Authors: Robert Sheckley
Hob felt numb at the end of Annabelle’s story and didn’t know what to say. Finally he said, “Why are you telling me all this?”
“I’ve got to talk to someone, don’t I? And I feel bad about this, Hob. I feel terrible about the spot you’re in.”
“So what happens now?”
“That’s not up to me, Hob. That’s up to Ernesto.”
“Annabelle, you could get word to someone, couldn’t you?”
“Hob, you don’t understand. You had your chance. You saw how dangerous it was. You could have walked away and nobody would have bothered you. But you didn’t take it. And now you’ll just have to take what comes.”
“And what about you, Annabelle?”
“I’ve got my own life to worry about. And believe me, I’m worrying about it plenty. More than you’ve ever worried about your own.”
“Is that your idea of a life? Being a gangster’s girlfriend?”
“I’m after a lot more than that, Hob. I’ve got a chance now at something really big. I’m not going to tell you what it is. I thought you were a friend, but you’re really quite unsympathetic. And I’m not going to let you or anything else stand in my way. I’ve been kicked around enough. It’s going to stop now.”
“Shit,” Hob said.
“Oh! You are no gentleman!” Annabelle cried, and rushed out of the room. The effect was spoiled when she found the door locked and had to knock several times before Arranque let her out.
9
“She’s something, isn’t she?” Arranque said, coming into the room and casting an admiring glance back at where Annabelle had been.
“No doubt about it,” Hob said.
“I want you to know something,” Arranque said. “I want you to know that even though I’m going to have to kill you, it’s nothing personal.”
“Glad you told me that,” Hob said. “It makes it a lot easier.”
“Well, I’m hoping it will.”
“Maybe I can make it easier on you still.”
“How?” Arranque said. “You plan to kill yourself?”
“No. I hope to spare you the necessity of killing me.”
“How do you figure to do that?”
“By giving you my word that if you let me out of here, I’ll drop this case. Annabelle was right. It’s too rich for my blood.”
“You’re not serious, are you?” Arranque asked.
“Perfectly serious.”
“I wish I could believe you,” Arranque said. “But I don’t. I’m afraid I’m going to have to fix your clock.”
“Beg pardon?”
“ ‘Fix your clock’ is a North American expression for ‘kill you.’ ”
“Oh. I’ve been out of the country for a while.”
“Try to put yourself in my shoes. Even if I believed you, I still couldn’t let you live. I have to make an example of you. I have to show what happens to people when they fool around with soma people. This isn’t no tiny little operation. This is the big time. We need to establish respect from the start. Like the mafia’s got respect. You know what I mean?”
Hob nodded. He saw no reason to be difficult just now.
“I have to do something dramatic with you,” Arranque said. “Something that’ll get people’s attention. Something spectacular. Or at least interesting.”
“What did you have in mind?” Hob asked.
“I’ve got a couple ideas,” Arranque said. “But it would be premature to talk about them now. Try to take it easy, seamus. I’ll get back to you soon.”
Hob decided it was not the time to tell Arranque the word was “shamus” rather than “seamus.” No sense getting the guy riled up at you.
And that was the last Hob heard until almost an hour later.
“All right,” Arranque said. “Tie him up and bring him out.”
The two bogus Special Branch men bound Hob’s hands behind him with a length of transparent plastic cord. Then he did the same for Hob’s feet. Then the other man took out a cigarette lighter and applied it to the knots, warming them but not setting them on fire. The knots melted into blobby masses the size of crab apples.
“Nobody unties those knots,” one of them said. The other nodded.
“Okay, carry him out here.”
The two men lugged Hob out of the room, and, following Arranque, down a short flight of stairs to the main floor of the factory room. Here, beneath overhead fluorescents hanging from chains, the skeletons and corpses of once busy machines littered the floor. The place seemed very old. Hob guessed that most of the equipment dated from the early years of the twentieth century. Not that he was any expert.
“Put him on the chute,” Arranque said.
The chute was waist high, an open-sided metal slide about three feet wide with sides about two feet high. It extended at an angle from a point in the factory wall near the ceiling and extended across the room at a slope to where it entered a bulky metal object the size of a garage, whose function Hob could not guess, though he feared the worst.
The bogus Special Branch men laid Hob on the chute on his back. Hob found that he was lying on rollers. Arranque walked to a wall and did something Hob couldn’t see. Machine noises started up. They came from belts beneath the chute, and from the garage-sized object ahead of Hob’s feet and about fifteen yards away.
“This gadget is an ore crusher,” Arranque said to Hob. “The chunks of ore are carried on this conveyor belt and fed into the crushing machine. It’s straight ahead of you. If you crane your neck a little, you can see it.”
Hob craned his neck and saw that a panel had slid open on the garage-sized machine, revealing two long steel rollers. The rollers had begun to turn—slowly, ponderously at first, then with increased speed. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that anything coming down the conveyor belt would be brought in between the two rollers and crushed to something small and, in his case, bloody.
Annabelle appeared and walked over to Hob.
“Hob,” she said, “I’m really sorry about this. But it’s not my fault. I did warn you.”
Hob couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that all this was happening. He said, “Stop apologizing and get me out of here.”
“Oh, Hob,” she said, and began to cry.
“I’m not really a cruel guy,” Arranque said. “But I need to make an impression on my partners. Especially the Indians. When they hear of this, they’ll know I’m someone to be reckoned with.”
From where he was lying, Hob couldn’t think of anything amusing to say. He heard another click. Arranque had turned another switch. The roller wheels under Hob began to move very slowly.
“Let’s get out of here,” Arranque said to Annabelle, adding, “and stop that sniveling, will you?”
