Tirin asked the question that was in all their minds: “You mean, a lot of people would beat up one person?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t the others stop them?”
“The guards had weapons. The prisoners did not,” the teacher said. He spoke with the violence of one forced to say the detestable, and embarrassed by it.
The simple lure of perversity brought Tirin, Shevek, and three other boys together. Girls were eliminated from their company, they could not have said why. Tirin had found an ideal prison, under the west wing of the learning center. It was a space just big enough to hold one person sitting or lying down, formed by three concrete foundation walls and the underside of the floor above; the foundations being part of a concrete form, the floor of it was continuous with the walls, and a heavy slab of foamstone siding would close it off completely. But the door had to be locked. Experimenting, they found that two props wedged between a facing wall and the slab shut it with awesome finality. Nobody inside could get that door open.
“What about light?”
“No light,” Tirin said. He spoke with authority about things like this, because his imagination put him straight into them. What facts he had, he used, but it was not fact that lent him his certainty. “They let prisoners sit in the dark, in the Fort in Drio. For years.”
“Air, though,” Shevek said. “That door fits like a vacuum coupling. It’s got to have a hole in it.”
“It’ll take hours to bore through foamstone. Anyhow, who’s going to stay in that box long enough to run out of air!”
Chorus of volunteers and claimants.
Tirin looked at them, derisive. “You’re all crazy. Who wants to actually get locked into a place like that? What for?” Making the prison had been his idea, and it sufficed him; he never realized that imagination does not suffice some people, they must get into the cell, they must try to open the unopenable door.
“I want to see what it’s like,” said Kadagv, a broad-chested, serious, domineering twelve-year-old.
“Use your head!” Tirin jeered, but the others backed Kadagv. Shevek got a drill from the workshop, and they bored a two-centimeter hole through the “door” at nose height. It took nearly an hour, as Tirin had predicted.
“How long you want to stay in, Kad? An hour?”
“Look,” Kadagv said, “if I’m the prisoner, I can’t decide. I’m not free. You have to decide when to let me out.”
“That’s right,” said Shevek, unnerved by this logic.
“You can’t stay in too long, Kad. I want a turn!” said the youngest of them, Gibesh. The prisoner deigned no reply. He entered the cell. The door was raised and set in place with a bang, and the props wedged against it, all four jailers hammering them into place with enthusiasm. They all crowded to the air hole to see their prisoner, but since there was no light inside the prison except from the air hole, they saw nothing.
“Don’t suck all the poor fart’s air out!”
“Blow him in some.”
“Fart him in some!”
“How long’ll we give him?”
“An hour.”
“Three minutes.”
“Five years!”
“It’s four hours till lights-out. That ought to do it”
“But I want a turn!”
“All right, we’ll leave you in all night.”
“Well, I meant tomorrow.”
Four hours later they knocked the props away and released Kadagv. He emerged as a dominant of the situation as when he had entered, and said he was hungry, and it was nothing; he’d just slept mostly.
“Would you do it again?” Tirin challenged him.
“Sure.”
“No, I want second turn—”
“Shut up, Gib. Now, Kad? Would you walk right back in there now, without knowing when we’ll let you out?”
“Sure.”
“Without food?”
“They fed prisoners,” Shevek said. “That’s what’s so weird about the whole thing.”
Kadagv shrugged. His attitude of lofty endurance was intolerable.
“Look,” Shevek said to the two youngest boys, “go ask at the kitchen for leftovers, and pick up a bottle or something full of water, too.” He turned to Kadagv. “We’ll give you a whole sack of stuff, so you can. stay in that hole as long as you like.”
“As long as you like,” Kadagv corrected.
“All right. Get in there!” Kadagv’s self-assurance brought out Tirin’s satirical, play-acting vein. “You’re a prisoner. You don’t talk back. Understand? Turn around. Put your hands on your head.”
“What for?”
“You want to quit?”
Kadagv faced him sullenly.
“You can’t ask why. Because if you do we can beat you, and you have to just take it, and nobody will help you. Because we can kick you in the balls and you can’t kick back. Because you are not free. Now, do you want to go through with it?”
“Sure. Hit me.”
Tirin, Shevek, and the prisoner stood facing one another in a strange, stiff group around the lantern, in the darkness, among the heavy foundation walls of the building.
Tirin smiled arrogantly, luxuriously. “Don’t tell me what to do, you profiteer. Shut up and get into that cell!” And as Kadagv turned to obey, Tirin pushed him straight-arm in the back so that he fell sprawling. He gave a sharp grunt of surprise or pain, and sat up nursing a finger that had been scraped or sprained against the back wall of the cell. Shevek and Tirin did not speak. They stood motionless, their faces without expression, in their role as guards. They were not playing the role now, it was playing them. The younger boys returned with some holum bread, a melon, and a bottle of water. They were talking as they came, but the curious silence at the cell got into them at once. The food and water was shoved in, the door raised and braced. Kadagv was alone in the dark. The others gathered around the lantern. Gibesh whispered, “Where’ll he piss?”
“In his bed,” Tirin replied with sardonic clarity.
“What if he has to crap?” Gibesh asked, and suddenly went off into a peal of high laughter.
“What’s so funny about crapping?”
“I thought — what if he can’t see — in the dark—” Gibesh could not explain his humorous fancy fully. They all began to laugh without explanation, whooping till they were breathless. All were aware that the boy locked inside the cell could hear them laughing.
It was past lights-out in the children’s dormitory, and many adults were already in bed, though lights were on here and there in the domiciles. The street was empty. The boys careened down it laughing and calling to one another, wild with the pleasure of sharing a secret, of disturbing others, of compounding wickednesses. They woke up half the children in the dormitory with games of tag down the halls and among the beds. No adult interfered; the tumult died down presently.
Tirin and Shevek sat up whispering together for a long time on Tirin’s bed. They decided that Kadagv had asked for it, and would get two full nights in prison.
Their group met in the afternoon at the lumber recycling workshop, and the foreman asked where Kadagv was. Shevek exchanged a glance with Tirin. He felt clever, he felt a sense of power, in not replying. Yet when Tirin replied coolly that he must have joined another group for the day, Shevek was shocked by the lie. His sense of secret power suddenly made him uncomfortable: his legs itched, his ears felt hot. When the foreman spoke to him he jumped with alarm, or fear, or some such feeling, a feeling he had never had before, something like embarrassment but worse than that: inward, and vile. He kept thinking about Kadagv, as he plugged and sanded nail holes in three-ply holum boards and sanded the boards back to silky smoothness. Every time he looked into his mind there was Kadagv in it. It was disgusting.