Chapter Nine

In the Cage

According to the general report of the Villagers, the fugi­tives had succeeded in their escape–but by the expedient of suicide. When the sphere capsized their raft, they had been far enough from the shore so that their weighted bodies sank to a good depth; there was ample time to drown before the divers could recover them. Number 2 main­tained that this was an entirely legendary acount, that in fact the fugitives had been caught warm and struggling and were presently undergoing rehabilitation.

“That’s too bad,” he had said.

“You would have preferred for them to be dead?” Number 2 asked.

“No, I’m not a romantic, and I don’t expect death to solve any problems. It’s too bad that they didn’t escape.”

“I’m surprised that, being there for the beginning, you didn’t stay to see the finish. Where did you go, by the way?”

“An escape is as private a matter as lovemaking. As I’m not a voyeur, I went home. You mean to say there are actu­ally minutes of the day your cameras aren’t watching me?”

“Oh, I have the report somewhere, but asking you is easier. It’s tedious study, cataloguing your habits, Number 6. You rise at seven, put on water for tea, shower, dress, drink your tea. Then, at seven-fifteen, you run to the beach for a quarter-hour of calisthenics. Then–should I go on?”

“I’ll admit it isn’t an inspiring theme. Now, if I were liv­ing somewhere else, I might put on a better show, with more variety.”

“Which reminds me–when areyou going to attemptyour escape?”

“Soon, Number 2, soon.”

“This inaction isn’t like you.”

“On the other hand, I’m not impetuous. When I do make my break, I expect to get through to the other side.”

“To freedom, eh?”

“To freedom.”

Number 2 chuckled. “Ah, it’s little moments like this that make it all seem worth the effort. Don’t abandon your ideals too easily, Number 6. Hold them up proudly, and show your pluck.”

He paused to study his listener’s response to this key word from Number 48’s therapy. “Doesn’t that word . . . ring any bells for you?”

“Should it? Was it the theme of one of your recitations?”

Number 2 sighed. A stalemate. “No, not that I recall, Number 6, but I’ll see if I can’t dig something up.”


He made the promised escape two weeks later, a month from the day of his arrival. It had been carefully planned, the detail-work accomplished during the hours of curfew and the necessary apparatus cached at the eastern perime­ter of the beach. The sheer rockface that bounded the beach all along its length pressed forward here into the sea. One could continue beyond this point only by taking to the water (and he knew that the bay was well-patrolled, that any escape by this route was almost guaranteed to fail) or by scaling the rocks, an action certain to call oneself to the attention of the Guardian that shepherded that sector of the plateau above.

The advantage of this position was its isolation. Vil­lagers seldom ventured here, for the water was rough, the shingle more than usually coarse, and the prospect seaward without any picturesque merit. It was also, because of the cul de sac formed by the cliff, the outermost point from the Village to which one could advance without being turned back by the Guardians.

He stood, that morning, at the base of the cliff, survey­ing for the last time the line of ascent he had marked out.

7:20 am.

The sea heaved and shattered against the cliff. The cliff’s shadow slid eastward by imperceptible degrees across the wet shingle. A muck of oil that had been steadily encroaching on the beach these past two weeks (a freighter must have foundered nearby during the storm) writhed amorphously at the water’s edge, prismed, bubbled.

He climbed quickly to the first ledge, unravelling as he advanced nylon cord from a thick spool. The other end of the cord was knotted about his bundle of equipment.

The second stage was the most dangerous, though it did not take him to any very dizzying height, for here he had to move out along rocks drenched by the breaking surf. Twice his shoes slipped on the wet sandstone, and twice as he sought for a handhold the projecting rock tore loose, like a child’s rotted milk-tooth, to vanish into the white turbulence below.

At the next ledge, forty feet above the beach, he paused for breath and dried the soles of his shoes with a handkerchief.

A gull leaped from a cranny in the rocks below and rode the updraft on a long arc, wings taut. As it sliced the air inches from his face, it screamed. A flicker of sentient black beads. And gone.

He had never seen another gull along the beach, nor in the town any birds but sparrows and pigeons. Had he been a believer in omens, he would have supposed this a good one.

7:24.

Without a pause at the third ledge, he scrambled up the last ten feet to stand, panting, on the ratchel, in sunlight. Grass stretched on before him to the south and west, a pas­toral vacancy that reverberated with the crash of the waves on the sea-wall.

