THE CHINESE BOXES
The room was white. Its walls were like unmarked fields of snow, gleaming in the light of four fluorescent strips set in the ceiling. In the center of the room stood the Box, a huge cube of stainless steel ten feet on a side. It resembled some exquisite, ultimately formal piece of modern sculpture, although Carpenter, whose last visit to an art gallery had been as a freshman many years ago, preferred to think of it as a shiny, oversized sugar lump.
The surfaces of the Box were, with one exception, featureless, and this exception showed the outline of a flush-fitting door. In place of a latch there was a metal plate possibly five inches square and secured with four crosscut, countersunk bolts. Elleston, who relieved Carpenter at the end of his afternoon watch, had told him that the plate concealed something called a time lock.
Carpenter sat on a chair with his back to one of the room’s white walls and facing the Box’s door. He was a large man and the chair was rather too small to be comfortable. He’d asked Horden, the man who’d hired him, for a new chair. Carpenter thought that Horden, who was a sedentary, oversized, florid man himself, would be sympathetic to his request, but three weeks had passed so far and the chair had not been replaced.
For four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon Carpenter was supposed to watch the Box. There was a red disk inset on the wall beside him and he was supposed to press this if anything untoward occurred. Untoward was Horden’s word. Supposedly the red disk was some kind of alarm.
Anne had picked him up in her Volkswagen after his first day at Chemitect.
She was glad he had got the job. He was really very lucky. Had he seen the unemployment count, going up and up? This was really a job he should try to hold onto. How had it gone?
The Volkswagen purred into life. Carpenter was happy to let Anne drive. He didn’t like the Volkswagen—its seats were too small for one thing—but it was cheap and it was economical to run and it was all they really needed.
He told her about the job, about how all it was just sitting there, you see, and watching this ... Well, he didn’t know what it was. It was big and square and shiny. Like a big, square shiny box. Yes, he meant he just sat there, he really did. On a chair. Well, wasn’t sitting in a clean room better than grease-monkeying? Yes, that was it, only this big square, shiny box, nothing else. What was in the box? Well, he didn’t know. It had a door so ... so he forgot about the door, just a door, nothing else. Well, it had a door, so he supposed there was something inside. Sure he’d asked. He’d asked Elleston...Who Elleston? He didn’t know who Elleston. Elleston relieved him at the end of his afternoon watch, Cochran stood in for him for two hours at lunchtime and Levinson—yes he thought he was Jewish—was the one he relieved in the morning. Yes, he’d asked all three, but none of them knew. None of them knew what—if anything—was in the box.
And there was the alarm of course....
Anne turned her head sharply. Blond, slightly greasy hair spun and whipped at him.
For Christ’s sake watch the road! What are you doing...
Anne turned into a side-street and pulled up.
Well, he was coming to the alarm wasn’t he? Jesus, just a red button. Yes, red. Look, you can’t stop here. He pushed the button if anything untoward happened. What untoward? He meant unusual. OK, he meant if anything went wrong. He didn’t know what was likely to go wrong. Nothing. Nothing would go wrong. They wouldn’t make him sit there if it was dangerous would they? He meant it wasn’t likely to explode was it? He meant that if it exploded, then they wouldn’t need an alarm, would they? Everybody would know about it, you bet. Yes, he realized it wasn’t funny.
Anne said she didn’t like it. Not at all. But she started up the car. Looking out of the window as the city swallowed the Volkswagen, Carpenter smiled so that she wouldn’t see. She was pretty when she worried and wasn’t it nice to have somebody worry about you? He’d marry her when things were better. This job was only the beginning. Hadn’t he thought that about all the others? Sure but the gas station, the drugstore, all the no-hope jobs that anybody could get, that had a high turnover rate unemployment or no unemployment...losing those jobs had at least taught him the importance of keeping this one. Wait until they had enough money put by to go east. Everybody knew the best jobs were in the east. He’d marry her then, in the east.
* * * *
Later that evening at his apartment she made him promise.
If you don’t promise you don’t get your reward. You know what I mean. Promise you’ll find out what’s in that box. Promise you’ll find out if it’s dangerous. I don’t want you involved in anything dangerous. Please. You know I get worried about you.
She smiled and looked pretty.
He promised.
* * * *
The cell was white, or had been once.
