I shivered in the chill of the morgue, nerving myself for the next step in our macabre escape. When we had slipped from Judith’s cell and sidled past the corridor cameras, when she had demonstrated that her memory of the door-codes was not perfect, when we had scurried through the hospital to the security of the Surgeon’s Lounge, I had been too conscious of our immediate peril to worry about our destination. When we printed along the passages in the guard zone and took the morgue elevator I was better prepared to fight any guards we i mi than to face the cold silence we found.
There was a deathly chill about the place. In the middle of • In- room, on the rails leading to the doors across the exit tunnel, was a container the size of a cell. One side was open mid inside were four coffins. Their lids were hinged back mid in each the body of someone I had known lay face upwind in that sickly imitation of life shown by wax flowers on untended graves.
I followed Judith slowly into the container. “You take Josh. I’ll go out under Greta.” She had a physician’s concern for the dying and indifference to the dead. “Come on, Gavin! You must have handled more corpses than me.”
That was probably true, but the ones I had buried or dug up had either been freshly killed or dead for some time. Judith picked up Greta’s stiff body, laid her gently on the floor of the container, covered her with the black cloth on which she had been lying, and tossed me a plastic garbage bag. “Stow the styro you dig out in that. If we leave bits lying around the guards may start to look for rats.” She burrowed into the foamed styro. “Plenty of room down here!” She looked across at me. “Go on, Gavin! Move old Josh out of the way. You know he’d want to help us. And he’ll be as mad as hell if we foul things up now.”
He would be. I put him on the floor; the wasted husk of the man who had come here twenty years earlier. I covered him with his grave-cloth as Judith had hidden Greta, and began to make a nest for myself in the foam of his coffin.
Judith had finished hers and disappeared into it. “Not too cramped!” came her muffled voice. “Greta’s no weight. And she’s not leaking!”
I had forgotten that bodies sometimes leak and inspected Josh. He was dry, thank God. The refrigerator had desiccated him. I climbed into his coffin and found there was just enough room for me to lie flat on my back, though I hoped I would not have to lie there too long. When I clambered out I found Judith inspecting the catches which would hold the lids closed. “We’ll have to take a strip of metal along to slide these off after they’ve clamped us down.”
“Are you sure they don’t use nails? Or screws?”
“Fairly sure. But we’d better include crowbars in our kits in case they do. There’s a workbench in that corner. See what you can find.”
I found two heavy wrenches. They’d make useful clubs at any rate. I stowed one in each coffin. “Have they got metal detectors?”
“Metal detectors, ultrasound imagers, fluroscopes, heat sensors, sniffers! There’s every damn thing in that inspection station. But I don’t think any of them are working.”
I hoped they weren’t, and went to hide the garbage bags filled with the foam we had removed to make our nests. When I came back to the container Judith pointed to my coffin. “You get in first. You’re a tighter fit than me, and I’ll arrange Josh and his cerements.”
“Who’ll arrange Greta on top of you?” I asked as I lowered myself into the foam.
“I can fix myself.” The light disappeared as she spread the black grave-cloth over my embedded body. I was alone in the dark silence, the constricted space, used in one type of interrogation equipment. I tried not to think about that technique.
Josh’s cold weight rested on my chest and stomach, but I could breath, move my head a little, and reach the metal strip and the wrench. I felt my flash. Sounds from outside were muffled but presently I heard Judith’s shout, “I’m in position. How about you?”
“I’m as good as I’ll ever be.”
“Breathe slowly if you have anxiety build-up!”
“Okay and out!” I shouted back.
I lay sweating and then, the last thing I had expected to do, I fell asleep. I was awakened by the sound of footsteps, and a man’s voice above me shouting, “Joshua Schwartz. Check!”
“Poor old Josh!” A woman’s voice, and a flash of light as the corner of the grave-cloth was lifted. A metal rod came probing down past my right arm. “Just Josh!” the woman’s voice called and the cloth dropped back.
I’d hardly had time to sweat for myself, but I had plenty of time to sweat for Judith as the inspection team probed the two other coffins before they came to hers. But, as she had forecast, people were not at their most zealous at dawn on a Saturday morning and assumed that one quick thrust into the foam was enough to ensure that nothing else was there. “Search complete and negative!” the man was reporting, as he must have reported many times on past mornings when the dead had left the Pen.
“Take it away!” The container went bumping and lurching forward, tilting slightly as it slid down the rails toward the tunnel entrance. We were going through the walls and into i he inspection station where the meticulous searches were supposed to take place. I got my hand round the handle of ilie wrench. These guards might be innocent men and women, only doing their job. But if they found me I planned to take as many with me as I could hit.
No sound had come from Judith. I had a terrible vision of her dead beneath Greta, a stab wound through her heart Then of her lying in agonized silence, blood and bile pouring from a punctured gut. The vision was so vivid that I was about to throw Josh off me when the container slowed and stopped. We had reached the inspection station and if she was injured I would soon know.
As an inspection it was a farce. Whoever checked the container was both incompetent and careless. Even in my coffin I could hear a counter clicking at a rate which would have alerted me. A loudspeaker shouted that the heat radiation from the container was above limits; the inspector yelled back that the heat detectors always read high. I felt I was radiating enough heat to trigger every sensor in the Pen. Judith had been right. The instrument search was now a formality. The sensors were either inoperative or far off calibration. After less than a minute in the station the loudspeaker called, “Okay! All clear. Close up, ready to ship.”
The coffin lid came down and the clamp snapped home. No nails in my coffin, thank God! The container side crashed closed and we began to bump forward. My relief that we had escaped detection was tempered by chagrin. In a way all of us prisoners had been proud of the complex systems which held us incarcerated. Now the staff had grown so slack that those systems had deteriorated until they were little better than masses of bogus gadgetry to overawe rather than use. “La Legion e’est ma patrie,” another gang of scoundrels had once claimed proudly as they cursed the regiment that was marching them through hell. Men grow loyal to the most absurd organizations if given enough time. If I’d been running the Pen I’d have been putting on simulated escape attempts at irregular intervals to keep the staff on their toes.
The container jerked to another halt. We must be on the wharf waiting to be loaded. I heard the low throaty wail of Old Groaner, the foghorn that had roared its warning from Jona’s Point since long before the days of radio beacons and radar. It had continued to roar after the Pen had been built, warning mariners of danger even after the seas around the Point had become verboten to every ship except the John Howard. An anachronism that lived on because no bureaucrat had dared to take the responsibility for pronouncing it useless. An anachronism which we prisoners had listened to with affection because it had told us something about the world outside—that there was fog around the Pen.