Orwell's Revenge (26 page)

The prisoners hollow eyes flitted round the walls, as though he half expected
to find a window somewhere.

“Yes, I belong to you.”

“
You are dead.”

“Yes, I am dead.”

“Your dream will die with you.”

“No. Others will carry it forward.”

“You are wrong. Winston Smith's diary is of no consequence. You are alone, and soon you will be dead.”

O'Brien felt wearier than ever. The pounding in his head was almost unbearable. His chest felt tight. Somehow, interrogations had been easier in the old days, a challenge which his massive intellect had met with greedy anticipation and enjoyment.

The prisoner reached toward his collar, and adjusted the rough cloth of his prison uniform where it had chafed against his neck. It was curious, but 'til that moment O'Brien had never realized what it meant to destroy a healthy, conscious man. The man's nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. He and O'Brien were seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in a few minutes, with a sudden snap,
one of the two would be gone.

It was time to put an end to the farce. The pain machines would not be needed. O'Brien knew the prisoner would cooperate.

“We know that you have helped stallkeepers connect their telescreens directly to each other.”

“Yes,” the prisoner answered dully.

“You have discovered some new way to control the telescreens.”

“Telescreens were designed to be controlled by their owners.”

“That is impossible. Telescreens are controlled by the Ministry.”

“No. People can control the connections themselves.”

“Do you mean—” the thought was so monstrous that O'Brien could hardly utter it. “Do you mean that any telescreen in London can be connected to any other?”

“Yes.”

“That people can stop watching Big Brother whenever they like?”

“Yes.”

“That they can disconnect from the Ministry of Love at will?”

“Yes.”

“You could send any picture you liked to the telescreen in my own apartment?”

“Yes. I would need to know your number. And your screen would have to be programmed to accept my call.”

“How is that done?”

The prisoner shifted on his hard chair. “The most reliable way is with a multifrequency generator. It is a small device that generates certain simple tones. Each tone represents a number. Each telescreen has its own number.”

O'Brien slumped back in his chair.

“But this is very complicated? It requires great technical ingenuity?”

“No.”

“The tone generators are in very short supply?”

“I don't know. But the tone generators aren't needed.”

“Why not?”

“A telescreen can also be programmed with appropriate voice commands.”

“How?”

“The screen responds to a simple vocabulary of spoken words. Each word has an exact meaning. The choice of words has been
cut down to a minimum, to avoid all possibility of ambiguity or confusion. Each word is simply a staccato sound expressing
one clearly understood instruction.”

The prisoner paused, as if wondering whether he would say any more. Then, with a shrug, he added: “The command set used to be called BASIC.
Now it is known as Newspeak.”

Newspeak. The word echoed in O'Brien s brain, and for a moment he wondered stupidly how the language was used. Then with a great effort, with the feeling of deadness creeping up into his belly, O'Brien spoke again.

“You are the only one who knows how to do this?”

“No.”

“Who taught you?”

“I don't know his name. The proles call him the phone phreak.”

“But you are the phreak.”

The prisoner looked back, surprised. Then, for a second, a smile flickered across his hollow face. For a ghastly moment O'Brien thought the man was going to laugh at him. O'Brien's whole life had been
one long struggle not to be laughed at.

“I would have earned my phreaking credentials soon enough,” the prisoner said after a moment. “There are thousands of phreaks out there already. But you arrested me too soon. I've only just learned how to use the box.”

O'Brien thought again of the hanging he had attended years ago. The hangman had fixed the rope round the prisoner's neck, and O'Brien had stood with the warders in a rough circle round the gallows. And then, when the noose was fixed, the prisoner had begun crying out to his god. It was a high, reiterated cry of “God! God! God! God!” not urgent and fearful like a prayer or cry for help, but steady, rhythmical, almost
like the tolling of a bell. Now, for a reason he could not understand, O'Brien found himself chanting the same words himself. But his tongue seemed to cleave to the roof of his mouth, and he made no sound.

He heard the vessel bursting in his head even before he felt it. It was a sound like water rushing angrily through a drain, and into the center of his skull. He felt a tremendous pressure. It was as if a bullet had penetrated his brain.

He climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with
legs sagging and head drooping. Every line of his body had altered. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility
seemed to have settled upon him; one could have imagined him thousands of years old. At last, after what seemed a long time, he sagged flabbily to his knees. Even in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, like a huge rock toppling. Thick blood welled out of his cavernous mouth
like red velvet. He fell forward, and his great fleshy face crashed into the desk. The blood dripped out of his nose and slowly formed a viscous pool on the map of the network spread out in front of him.

Blair smelled the rats long before he saw them. It was
a foul, musty smell of fetid droppings and wet fur. He heard them scuffling evilly behind the bricks. The small flashlight cast only a tiny pool of light on the floor of the tunnel at his feet; everything else was darkness. Occasionally he raised the beam to check on the rubbery orange cables. They were to his right, about shoulder high, just under the curved roof of the tunnel.

“Follow the cables,” the phreak had said.

For a moment Blair wished he had not listened to him. He would have forgotten Kate in time, consigned her to the memory holes of his mind. He had gone about a mile in the tunnel now, and it had taken the best part of an hour. It had been bad going underfoot—thick dust and jagged chunks of rock, and here and there the mud as deep as in a farmyard, and viciously slippery At the start the stooping had not been too difficult, but now it was almost unbearable. At some points in the tunnel he had to bend double, but all the while he also had to keep his head up to watch for the tunnel arches and dodge them when they came. He had a constant crick in his neck, but that was nothing to the pain in his knees and thighs. After half a mile
it had become unbearable agony.

