Orwell's Revenge (14 page)

There was nothing else of any interest in the shop. For a moment Blair toyed with a lunatic idea of renting a room somewhere in the area, and living there with the girl. Yes, he would do that! He would ask if he could join her. He would become a prole, erect an obscure stall in the market, and simply disappear from the Party rolls.
For a moment the pleasure of the daydream filled his thoughts. He didn't even notice the telescreen mounted on the wall beside the shop.

A moment later they were upon him. Four or perhaps five men in black uniforms. For a moment he thought he recognized his neighbor Wilkes, his tongue protruding slightly from his mouth, grinning sadistically. But before Blair could even make a sound, he was on his knees, and the first kick landed squarely in his testicles. Vomit spewed from his mouth. He felt his ankle crack under another kick as he rolled on the pavement. A truncheon smashed into his two front teeth, and everything exploded into yellow light. Inconceivable—inconceivable that one blow could cause such pain. As he lost consciousness Blair felt himself floating back to a schoolhouse and cowering once again under the lash of a schoolmaster's cane. He badly wanted to urinate, and felt a faint surprise, because he had done so
only two or three hours before.

Gasping for breath, O'Brien shifted his bulk into the back seat of the car. He was unaccustomed to walking more than a few yards any more, and even the trip down the hall from his apartment had been a challenge. Still, he was glad to be on the move again. Another hour with the network manuals would have been unbearable.

He had left them stacked around his desk, great piles in hopeless disarray. Plowing through a dozen of them that afternoon had been the most tedious thing O'Brien had ever done. The manuals seemed to treat him like a six-year-old, with page after page of painfully detailed instruction about things either obvious or trivial. Then, when finally he arrived at something important, the explanations were completely opaque. It was Orwell—Orwell, reaching out to infuriate him even from the grave.

Fortunately, Burgess had already located one of the engineers, an original, who had worked with Orwell in the early days. The man's cooperation was assured, of course. Sooner or later, everyone cooperated with the Party.

The car moved slowly through the dilapidated streets of London. It was headed to a pub in
one of the seedier parts of town. This was unpleasant, but necessary The engineer had served time in a labor camp, and men with that kind of experience simply froze when
confronted by official authority. The beer and the casual surroundings of a pub would put him at ease. If that failed, they could always try sterner measures.

The manuals hadn't been altogether useless. The network itself was almost annoyingly simple. The cables ran through the tunnels, with branches leading off into the apartments and offices. Directly or indirectly, every point on the network was connected to every other. One could say that the cables all connected to the Ministry of Love, but it was equally true that they all connected to any telescreen anywhere on the network. No, they didn't quite connect. Over the last few hundred yards to the telescreens, the signals often traveled by radio.

Everything important apparently happened in the telescreens themselves. Messages traveled primarily through the rubber-coated glass cables in the tunnels, but up to a point, it seemed, telescreens could communicate directly by radio with each other.

Each telescreen had four principal layers. The front side converted sound and light into electrical signals. The back converted electrical signals into either radio waves, to be transmitted through the air, or intense beams of light, for transport through glass. Ordinary light and sound went in at the front; laser light or radio signals went out the back. It all operated in reverse too, with incoming light or radio waves converted into pictures and sound. The front end was both a camera and screen; the back, both a transmitter and a receiver. All the parts functioned independently and simultaneously.

The power and brain of the telescreen were lodged in the middle. Just below the front surface lay a battery, an inch thick, as broad and wide as the screen itself. Charge was maintained by an array of cells incorporated in the front surface of the screen, which transformed light or loud sound into electricity. When fully charged, each unit converted any additional energy it picked up into amplified light or radio signals and shared the excess power with other units on the network.

The third layer of each telescreen was a calculating device that processed and stored information. It was apparently here that spoken commands were converted into machine instructions. But the manuals
said nothing about this function at all. After diligently searching for the information, O'Brien was quite sure it wasn't there. He was equally sure the omission had been deliberate.

The best hope now was with the engineer. The man had managed to survive the great purge and ended up in a camp. He had spent ten years there, and then finally had been released into the slums of London. O'Brien found himself hoping almost desperately that the engineer would understand how telescreens really operated. Surely he would. A bit of Orwell's genius must have rubbed off on his assistants.

Somehow or other, O'Brien knew, it was possible to control from where telescreen pictures were received and to where they were sent. Most telescreens just received Big Brother's standard broadcasts from the Ministry of Truth. But in the Ministry of Love there had to be a straightforward way to choose which pairs of screens were connected at any given instant. The manuals even explained how this was done, but in a completely mechanical way (“Hold blue box up to screen, press button NXX, then press button NYY . . .”) that provided no insight at all into what was really going on. The telescreens in the offices, like those in the Ministry of Love, could also be set to receive information from one place (a back issue of the
Times,
say, from the Records Department) and send it to another (the same issue after revision, sent on to higher authority for review). O'Brien had even sent for one of the blue boxes, but it hadn't helped. He had stood in front of his own screen, pressing buttons at random. Nothing had happened at all.

O'Brien's car stopped in front of a low-looking pub
on a corner in a side street. The windows appeared to be frosted over but in reality were merely coated with dust. He pulled himself out of the car and stepped heavily down the stairs. A sour cloud of beer seemed to hang about it. The
smell revolted him. The landlady, a tall grim woman with a black fringe, looking like the madam of a brothel, stood behind the bar, her powerful forearms folded, watching
a game of darts. The players were proles, with calloused dirty hands, wearing grubby overalls and heavy work boots. They stared at the darts board with casual concentration, let the darts fly in a single, deft movement, and stood back to lift their thick glass mugs
of beer to their lips once again. There was a moment's hush as people glanced inquisitively at O'Brien. He pretended not to notice that they were staring at him.