Its walls were blank, or had been once.
The prisoner slept on a discolored pallet that stank of decaying weeks and months. He wore a coarse shut and trousers that itched upon his skin and caused rashes. Apart from the prisoner and the pallet, and the pail into which he urinated and defecated, there was nothing.
The light, which came from a small barred slit high on one wall of the cell, was dim and constant during the day, nonexistent during the night, which, like the dawn, always came on abruptly. If he jumped he could just reach the window slit with his fingers and, hanging there, could usually just manage to draw himself abreast of it for a few seconds. The slit was only a few inches high and possibly a foot deep in the wall. Through it he could see only blue sky. He never saw a trace of cloud, nor any birds.
The temperature was constant too. Constantly warm. At the window slit he never saw either rain or snow, or any manifestation of the seasons, although he assumed, as with the absence of clouds and birds, that this was merely bad luck. He seldom had the strength to hoist himself to the slit more than twice a day, usually after the meager warmth and sustenance of a meal.
A typical meal was a lukewarm soup with a little meat in it and two ounces of something spongy that might have been bread. It was served to him regularly through a narrow, hinged flap in the door, so regularly that his stomach had become attuned to it. He could tell if it was even thirty seconds late, and it never was. The food was served in a flat metal pan. Sometimes, when the pan was slid through the door, he would be kneeling there, waiting by the slit. He never managed to see the hand that fed him, however. Sometimes he would shout through the slit as his meal was pushed in—requests for small comforts, for a word, for a sight of his captors.
Once he refused to eat the food. He couldn’t remember what his crime was or why he should be in prison. He was convinced they had done something to his mind to make him forget. He thought they might be using drugs in his food, slowly poisoning him, so for six days (he counted them with fecal smears on the wall) he starved. And remembered nothing.
After that he searched his scalp through his long matted hair for a surgical scar. He found nothing, but this didn’t shake his conviction that somehow they had interfered with his mind: why had they taken his memory? Had they done it thinking it to be a kindness? Or had they done it in the hope that, not remembering, he would come to accept his guilt? He would never do that. He was sure that things like guilt and innocence transcended memory. They were qualities of mind, and wherever mind was, memory or not, they would be there. And innocence was there in his case, he was sure of it. He did not believe he had committed any crime. He could not believe he should be punished. “Give me a trial,” he cried through the dinner slit. “Tell me what I am accused of.” But his captors, whoever they were, gave no sign of having heard him.
He began to take food again. When he finished, he would fling the pan into a corner. The following day, when he awoke, the pan was always gone and a new pail (or perhaps it was merely the old one emptied and cleaned) had been placed there for his droppings. He assumed that, when he slept, one of his captors entered the cell to perform these duties. For three nights he tried to stay awake but succumbed eventually to the absolute womb darkness and the comforting warmth. Always the pan was removed, the pail changed.
The next night he succeeded, standing in a corner and scoring his arms against the stone wall to achieve additional discomfort, in staying awake until dawn came. He was certain that nobody had entered the cell, but once again saw that the pan had been removed and the pail changed.
By this time he had become obsessed with the pan and the pail and decided he would make it impossible for either to be removed without his knowledge. He ripped a sleeve from his shirt and, lacing it through the pail’s handle, used it to secure the pail around his neck. The stench itself was enough to keep him awake that night. The pan formed an uncomfortable pillow for his head. In the morning both the pail and the pan were untouched. His captors, spying on him, had obviously noted his precautions and had refrained from entering the cell. The prisoner let out a cry of triumph. He had achieved communication of a sort; he had at least done something to influence the actions of his captors. He set the utensils down in a corner and went back to his pallet exhilarated. That morning, however, when he came to use the pail he found it clean and empty. He looked for the dinner pan but it had disappeared. He thought about this for a long time but was unable to find an explanation of the phenomenon.
* * * *
Chemitect was a campuslike layout of small island structures surrounding a massive central hive. Anne dropped him at the entrance of the main building. On the raised piazza fronting the entrance, water dribbled over a chunk of shiny basalt in a concrete bowl. Beyond this, over the entrance itself, “Chemitect” was picked out in low relief. The whole hive was faced with a specially treated sandstone, like some Nubian desert fortress.
“What goes on in there anyway?” asked Anne.
