Chapter 8

I didn’t wake again until about ten o’clock. The hall was practically empty, and there was only a handful of us not queueing for breakfast. All the super-group on whose periphery I had put myself down had disappeared.

I needn’t have saved anything for an early breakfast at all. Shall I have this now, and save some breakfast? Don’t know what breakfast’s going to be. Get it first, and then decide what to eat, and what to put by.

But I wasn’t in a tearing hurry to get up. I changed into the towelling clothes inside my sleeping bag. The legs of the trousers came half-way down my shins, and the socks reached almost to my knees. Unisize style.

I was just entering a passageway when an alarm bell sounded, followed by an announcement:

‘Ten fifteen! The turnstiles will be closing in fifteen minutes! Hurry up or you’ll miss breakfast!’

I wondered if the announcement would be made in any other languages; if they were, I didn’t hear them. I thought about what would happen to anyone who did miss a meal; presumably they would then be in a following population. All very well provided it isn’t a child, separated from its family. Okay if the child is behind; the family stays back next time, it’s a safe bet the child would come, it’d be starving. But if the family is behind?

I imagined a child wondering where its parents were, moving on several times before realizing, or being told, that they were in a following population; staying back once, a few moves after the initial separation, only to find them not there either, because they’re staying back twice to wait for it. Then the parents arrive to find the child isn’t with the people they all started out with, when they finally catch up with them. I imagined people trying to leave messages for each other, but the whole place seemed to be made in a way which made graffiti very hard to make. Anything else would be hard to make sufficiently durable, or sufficiently easy to find.

You could leave messages with the people in each population, of course. You’d have to spread your message around quite widely, to be sure it got through, but that’s the solution. I felt quite satisfied with myself.

I wondered how quickly a divided family would reach the same idea. Some of them, immediately. Others, never. They’d ask for help, or spill their troubles, and somebody would suggest it, though.

It might be interesting to stop back myself, sometime, just to meet the other groups. I’ve started to build up a stock of food.

I expect the cross-section of society in the other groups is much the same as in this one. Different individuals, of course, but I’ve scarcely met any of the individuals in this group yet.

Plenty of time.

Fully half the people in Hall Two were wearing pale buff towels. Breakfast was almost identical to the previous one.

I was just beginning to wonder how to go about approaching people for a book swap, and wondering whether many other people would have finished their first one yet, when Will appeared.

He too had finished his book, and we swapped. But this morning we both felt more like chatting, and we sat with our backs to our bags, books disregarded in our hands.

It didn’t take me long to decide that Will and I were going to be friends. He seemed to see things in roughly the same sort of way that I did, to think about the same sort of things.

Not like my idea of a salesman at all. Perhaps he’s not a salesman by nature, perhaps it’s just a case of ‘any job is better than none’.

Perhaps that’s the way it is for most salesmen.

I wonder how many salesmen are anything like my preconception of a salesman?

Will waved his hand in front of my eyes. ‘A hundred miles away, weren’t you?’

‘Mmm. Something like that.’ Probably still a bit vacant.

We talked about the shelter, the probability that there were three circulating populations, the question of what was below us, and above us.

‘A lot of rock, apart from anything else. I was too freaked out to judge how far we came down those stairs, but it was an awful long way. This part of Sweden is famous for excavated caverns in the bedrock – apparently the rock is ideally suited for it, and the Swedes have got pretty good at it. The ceiling of the cavern itself will be way above us, a great big arch, but I’ll bet a pound to a penny there’ll be a false ceiling of some sort somewhere between here and there, otherwise we’d be getting dripped on all the time.’

‘And the drips would be contaminated, at least they would be after a little while. I hope the false ceiling’s pretty good. If the water the other side of it’s radioactive, I hope it’s pretty thick, not just waterproof.

‘I wonder why it’s so far up?’

‘It’ll be arched too. Easier to make.’

‘The walls go straight up, though, for quite a way beyond the lights. If you shield your eyes from the direct glare of the lights, you can see quite a way up them.

‘I’d like to know what those hawsers in the corners are for, too. It’s almost as if our whole world was hanging from the ceiling.’

