Unite? The concept seemed to me then as mysterious as the sender. I looked around, trying to think who could have sent such a note and what he might have intended. Surely it had come from another slave, but what had he wanted, and why had he chosen such an unlikely method of communication? It would have been simpler merely to arrange to sleep beside me, and whisper his message to me while the others slept.
Of course, the problem was even more complex than that, because the note had clearly not been directed exclusively at me. The writer had tucked it away in the straw with the apparent hope that someone would see it. And, of course, someone had.
It had been left there recently, that was one thing I could know; we had had rain just two sleep periods ago, a very bad rain which would surely have left evidences of itself on the note. So it was recent, and it was an attempt at communication from someone who, like myself, was not entirely sunken into vacantness.
But there was no one like that among the fourteen. And where would a slave have found pencil and paper? And what did the note mean? Above all, what was I to do about it? (And there was still the revelation about the visitor and Gar to distract my mind.) I couldn’t think. Clutching the paper, falling now and then into uneasy dozes, I spent the rest of that sleep period in frustrated attempts at concentration.
It was later, during the following work period, that I thought of the answer to a part of the problem. I was positive the note had been written by a slave, but just as positive he was none of the slaves with whom I slept in the shed, and while sitting at the number machine I finally thought of the explanation. The slave population was divided into three groups, or shifts, who slept in the same sheds one after the other; the note must have come from a member of one of the other groups!
As to the meaning of his message, that too came clear to me. There were better ways to live than as a slave at this mine, but the officials would not permit us to make any change. Still, there were more slaves than officials, so that if we were to unite together and insist on changing our way of life, possibly we would get what we wanted.
I could understand the theory, and even found myself excited by it, but I couldn’t begin to visualize its application. The other fourteen in my shed were already united, to one another, bonded together in work, in exhaustion, in the search for warmth, in brute mindlessness. I had no desire to reunite myself with them, nor could I see any way to get them to unite with me. It had taken the amputation of my hand to shock me back to self-awareness; an equivalent shock would be necessary for each of the other fourteen, and I could see no way to supply it.
Yet there might be a way. Perhaps he who had sent me this message also had some idea how to carry it out. For that reason, I kept his note with me all that work period, and used the back of it the next sleep period to send him my reply. Out of dirt and saliva I made my ink, a blade of straw became my pen, and laboriously, slowly, one small line at a time, having to wait and wait for each stroke to dry before going on to the next, I wrote my one word answer:
I had intended to put a question mark at the end, but the process was so long and tiresome I decided the message would have to be comprehensible as if was, and I tucked it away into the straw as close as possible to where I had originally found it.
At the next sleep period, it was gone. I was elated; contact had been established! I couldn’t sleep at all.
I never heard from the note writer again.
XVIII
This abortive communication left me very depressed and saddened at the time, but in many ways it was an excellent thing to have happened. In the first place, it got me to think in terms of change, of revolt, ultimately of escape. In the second place, it reminded me that I must depend upon nothing and no one other than myself.
Still, it was a hard lesson, and for some time after I had given up searching for another white slip of paper I sunk into an apathy very like the endless stupor of my companions. Except that, far inside me, I continued — against my will — to think.
There was no incident or event which drove me out of this apathy. It merely faded; slowly, my thinking grew steadily stronger and more purposeful, and a day came when I was looking at the compound outside my work-shed window with an eye escape-oriented for every detail that might be useful, and it occurred to me that my depression was gone and had been gone for quite some time. I smiled, and an official, arriving then with a sheet of numbers for me, said ironically, “What makes you so happy?” It was one of the few times in that place than anyone ever spoke directly to me.
I didn’t answer, as I knew no answer was expected. I merely stopped smiling, took the sheet of paper, and turned at once to the machine. But even as I punched the buttons which told the machine these new numbers I continued to think about myself, and about the changes within me, and about my escape, which I now knew must be coming soon.
No one escaped from the compound, of course. Most of the slaves were so steeped in vacancy they no longer remembered themselves or their past lives or the possibility of a world outside the wooden walls. The only slaves not kept stunned by the grind of their labor were a few cripples like me. And because of this, because there was no such thing as escape and never had been any such thing as escape, the officials were very lax, very sloppy.
Still, there was the wall, very high, smooth on the inside, impossible to get over. The only way out was the gate near my work-shed. The trucks came in there, on their treads, to be filled with ore from the mine. Trucks and wagons came in carrying food and other supplies or fresh slaves. From time to time someone on a hairhorse would come in, bearing papers of importance for the officials, and sometimes a group of officials would leave for a while in the back of a truck, looking happier than usual.
I intended to escape. In order to escape, it was necessary first to get on the other side of the compound wall. The only way to do that was to leave by the main gate. And the only way to leave by the main gate was somehow to become a part of the normal traffic which left by the main gate. A truck, or a wagon. Somehow, leave on a truck or a wagon.
I studied these vehicles from my window. The ore carriers I had the most opportunity to study, these being the most frequent arrivals, and finally I saw just how it could be done.
The ore carriers, as I said, were on treads. They had a large flat-faced cab in front, in which the driver and his assistant sat, and an ample high-sided metal open-topped storage area in the rear, where the ore was loaded. Between these two, there was a narrow empty space, no more than a foot wide, with the back wall of the cab on one side and the front wall of the storage area on the other. Tread mountings shielded it from view on the remaining two sides. A man inside there could not be seen.
Once the discovery was made, all that was left was timing. I understood by now the normal ebb and flow of my job, knew those points when a long stretch of time would go by before I was given any more numbers to punch. All I had to do was wait till such a time began just as an ore carrier was preparing to leave and at a moment when no official was looking directly toward my shed or the truck. I knew I would have only the one chance, so I permitted several possible opportunities to go by, and waited for that one perfect juxtaposition of factors.
It did come. I looked out my window, scanned this way and that, and saw that everything was perfect. Without hesitation, I performed the action I had rehearsed so often in my mind, raising both feet, sliding them out the window, leaping out onto the ground with both arms wide to help me keep my balance — the lack of a left hand bothered me there, made me tend to lean too heavily to the right — and running across the short stretch of open ground between the shed and the truck.