Where the cliff’s overhang allowed him to draw up his equipment without danger of snagging it in the rocks, he drew the cord tight, tighter. It accepted the strain (as it had in his earlier tests) and the bundle rose, with a slow pendu­lous swing, from the beach far below.

Then (7:31): it lay spread out before him in the grass–a sack of food, twenty-odd lengths of curved aluminum tub­ing, and an adjustable spanner. Still no sign of a Guardian. He needed five minutes to assemble the cage, five minutes, and then let them bowl their whole armada at him. If, that is, there was any truth in Euclid’s geometry.

He grabbed the spanner and set to work.


The sphere (it was baby-blue with a few lavender spots of acne) stopped short some thirty feet ahead. Always before at its appearance he had headed back like an obedient sheep to the Village.

“Budge me,” he said. “Just try.”

The oblate hemisphere of the cage was planted in the earth four feet behind him; not much farther behind the cage–the cliff’s edge.

He would allow the thing five minutes to make a charge. Then, if it proved too patient or too wise, he would set off without that particular satisfaction.

To taunt the sphere (did they have some kind of robotic–and woundable–ego programmed into them?) he cast small rocks at it, which bounced harmlessly off its hide. (Plastic? Probably.) The sphere quivered, just as (he hoped) a bull, its rage building, would paw at the dust.

He dashed to the right, to the left, without, however, straying more than a few feet from his cage at any time. (El Cordobes, clowning close beside the barreras.) The sphere echoed his movements uncertainly, approached to twenty feet, to fifteen feet. He flung the largest of the rocks. Where it struck another lavender blotch slowly spread across the baby-blue. Then, if it had been a bull, it would have bel­lowed; it charged. He threw himself behind the cage.

Too late, as though it realized its error, it tried to slow. Too late: it struck the cage broadside, deforming at the impact. (The cage held.) The sphere’s momentum carried it up across the arched tubing and, cresting the small dome, still up, and out.

He turned on to his back to watch it sail forth, blue against blue, into the vacant air, and drop (had it been alive, it would have screamed) toward the roaring con­frontation of sea and cliff, of sea and cliff, and, now, sphere.

There was an explosion. One could just trace its outlines amid the continuing tumult. So, the things were mor­tal. He hadn’t expected that.


The assembled cage stood a bit over three feet high, with a diameter at its base of seven feet. The 35 pounds of tubing, pilfered from the terrace restaurant (they had supported the umbrellas over the tables, the awning above the band-stand), described lines of longitude and latitude with diag­onal struts to reinforce major points of stress. Though not as sturdy as a geodesic dome, this design required fewer joints and was therefore easier to assemble. Even so, its construction had occupied four hours of each night for the last two weeks.

For easier carrying it could be disassembled into three pieces, but he could also carry it, as he did now, tortoise-fashion, on his shoulders. He walked at a steady pace, for the slightest break in his stride tended to make the carapace tilt and snag a foot in the grass. His arms ached from the cruciform attitude required to keep it balanced, but caution was to be preferred to comfort. The next sphere might appear in an hour or in the next minute: until he was cer­tain he had reached safe ground (and he didn’t know yet whether he could, whether the Village was established on the mainland), he could not afford to let down his defenses.

It was noon before the second sphere evidenced itself. This one was beige.

“Hello there, Rover,” he called out, quickening his pace. The sphere followed at a considerate distance, sometimes shooting out on a tangent from its direct course in a sud­den burst of speed, at other times describing broad loops or bouncing. Its erratic, whimsical zigzagging reminded him of a puppy at play.

At one o’clock he chose a level of ground and pulled the cage down about him firmly. Then he opened his make-shift knapsack and took out the lunch he’d prepared–a roast beef sandwich, pickles, two deviled eggs, and a pop-top can of soda.

Rover rolled up to the edge of the cage. Tentatively, sphere pushed at hemisphere. Joints creaked. It pressed harder, and beige skin bulged in through the squares and triangles of the lattice. He sipped his soda and watched the sphere slowly mount the mound above him and roll to the other side.

Then, a second time, with a running start that carried it over the top and several feet into the air. It landed with the sound of a fat body unstuck from a bathtub.

The third time it tried to climb the lattice of the cage as slowly as possible. Halfway up, miscalculating the force required, it collapsed back to the ground.

The cage had withstood each test without any sign of weakening.

The sphere withdrew to a normal conversational dis­tance, and a voice said:

“Well, Number 6, I have to give you credit. This is a splendid idea, splendidly executed.”