‘Not really. They’re not in the right places. They’re not structural at all. Apart from being too thin, their placing relates to the rooms, not the structure. Just making a wild guess, they’re something to do with cleaning the place. If you look closely, there’s a slightly wider joint in the floor, dividing off a long narrow rectangle, with one of the hawsers in each end of it. I imagine that every so often, between one lot of folks leaving a room, and the next lot coming in, that section of floor is hauled up on those hawsers. Underneath there’ll be some kind of cleaning gear. Just guessing, mind.’

He’s looked at our prison more closely than I have. I wonder how he happens to know about Swedish bedrock? Knows more about structures and things than I do, too. Not surprising, being in the building trade, I suppose. Wouldn’t have thought he’d have had much to do with this kind of place, though. Hawsers and polished metal walling aren’t the kind of thing one associates with builders’ merchants!

‘I’d not thought about cleaning at all. I suppose the place would get pretty revolting pretty quickly without some kind of cleaning. There certainly isn’t a sign of any kind of staff.’

‘There could be in one of the other populations, of course. But I suspect that the whole place is a hundred percent automated, like the hotel. Everything seems to be designed with that in mind, and those turnstile-and-serving-hatch arrangements are incredible.’

‘Somehow, they know your size. They gave books to adults, and toys more or less appropriate to the ages, to the kids. And clothes are more or less to fit.’

‘I think they identify you individually, with the hotel records. Even the books are in the right language.’

‘No, they’re not.’ I explained to him about Harry and Irene’s experience. We got on to talking about the psychology of encouraging swapping, and how difficult it would be to ensure that everyone remained sane. We came to the conclusion that it was most unlikely that everyone would remain sane; and we wondered what the effect on everyone else would be when someone did crack up.

‘That’s possibly a very strong part of their reason for automating everything. The staff would be obvious targets for anyone going off the deep end.’

‘But I’d like to see the automatic version of a policeman. Well, really, I don’t think I would, at all. I suppose they could be programmed to use the ‘minimum necessary force’ to restrain someone. But would they be?’

‘There’s a darn sight better chance of programming a machine to use the minimum necessary force than there is of programming a man to – if you could possibly design a robot policeman, which I’m sure is way beyond the wit of man to do really. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that policemen are the one kind of staff there is here. Plain clothes. But I suspect it’d take more than one homicidal maniac to tempt them to show themselves. In a closed community like this, you can only blow your cover once.’

‘So our hypothetical homicidal maniac would be left on the loose?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it depends on what kind of other contingencies they’ve considered. Perhaps they would intervene.’

He thought for a moment, then continued, ‘But no, think about what would happen if they didn’t, or if, for that matter, there weren’t any police anyway. Someone would organize something to deal with the situation. Sort of vigilantes. Or perhaps some tuppeny hero would do the maniac in, or something. Anyhow, the situation would resolve itself somehow. There’d probably be all kinds of emotionally charged debate about whether the tuppeny hero did the right thing, afterwards, or even whether he should be done in himself, as a murderer. But I have the feeling it wouldn’t be likely to develop into widespread violence.’

‘Oh, I’m not sure. Probably not so many people will crack up anyway. They probably won’t be homicidal when they do. Or they’ll be restrained before they do any harm.’

‘Another possibility occurs to me. Our policemen don’t have to be plain clothes. They could be living in another part of the shelter, watching us with video cameras, from above the level of the lights.

‘Or the policemen themselves could be up there.’

I suddenly had a vision of ladders descending from the darkness above, and cops descending, notebooks at the ready. Then I imagined that the cleaning staff might do the same thing, between one population moving out and the next moving in.

‘Go on then, share the joke!’

My vision must have shown in my face. I described the two pictures that had come to my mind’s eye.

‘You ought to make surrealist films, you ought. Still, it would be nice to have a look what’s above the lights. I wish I could think how.’

Eventually our conversation ran dry, and we began to read. I’d gained greatly in the exchange. ‘Of Mice and Men’, John Steinbeck. I’d read it once, many years before. I almost felt like keeping it; but then I’d not be able to get any others. And I’d be depriving other people, too.

