Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (3 page)

Davide, holding the third excavator, removed his attention from the controls to angle his face in Lwon’s direction. ‘That sounded very much,’ he said, ‘as if you were
giving me an order.’

The tone in which he said this, as much as the words themselves, brought a frozen quiet to the space. Everybody looked at Lwon.

‘If you’d prefer not to, Davide,’ Lwon said, in a low, measured voice. ‘That’s fine. But if we don’t find water, we will die.’

‘
I’ll
have a go!’ said Gordius, brightly, holding his arm out for Davide to pass him the excavator.

Saying nothing, Davide uncoiled his own waste schute, and fitted the open end into the port at the back of the excavator.

E-d-C had already fitted his schute to his digger. ‘So, the exhaust,’ he said. ‘Through the rock? Or through the stuff they sprayed to seal this cave?’

Marit, near the ceiling, reached out and thumped the artificial substance with his fist. Then he wrapped his arm back around his knees and hugged himself. Jac, from the other side of the cleft,
saw how vigorously he was shivering. In the microgravity the little muscular tremors made him jiggle in position slightly, as if he were being agitated from without, like a particle in Brownian
motion.

‘The thing about the seal,’ said E-d-C, ‘is that at least we know it’s not too thick.’ He pushed off with his feet, dragging his excavator with him. On reaching the
ceiling he pressed the sharp end of his schute against the material of the ceiling, and turned the device on. Jac expected – he didn’t know what: whirring, lasers, something. But the
point simply sank into the material. It pulled a metre or so of hose after it. Then it stopped.

‘I’m going to try this one on rock,’ said Lwon, scrabble-pushing himself to the other side of the cavity and pressing his waste schute against the wall. This time there was
more noise: a coffee-grinder whirring sound. The schute-point burrowed more slowly into the rock, and tugged one, then two, then three metres of hose after it. Then it stopped.

Davide had picked a third place on the rock, and his schute dragged less than two metres of hose. The three men took their respective machines to different parts of the cavewall, and set the
drillmouth against the rock.

‘Is there no way we can – what’s the word—’ Marit said, evidently unhappy that he didn’t have one of the drills. ‘Dowse?’

‘Dowse?’ Lwon repeated.

‘You’re just going to dig? That’s blind luck. What if there’s no ice in the direction you choose to excavate?’

‘Then,’ said Lwon, ‘we try another way. We keep digging until we find it.’ And he started his machine.

It wasn’t an excessively loud sound, but it wasn’t restful on the ear either, and there was no escaping it. Lwon, E-d-C and Davide ground at the rock in sweeping or
circling motions. The first two were able to provide traction by setting their feet against the other wall, and Davide dug his heels into the edge of the ceiling. But it did not go quickly, and
there was nothing at all for the other four prisoners to do but watch. The fusion cell was giving out a modicum of heat, and although it did little to warm the air more generally, Mo, Marit and Jac
clustered around it, and Gordius got as close as his great bulk would allow. ‘Why isn’t the fusion cell hotter?’ Mo wanted to know. ‘It’s got enough energetic
potential to blow the whole asteroid to dust. I mean, if all released at once. So why did they set the heating element to max-out at such a
low
threshold?’

‘Why do you think?’ growled Marit. ‘They’re sadists. Low-level bureaucratic sadists.’

‘I think,’ Jac put in, emphasising the first word, and continuing in a singsong voice, ‘there’s a more practical reason. It’s cold now, and will be for a while. But
there
will
come a time when our main problem will be finding ways to radiate excess heat.’

‘Shut your head-hole, Leggy,’ said Marit. Jac looked away, smiling.

Grrn, grrn, grrn, went the drills.

‘I’m thirsty,’ said Gordius, eventually. ‘Would it have killed the Gongsi to maroon us with a couple hundred litres of fresh water? Would it? How much would that add to
their precious expense sheet?’ He kept chattering on. His was the type of personality, Jac noted, that was unable to leave well alone.

The dark grey walls made a
Λ
. The air was filled with scraps and orts of dust, crumbs of rock. The smell of cordite was in Jac’s nostrils. Stenchy,
stenchy.

‘It would only be postponing the inevitable,’ said Jac. ‘They could hardly supply us with eleven years’ worth. We
will
have to shift for ourselves. Might as well
start as we mean to go on.’

‘But,’ said Gordius, pressing his fists into his ample stomach. He didn’t say anything else.

‘You sound like you’re on
their
side,’ observed Mo. ‘That’s a provoking attitude to take.’

‘I will say it one more time, Leggy,’ said Marit. ‘And no further warnings. Keep your head-hole shut.’

Jac regarded him with a sly eye. But he didn’t say anything else.

‘Eleven years,’ said Gordius. ‘We won’t last
one
. We’ll die of thirst in a week. There’s no ice in this rock. There ought to be a law. The Gongsi ought
to be compelled by the Lex Ulanova to survey their prison stroids, to ensure—’ He petered out.