“I just hate to see this happening to someone from Ibiza,” Annabelle said, drying her eyes with a tiny handkerchief.
“He was warned,” Arranque said, as if that explained everything. “Take it easy, Mr. Draconian. I’m off to Ibiza now. Your buddy Nigel ought to be just about finished hanging my pictures. When he’s done, I’ll send him to hell to join you.”
Hob heard more footsteps, receding. And then there was nothing but him riding a conveyor belt into the mouth of hell. To put it one way.
1
0
When he was alone, Hob’s first thought was a curiously optimistic one. There was little doubt in his mind that Arranque was some sort of a loser.
Proof of this was the fact that Hob’s demise hadn’t been planned out with meticulous care. Apparently there had been no time to hold a rehearsal. By wiggling around and wedging his body sideways in the chute, and pressing with his head and feet, Hob was able to stop himself from being carried down to the crushing cylinders. He held himself in this position and tried to think of what to do next. It was difficult to concentrate in all that noise. He couldn’t hear anything above the grinding of gears and the roar of the motor impelling the contraption, but he let enough time pass for Arranque and the others to have gotten into their car and driven away. Then it was time to get himself out of this.
Harry Houdini, with his incredible contortionist talents, would have had little difficulty getting off of the conveyor belt. But Hob was no Houdini. He tried to get his bound feet above the side of the belt but couldn’t find enough leverage to do that, and the conveyor belt carried him another five feet toward the grinding cylinders before he gave it up and wedged himself again. His motion toward the cylinders stopped. But he couldn’t do anything about getting himself off the conveyor belt while he was wedging himself that way.
At least he was safe for the moment. It took some effort to keep himself from sliding down toward the slowly revolving cylinders. It gave him the most precious boon of all: time to think, to plan, to come up with the brilliancy that would get him out of this mess.
Unfortunately, no useful thoughts came. He breathed the sooty air of the factory, listened to the clanking of the gears as the conveyor belt rotated slowly beneath him. It was curiously difficult to concentrate. Images flitted across his mind, vague and indistinct, black-and-white snapshots of Ibiza, grayed-out prints of a Paris he might never see again. He was in a curious state: tense and pumped up, but with a great fatigue working in him. His back and leg muscles were trembling from the effort of keeping himself pressed against the sides of the conveyor belt.
Minutes passed. No loss, no gain, but he was getting tired.
A sense of hopelessness started to seep into his mind. Yes, he had found a momentary way of arresting his death. But it required a constant effort, and he was starting to wear out. He didn’t begrudge making the effort, but how long could he keep it up? How long would he need to keep it up? As far as he knew, nobody knew where he was. Could he expect somebody to come by? A watchman, an area guard? A tourist, or a kid exploring the place? No, there was no reason he could think of for anyone to come by and interrupt his slow slide toward death.
Even as he was thinking this, he felt himself carried a few feet along the conveyor belt. His burdened leg muscles had relaxed of their own accord. He checked his motion at once, pushing hard, feeling the rollers turn under his back. He had about twenty-five feet to go before he was pulled into what he had come to think of as the jaws of death.
Time to take stock, figure something out. There had to be something he could do. He strained against his bonds. There was no give. He couldn’t see the knots, but he knew they had been melted into roughly spherical blobs. There were no loose ends to work with, and the knots he could reach were sealed tight.
Lying there on the bed of the conveyor belt, Hob couldn’t see much, only his tied feet and the shiny metal sides of the conveyor. He levered himself up to a partial sitting position, giving ground on the conveyor belt so he could look into his possibilities. He lay back again, bracing and arresting his progress. He had noticed only one thing that might be of use: The top side of the chute, the left side as he looked down it, was not smooth metal. Something must have fallen against it. The metal rim ten feet ahead of him was bent and torn. If he could get his bound hands over the side and then let himself be carried forward, there was a possibility the jagged metal would sever the plastic with which he was bound.
The only difficulty was, if it didn’t work, if the plastic cord didn’t sever, he’d be carried right on into the rollers.
How tough was that plastic cord?
Could he just lie there, wedged in, and think it over for a while?
Not for long. His tensed muscles kept releasing on him, easing up, losing him a few inches here, a foot or so there. Waiting was a losing game.
All right. There was nothing to do but go for it.
Hob released his muscles, felt himself carried along the moving belt toward the rotating cylinders, tried to get his bound hands over the edge of the belt, failed by several inches, fell back, felt himself carried along, brought up his bound feet with a wrenching motion, arched his back and thrust again, this time getting his ankles onto the upper rim of the belt. Now he tried to bring pressure to his ankles by arching his back, feeling the rough metal tear at the plastic cord; hearing the growl of the rotating cylinders; feeling the plastic slip and tear, slip and tear; realizing the plastic wasn’t going to part in time; bending at the waist and seeing the cylinders approaching his feet; pulling his legs in and wedging against the sides again. He was about three feet from the rotating cylinders. His body was quivering with muscle fatigue.
And at that terrible moment, he heard the most welcome sound of all: George Wheaton’s voice coming from somewhere above him and to his left, calling out, “I say, Hob! Hang on, old boy!”
And then a most unwelcome sound after that: George’s voice saying, “Have you any idea how to turn this damned thing off?”
George, panting, out of breath, one trouser ripped from slipping on a pile of rubble outside, was looking at a crudely constructed switchboard set onto the wall of the observation booth above the factory floor. There were some twenty small switches on that board, a dozen buttons, and two big knife switches. Nothing was written under or above any of the instruments. George hesitated for a moment, then pulled one of the big knife switches. Nothing discernable happened. He tried the other one. Another dud.