At first, as he crept into the dark, stinking tunnel, a terror had risen in his throat, an unreasoning fear that he could not understand. He knew that in the darkness was something unendurable, something
too dreadful to be faced. And then he had known. Rats. Somewhere, near him, they were rustling, scurrying, gnawing. He felt blind and terrified. Of all the horrors in the world,
he despised rats the most.

He shone his flashlight up onto the cables. Every third or fourth hanger was dislodged, and the cables dangled limply downward like decaying vines in a dying forest. The rats had been at the orange insulation, and in many places it was entirely stripped away. Every few feet the pale beam of the flashlight picked up a glint of glass threaded through the tattered rubber shielding.

The tunnel was curving to the right now, and seemed to be sloping slightly upward. He had just passed through a low stretch of about a hundred yards and a succession of arches which had forced him to a crawl. Getting down on all fours had been a relief after the stooping, but when he came to the end of the arches and tried to get up again, he found that his knees refused to lift him. He rested for a minute or two, before painfully rising again to his feet. A large patch of muddy water appeared in the pale light of his flashlight. He reached up with his left hand to steady himself against the wall.

For a moment he felt the dank hairiness under his hand, and then a piercing pain shot through the tip of his index finger. He swung his flashlight toward the wall, and the animal seemed to leap at his face. It was enormous, an old scaly grandfather of the sewers with pink hands, fierce whiskers, and yellow teeth. It was at the age when a rat's muzzle grows blunt and his fur brown instead of gray, and it seemed to shoot out toward his face like a bullet. In an instant Blair knew that it was going to attack his eyes and burrow through his cheeks and
devour his tongue.

He saw his flashlight arch through the air toward the blur of fur, moving by its own will. The light crashed against the brick wall of the tunnel, and a black darkness enveloped him. He felt the blood dripping off the end of his hand. Behind the walls of the tunnel, not far from where the flashlight had struck, there was an outburst
of squeals. The sound seemed to reach him from far away. The rats were fighting.

He heard a wild singing in his ears, and he was overcome with a feeling of utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a Rat desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to him out of immense distances. He stood hunched in the tunnel, rigid with terror. A succession of shrill cries now appeared to be occurring in the air above his head. There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him. Panic took hold of him.

He turned violently, striking his head against the roof, and scrambled back up the tunnel. Now he was insane,
a screaming animal. Kate didn't matter any more. He hated her. She was a syphilitic whore. She was not young and soft as he remembered, but old and hard, with paint plastered thick on her face, with white hair and a cavernous black mouth with no teeth. Kate didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except escaping the rats. And then he was falling backward, into enormous depths, away from the rats, through the floor of the tunnel, through the earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer space, into the gulfs between the stars, always
away, away, away from the rats.

His eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness and he saw the lights—tiny filaments of light, jensen blue and ruby red, suspended near the upper edge of the tunnel. Immediately to his side was a hairlike thread of red about a yard long, a sort of deep, glittering red, like blood spilled on an illuminated piece of cut glass. For a moment he thought the color came from his bleeding hand. A bit farther ahead was a short line of blue, the richest blue imaginable, as if drawn in the air with a fine-tipped, luminous fountain pen. He forgot his terror and marveled at the beauty. Perhaps he was hallucinating, but the terror was gone. All that remained was the crystal revelation of light, beautiful light, after the tomblike darkness. He thought what a good thing it was to be alive in a world where
such beautiful things could be found.

He remembered lying on the street before Kate had found him; he remembered his dream of the sea and the seashore, of enormous, splendid buildings and streets and ships, and his peculiar feeling of happiness. He knew that these thoughts meant death,
but he could not understand why death had to appear to him in these various disguises, for
he was no longer afraid of dying.

He thought of the phreak. He remembered when he had first seen him, an overgrown child, tinkering with the wires in the market.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness,
the phreak had said. Blair turned around and reached up with his right hand. Delicately now, without fear, he touched the red light and saw it sway gently under his hand. He felt the tattered rubber insulation of the cable where the red beam disappeared back into the darkness. So long as he had regarded himself as an individual, his attitude toward death had been
one of simple resentment. But now Kate was a part of him too. She was alive and he was going to get her.

He began to move forward again, splashing through the puddles and the mud. The smell of rats was still heavy in the air, and the blood still dripped from his hand, but he clutched at the lifeline of the cable and pressed on. He reached a stretch of a couple of hundred yards where the tunnel was exceptionally low, and he had to work himself along in a squatting position. He felt only a tremendous longing to finish the journey, an agonized desire to reach the end, and a dreamlike
certainty that it was possible. Suddenly the roof opened out and he could stand upright. The relief was overwhelming.

The tunnel continued to curve toward the right and slope upward. After a few minutes more, the red and blue filaments faded from his sight again, and the pitch black of the tunnel became a shadowy gray, and then a weak yellow A moment later Blair found himself looking through a grating into a musty basement room.

It was a long, rectangular cellar, lit by a single bulb. About a dozen other tunnel entrances were cut into the four walls. The orange rubber cables issuing from each tunnel were routed on large, gray steel trays and converged at the far end of the room. The trays were massive—far too big, it seemed, for the slim orange cables they supported. At the very corner of the room, a single tray curved toward the ceiling, and the cables disappeared through a hole. Next to it, an iron ladder was bolted to the wall. Blair pushed the grating open and climbed into the basement room.

He looked at his watch. It was four-fifteen in the morning. Wait until five, the phreak had said. Wait until five—then go in and get her. They won't stop you. The phreak had promised.

Blair sat down on the floor. The minutes crawled by. To his surprise, he felt a pleasant sort of calm creeping along the length of his limbs. He stretched out his legs, and even imagined that if he had wanted to he could have slept. He ran his tongue over his broken teeth, and wondered abstractly whether he would soon be in the hands of the Thought Police.