Never once had he put the marble egg in his mouth, nor, though he had steeled himself against both, had he felt the least tingle of pleasure, the slightest twinge of pain.
He understood what she had done for him, and she had explained, in great detail, what he would now have to do for himself.
He stopped beside the bench where the old woman was bent over her embroidery hoop. “Goodafternoon , Granny.”
She heard him the very first time and looked up with twinkles from her eyes and from the wire-frame spectacles. “Why, good afternoon, Number 2!”
“Hard atwork , I see.”
“Work? Oh yes, there’s never a free moment forme !” With a little chuckle at her own little joke, she held the hoop up so that he might admire her handiwork.
“That’s veryhandsome ,” he said, stooping to study the meticulously stitched orchids. “And very true to life.”
“Thank you! I do love roses so–don’t you?”
“Roses, well . . . yes. Do you ever embroider . . . other kinds of flowers?”
“No, just roses, Number 2. Roses have always been my favorite flower, since I was just a little snip of a thing. Red roses and white roses. I can never decide which I like better.”
“It’s very expert work that you do, Granny. This stitch here, for example.” He pointed to one of the writhing tendrils.
“That’s a scroll stitch,” she confided in a low voice. “And this”–touching the dark mauve of the corolla with the tip of the needle–“is a dorando stitch.”
“A dorando stitch, well, well, well.” In a tone that implied that this piece of information had appreciably expanded his intellectual horizon. Patting the veined, knobby hand that held the hoop, he doled out some further sugar lumps of approbation, until all the wrinkles of her face had been brought into play by a grin of proud, senile accomplishment.
It wasclammy , he thought, leaving her. He rubbed hisfingertips against the palm of his hand, as though that brief touch had drawn away all the warmth of his own flesh.
“How’s it going, men?” he asked cordially.
“Great!” said the male model, with a smile that would have made anyone ready to buy the same toothpaste. “Just great, Number 2!”
“Pretty well,” the goitres grumbled.
He shot one of his own smiles back at Number 83, not so broad but more confidential. “It’s not hard to tell which of you is winning.”
Even Number 29 had to laugh at that.
He watched their game for ten minutes, offering comments on the weather, kibbitzing when it was the goitres’ turn, analyzing Number 83’s performance, last Wednesday afternoon, at the big soccer match.
The waitress who brought his coffee was the red-faced woman who’d been working at the cafe by the railway station the day he’d arrived.
“Where is Number 127?” he asked with some concern.
“Oh, her!” the waitress said, with an ant’s scorn for the grasshoppers of this world. “She’ssick again.”
“Has she been sick often?”
“For the last three days. It’s theflu , she says.” As she pronounced the word, “flu” became a synonym for malingering.
“Give her my regards, would you, the next time she calls in? Tell her how much we all look forward to her recovery.”
The waitress sighed her consent and returned to a sinkof dirty pots, feeling somehow enriched. “It’s amazing,” she told herself, as she rolled up her sleeves, “how you canalways tell a gentlemen.” There was an element of sadness in this thought, for she knew that in the ordinary scheme of things such gentlemen were not for the likes of her, but even so, as long as she could bring him his cup of coffee in the afternoon, as long as there was one smile that he smiled just for her, there was some comfort to be had, there was apoint in scrubbing all these pots.
The game of dominoes ended, and Numbers 83 and 29 rose from the table.
“Four o’clock already!” he said.
He stood to shake their hands, a handshake that made each of them realize his own special importance to the Village and to Number 2, and to what they represented. With a bemused smile, like a proud father seeing his sons set off to their work in the mines, he watched them go toward the church.
At the eastern end of the crescent of shingle, near the cliff he’d scaled on that other morning (how long ago!) he saw a figure emerge out of the rocks of the cliff. A woman dressed for swimming. It was proscribed to swim at that end of the beach, where the currents were dangerous, and it was uncommon to see anyone swimming at all this late in the year or this early in the morning.
“Hallo!” he called to her.
Instead of replying by word or gesture, she ran into the dark, cliff-shadowed water.
He pressed the alarm signal on his wrist-band.
“Wait.” Sprinting across the wet, shifting pebbles. “Wait a moment! Stop!”
The woman, out to thigh-depth, veered right, toward where the cliff thrust out from the shore to meet the ocean head-on. At the moment he entered the water himself, the undertow pulled her down, dragging her–and several tons of crushed stone–toward the whitecaps. He caught a glimpse of blond hair (and it was, as he had thought, the waitress, Number 127, who had been calling in ill with “flu”) ten feet farther out, which vanished behind the curl of a breaking wave. He sighted her again, past the line of the surf, swimming toward the deadly roiling beauty of the cliff. He struck out in pursuit, breasting the line of the surf, gaining quickly at first, until, nearer the cliff, the varying currents mocked both their efforts, flinging them toward each other, and tearing them apart.
