“Who was carrying the gun—a Makkee?”
“A what?”
He hadn’t heard of the Makkees. I said “We’d better swap stories. You start.”
His story was simple. He was staying with friends in Exeter. “Tom Whitaker and his wife, Anne. Known ‘em for years. Few days back we were in their lounge watching TV—some song and dance show. The screen went blank white. Then faded. Then became very bright. And so on. The picture had gone altogether, but this queer brightness trouble increased to a pitch you wouldn’t credit—”
“I would,” I interrupted. “I saw it too. You didn’t raise your hand?”
“Of course not. I was baffled. I turned to Tom, saying, ‘What kind of gag is, this?’ And there he and Anne were sitting with their arms raised like a couple of kids in a schoolroom. They had a glazed look in their eyes.”
“Hypnotized,” I said.
“So I gathered. I couldn’t get any sense out of them after that. They wouldn’t talk to me. Tom visaphoned for the police. I got the hell out of it and headed back for London in my car. At least, I set the buttons that should have taken the car to London. A couple of miles from Honiton the car suddenly developed a mind of its own and wheeled back in a semicircle towards Dartmoor. I tried to stop it. The manual controls wouldn’t work. I tried to jump out, but somehow the doors had locked themselves. Even the windows wouldn’t wind down. The car seemed to be under some kind of remote control. I still don’t get it.”
“Neither do I. But the Makkees are behind it. Seems machines do tricks for them like monkeys in a circus. But go on.”
“Not much more to it. The car headed across the moor straight for the jail. I noticed three or four other cars following me a mile or so behind. Maybe they were other tumbrels conveying trapped victims here. Didn’t have a chance to find out. Soon as my car rolled through the main gate, a couple of men ran alongside. The car stopped for them, all right, and the doors opened for them, too.”
“Did they look hypnotized?”
“Yes, they had that same dopey look. I asked them what the hell, and all that. One ignored me, and the other jammed a needle-gun against my spine and marched me in here. Haven’t been outside since. We get no exercise.”
“But they come and feed you?”
“Do they heck! Nobody comes. The bread comes through the chute, the water comes through the faucet. And that’s all there is. Punishment diet.”
“Were the men in any sort of uniform?”
“No, just business suits. They looked like a couple of civil servants.”
“Maybe they were,” I said. “Hypnotized stooges from Whitehall, sent by the Makkees when they took over. The little devils sure had it planned out. You seen any of ‘em-skinny little yellow men?”
“No. I’ve seen nobody except the two men I mentioned and another two fish-eyed stretcher-bearers who dumped you in here and never came back. There must be other prisoners here. But the field of view beyond that door grill is very narrow and I’ve never seen anyone cross it.”
I looked. He was right. The door was thick. The metal grill was clamped over this side of the small aperture, and a pane of clearplast was fitted at the far side. I could just make out another cell door, opposite but distant.
“I’ve shouted myself hoarse through it,” said the young man. “If anyone heard, no one cared.”
“No one heard. Clearplast is soundproof. What’s your name?”
“Butler—Peter Butler. What’s yours?”
I cleared my throat. “My name is Charles Wallace Magellan, which sounds like the kind of name that ought to mean something…”
It made a nice little story. Butler was more credulous than I—he didn’t call me a liar. He was intrigued by my description of Sarah Masters.
“Zounds, if she’s really like that what a model she’d make!”
“Model?”
“I’m a painter, of sorts. Mostly for my own amusement.”
“Oh. Don’t happen to have a palette knife on you?”
“Good lord, no. Why?”
“If I had a long thin blade I could beat that type of door lock. Pop showed me how. Darned if I’m going to sit here on my hams living on bread and water while the Makkees just help themselves to our world and all that’s in it. I might be able to work the trick with a large penknife.”
I looked at Butler hopefully.
“Sorry, Charles.”
“Pity. Perhaps we can make a knife out of something.”
I began to look around.
