They were relying on two things. One: that I would be brought to the stage where I would sell the Bureau for a glass of water. No go. We are prepared at any time to do what the scorpion does. Two: that I would lose my reason and become a gibbering traitor. And of this I was afraid. The Bureau and all of those men whose safety depended on the law that secrecy was sacrosanct would remain safe in my keeping until the moment came when sanity was threatened. Before then, and in good time, I would have to blot it all out.
But I was afraid because no man knows when his reason goes: once it has gone he can no longer reason.
The north light came grey from the winter sky through the glass that would soon be smashed.
My one task for the day was to find out if the room were miked because I didn't want them to hear my movements. I found it behind a section of wallpaper just below the ceiling and I tore a wad of pulp from one of the blankets and stuffed it into the gap. Never destroy a mike: it can sometimes be used to carry false information.
The thirst was a worry now and at some time before noon I found myself at the basin making sure the taps were turned on.
Someone might be stupid enough to open the main cock outside the room. I hadn't planned to check on this but it seemed all right, a natural thing to do.
There was some activity in the afternoon: some cars arrived and once I heard a shout as if someone were trying to run free. There was no shooting but the dogs barked a lot just afterwards. Their sound was faint and it reached me through the building, not through the window, so I assumed they were in kennels somewhere at the rear.
The big man came when the light began fading. I was prone on the bunk when he looked through the grille. He opened the door and stood there while the heavy-breasted girl in brogues came in with a waxed picnic-plate. She didn't look at me but just put it carefully across the corner of the basin and went out. There was something about her attitude that gave me the impression that she was afflicted, perhaps deaf-mute.
They were salt-beef sandwiches so it wasn't any good trying to press the moisture out. I didn't even hide them under the bed: unlike thirst, hunger is containable.
In the late evening I got up to make sure the taps were on but didn't actually do it this time. The will-power was coming into its own at this stage: the body had at last recognized that things were serious. They'd no more let someone stupid turn on the water from outside than they'd let him unlock the door. I would have to stop thinking wrongly.
I re-checked before putting the light out: possibility of forcing the metal basin away from the wall and using the brackets or the basin itself to lever the bars apart, possibility of straining the rag-bolts of the bunk and climbing on it to reach the ceiling and break through the lathes and plaster. This was the third floor and there was no support-scaffolding outside the window so the bars weren't too important. There would be nothing higher than the raised width of the bunk to swing up on so a hole in the ceiling wouldn't do any good. The microphone, however muffled, would bring them here to see what I was doing.
Before midnight by mental reckoning they came and woke me from fitful sleep. One stood near me with the black-jack. The other stayed in the doorway and poured water slowly from a jug into a glass and slowly drank it. I turned away as soon as I saw the idea but the sound brought sweat on me, wasting my reserves. Impotence expressed itself in anger surprisingly fast and I had to relax consciously so that I couldn't swing round on them and attack. Any effort of that sort would use up moisture and that was what they wanted.
But when they had gone I couldn't sleep again for a long time because of the sound of the water.
Hallucinations began towards the end 6f the second day, most of them aural. Sometimes they came to the door and opened the grille and poured water for me to hear but sometimes I knew they weren't there, only the noise, because the grille was shut.
My tongue was shrinking now, the mouth a husk. One difficulty was in trying not to review the bodily processes that I knew were going on. Movement could be controlled, and I spent most of the day prone under the window where it was coldest, but breathing had to go on and I knew that every breath was passing moisture from the lungs to waste it on the air. Inactivity and the visual monotony of the walls and ceiling were inducing sleep and I forced wakefulness and concentrated on keeping tidal respiration to a minimum.
They came again at midnight. One filled the glass and offered it to me and I took it at once: the body was avid and the mind careless. Then I smelt petrol and threw it against his face but he was expecting it and ducked and the glass smashed on the wall of the passage outside.
Later I knew they had devised the stratagem so that I should be made to see the glass: being offered it, I wouldn't turn away as I had before. I had been made to see the cool liquidity of what I believed was water and the fact that it was petrol made no difference because I saw it still as they knew I would, shimmering in the dark against my eyes, and it had no smell and it was drinkable, infinitely desirable.
By the evening of the third day I was ready.
The initial shock-dose of saline had advanced the physical process critically and even though inactive, even though for most of the time inert, I had passed more than a gallon of moisture through the skin and lost an added amount from the lungs. The mental process had been advanced by the sight and sound of liquid and by the presence of the taps over the basin. Today I had had to tear the picnic-plate into halves and cover the taps so that they were hidden: because every time I woke it was there that I looked.
I was ready this evening because earlier I had seen a damp patch forming on the wall below the metal basin and heard water trickling. Realizing that it was a leak I began gouging-at the plaster but found it was dry, perfectly dry. Memory came back from the far side of the miracle: pipes that are empty cannot leak.
The body could go on for days before it died but the time was shorter for the mind. There had been seven hallucinations during last night and today, three of them visual, and the stage was approaching when I would tell them: Look, there's water on the wall, his name is Parkis, head of Whitehall 9. And it would seem reasonable to tell them, reason being gone.
The danger was in proportion to the stake: you can gain more with less to lose. The stake was the Bureau.
In the afternoon I had pulled the wad clear of the microphone and crushed the diaphram. The basin was difficult because I had lost a third of my strength but one of the brackets came away with it and it was a bracket I wanted: the pipes were plastic, not lead. It took an hour to free the bracket from the basin, flexing the bolt until it snapped.
It was a poor weapon but the value of any weapon is increased when it's the only one you have. There was of course no chance of success: none. They always come in pairs and were armed and there were others in the building and the building was itself under guard. Barbed fencing. Whip-lamps. Dogs.
But what I had to do, for pride's sake, before I turned to the final act of blotting it all out, was draw blood.
By midnight they hadn't come.
An hour ago the grille had been opened and closed. I had been standing within three feet of it, close enough to conceal the wall where I'd wrenched the basin away. But they didn't come in, and for this hour I had tormented myself because I could have waited against the door and driven the bracket through the grille: an eye for a withered tongue, with luck a death for a death.
The central heating had gone off: the pipes ticked as they contracted, the water cooling, water, cool water.
I left the light burning so that I could see objects that were real; in the dark I could see only fountains shining.
In an hour they came, opening the door quietly without first looking through the grille. The lock turned so slowly that I had to put my hand against the panel and feel the movement of the mechanism, afraid that I imagined it.