He caught hold of an arm. She jerked free of his grip with a convulsive strength. Screamed: “Go—” Gagged by the salt water.
A handful, then, of the blond hair. Towing her by this rope, he swam seaward against the current drawing them toward the cliff. Twisting around, she wrapped her arms about his kicking legs. They sank, interlocked, beneath the frothing surface into the stronger and stranger eddies below. Her arms were a vice of rigid, hysterical strength.
His first blow was not forceful enough. With the second she went limp.
He towed her unbuoyant body upward and surfaced,gasping. By luck the nether currents had carried them farther from the face of the cliff, and he could swim back toward the shore, even disadvantaged by the dead weight of her body, without being drawn back into the area of danger.
The patrol was inflating a life raft as he pulled her up on to the beach. He lay on his stomach; while the gentler water of the shore played about his ankles, he watched a medical aide administer artificial respiration to Number 127. The guards waited respectfully until he had recovered his breath.
“Is she all right?” he asked.
“She will be,” the aide assured him, drawing his lips away from hers to speak.
“Send out all the launches,” he said, to the leader of the patrol.
“That’s been done sir.” He nodded distastefully at the woman. A mixture of vomit and brine spilled from her unconscious lips. “Was she swimming out to meet someone?”
“Possibly. Any boat that attempted to enter the bay would be dealt with in the usual way. What I suspect is that the crew of one of our own patrol boats has been—”
He was interrupted by the scream of the medical aide. He had leaped back from his patient, scrabbling across the loose stones. Blood streamed from the deep cut in his lower lip.
The waitress was struggling up to her elbows. Threads of vomit still clung to the corners of her mouth and trembled as she spoke: “You needn’t . . . bother . . . Number 2. I wasn’t . . . swimming out . . . to meet . . . anyone.”
“What were you doing, Number 127?”
But she did not have to answer him, for their eyes had already completed the conversation. Hers had said:Suicide –and his replied that he had known. Hers said:If I had the strength, I’d try and kill you again –his told her that she’d had her chance, and failed.
“Youpig !” she said aloud, though her eyes had said this too, and with even more force. She tried to smooth back the bedraggled hair, but the hand was smeared with her vomit. She began to cry.
“Number 2?” the medical aide asked.
“Bring her to the hospital. Number 14 will look after her now. It’s all in a day’s work.” He turned away.
“Number 6!” she screamed, forgetting in her pain that he was no longer Number 6. “You were theonly one, and you—” She choked as more brine welled up into her throat. By the time she had emptied herself on the wet rocks, she had realized the hopelessness of what she had been about to say.
“Sir, you don’t have to walk back to the Village. Take our jeep.”
“Thank you, Number 263, but I haven’t had my morning run yet. Be careful with that woman. She’ll probably attempt some kind of violence.”
He began to trot westward, following the long shadow that glided ahead of him across the glistening pebbles, the lumps of tar, the strands of kelp, the quaking, clustered foam.
Behind him he heard her final, and definitive, curse, then her screams as she struggled with the guards.
He ran on, concentrating on his breathing. It was shallow, even, relaxed.
Entering his cottage, he found yesterday’s domino-players, Numbers 83 and 29, sprawled in the Chippendale chairs, half-asleep. Automatically his hand switched on the Muzak control, and the room filled with the waltzing ghosts of a thousand animated cartoons. The goitres snorted himself to alertness, and the male model stretched himself, cat-like, and produced a very sleepy smile that would never have sold anything.
“An unexpected pleasure, gentlemen,” he said.
In unison: “Good morning, Number 2.”
“Tea? Coffee?”
“We’ve had our breakfast, thank you,” said Number 29.
“You’ll excuse me if I go into my bedroom to change out of these wet clothes. I won’t be a minute. Here–I’ll leave the door open, and you can tell me what it is that brings you to me at this unusual hour. There’s no serious trouble, I hope . . .?”
“No sir.”
“Did you hear about my little adventure at the beach this morning?”
The two men exchanged a look. The younger answered. “Yes, we did, Number 2.”
“Quite a stroke of luck that I was on the spot. I think the poor girl thought she was going toswim away!” From the bedroom, a hearty laugh. Then, as though contritely: “Of course, it’s not a laughing matter. Even if it turns out that no one else was involved, an incident like this should be a lesson to all of us. If she’d gone into the water just a few minutes later, who would have seen her? Who would have brought her back? No one! Do you realize what that would have meant?”
“That she would have drowned,” Number 83 said, affecting to yawn.