Peter Butler said, “You’re wasting your time. This room’s as bare as the Venus de Milo.”
He was right again. Foxed, I began hauling at the two-tiered bedframe.
“What now?” asked Butler curiously.
“Let’s get this under the window, climb up and take a look outside.”
“But that thing isn’t tall enough.”
“Were you a born defeatist, Pete, or did college do that to you?”
He looked hurt, then grim. He flung himself angrily at the bed and dragged it under the window. I rolled up both paillasses, piled one on top of the other on the upper shelf. Then, like a Chinese acrobat, I mounted the shaky heap. On tiptoe, I could just touch the window ledge with extended fingers. With a little jump, I hooked my fingers over it, hauled myself up to peep out through the inevitable clearplast.
We were several floors up and I had a fair view of the prison yard and the moorland stretching beyond to the horizon. There wasn’t a soul in sight. My mind remained as empty as the landscape. I could see no way of escape via the window; it was too small even for me to wriggle through, and anyhow clearplast was unsmashable.
I hopped down, and chewed some more bread thoughtfully. In my time I had materialized Richard the Lionheart, complete with his crusader’s sword. Yet now I couldn’t materialize even one little knife.
Pete got tired of watching me chew things over physically and mentally. He began to peer restlessly through the door grill.
“Say,” he said, presently, “I think there’s someone in that other cell. I could swear I saw a face looking out. But it’s hard to see at this distance.”
I took a look. The lighting was very poor inside the prison. The other door was way off, and there was a hindering reflection from the clearplast. A hawk would have had trouble trying to descry another hawk beyond that far window. I looked hard and long, and decided there was a vague shape moving there.
“Yes, a fellow-prisoner,” I said. “Maybe more than one. Reckon there must be quite a few here now. That Makkee, Drahk, said something about the western concentration center. Obviously, Dartmoor Prison is it. All the other folk who couldn’t be hypnotized, and therefore might give trouble, will be herded in here. Somehow we’ve got to contact them.”
“I was never much good at telepathy,” said Butler.
I searched my empty pockets again. Nothing, just nothing, not even pen or pencil. Poor fool, I’d so wanted to make a good impression on Sarah Masters that I’d changed into my best Savile Row suit to keep the appointment with her. I hadn’t stopped to transfer any of the knickknacks which usually cluttered my pockets.
Then I noticed the starched white handkerchief I’d so carefully arranged, three corners showing, in my breast pocket to look my sartorial best. It was a bit crumpled now, but still pretty clean. I opened it out. Its square was about the same size as the door grill and that gave me the idea.
I hung the handkerchief over the grill, raised it, dropped it, raised it again, as though it was a window blind gone mad.
Pete thought it was I who’d gone mad. He looked at me strangely.
I explained, “I’m trying semaphore. The other guy mightn’t be able to distinguish my rosy cheeks in this gloom, but he should be able to see this white handkerchief.”
“Well done, old man!” Butler applauded as though I’d just hit up a century at cricket.
The man in the other cell was smarter than Pete. He got the idea at once, and responded. His
handkerchief wasn’t as clean as mine, but it was visible. We flapped at each other for a bit, and then I got down to serious work.
For my fake mind-reading acts I’d memorized several codes, including the near-forgotten Morse code; my accomplice and I had often found it useful.
I let the handkerchief hang down over the grill for three seconds. That meant a dash. A mere dip and snatch up meant a dot. I signaled ARE YOU ALONE and waited, with incredible optimism, for an answer.
The other fellow signaled back only aimlessly. He didn’t know the Morse code. Neither did Pete. He’d never heard of it.
“What do they teach you at college these days?” I growled, and attacked the last of the loaf Savagely. “Only one thing for it now. If we’re going to get anywhere, I’ve got to teach that other guy the code first.”
And I did it. I kept sending a dot immediately followed by a dash until at last the other man divined that I wished it repeated back to me. Then I proceeded to send b. After some hesitation, my wondering pupil copied me.