He looked around, but there was no one, nothing visible but himself and the sphere amid all this green uniformity, yet ithad been the voice of Number 2, and, as the sphere shook like a bowl full of beige jelly, his laugh.

“Haunted?” Number 2 asked.

“Oh, another advance in technology. Where do you put the speaker, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“This whole thing is just a membrane, you know, and then, what with the miracle of transistors . . . I can take the volume up to something unbelievable—LIKE THIS:

THE THING THAT GOES THE FARTHEST

TOWARDS MAKING LIFE WORTHWHILE,

THAT COSTS THE LEAST AND DOES THE MOST,

IS JUST A PLEASANT SMILE . . .

“But,” he went on, sniffing, much subdued, “I have to remember to adjust the audio pickup on this end when I do that. It’s much worse for me, with these earphones, than for you out there in the pasture with your picnic basket. I always seem to be interrupting your meals.”

“It’s your most excusable fault, Number 2.”

“May I ask you a personal question, Number 6?”

“By all means! Let’s have no secrets betweenus !”

“It’s about Number 127, the young lady with whom you had arranged a tryst this morning. I was wondering whatlure you used to persuade her to come to such a strange place, at such an odd hour.”

“Ah, how is she?”

Thisis a fine time to show your concern! After sending her out to the meadow–and heaven knows what you’d led her to expect–as yourdecoy . She’s back, a little sadder and wiser, but none the worse for wear. In fact, I think . . . let me see which camera is . . . yes, she’s already back at her job. The restaurant should take her mind off your betrayal for a little while, but I’m certain she will never trust you again.”

“She probably will never see me again. But if you would like to apologize to her on my behalf, I would appre­ciate it.”

“I already explained to her that you were only follow­ing our instructions. That seemed to cheer her up a little.”

“If I could have come up with any other way to divert Boy-Blue’s attention, I would never have—”

“Yes, yes, I know: ends and means. People are only pawns in your ruthless bid for power, eh, Number 6?”

“For freedom, rather. And far from being ruthless, I think I’ve shown great restraint.”

“You call arson restraint?”

“Arson? Did I leave something heating on the stove?”

“And the wanton destruction of equipment worth . . . well, I won’t say how much.”

“Boy-Blue, you mean? It didn’t show that much restraint about destroying my equipment, which is irre­placeable, after all. It was quite ready to herdme over the cliff.”

“That was an error, however. It was on auto-pilot, and though its sensory apparatus et cetera would have sufficed in most circumstances, it was simply unaware of the drop-off. The Guardians can sense objects and discriminate shapes, even in the infrared spectrum, but theabsence of an object requires some larger degree of sophistication. It shouldn’t have charged, of course, and had I been forced to choose between you and it, I’d agree that you’re less easy to replace and therefore more valuable.”

“You flatter me.”

“But that doesn’t excuse your taunting the poor thing.”

“Well, perhaps I am ruthless. I’ll tell you what–when we come to thenext cliff—”

The beige sphere emitted a dry chuckle. “Oh, we can’t allow you to repeat your successes. Rover isn’t on auto-pilot: I’m in charge now. And our engineers are already making modifications to insure against any future repeti­tion of such an error. But why am I tellingyou all this? Really, I’m too candid with you, Number 6. You draw me out. What is the secret of your charm? It’s unnatural of me, your jailer, to deal with you on terms approaching equality. Don’t you agree?”

“That it’s unnatural? Quite. But unnaturalness–I thought that was the whole point of the Village.”

“You’re being semantic again, Number 6. What I meant was quite simple, heart-warming even. I feel anaffinity for you–I have from the first. And admit it, Number 6, don’t you feel something of the same sort for me?”

He glanced up quizzically at the huge sphere, which rolled forward a few inches across the grass, as a dog will step nearer when it is expecting to be scratched. “Well, I can say this much–nothing human is alien to me.”

The sphere breathed a sigh, a brief hiss of gas before the puncture sealed itself. “That rather begs the question, but I won’t press the matter. As for me, I have always foundeverything human to be alien. But this is all philosophy, and though I enjoy a little philosophy just before I go to bed, it sorts ill with heroic endeavor. Have you finished your lunch? Are you ready to continue this doomed escape? I am. This is quite a holiday for me, you know. I’ve never run one of these contraptions before. The sensation can’t be described.”

Indescribably, the sphere bounced up and down in place.