I’d not be able to get any others. There’s a thought. Will there be any more books given out? Or have we received our library?

Will looked at his watch. ‘Nearly two, Pete. How say you we try to get through first, and count everyone? I’d love to know how many of us there are. There’s no chance of counting people in the hall, but if we each watch two passages, we can count them as they come in.’

‘Mmm. Good idea. We’ll do it this evening, though. There’ll be a queue already, and we’d be nothing like the first through.’

‘No, come on. No time like the present. We can guess roughly how many are ahead of us – count the queues before we start going through. We don’t need to know exactly.’

We don’t need to know at all. But I’ll pick up the thread easily enough later, and I wouldn’t have finished the book before last orders anyway.

‘Okay. Come on then.’

There were about a thousand of us. Times three, probably.

Our dinners were cold. The counting had been slow enough to be deadly boring, but too quick, and too erratic, even to transfer the food into the insulated boxes, less still eat any of it.

‘I wish we’d thought of doing that at breakfast time. This is awfully greasy.’

‘Or counting people out of the last place and getting ours last.’

‘If there’s really three thousand of us down here, surely we aren’t all from the hotel? I’d love to know who everyone is, and what they’re doing here. But I don’t want to go round asking people, and draw attention to myself. I’d much rather stay anonymous.’

‘I don’t know. It’s an awfully big hotel. But no, you’re right, it can’t possibly be that big. But the announcements are only in English. That’s fair enough for the hotel guests, they’re an international mob, and it’s the lingua franca; but if there were a lot of locals, you’d expect them to use Swedish, too. Perhaps this lot are the hotel lot, and the other two are locals. I can’t think of anyone I met at the conference, who isn’t here.’

‘If you already knew some people here, how come you singled me out?’

‘I thought I’d give you a try, after meeting you when you didn’t know what time breakfast was. You didn’t seem to know anyone. And to tell you the truth, all the people I got to know at the conference seemed to be proper noddies.’

So he is an odd man out among salesmen. Were all the delegates at the conference salesmen anyway? Wouldn’t there have been architects, builders or civil engineers as well? Shall I ask him about it? No, leave it a while. Get to know him better first.

‘Have you finished with that aluminium foil dish? Pass it here.’

I passed him my dish. He wiped it cleanish with a bit of tissue, and then pressed it out flat on the floor. He’d already done the same thing to his own. He folded an edge of each over, locked them together, and made a tube out of it. Dextrous fellow. He stood up, put the tube to his eye, and stared between the lights for a full two minutes. Then he sat down again, looking disappointed.

‘Can’t see a thing. Too much light reflects inside the tube. Ought to be made out of black card. Preferably with a belled-out end. Can’t see them giving us anything like that though.’

‘It took me a minute to cotton on to what you were doing. I jut had a thought myself. How about climbing the hawser in the corner? Just to just above the level of the lights. I reckon I could do it, with my feet wedges into the angle of the walls, leaning back with my hands round the cable.’

‘You can try. It’d cut your hands to ribbons, though, I reckon. Put your towel round the hawser first.’

We set off for the corner, the one by the outer concrete wall, for extra grip on the concrete.

Disappointment was almost immediate. There wasn’t enough tension in the cable. When I leant back, and put my weight against the cable, it pulled away from the corner. Will bent down quickly and looked at the floor near the foot of the wall.

‘Mmm. You’ve not lifted the floor a fraction, doing that. All the give is at the top end. Can you climb it straight up, without using the walls?’

‘No, it’s too thin, and too close to the walls. Here, look, I’ve made an awful mess of my towel.’

‘Don’t worry, they’re not going to put it on your bill. It’s only shredded, anyway. It’s perfectly clean. You can still use it. I’d love to know how we’re going to clean anything, though. Maybe they’ll just issue us some more stuff in a day or two, and we’ll throw the dirty stuff away.’

‘Where do we throw things away? I’ve still got loads of empty cartons.’

‘I’ve been throwing mine down the lavatory. It seemed the obvious thing to do. Don’t they smell?’