O'Brien saw his man almost immediately—a very old man, bent but active, with white mustaches that bristled forward like those of a prawn. He was wearing a decent dark suit and a black cloth cap pushed back from very white hair. O'Brien approached. The man's face was scarlet and his eyes were blue and laughing. He
reeked of gin.

As O'Brien stood watching, it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at least, had already been middle-aged when the network had been deployed. He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of technical knowledge. Scientists had been wiped out almost completely in the great purges. If there was anyone still alive who could give you a truthful account of how the network had been built, it could only be someone like this, someone old enough to have worked with Orwell from the beginning.

The man was standing at the bar, having some kind of altercation with the landlady. His white-stubbled face flushed pink. The old man turned away from the bar, muttering to himself. O'Brien moved heavily up beside him, and touched him on the arm.

“May I offer you a drink?” he said.

“You're a gent!” said the other,
straightening his shoulders.

The barlady swished two liters of dark-brown beer into thick glasses which she had rinsed in a bucket under the counter/The game of darts was in full swing again, and the knot of men at the bar had begun talking about black market deals. O'Brien's
presence was forgotten.

There was a free table under the window where he and the old man could talk. O'Brien carried their drinks over to it. The glasses were thick and cheap, thick as jam jars almost, and dim and greasy. It crossed O'Brien's mind that this beer had been sucked up from some beetle-ridden cellar through yards of slimy tube, and that the glasses had never been washed in their lives, only rinsed in beery water. O'Brien swallowed a mouthful or so and
set his glass gingerly
down. It was typical London beer, sickly and yet leaving a chemical aftertaste. O'Brien thought of
the wines of Burgundy.

“She could've drawed me off a pint,” grumbled the old man as he settled down behind his glass. “A 'ole liter's too much. It starts my bladder running.” The man reminded O'Brien of many prisoners he had dealt with over the years. Either out of fear or disease, they used the chamber-pots
half a dozen times during the night.

“You must have seen great
changes since you were a young man,” said O'Brien tentatively

The old man's pale blue eyes moved from the darts board to the bar, and from the bar to the door of the Gents, as though it were in the barroom that he expected the changes to have occurred.

“The beer was better,” he said finally. “And cheaper!”
He took up his glass. “In those days beer cost twopence a pint, and unlike the beer nowadays it had
some guts in it. ‘Ere's wishing you the very best of 'ealth!”

In the man's lean throat the sharp-pointed Adam's apple made a surprisingly rapid up-and-down movement, and the beer vanished. O'Brien went to the bar and came back with two more half-liters.

“You worked with Orwell, I believe. On the network.”

The man seemed to stiffen a bit, and his shoulders straightened again.

“You can remember what it was like in the old days,” O'Brien continued. “There aren't many like you left. Few people even understand how it was built any more. We can only read about the network in manuals, but they don't explain very much.”

The old man brightened suddenly. “The manuals!” he said. “Funny you should mention 'em. The same thing come into my 'ead only yesterday, I dunno why. I was jes thinking, I ain't seen one of 'em in years. I remember Orwell working on 'em. Ever so careful with 'em he was. And that was—well, I couldn't give you the date, but it must 'a been thirty years ago.”

“It isn't very important about the manuals,” said O'Brien patiently “The point is, can you tell me how the network operates? The Ministry, Members of the Party—they live like
the lords of the earth. They watch whatever they like. The whole thing works for their benefit. You—the ordinary people, the workers—you're always under their eye.
They can use the network to do what they like with you. They can watch you at work and at home, in your lavatories and in your bedrooms. But you can't even turn off your telescreen. You can't choose . . .”

The old man peered at O'Brien, his white eyebrows bristling up on his forehead. “Orwell could,” he said insistently. “ ‘E knew 'ow they worked. Always laughed about that one. Can't choose indeed!” The man grinned widely. “They 'ad the television. With the television, you couldn't choose. You jes listened to ol' B.B. But it weren't enough for 'em. Oh no! The people at the Ministries, they wanted more. That was the joke, see? It was the blokes at the Ministries that wanted more. And Orwell gave it to 'em. 'E found it ever so funny.”

The man chuckled and took another long drink.

“And Orwell gave it to them?” O'Brien said after a moment.

“Oh, 'e gave it to 'em all right. He gave 'em the network they wanted. Everyone connected to everyone. Made the Thought Police 'appy, 'e said. 'Cos now they could watch you all the time, see. And t'other Ministry got the systems for rewriting all them papers, see, so they was 'appy too. And Orwell said, if that's what the idiots want, that's what the idiots'll get. A telescreen in every 'ome, in every office.” The old man chuckled, and drank some more beer. “If that's what the idiots want, says Orwell, that's what the idiots'll get.” He was laughing again—a sort of weak wheezing laugh, but the man obviously found the memory deliciously rich.

“Why was it funny for the Ministries to get what they wanted?”

“ 'Cos the screens really worked.”

“How exactly did they work?”

The old engineer appeared to think deeply. He stroked his face with a palsied finger before answering.

“It wos done with the blue box,” he said vaguely. “I recollect it as if it was yesterday. Orwell knew 'ow it worked. Quite a gent, Orwell was, though he never dressed the part. Dressed almost like a tramp, 'e did. Always pretendin' to be down and out. But he weren't,
not a bit of it. Went to Eton, I don't doubt. A real gentleman, 'e wos, and 'e knew the network. Well, I was young in them days, and I was 'appy to 'elp, only—”

A sense of helplessness took hold of O'Brien.

“Perhaps I have not made myself clear,” he said. “What I'm trying to understand is this. How can the screens be so selective? You have been alive a very long time; you worked with Orwell on the network. Can you explain to me just how the network decides which pictures will show up where?”

The old man looked meditatively at the darts board. He finished up his beer, more slowly than before.