Somewhere about h he cottoned on to the fact that I was going through the alphabet, and flapped a, which luckily he remembered, repeatedly as a sign that he wanted to go back to the beginning. I complied.
Obviously this time he or a companion was noting down the dot-dash combination for each letter, for there was a pause after z and then I received my first slow, shaky message, “Who are you?”
I told him, even more slowly, for I knew he’d have to search his list to identify each letter.
I learned he was Gerald Cross, and he’d been there two days in company with another man named Watts. They were wondering why everyone had gone crazy, what it was all about; they were eager for news.
Instead of satisfying them, I signaled, “Do you have a knife of any kind?”
Watts—who turned out to be a gardener—had a sizable clasp knife. I feared that the blade would be too-thick for my purpose. Still, I passed instructions for its application in springing the lock on their door, for the odds were that the lock was of the standard type like ours. As an incentive, I told them I’d tell them the whole story, verbally, as soon as we could meet up.
I didn’t get far with the instructions. It was a dull day and evening came early. The light became too poor to make out signals and no artificial lights came on in the prison.
I was glad to rest my tired arms, anyhow. Fatigue and frustration made me irritable. When Pete began wondering audibly what the Makkees would do with us, I snapped, “You should be asking what we’ll do with them.”
He shut up, and we went to bed in silence. In the darkness a loaf thumped through the chute. Did that prove that there was at least one button-pressing warden on duty? More likely, the food supply was entirely automatic.
I slept badly. Despite my crushing remark to Pete, I spent half my waking hours wondering what the Makkees would do with us. The other half I wondered about Sarah. What was she doing now? I presumed she had already confiscated my house. Maybe at this moment she was going curiously through my boxes of tricks, my gadgets to make tables float and luminous trumpets speak. I writhed at the idea of her reading my notebooks and diaries. Some of my frauds were pretty mean.
Yet, who was she to condemn me? We were two of a kind. We’d both taken our revenge on society by tricking it. and using it.
The difference was that she was still doing it, and on a far greater scale than I’d attempted to do. Despite my contempt for society, I could only ally myself with it against the far more poisonous Makkees.
And she had ranged herself on the other side.
But my thoughts weren’t confined to ethics. The old Adam wouldn’t stay out of it. I tossed around restlessly on the straw bag. The bedframe squeaked and creaked. In the end, I had to accept it; on the physical level, anyhow, I’d fallen in love with her. I ached to see her again, and vowed I would, even if I had to fight my way back to London alone.
Chapter 3
When Pete awakened me, it was morning.
“Our friends across the way are trying to attract your attention. Why didn’t you teach me the code?”
I snorted. “If you had any nous at all, you’d have picked it up at the same time.”
He was chagrined. I pushed him aside and resumed signaling. This time we really got places. About an hour later I saw with delight that other door swing open. Two men emerged. Very soon, a face was peering through our grill. It was as round as the grill was square, a beaming full moon of a face. Cross contradicted his name; he was always good-humored.
The door remained a barrier to verbal conversation. Signs and attempted lip reading didn’t get us far. Preposterously, we had to fall back on the flapping handkerchiefs, although only a few inches apart. But not for long. Cross quickly absorbed the technique of tackling the lock from outside. Watts helped him.
They got our door open.
“Come on in,” I whispered. “That’s it—shut the door.”
With the exception of Watts, we all tried to start talking at once. Unlike the beefy and alert Cross, Watts was slight, slow of speech and thought. Both men were in a bar when the Makkees’ TV transmission came over. Both were unaffected by it, were hounded by their neighbors and tried to escape by car. Their cars took them captive, brought them here.
I deduced there was no single common quality of character or mental strength which gave us immunity against hypnotism. We had nothing to congratulate ourselves about. We were only freaks.
One thing we shared: an urgent wish to escape. Over a bread and water breakfast, we planned the breakout.