‘Yes, actually, they are beginning to. But I don’t like throwing anything down there. I don’t know how they work. I wouldn’t want to block anything up.’

‘I figured they must be designed for it. They’d have to allow for the possibility that someone would throw almost anything down there. And the lack of any other disposal system suggests that that’s where you’re supposed to sling things. The only reason I considered keeping a few is as materials for making things, like that tube. But the supply seems pretty reliable. I bloody hope it is!’

‘So do I! We’re very much in the hands of whoever created this place. Did you know the hotel had a shelter when you booked for the conference?’

‘No. It might have said in the hotel brochure that came with all the conference bumph, but I scarcely looked at it. It was obviously a pretty classy place, the sort I’d never dream of patronizing, except that the firm were paying. We still haven’t worked out who’s in the other two groups of people.’

‘There’s a few things we haven’t worked out. I wish we had a pen and paper. We could make ourselves a list of questions, and rack our brains about how to find out about each one.’

‘Mmm. My pen was in my jacket pocket. It’s still up there in the hotel. There must be somebody down here who’s got one, but somehow I don’t fancy going around asking.’

‘I doubt if they’ll part with it anyway. Would you, if you had one? I wouldn’t mind lending it to somebody, but we really want one long-term. I don’t know why, but I have a feeling that pens and paper aren’t going to be on the menu, either.’

We got into another long discussion about what we thought we might get, and why. The psychological study behind the planning of this place must have been fascinating.

If it was done at all. It could have been all purely conjectural.

In fact, it must have been. How do you conduct experiments about things like this?

Like this! Ugh! The thought made me shiver; the notion of us all simply captured, mass-kidnapped, came to me.

‘Whatever’s the matter with you? Seen a ghost?’

I shared my thoughts with him.

‘I’ve heard of daydreams, but daynightmares are a bit much. It couldn’t be done. Too many people, and people back at home know where we are.’

‘No-one knows where I am. So far as the rest of the world’s concerned, I was on a plane that never arrived in Helsinki. No problem for them there.’

‘Well, I suppose if the conspiracy is postulated on that scale, anyone trying to find us conference delegates could arrive at the offices of the firm who provided the coaches from Stockholm, to find them closed down or something. I don’t think they said where the hotel was, exactly, in the brochure. And the pictures could have been any modern Scandinavian hotel.’

I began to think again of the people who would be missing me, if it were a kidnap; and then I began to think about what was really happening to them; and that I didn’t really know. I decided not to say anything about it to Will; I didn’t know who he’d lost. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk about my old friends or not, but I certainly didn’t want to force him to.

He could well be feeling just the same; we might never know that, secretly, each of us was dying to talk about it. That’s the shyness trap.

‘And the address we were given, to give to our families, could be completely imaginary.’

It took me a moment to reconnect with his train of thought.

‘But that would expose the whole thing as a set-up!’

‘I never suggested it could be hidden entirely – that’s a bit of a tall order, for three thousand people – but knowing it’s happened, and finding the perpetrators and the victims – two different things altogether. I’m not suggesting it’s very likely, mind you.’

‘It doesn’t have to be three thousand people – we only surmise that the rest of them are there. For an experiment in social psychology, the other groups aren’t actually necessary.’

‘All this isn’t actually getting us anywhere...’

‘Which doesn’t really matter much, I don’t think.’ I regretted saying it as soon as I’d said it. True as it was, it wasn’t very polite, and we didn’t need untimely reminders of the futility of anything we were doing. But Will took it in his stride.

‘Pete, have you noticed anyone smoking?’

‘Not a soul. Now you come to mention it, that’s pretty odd, in a crowd this size. It’s not as though there were any no smoking signs.’

‘Perhaps more people than I thought might have realized that smoking in a shelter would be a dreadful waste of good air. Or perhaps most people’s fags are in their rooms in the hotel. Or their lighters. It’s a lighter I want.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘I want to set fire to a waxed carton, and drop it down the loo. Then stick my head down after it and see what I can see.’

‘I tried that without a light, but I couldn’t see a thing.’