“Does that seem such a light matter to you?” he asked sharply, entering the living room in his everyday costume of slacks, turtleneck and jacket. “Gentlemen, an attempted suicide is a graver threat to this Village than an attempted escape. A fugitive can be brought back; a corpse cannot be.”
He took a seat beside the Riesener secretaire and studied the faces of his two visitors as they chewed on this concept.
“Number 2 is right,” the goitres announced, having swallowed the concept, digested it, and transported it by blood corpuscles to his brain, where it was shelved in the bulging files of Orthodox Views. In the next month he would often take the opportunity to retrieve it from the files and read it to his fellow numerals in the service of the Village–the very words addressed tohim by Number 2.
“But how can suicide be prevented?” Number 83 asked. He did not seem to have the same digestive capacity as the goitres.
“A good question, Number 83.”
Number 29 began chewing on this good question. It was going to be a full morning.
“The answer is to be found in almost every aspect of our lives here in the Village. Tell me, Number 83, areyou happy with your life here? Does it seembig enough? Is it active, exciting, stimulating? Is your work as agreeable as your leisure hours?”
“Oh,yes sir! There’s nothing that—” He raised his empty hands as a sign of his plenteous fulfillment.
“Nothing!” the goitres echoed emphatically.
“Nothing that either of you could wish for in addition to what you already have been given,” he summed up for them. “In short, the Village is a kind of utopia for you, and most of us here would have to say the same thing. There iscomfort and affluence. Our work is scaled to our individual capacities, and our leisure is filled to bursting with meaningful and self-improving activities. But that represents only the material aspect of the Village. There is also a spiritual aspect, which can be summed up in a single word–Oneness. The idea of Oneness should inform our every action throughout the day. It should . . . But I’m getting carried away. I know that both of you, in your own ways, treasure that idea in your inmost hearts. It’s just this–the idea of Oneness–that makes our life so very much worth living that for people likeus the notion of escape, much less of suicide, is literally unthinkable.”
After a reverent silence, the goitres asked, “But in that case, Number 2, I don’t understand! Why would anyone . . .?”
“Unfortunately, Number 29, there are afew people in this Village–and I must confess, to my sorrow, that I used to be the worst of them–a few people who will not accept that idea, or rather–who haven’t been able tounderstand it. Often the more intelligent they are, the more difficult it seems to be for them to grasp the notion of Oneness. In that respect a man like Number 189, though he may be a little slower than we are, is one of the happiest, and mostloyal , citizens of our Village Faith is not a problem for Number 189. Of course, with the right education, faith would not be a problem for any of us. Disloyalty is only a form ofignorance . Always bear that in mind, gentlemen.”
Loyally, the goitres filed this in the less crowded file reserved for the Eternal Truths, while Number 83 assumed his gravest expression, suitable for advertising the Great Books or an encyclopedia.
Confident that they would be occupied by these loftythoughts for a few minutes, he turned his chair around to face the papers spread out on the secretaire.
He froze, without knowing why, as though he’d glimpsed, with his peripheral vision, a glint of the blade above his head. His conscious mind sought for what his unconscious had already sensed.
It stood in the far left-hand corner of his desk, behind the report from the Employment Advisory Board: a marble egg, rose-colored, in a white egg-cup. A film of dust obscured the mottled grain.
My God!he thought.How long has it been there?
Then he recalled that last night, when he’d been working on his security recommendations, he had placed a cup of tea on the same spot, that he had left the cup and saucer there when he had gone to bed.
He spread open the folder of cost and maintenance figures of the Guardians. Reaching across the desk with apparent casualness, as an addicted smoker might reach for the cigarette he has left burning in an ashtray, he took the egg from the eggcup. He weighed it a moment in the palm of his hand, then, without seeming to notice what he did, he placed the dusty marble egg in his mouth.
Number 83 rose to his feet. “Number 2!” he said.
“Mmm?” Turning to confront him with a look of mild annoyance.
The goitres also rose, realizing from Number 83’s meaningful glance toward the empty egg-cup, that the purpose of their visit had been accomplished while he’d been napping among the Eternal Truths.
Apologetically he let the egg slide out into his cupped hand. “Yes, Number 83, what is it?”
“We have instructions to accompany you to the administration building. Number 1 wishes to speak to you.”
“Number 1!”he said, with an expression of transported delight that would have convinced the assembled saints in heaven that this was the real article, a bonafide Beatific Vision. “My God, why did you take all this time totell me?”
“We were following our orders,” the goitres explained primly. Of all the Scriptures in all his files, he liked this one the very best.
“Number 1,”he repeated reverently.
And thought:It’s about time!