Carpenter paused with his hand on the Volkswagen’s door. “It’s a research foundation,” he said. “There are a lot of college kids about, too. I think its function is partly educational.”
“But what do they do?”
“I asked Horden that and he said, ‘Anything and everything.’ He speaks like that. He’s actually got a plaque with ‘THINK!’ on the wall of his office. It’s probably a joke though.”
“What does it mean, ‘Anything and everything’?”
Carpenter shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me as long as they know what they’re doing.”
“Do they though,” said Anne and Carpenter threw a playful punch at her and closed the Volkswagen’s door. Anne watched him until he had entered the building.
Horden’s office was windowless, snug in the core of the building, along a mirror-sleek, waxed corridor that made Carpenter feel as though he were walking on ice. He knocked on the door once and went in. Inside it was cool and the air conditioner blew out an artificial scent of pine. Horden was checking typed columns of figures. He looked up from his papers and nodded Carpenter to a seat. Carpenter sat looking at the plaque which said “THINK!” and finally decided he didn’t understand it. On the opposite wall there was a print of an “impossible object,” a spiral staircase that ate its own tail and spiraled downward (or upward) forever. It was rather easier to understand.
Horden shuffled his papers together and shifted his weight in his chair.
“Carpenter, isn’t it? How does it feel to be one of the team?”
“It’s okay. It’s a job and jobs are hard enough to get. I’d feel a bit better if I knew what I was doing though.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Watching a shiny steel box isn’t exactly taxing work, mentally or physically. I could feel a bit more interested if I knew the point of the exercise. What’s in the box? What’s it for?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“You can’t?”
“I mean I don’t know myself. My job is to hire administrative personnel for this establishment. I’m an administrator myself, not a scientist.” Horden leaned back in his chair and fixed his gaze on the “THINK!” plaque. When he spoke his tone was almost nostalgic. “Once I was curious about Chemitect’s role in society too. When I first came here. I knew its business was research, the kind of research that only makes the headlines in the technical press, but I thought it would be interesting to know a little more. A general view is always more rewarding than a narrow one, and like everybody else, I thought it would be nice, too, to be able to point to some gadget or scientific achievement and say, I played a small part in that. So I went on a grand tour of the various departments. I asked what the processes involved were and what the end results were supposed to be. Most of the scientific staff were pleased for an opportunity to explain their work, and when they weren’t available the students always proved equally willing. They told me everything, explicitly, in the minutest detail. And do you know what?”
“What?”
“I didn’t understand a word of it. Not a fact, not a theory, not a concept, not an idea. I never thought I was an exceptionally intelligent man, just normal, but to have kids of nineteen and twenty run mental rings round you is a frightening experience. I could arrange it for you if you feel you’d fare any better than I did. Do you want a grand tour?”
“No, I’m not looking for godlike knowledge. All I want to know is one very simple thing: what’s in that box?”
Horden smiled and sighed. “And I must tell you again that I can’t help you.” He swiveled in his chair and switched his gaze from the “THINK!” plaque to the impossible object. His eyes seemed to follow the staircase in its eternal descent/ascent. Carpenter left the office.
Levinson was reading a newspaper. He was a small man with black nervous eyes that seemed to be perpetually flinching away from something nobody else could see. They flinched as they wandered across the newspaper columns and they flinched as they looked up to greet Carpenter.
“I’m sorry I’m late,” Carpenter said. “I went to see Horden.”
Levinson looked at his watch and dropped his newspaper to the floor. “I hadn’t noticed,” he said. “What did you see Horden about?”
“I wanted to know what we’re all supposed to be watching the Box for. Don’t you ever get curious?”
“I never think about it.” Levinson stood up, stretching himself.
“How long have you been here?”
“Three-four months. It’s only temporary, though. My uncle’s got a delicatessen out east. He’s going to die soon and leave it to me. Then I’ll pack up and take my family the hell out of here.”
“What’s wrong with your uncle?”
“Bad heart. He’s just going to fold up someday.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, he’s been like it for years. I’m over that now. He’s going to die soon though. Real soon.”
He left and Carpenter settled himself awkwardly in the chair. He picked up Levinson’s newspaper and began leafing through it. He glossed through articles on how the population growth curve was leveling out at last and on how the unemployment curve continued to skyrocket. There was an article on suicide as well but he didn’t bother to read that.
