox, you’ll wake up dead. If you’re lucky,’ he added, with a hint of doleful schadenfreude. ‘When you tried to get out the door – yes, of course, I know about that, what do you think I do all day, knit baby clothes? – when you tried the door, all you got was the minimum setting, ’cos He knows there’s always some clever bugger who’ll try and get out, and He doesn’t want to kill the whole bloody workforce. Hard enough to meet the delivery dates with all of you alive; if He was to let you go frying yourselves all over the place, there’d never be any work done. But the rest of the field, He’s got the power cranked up to max. There’d be a little blue spark, and that’d be you.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘And another thing,’ Sweetie-Pie went on, in the extra-mournful voice he used when pointing out really crass errors. ‘It’s all very well you morons going around weighing each and making up the weight with paper clips and stuff, but didn’t it ever occur to you that if you do that, the boxes are going to rattle like buggery? You ever heard of a shoebox that rattled?’

  He had a point. It was a pity he insisted on shoving that point right up our self-confidence, but I guess he had the right.

  ‘And,’ he continued, ‘that’s not the worst of it, either.’ He shook his head. ‘The boss, see. He doesn’t want his customers putting on their brand new shoes and finding ’em full of invisible elves. Could give someone a nasty jolt, that. So He’s got all sorts of scanning gear out there in the loading bay, and if there’s an elf in the box, it sets off this alarm—’

  ‘My god,’ I said, awed. ‘Elf detectors.’

  ‘Never used ’em, mind,’ Sweetie-Pie pointed out. ‘Never had to. I mean, you lot are a pretty sad bunch, but at least you aren’t dumb enough to think you could get out of here. Or at least,’ he added, ‘up till now you haven’t been. It only takes one smartarse to spoil everything.

  Meaning me, naturally. ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘So why were you in such a hurry to join us?’

  He shrugged. ‘Thought you’d actually found a way that’d work,’ he said. ‘Else, why’s everybody suddenly got escape fever? ’Course, I was completely wrong. Haven’t got a clue, the lot of you.’

  My fellow conspirators were starting to look at me with less than friendly expressions on their little faces. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘if you know so much about it, what would you suggest?’

  ‘Forget it,’ he answered, with a sigh. ‘Can’t be done, don’t go breaking your heart over it. Oh, and before someone makes a fool of himself suggesting it, no, you can’t switch off the field from inside the building, and you can’t jam it or sabotage it either. All the controls and stuff are in a junction box on the north outside wall.’

  There was a lot more of this sort of thing, all of it described with such miserable glee that you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Sweetie-Pie’s real motive for joining up was to persuade us to forget about the whole thing and resign ourselves to the prospect of a life in the factory. But it wasn’t like that, I’m sure. You couldn’t have faked that triumphant told-you-so disillusionment in his voice. Besides, a few straightforward tests proved well enough that what he’d told us wasn’t any kind of disinformation, it was the plain truth. Brand new form of counter-espionage: you infiltrate the enemy and tell him all your most closely guarded military secrets, whereupon he realises for the first time just how profoundly outmatched he is, and gives up. Not a bad idea, at that.

  ‘What about up?’ I remember suggesting, rather desperately, during one of our rather tragic brainstorming sessions. ‘Or are you going to tell me he’s booby-trapped the roof as well?’

  ‘One of the first things He did,’ Sweetie-Pie replied. ‘On account of, it’s exactly the sort of thing He’d expect you lot to try. So yes, the roof’s wired to buggery, and so’s the floor, and the drains. And whatever you do, don’t try crawling out through the ventilator shafts. He’s got stuff hidden in there’d give you screaming bloody nightmares just thinking about it.’

  I sighed. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘what about overloading this dampening field thing? If enough of us were to try getting through a door at the same time—’

  ‘You’d be vaporised,’ Sweetie-Pie replied, with an unwholesome glint in his eye that suggested that this might not be a bad thing, especially if one of the unfortunate souls reduced to his component atoms happened to be me. ‘Bloody clever system – the more load you put on it, the higher the setting it adjusts itself to. I s’pose you might just overload it if you all tried leaving at once, but that’d sort of defeat the object of the exercise.’

  ‘We could blast a hole in the wall,’ put in Spike. (You remember Spike: small, ingenious female elf with an attitude problem, figured out how to do the weighing stuff.) ‘I’ve been thinking about that, actually. That stuff they make the polycarbonate trainer soles from, I reckon that with a bit of time and some improvised lab equipment, I could get nitrocellulose out of that. Explosive,’ she explained. ‘We could blow the east wall out, where the masonry’s not as thick as in the rest of the building. Don’t tell me this dampening field’d still work if we took the wall away.’

  Sweetie-Pie nodded gravely. ‘You could do that,’ he said. ‘You could blow up a wall, no problem. Only trouble is, if you do that you’ll set off the explosive charges stashed in the wall cavities, just in case someone ever find out about this place and he needs to get rid of the evidence in a tearing hurry. Nice idea, but I wouldn’t try it if I were you.’

  You can tell how much Sweetie-Pie’s thoroughly depressing revelations had got to us from the fact that Spike didn’t ev
en argue; she just shrugged, muttered, ‘Oh, screw that, then,’ and went back to doodling symbolic logic equations on the concrete floor with a rusty nail. Someone told me later that her doodling was a breathtaking insight, a melting-down and recasting of the most basic conventions of mathematics that would finally allow Fermat’s Last Theorem to be fully evaluated in a simple expression that could be easily understood even by a Californian high-school teacher. Presumably that meant she’d done something clever, but don’t ask me what. I’m only a double Nobel laureate, for crying out loud.

  ‘Oh well,’ someone said (can’t remember who; some elf or other), ‘that’s that, then. We stay here and rot. Well, you can’t have everything, I suppose.’

  Nobody said anything, and the meeting decomposed. (‘Broke up’ is too vigorous a term to describe the aimless way they all drifted off, shoulders drooping, heads lolling off necks, little heels dragging, like a bunch of Action Man dolls who’ve just learned that the ceasefire is now official.) The general unspoken consensus seemed to be that the great escape was off, postponed indefinitely because of lack of interest. I found this extremely annoying.

  – All right, yes: I’d ended up here because I got caught, not because I’d actually carried through on my early resolve to rescue all the prisoners and bring ’em back alive to the promised land, like Rambo Moses. But it was that initial spurt of heroism (heroic as two short planks, me) that started off the landslip in my fortunes that ended up with me getting my collar felt, so in a sense I was there because of them, I had put myself in harm’s way for their sakes, and to have them give it up as a bad job simply because escape was impossible and resistance was futile struck me as gormless cowardice of the worst possible sort. I’d have turned on my heel and stormed out in a huff if it hadn’t been for the containment field and the booby-traps.