“All right. Why don’t you back up some twenty yards or so, and I will be able to walk on much more comfortably. If you come too near, I shall have to go along at a crouch.”

“But our conversation.”

“Just raise your volume.”

The sphere backed away with evident reluctance. “Here?”

“A little farther, I think.”

HERE?”

“There, and now—” He glanced at his watch (1:36 pm), strapped on the pack, and lifted the aluminum cage from the ground. Balancing the cage on his shoulders, he set off to the southeast. “—freedom or bust.”

The sphere followed at the agreed distance. Number 2 had switched the audio to the regular Muzak tape that was constantly broadcasted over the Village PA system. Uncon­sciously, the sphere bobbed and his feet marched to the varying tempos of Sigmund Romberg’sDesert Song .


3:20.

Two horizons: the first, an ochrous line of scrub, marked the limit of the foreground, so near that he could distinguish even from here the few late blossoms on the branches of the gorse and the guelder rose; the second, above this, was a thin wavering stripe of ultramarine–a pine forest. How far ahead, or what might still lie before it, he did not stop to consider.

He did not stop. He walked, crouched, never raising the cage more than a foot off this rougher ground, pocked with holes, dotted with boulders, intent on just the few yards directly ahead of him, careful of his own and his cage’s footing.

The sphere, taking advantage of the irregular terrain, followed him closely or moved ahead in order to deflect him toward the rockier patches of ground, ready to rush against the cage whenever the lay of the land might make it the least bit vulnerable. It need not overturn the cage to succeed; it was enough, by attrition, to disable it, to bear down on it when some dip in the earth or spine of rock prevented an equal distribution of the load. Cripples are easy prey.

And so he did not notice when the simple green horizon behind him generated the first telltale dot, the merest whirring gnat; did not notice even the gnat grown, at ten o’clock before its zenith, to a hawk’s stature. Only when the shadow of its segmented body lay, flickering, in the dry grass ahead did he pay it any heed.

The helicopter hovered, describing a slow conical helix that narrowed and lowered toward him with gentle persua­siveness.

To the right the warp and wrinkle of the ground that arched up to the ocher horizon was less pronounced. The sphere, as he angled toward this smoother passage, darted ahead and planted its bulk before him. He veered left. The sphere rolled closer, pressed itself against the bars of the cage with force enough to bring them both to a stop but not so much that it would be propelled up and across the dome of the cage. It had learned the precise balance of thrust and counterthrust required to achieve equilibrium.

Little by little, he sidled the cage about the sphere, a small gear circling about a larger. Eventually the sphere had to concede another few yards of ground, but, so long as it persisted, never much more. Again it would station itself in his path, again he would be forced to revolve the cage’s cogs about the base of the sphere. The sphere could not finally prevent his progress, but it could, and did, reduce the speed of his advance to a glacial crawl.

The helicopter depended directly overhead, deafening. Its rotors sliced at the molecules of the air, a sword-dance above the tiny, struggling Damocles below.

Again the sphere approached, and just as it would have pressed itself against the cage, he shifted the bars sideways. The sphere skimmed over one side, plopped into a boulder, bounced, and rolled several feet down the slope before it recovered its wits. He had gained a dozen yards meanwhile. He reversed his course, and the sphere bounded over the crown of the cage, landed with a damp smack, bounced high, and bobbed even farther down the slope. A gain, this time, of almost twenty yards.

Growing cautious, the sphere circled some distance ahead and bore down on him slowly until again sphere and cage were locked in their abstract embrace and again he had to begin the laborsome business of revolving the cage inch by inch across the resisting grass, the gouged earth: though he made certain at regular intervals that the joints were tight, he knew the aluminum latticework could not hold out against this kind of strain.

At 4:30 pm he was still fifty feet from the crest of the slope. It had taken an hour and ten minutes to cover 300 yards of ground (half that distance discounting the diver­sions and false starts that the terrain and the sphere had forced on him).

But now Rover seemed to undergo a sudden change of heart. It sailed up the hill on a smooth arc, its great beige bulk all atremble from the unequalness of the land. It topped the ridge, dropped from sight, then rose on a high skyward bounce, a swift beige idea of a flower, fell behind the ridge, rose again, though to a lesser height, and called out in a tenor voice that rivaled the bass of the helicopter:

“BRAVO!”

And, on the third bounce, lower, louder:

“MOLTO BRAVO!”

And finally, with just one hemisphere rising over the hilltop:

“WELL DONE, NUMBER 6! WELL DONE!”