Then we tried it. We ventured out cautiously, our only weapon the clasp knife. Our cell was at the end of a long gallery and we’d been looking the whole length of this to Cross’ cell. In between, a well, four floors deep, crossed by catwalks. Along either side were rows of cells.
No one was in sight, and we became bolder. It seemed that our captors had been instructed to lock us up, and that was all. These zombies seemed incapable of caring what became of us after that.
We found most of the cells were occupied—all by male prisoners, all trance-proof. We freed them. It took time, but we acquired more knives on the way, and Cross and I showed others how to use them.
As the day wore on, we became a sizable crowd. As our numbers grew, we became noisier and even boisterous. At the end of the gallery a tough gate of steel bars won an hour’s sweat from me. But Dad’s training paid off. We thronged through into another gallery, and repeated the story.
Then we reached the female ward, and the multitude became noisy indeed. I tried to keep it reasonably compact, and led it down a broad main corridor. And still no one had tried to stop us.
We poured through the reception hall, through the doors, out onto the wide concrete expanse of die prison yard. We were yelling like kids let out of school.
The high boundary wall, with its barred main gate, stood between us and complete freedom. I was content to let it, for the moment. I didn’t want this crowd to get out of hand, and go streaming out into the endless, treacherous moors. The sun had set and soon it would be dark.
We had to get organized.
When everyone was out in the yard, I climbed onto a ledge of the main gate, and signaled for silence.
Then I shouted, “Listen, friends, we’re all in the same boat. And we’ve got to stay that way for a time. If we try to go back to our homes individually, we’ll only end up in jail again. We’ve got to live together like an army. We’ve got to get food, transport, weapons. First we’ll have to fight to keep the freedom we’ve just won. Then we’ll have to fight to get our old life back.”
And, in the thickening dusk, I told them about the Makkees.
They hung on my words. I found myself listening to myself with interest, too. Man, what an orator! They cheered. They wanted me to be their leader. I approved their choice. I began to feel like Napoleon addressing his troops on the plain of Austerlitz. Another ten minutes and I should similarly be exhorting my followers to n
ame their children after me.
The ten minutes weren’t granted.
High up on the prison roof appeared a small figure bundled up like an Arctic explorer, with a thin yellow face clamped between ear muffs. Four zombies flanked him, carrying things like disconnected automobile headlights. They stood in a row against the dulling sky.
I pointed dramatically. “There, my friends—a Makkee! Go! Drag him down.”
“
The crowd wheeled round with a hunting cry. Immediately, it became a cry of pain, and I was yelling with the rest. For the zombies were pointing the objects down at us and four wide-spreading pale green beams of light played over the prison yard.
I came off my perch like a shot pigeon and writhed on the unsympathetic concrete. My erstwhile followers were doing the same. Even now, we don’t know quite how those rays affected the human spinal cord. I can vouch that they did, in a highly unpleasant way. My nervous system became a web of glowing hot wire. My muscles contracted into hard lumps of pain.
Five seconds passed, each an age. Then the lights snapped off.
I felt as if I’d just crawled out of an electric chair.
Cross’ bulky figure lay beside me. I managed to mumble, “I’ll get that devil when it’s properly dark.”
He gasped, “I’ll come with you.”
Night came slowly with the stars. I’d passed the word around that no one was to move. The five on the roof could no longer be discerned.
“Right, Gerry, let’s go.”
We began crawling towards the prison door. The plan was to gain the roof from within and jump the five from behind. We each carried a knife.
We covered all of four yards. Then a pale green beam smote us—and those near us. More paralysis and unendurable agony. This time it was more prolonged. I passed out.
I came to, threshing wildly. Cross, grunting with pain and effort, pinned me down.
He whispered, urgently, “For Pete’s sake, keep still. They can see in the dark—at least, the Makkee can.”
“The hell they can? That does it.”
The Automated Goliath Page 3