After ten minutes he put the newspaper aside. His back was stiff from the chair and he stood and walked over to the Box. He put a hand on its side. It was pleasantly cool and he thought he detected a slight vibration. He put his ear to the Box but could hear nothing.
* * * *
The fungus was a green patch about the size of a hand. It appeared one morning on the wall above the prisoner’s pallet. The prisoner moved his pallet into the opposite corner of the cell and a cockroach fell from the bedding, scuttling about on the dusty floor of the cell, as trapped as he was. He watched it with interest. He formed barriers in its path, diverting it, making it trek from location to location in the cell. He shook his bedding and succeeded in dislodging a second insect. He picked a cotton thread out of his shirt and tied one end around the thorax of each of the cockroaches. The cockroaches circled about each other, weaving the cotton into complex knots, occasionally indulging in a comic, scrabbling tug-of-war that would leave them quiescent for a while, as if dazed.
The day passed quicker than usual. That night he allowed the insects to return to the safety of the bedding. He slept fitfully. It seemed colder than usual and he dreamt that cockroaches swarmed on his body. He wanted to run, to shake them off, but he was tied down and wore the insect bodies like a suit until it seemed to him that he himself had become an insect.
He awoke at dawn, sweating. When he shook his bedding seven chitinous bodies fell to the floor like dry leaves. He killed them all in a fit of disgust but regretted it almost immediately.
It was distinctly colder in the cell. The drop in temperature prickled his skin and made him shiver. He ate the warm soup greedily when it was served and hoisted himself up to the window slit. There seemed to be a change in the quality of the light outside. It was hazier, grey, the sky itself seemed colder. It was winter’s initial foray into a long, timeless autumn.
Days passed and the cell became a beachhead for the cold’s attack on his body. Everything he touched seemed dead and inert. Warmth drained quickly from the soup when it was served, and it was cold and unnourishing before he finished it. Only very rarely now could he muster the strength to pull himself up to the window slit, and when he did, the sight was never encouraging, merely the usual empty expanse of cold sky.
He begged through the dinner slit for extra clothing or a small stove to heat the cell, but there was never any response. The cold affected his feet worst of all. When he awoke in the morning, there was no sensation in them, and the skin always seemed pasty and colorless. He forced himself to walk to restore some feeling in them, dragging them across the icy stone floor until they bled.
Occasionally he heard the sound of rain blustering outside the cell. He would have liked to see it, to feel the water on his skin, but he had to save his strength for the endless automatic hobble from cell wall to cell wall.
Day followed day and he began to hope that during the night his frozen body would finally sink through the surface of sleep to death. He always awoke, however. There was always another day.
The fungus continued to spread. Now its mottled pattern covered one wall and half the ceiling.
* * * *
Winter came suddenly, early, with a severe uncharacteristic blizzard that left the city snowbound for a day. The heating in his apartment was inadequate and Carpenter began to long for the controlled warmth of Chemitect. Anne called him to say she would come over. She lived on the other side of the city and he told her not to bother, traveling was impossible. But she said she had to see him. It was important.
She arrived two hours later with snow melting into beads of moisture on her hair. Carpenter kissed her. “You’re cold,” he said, touching her cheek. “You shouldn’t have come. What was so important?”
He helped her off with her coat and she opened her handbag and took out a newspaper clipping headed “The Loneliest Man in the World.” She gave it to him. “This.”
“Where did this come from?”
“I was clearing out some old newspapers and it caught my eye. It’s about six months old. Read it.”
He read: “Today Richard Crofton Keller enters an eight-foot square cell at the Chemitect Research Foundation to become the loneliest man in the world. Keller, a thirty-four-year-old, unmarried ex-bartender, will spend eighteen months in voluntary solitary confinement in an attempt to discover the effects of prolonged periods of isolation. Dr. Thomas S. Maynard, in charge of the project, explained: ‘Keller will be fed, nourished and cared for by completely automatic systems built into the cell and during the term of his confinement he will have no contact whatsoever with the outside world. Experiments of this nature have been carried out in the past, but we believe this will be the first time in which the subject will be isolated in any absolute sense. Keller won’t even possess what is popularly termed a “chicken switch.” He will have no means to curtail the experiment should he feel it is going badly. We are using body sensors and other devices to record his behavior and condition, but will have no means of monitoring these while the experiment is in progress. This may seem inhumane but we feel the step is psychologically necessary if the experiment is to have any validity at all. Because this is the first time anything like this has been attempted we’re naturally reluctant to discuss the possible results of the experiment. It is, however, basically intended to provide information of use in the treatment of a wide range of schizophrenic and other mental disorders stemming from isolation and alienation in society.’“
Anne took the cutting from him when he had finished it. “I don’t think you should go back there,” she said.