At the top of the hill he thought of Moses on the bank of Jordan. He stood at a brink no tortoise could ever nego­tiate, a drop of twenty feet to the rocky ground, not sheer but steep enough to make the cage worse than useless.

The sphere bounced itself out, diminuendo of a Japan­ese drum.

“No, no, no!” it grumbled at a sane decibel level. “Notnow , Number 19! Fly away home, and I’ll whistle when I need you. Can’t you see he’s still full ofhope ?”

The helicopter canted left and rose to vanish at the horizon that had engendered it.

“And now, Number 6–how do you intend to get downhere without being tipped out of that shell of yours? Eh? Eh?”

“I’m thinking.”

“The fault extends to your left for a good mile and for longer than that on your right. Of course, youcould try and take your chances here.”

“No, I’ll take your word instead.” He set off toward the left.

“You mean it–you reallyare taking my word! Oh, you sly fox! Do you know what I’m going to do just for that? What nice reward? I’ll move offway down over there (oh, I keep forgetting I can’t point–there, toward those hills) and let you lower your shell by its cord and climb down after it. In perfect safety, undisturbed. Isn’t that big of me?”

“Number 2, you’re a peach.”

The sphere laughed uncertainly.

“I’m waiting for my reward.”

It bounded off, beige on tawny green, toward the pine slopes, a mile across the intervening plain.

He lowered the cage by the nylon cord, eyeing the sphere carefully meanwhile to see whether it would swoop to the bait.

From the distance a tiny voice called to him: “YOU HAVE MY WORD.”

The cage settled upside-down. He threw the cord after it and scrambled down the incline at breakneck speed. At the bottom he quickly set the cage upright, safely enturtled once again.

The sphere had not stirred. Its tiny voice called out: “READY?”

He started off in the direction of the pines. Two miles? Three?

READY OR NOT!” The sphere rolled toward him, but preserved a comfortable distance, although the ground here was as uneven as it had been on the other side of the fault.

“Not so much as a thank-you?” Number 2 asked.

“Does the mouse thank the cat?”

“Perhaps a very clever mouse would.”

“Clever mice–do they taste better?”

The sphere reproduced, highly amplified, a sound of smacking lips.


* * *

5:30 pm.

The hills were tantalizingly near. He cursed the long midsummer day, which he had been thankful for till now. Until darkness offered him an equivalent defense, he hadn’t wanted to abandon the cage.

Number 2, who had been mumbling something to himself for the last mile about the Lake Poets (he seemed to have it in mind to bring them to the Village for rehabilita­tion), suddenly stepped up his volume and gargled for his attention.

“I hope you’re beginning to get some idea, at last, of the futility of this adventure of yours.”

“I thought it was the other kind of attitude you wanted to encourage in me, Number 2–my idealism, my resolution, my optimism.”

“Oh, those things are fine to talk about, and the enter­tainment industry would be ruined without them. But there are times one must be serious and despair. Not of everything, of course, but of these treacherous, abstract ideas. Freedom! As though we weren’t all determinists these days! Where, in this vastly overpopulated world, is there evenroom to be free? No, Number 6, though you may clang your bells for freedom, the best that you can escape to is some more camouflaged form of imprisonment than we provide, though we do try to be unobtrusive. Freedom? Perhaps there was a time long ago, a Golden Age, when men were free, but I see as little sign of that utopia in the past as in the future.”

“So much philosophy, Number 2. It must be close to your bedtime.”

“Philosophy? Psychology rather, or literature. My arguments aren’t based on reason but on the particular sit­uation you find yourself in at this moment, sustaining, with ever-increasing difficulty, the illusion that you are escaping.”

“If I can sustain the illusion long enough, it would be as good as a reality. That’s Bishop Berkeley. I should think that jailers must experience a larger degree of futility than even the most degraded prisoner. A prisoner can take refuge in the consciousness of the injustice done him, and for him there are at leastfantasies of freedom. But the jailer is sentenced to his jail for life: he and his jail form an identity. Every one of his prisoners might escape, buthe would still be left, a jailer in a jail, the prisoner of a tautol­ogy. The very best he can hope for is to make his jail per­fect–that is to say, escape-proof–but the manacles he loads with iron are locked to his own wrists. No, if it’s a question of futility, I’d rather be a prisoner any day.”

