The compound had been beaten out of ground so jagged and rocky and inhospitable that nothing at all lived here under normal conditions except a kind of tenacious moss. The rocky outcroppings had been pulverized by sledges and the resultant pebbly dust used to fill crannies and holes, until at last a large square of mostly flat ground had been torn out of the environment. One side of this square was against a rocky vertical mountain face, but the other three sides, naturally open, had been enclosed by high wooden walls.
I still don't know what mineral we were bringing out of that mountain. It was a pale gray stuff, lighter than the useless rock around it, and would sometimes chip off in layers, like shale. Picks were used to break this stuff free, and then it would be loaded by hand onto small deep carts with metal
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wheels. Slaves pushed these carts up the long tunnels to the compound, where officials added the slips of paper which eventually came to me. Other slaves emptied the carts by hand into large motorized trucks with treads rather than wheels, and the loaded trucks drove past my window and out the main gate and away.
Food and other material—and new slaves—arrived the same way, by truck or wagon, coming through the main gate and being unloaded very close to my window. The flow of traffic was really very light, but any movement at all was thrilling to a mind newly emerged from atrophy, so I watched the ore trucks and the supply trucks with fascination and a retentive memory. I came to know the pattern of the compound possibly better than anyone else within it.
Only once did anything break into that pattern, and that was the Hay the helicopter came. It was green and yellow, and it settled into the middle of the compound with a great whirling of wings, blowing dust up and seeming to have been lowered into our midst on the end of an invisible rope. There was an insignia in outline on its side: a hammer with a dog's head. Hadn't I seen that symbol before?
Three men emerged from the helicopter, young and well-dressed, and I understood at once that they were also officials, but of much more importance than the officials who lived in the compound and who now clustered around the new arrivals the way we slaves clustered at feeding times around our trough.
It was a tour of inspection. The little group of officials moved off in a body, and for the next long while, very nearly until my work period ended, the ordinary routine of the compound was disrupted and almost halted, so much so that the flow of papers containing numbers for me to punch onto the machine slowed to the barest trickle. The officials still at their normal work were affected by this break in the pattern, being increasingly short-tempered and agitated, and the slaves felt it too, growing restive and sullen and unwilling to work, some of them having to be beaten with sticks.
The inspection was very thorough, including the sheds, the mine itself, everything. Near the end of it they came at last around to me and my machine. It was the machine, of course, which interested them; one of the compound officials hastily
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explained its function and methodology—an explanation I was incapable of following—while the three visitors listened carefully and observantly, nodding their heads.
As they were starting out, one of the visitors glanced in my direction for the first time, and stopped in his tracks, staring at me. "Malone?" he said, as though pointing out to himself the existence of an impossibility. He stepped closer to me, saying my name again: "Malone?" But this time it was a question directed at me, wanting an explanation.
I was terrified. No one had looked upon me as an individual for so long that I now couldn't possibly handle it. I stared at the compound officials, waiting for one of them to solve this problem for me.
The visitor called to one of his companions, "Elman, look! Could it be-"
The other one said, "Don't be silly. Malone's dead." Then he looked at me himself and said, "He's close, all right."
"It's uncanny," said the first one.
Elman said, "His head is broader, and his eyes are different. Besides, Malone is dead. You know it as well as I do."
I wanted to say that I wasn't dead, but I was unable to make any sound at all. I merely stood there and stared at the faces of the officials I knew, and hoped they would solve this for me soon.
It solved itself. Elman and the one who had seen me first and the one who had been no part of it at all, the three of them turned around and walked out of the shed. I had never seen any of them before, of that I was positive, and I was pleased when, a short while later, they got back into their helicopter and were drawn up once again into the sky.
Much later, after sleep periods and work periods, it occurred to me the particular mistake they had made. That was the day I found the note.
XVII
I no longer spent my sleep periods entirely in unconsciousness, but woke at intervals, to lie a while in thought amaid the still limbs and soft breathings of the others, and then uneasily to drop off once again.
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There were two reasons for this. Most obvious, I did not now spend my waking hours in exhaustive labor, but sat in comfort on the stool by the number machine. But there was also the constant pain in my left wrist, which refused to finish healing itself and which now and again twinged me out of slumber. The doctor kept the stump wrapped in cloth and when, from time to time, I was taken to him for the bandage to be changed, the same hot musky bloody smell always bloomed out as the cloth was removed. The doctor appeared to treat me with a competence unlit by interest,. yet I had confidence in him and believed he would eventually make my wrist well again.
In the meantime, the pain was a constant background hum to my existence. It might be that it was this continuing pain which kept my brain awake and forced me back into being when I had already—like the other fourteen, snuffling and sleeping around me—ceased, in any way that matters, to be alive.
The periods of wakefulness in the shed, while all around me the others slept, seemed the worst parts of my life at that time, though ultimately they must have been the best for me. But they were so empty, so boring. During the work periods, though I had little myself to do, there was at least the activity outside my window with which to distract myself, while in the sleep periods there was just nothing at all. Around me lay the thin, white, wire-muscled bodies, all entwined together in the endless search for warmth. Under me was the straw, over me the wooden walls and roof of the shed, with long streaks of daylight showing the broad cracks where water came through when it rained.
It was in these restless periods that I did my most constructive thinking, the major part of the reconstruction of my personality and memory. And it was in such an interval that I connected at last the fact of my dead brother Gar with the incident of the visitor who had called me Malone and claimed that I was dead.
The visitor could not have meant me, even though he had used my last name, because he and I had never met before, of that I was certain. But if the last name were right, and if I looked quite similar to the person he'd been thinking of, and
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if the person he'd been thinking of was truly dead, the conclusion was belatedly obvious: He had mistaken me for Gar. And that meant he had known Gar! Might even know for certain what had happened to him, and why.