Carpenter found himself shivering and moved nearer the orange glow of the apartment’s electric heater. “What do you mean? I’ve got to go back. Horden must have known about this. He lied to me.”
“The job’s not important,” Anne said. “Not a job like that.”
Carpenter turned to her. “What do you mean the job’s not important? A couple of weeks ago you were glad I’d got it.”
“Don’t shout at me, hon.”
“I’m sorry,” Carpenter said. “I’m upset about Horden lying to me. Why would he do a thing like that? Deliberately keeping me in the dark.” He put his arms around her, wrapping her slight figure in his body. “Do you want me to quit the job?”
“It’s the thought of that poor man,” Anne said. “I don’t like the idea of you as some kind of jailer. I didn’t think you’d want to be used that way either.”
For a moment they stood together wordless and swaying slightly, enjoying the warmth of each other’s body. Then Anne broke away almost guiltily. “Think about it, hon,” she said.
“I will. I will.”
* * * *
One morning the prisoner awoke and knew it could not go on. There was no purpose in remaining alive, in dragging his body through the torture of extreme cold or in dragging his mind through the torture of exhausted memories. The memories had sustained him at one time, but they were scanty and largely morbid glimpses of a childhood that had never seemed happy and of an adulthood that had so far been a chronicle of failure, of drifting from job to job and worthless relationship to worthless relationship. The more he reran these scenes in his mind the more unreal they seemed, like the less-than-credible plot of a particularly melodramatic movie. The movie faded out into mental blankness sometime before his imprisonment and picked up again sometime after, when existence was his cell and memory was no real memory at all but merely days running out like identical grains of sand. The terminal memory was a suitably bizarre one. He had once run a bar, a dim basement grotto beneath a pawnbroker’s in the slum area of the city. He remembered a poet, a young Jesus-haired character (who knows, he might have thought himself the messiah of his age) who used the bar’s toilet to fix himself and then came to sit and talk to him while the heroin worked in his blood, an untouched beer before him for appearances. He talked about things the bartender could understand: disillusionment, a lifetime of bad breaks and unkind people. He talked about what it was like to poison yourself with heroin until the kick began to kick you back, until it became a necessity like air. It was a form of suicide, the poet said, suicide without real decision, an easy suicide for people with weak minds. The bartender asked him if it was really any different from drinking yourself to death or, for that matter, driving a car until statistics singled you out as one of the x percent killed every year in motor accidents. The poet merely smiled and said no, he supposed all life for everybody was one prolonged suicide, that you started killing yourself on the day you were born.
The poet had once given the bartender a book of poems. They were by T. S. Eliot and the bartender had put the book aside, saying he didn’t read poetry. One morning he’d just opened up the bar when there was a scream of brakes outside. He went up to the road where a small crowd was already beginning to form. A big saloon was wedged diagonally across the road. Its rear fender had scraped paint from three cars parked along the opposite curb. Something was wedged under the rear wheels and the bartender saw it was the young poet. The driver, a plump man in a neat business suit, was leaning on the car’s open door. His face was streaked with blood from a cut on his forehead and he was appealing to the bystanders. “The kid must have been crazy ... He just stepped out in front of me. Did he want to get killed or something? What was I supposed to do? You saw it, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”
The bartender went back to the bar. He remembered the Eliot poems and found the book. He read one called “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” which ended:
The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair.
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.
He didn’t understand the poem, except that it seemed black and pessimistic, somehow a suitable epitaph for the young poet.
Memory faded...
Perhaps it was a suitable epitaph for him too, the prisoner thought. The cold would kill him eventually, he knew, but he was afraid of the discomfort and suffering and that it would take too long. He dwelt on the fear. Briefly it seemed to warm him, but soon it was just another stale taste in his mouth. He realized that he wasn’t afraid, after all, and that he had come to an acceptance of what he had to do. It wasn’t fear that led to suicide, he realized, but a lack of fear and a lack of any prospect of ever experiencing fear again.