“All that you say, Number 6, is half true. Mine is not an enviable lot. It is, indeed, futile at times, but a little futility never hurt anyone. It’s homeopathic medicine for the larger futility of Life with a capital L. However, there aresome advantages in my situation. There is pleasure in the exercise of power, and more pleasure in the exercise of more power. I can hope not only to perfect my prison–our prison, I should say–but also to fill it with more and more and more prisoners, until finally–but it would not be mod­est to say that.”

“Until finally you have made the whole world a single prison.”

“It almost makes me sound like an idealist, doesn’t it? My intention was only to demonstrate that even jailers have their dreams, and a jailer’s dreams are, in a practical sense, more realizable than a prisoner’s. The moral of that, Number 6, you may draw yourself.”

“An offer of employment?”

“Possibly. Your qualifications are evident: you have initiative, intelligence, experience of the world. You lack only acceptable character references, but that could be worked on. If your interest is sincere, what better moment to demonstrate it than now, you are still, putatively, escaping?”

“Speaking of my escape–look: we’ve almost reached the woods.”

“Yes, I was about to mention that myself. It means that I shall have topress you for a reply. You are still free to return, free to join us.”

“Thanks, but if it’s all the same, I’d rather be free to be free.”

“You intend to return, then, to London?”

“Not then–now.”

“And there, what will you do?”

“Contact the authorities.”

“You see, immediately you leaveour jail, you fly totheirs ! I’m sorry, Number 6, but I really cannot allow that.”

The beige sphere made a sudden rush.

Squatting, he pulled the cage down about him. The sphere swerved and interposed itself between the cage and the woods, pressed itself against the bars.

“We’ve been all through this, Number 2. The woods aren’t fifty yards away. You’ve lost.”

The beige sphere began to pulse at a rapid tempo. Its south pole depressed and darkened to chocolate-brown.

“You won’t reconsider, Number 6?”

“Not even if you threaten to turn to Golden Syrup and candy me. Sorry, pal.”

“Well then, adieu,” said the sphere, and shot high,high into the air.

“Finally,” he muttered. He slipped the three false joints from the carefully sharpened poles and swung them on their hinges. Then, as the sphere reached the apogee of its ascent, he slipped out from the cage and begun running to the woods. He had not gone twenty yards when the sphere smashed into the cage with a loud metallic groan (the cage collapsing) and a plastic burp (the sphere punctured).

He turned to see the sphere gradually metamorphose into an ellipsoid, as it writhed, impaled, on the three spikes. It flopped softly to its side, and shook the wreckage of the cage from its wrinkling hide. Half its surface now was lavender, with scarlet pox-marks where the pikes had entered.

The hissing changed to a bubbling whistle, a flute clogged with spittle. Rather, a trio of flutes, which one by one abandoned their shrill, monotonous song. The damned things were self-sealing!

He started running, for his life.

The sphere bellowed at him: “FUM BLOOH EH SCHPUSH UFH! SHUH BEPPEP!” and lumbered liquidly after. Even half-deflated, it could slop along at a fair clip, but he reached the woods with yards to spare and stood once more encaged by the gigantic bars of the pines.

The sphere somehow was managing to re-inflate itself. It addressed him earnestly: “WABE, NUBBER SHES! WABE A MINNUB!”

He wabed, and in a minubb the sphere had reassumed its earlier, Euclidean proportions, though all but a little patch at the top was lavender now.

“Thank you,” Number 2 said. “I wanted, before you went off, to extend my congratulations and—”

“If that’s all, then I really must—”

Andto say that I’ve found that poem you asked me to dig up. So if you will wait just a moment . . .”

“Why not send a copy to my address in London?”

“Because it’s very apposite to the present occasion. If I may?”

“Is it long?”

“Just six lines. It’s called ‘Pluck Wins.’ Listen:


‘Pluck wins! It always wins! though days be slow

And nights be dark ’twixt days that come and go.

Still pluck will win; its average is sure,

He gains the prize who will the most endure,

Who faces issues; he who never shirks,

Who waits and watches, and who always works.’ ”


At the northern horizon he saw the gnat that would become the hawk that would become the helicopter.

“That was nice, Number 2, but now I really must say goodbye.”

“I understand. Goodbye, then, and I do hope you’ll come back soon. I’ll miss you, Number 6. You’re my very favorite prisoner, you know. Give my regards to—”

Was he gone now? A regular rabbit, that fellow, when he had the chance.

“To my friend, Mr. Thorpe,” Number 2 continued qui­etly, “if by any chance you should meet him in London.”