‘You didn’t let your eyes get accustomed to the darkness then. I could see a bit, but only enough to make me wonder what on earth I was seeing.’

‘Go on. I’m fascinated.’

‘Just some very faint greenish glows. Couldn’t focus on them, or anything, so I don’t know how far away. I felt as though it was an awfully big open space, but I couldn’t bring myself to shout and listen for the echo.’

‘Could be very unsettling for anyone in the other loos, anyway.’

‘That was something I wondered about. If it is a big open space, all the loos, within each group at any rate, must go into the same place. But I couldn’t see light coming down any of the other toilets. I was looking for long enough, someone must’ve got up while I was there.’

‘Which supports your idea that it’s a jolly big space. The floor must be too far away for the light to reach. And you don’t hear anything hitting the deck, either.’

‘Never thought about that. I wasn’t particularly surprised not to hear my own, because I was covering the hole, but you’re right, you can’t hear anyone else’s, either.’

We chatted about the structure of the shelter, and how to investigate it, without actually doing anything further about it, the whole afternoon. We didn’t take any notice of anyone else, and if anyone else was listening to us, we didn’t notice them.

While we were eating our supper, the eldest Blunt boy came and sat near us. I wondered if he was angling for a game of chess, and asked Will if he played.

‘Yes, I play. Not very well, mind, and in the ordinary way I don’t have the time. But we’re not going to be able to fill all our time chatting about how to find out more about this place. Surely you’ve not got a set down here, have you?’

‘No, but Ken there has, and I’m sure he’d love a game. I’ll watch.’

Ken played with us alternately all evening. But it didn’t stop our talking, and Ken caught on to our way of thinking very fast.

‘I’m much lighter than you, Pete. I might be able to climb the hawser. I’ll try after breakfast, when it’s properly light.’ He suggested making a rope out of towels – ‘especially if they do issue new ones when they reckon these’ll be dirty’ – and lowering Leon down the loo – ‘my shoulders would be too big’ – to have a look. We didn’t think that was such a good idea.

He also suggested that we could go on pulling on the hawser, rather than just pull enough to find out that it gave a little at the top, and see what happens. We thought perhaps it might be good to see what was at the top first.

But he did have the useful piece of information that his father had a lighter.

‘He keeps on cursing himself for not picking up his cigarettes. They’d all have been finished by now anyway. But I’ll have to tell him what I want it for, and then he’ll want to join in and watch too. that means occupying four loos, and waiting for the last one to get a place before dropping the paper.’

‘Which seems pretty antisocial, what with there being queues all the time anyway. I haven’t actually watched carefully, to see if there’s any time of day or night when there’s no queue. We could all crowd into a couple of closets, I suppose, but I don’t really want to draw attention to myself like that.’

‘That’s something I thought about after we were talking about three circulating populations, and moving from one population to another by staying behind. I don’t want to draw attention to myself in this population, but somehow I feel as though I wouldn’t care what I did in one of the others. I’d just come home here.’

‘I think I’d want to get to know all three populations first, and decide which one to call home. And by the time you knew all three, I doubt if you could bring yourself to make a fool of yourself in any of them.’

‘The other thing is, we’ve been talking as though we’d be the only ones with the key to the magic door from one existence to another. I can imagine that after a while there’ll be quite a few people moving from one group to another, and to all intents and purposes it’ll all be just one big population in the end.’

‘Anyway, we’re surely not going to be down here forever! We’ll all be together when we come out, won’t we?’

‘God knows. God knows where there’ll be to go when we come out. I can’t see us all catching the next bus home, somehow. Unless it is a psychological experiment, of course. Checkmate. Sorry, Ken, old chap. Your turn, Pete.’

‘I think I’d better pack up now and go and find Mum and Dad. They’ll be wondering where I am. I’ll not say anything about the lighter just yet. See you in the morning.

‘Do you want to borrow the chess set?’

‘No thanks, Ken.’

‘Go on, Pete. I haven’t played with you yet. All our other chat’ll keep. Anyway, playing chess won’t stop us.’

‘Go on then. Thanks, Ken. Good night.’

He beat me, but not too easily. We only played one game before we decided to turn in.

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