He took off his shirt and tore it clumsily with numbed fingers into strips. He tied the strips together until he had formed a serviceable rope several feet long. He tied one end tightly about his neck.
He went to stand beneath the small barred window slit. It required an almost superhuman effort to pull himself up to the slit, but he reflected that it would be the last effort ever required of him and jumped, wedging one hand into the slit and grabbing a bar with his cold fingers. The stone lip of the window cut at his wrist, sending shooting pains along his arm, but he hoisted himself up until he came abreast of the slit. Quickly he tied the rope’s other end around one of the bars. The strength was slipping rapidly out of his arms as he pulled the knot tight. He took a last look out of the slit. The sky was as cold and grey and hopeless as ever and with his last remaining strength he threw himself backward from the wall.
* * * *
Carpenter dropped the cutting on Horden’s desk. Horden glanced at it briefly and said: “I see.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Horden? You must have known what was going on.”
“Yes, I knew. But you’re making it sound unnecessarily sinister....”
“I’ve reason. You lied to me.”
“I told you a harmless untruth, yes. I didn’t see why such things should concern you. I still don’t. Really, does it matter? You were happy enough doing the job when you didn’t know about it. Does this really change anything?”
Carpenter went to the door. He felt confused by Horden’s questions. “A job’s a job,” he said, “even if I don’t particularly like myself for doing it. I don’t like being lied to, that’s all.”
Horden waited until Carpenter had left the office; then he leaned forward and pushed a button on his intercom.
* * * *
Carpenter went down to the Box to find Elleston on duty.
“Where’s Levinson?” he asked. It disturbed him to find a familiar routine interrupted. “Is he sick?”
“More than sick,” Elleston said. “He’s dead.”
“Dead?” For a second the word genuinely puzzled Carpenter, like a case of jamais vu.
“Yeah, the poor little kike. Apparently he collapsed in the street yesterday, in the snow. He should never have gone out, not in that sort of weather, not with a heart condition like his.”
“He had a heart condition? I never knew that.”
“Yeah, he’d had a bad heart for years. He must have known it would catch up with him sooner or later.”
Carpenter felt a profound sorrow for the small, nervous Jew. He wondered if Levinson’s uncle really owned a delicatessen out east. Probably not. There had probably never even been an uncle.
“Well, I’m going to grab some rest,” Elleston said. “I sure hope they can get somebody to replace him soon.”
“They will,” Carpenter said. “There’s always somebody.”
Elleston nodded and left.
Carpenter approached the Box. He wondered what Keller was doing at this moment, what he was thinking. Perhaps he was asleep. He tried to imagine what six months in isolation would do to him, but it was unimaginable. Like trying to imagine death, he thought. Surely no man could endure such isolation and remain sane? What sort of man would volunteer for something like that anyway, something that would very likely destroy him? A disappointed man? An idealistic man? He remembered what he had told Elleston: “There’s always somebody.”
He ran his fingers along the seam of the Box’s door. The man had volunteered, but there still remained a moral question. The full burden of it lay upon the scientists who had devised the experiment, but Carpenter carried some of it on his own shoulders. Ought Keller to be held to his voluntary decision, a decision almost certainly made without full knowledge of the consequences? Absently, experimentally, Carpenter took a coin from his pocket and tried it in one of the bolts that secured the door’s time lock. He twisted and the countersunk bolt turned easily. He gave it several turns. He watched the bolt as it threaded smoothly away from the covering plate and felt suddenly dizzy. What was he doing? If he freed Keller, he possibly freed a man with no desire to be free. And he certainly lost a job that paid good, regular wages. Carpenter screwed the bolt back firmly and dropped the coin into his pocket.
He went back to his seat by the wall and noticed for the first time, with some irony, that Horden had at last replaced the chair. The new one was larger and fully upholstered. Carpenter settled himself into it comfortably. He had only been watching the Box for a few minutes when a stranger in a white lab coat arrived, accompanied by a tired-looking, disgruntled Elleston.
“Are you Carpenter?” the stranger asked. “Will you come with me?”
Carpenter looked questioningly at Elleston, who merely shrugged and took Carpenter’s place in the chair. Carpenter followed the stranger along quiet corridors to an office practically identical to Horden’s. Instead of an impossible object, however, there was a print of Brueghel’s “Massacre of the Innocents” on the wall. The stranger sat behind the desk and Carpenter sat opposite.
“Cigarette?” The stranger offered him a box in which cigarettes and cigars lay partitioned and segregated. Carpenter declined and the stranger took a small cigar and lit it from a desk lighter that reminded Carpenter of a miniature version of the Box. It was shiny chromium. The stranger tapped its top and a lid opened automatically.
Automatically a second, smaller box rose from within the first. Its lid, in turn, opened to reveal a third box which rose up, its uppermost surface glowing like a hot plate. The stranger touched it to his cigar, smiling. “Chinese boxes. It’s a favorite toy of mine. My name is Maynard. Horden has asked me to speak to you, to explain why we have to fire you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’ve shown yourself to be disturbed by certain aspects of the work,” Maynard said. “It would be dangerous to let you remain.”
“Dangerous in what way?”
“Dangerous to the experiment and possibly dangerous to you. It would be a pity, for instance, if you got it into your head to try and release Keller.”
“Why should I do that?”
“Not everybody has the mentality of a prison warden, Carpenter, which is in effect what you’re expected to be. For certain people—I’d say for practically everybody these days—it goes against the grain. That is why Horden had to lie to you. He has standing orders to conceal the nature of the work whenever possible.” Maynard looked at Carpenter through a haze of cigar smoke. “You see, we live in a liberal society, a society educated in the politics of freedom and human rights. It’s not always possible to find people who will accept the role this particular job calls for.” He smiled. “It’s true of the job situation as a whole these days. Education is more than assimilating facts. It’s acquiring a whole system of behavioral rules and values. At the present period of history people have been educated to expect a better deal than society can manage to give them. Hence unemployment and unrest. There are too many well-qualified people going after too few really worthwhile jobs.
“You look surprised, but I should have thought you’d have realized this yourself, Carpenter. You’re no fool. You’re smart. Not so many years ago you wouldn’t have been chasing dead-end jobs. You’d have held some senior management post. Now, however, there are too many people like you. And everybody can’t be in management.”
Carpenter nodded. “Perhaps I did realize it all along. But it’s not an easy thing to accept.”
Maynard took a packet from his desk and gave it to Carpenter. “Here’s a month’s pay. What’s the matter? You don’t look too happy.”
“It’s just one thing that still puzzles me about the Box. You said in that article that Keller was going to be isolated for eighteen months, that he’d be taken care of by various gadgets inside the box and also that he’d have no way of curtailing the experiment himself. When Horden gave me the job, he said it involved watching for anything ‘untoward,’ but it seems to me you’ve got the untoward pretty well sewn up. What’s the point of hiring people to watch a foolproof system? Is it just making jobs for the unemployed?”
“No. It’s an essential safety measure. You see, there is one way Keller can curtail the experiment although not directly through an act of his own will. It’s a way he didn’t even know about. We don’t monitor his life functions, but they’re linked directly to the time lock. If, for some reason, they become critical or indeed, stop, then the door automatically opens.”
Carpenter felt sick. “You mean the only way he could escape would be by committing suicide. Is that likely?”
“By no means likely, but possible. There are so many unknown factors in this experiment and we have to cover every eventuality. Almost certainly he’ll fantasize and some of the fantasies may involve symbolic suicide. From that it’s only a small step to the real thing.”
Carpenter swore at Maynard, dragging up the most considered, unsubtle epithet he could think of. “There’s another reason you employ people to watch that Box,” he said. “You’re the prison wardens, Maynard, you and your kind, but you need someone to take over your role. You hope it will absolve you of responsibility but it won’t. And I think you know it won’t.”
He stood and went to the door. Behind him he heard a voice squawk from Maynard’s intercom. It was Horden and he sounded overexcited. There was another voice in the background, possibly Elleston’s. Carpenter didn’t pause to hear what they were saying. He was afraid he knew and he hated himself because he knew he could have prevented it. He left the building, walking past the basalt fountain and across the campus to the highway. Above him the sky was grey and cold like the underside of a great steel lid.