They fell into an unhappy silence. Jac watched the three diggers. Davide was the most aggressive, straining his muscles to try and force the drillmouth hard against the rock. Jac wondered if
that would make a difference; presumably the machine processed as much matter as it did, regardless of whether it was pressed or merely set against the rock. But Davide was an impatient man.
Everything about him made that fact plain. He would have to learn to shed his impatience, Jac thought, or he would not last very long. Lwon was more methodical, moving the drill in a tight circle
and slowly carving out a metre-diameter circular space. E-d-C was making more dramatic, sweeping leftto-right gestures with his machine, scraping out a shelf. It required considerable muscular
effort to move the excavators – weightless but nonetheless massy – through this shuttling series of motions. Jac wondered how long it would be before he exhausted himself. From time to
time E-d-C and Lwon would stop, examine the area they had carved out, and check their machine. Davide did not stop.

Time passed. Nobody had any way of measuring the time: none of them had any bId connection any more. Jac cast his mind idly back to his schooldays. How had ancestral humans done it –
measured the passing of time? (He was going to think: how did
cavemen
manage? But that seemed, in his present situation, too much like irony.) Water clocks. Pendula. Both things that depended on
gravity. What sort of clock could they build in this gravityless environment? Sundials. There was no sunlight, here.

It didn’t matter. Time didn’t matter. Only the will mattered.

Davide was sweating, despite the ferocious cold.

Jac watched the particles of dust sliding slowly-slowly in beautifully coordinated trajectories, slowly, in towards the intake end of the scrubber. Gordius saw that he was looking. ‘I know
what you’re thinking,’ he said.

‘You do?’

‘You’re thinking: what if the power chip in the scrubber malfunctions?’ Jac hadn’t been thinking that, actually, but he didn’t say so. ‘Well,’ Gordius
went on. ‘I was thinking that too. Without the scrubber, we’d all asphyxiate in a very short time. But, see,
if
that happens, we can hook it up to the fusion cell.’ He said
this as if he had spotted something terribly clever and useful. Jac went back to watching the dust patterns.

Time passed. The next thing that happened was that Davide broke off from his digging. ‘Somebody else have a go,’ he gasped. ‘I need a rest.’

‘You’re straining at the machine,’ observed Lwon, over the noise of his own digger. ‘You need to take it easier.’

‘Two-and-a-half-hours a day,’ Davide snapped back. ‘Minimum –
minimum
. Any less than that, and your muscles will waste. You’ll end up looking like Leggy,
there.’ He nodded in Jac’s direction. Then he pushed off and flew slowly over towards where the biscuits had been stowed. Lwon saw what he was up to, quickly enough. ‘Wait!’
He shut off his digger.

‘I’m either having some biscuit,’ Davide announced, ‘or I’m eating your flesh, raw, Lwon.’

‘We
all
eat
at the same time
, and we all take the same amount,’ announced Lwon, forcefully. ‘That way we avoid falling out. If we start fighting amongst ourselves, then
we might as well cut our own throats. And the biscuits won’t last us long, anyway. We should keep them till we’re really hungry.’

‘I
am
really hungry,’ Davide barked. ‘Did you just see the job of work I did?’

Jac watched Lwon’s face, as he sized-up the situation – whether this big man was going to back down, or not. Lwon evidently decided the latter was the truth of it. ‘In that
case, we all get one Lembas. All of us – one each.’

Davide growled, but made no objection. So E-d-C shut off his digger too, and the seven of them gathered around the food. Davide took it on himself to hand out the supplies: one biscuit per
person. ‘Leggy here don’t need a whole one,’ he said. Marit laughed. ‘I’d be happy with half,’ Jac said, mildly. But Lwon spoke up: ‘give him the same as
everyone else, Davide.’

Nobody got very far with their biscuits. Without water, it was too parching a meal, not calculated to please dusty mouths. Jac ate some few nibbles, and put the remainder back. Davide went to
the far side of the cavern, turned to face the rock, wedged himself in, and went to sleep. Or perhaps he didn’t: he was shivering pretty violently, and it was hard to imagine he got much
rest. But he made a performance of sleeping, and of do-not-disturb, and everybody else let him be.

‘Come on,’ said Lwon. ‘We need
water
.’ Gordius again offered to take his turn, but Marit overruled him and took the spare machine. Drrn, drrn, drrn.

They laboured for a long time. The relatively high pressure in their pocket meant that the air was dry, and that fact combined with the dust meant that everybody felt terribly
thirsty. ‘Could they not leave us a single keg of
water
?’ groaned Davide.

‘The scrubber will produce a little water, I think,’ said Jac. ‘The reaction takes the carbon from the see-oh-too and—’

‘You’ll be quieter,’ snarled Marit, ‘when I rip out your tongue.’

Jac, smiled, but said nothing more.

It was colder than could easily be expressed, colder than any of them had known before. As Davide said, repeatedly, in tones of gruff incredulity, it was amazing that human beings could exist
for any length of time in such cold without simply expiring. They were wearing whatever they had been wearing when they were arrested – tunics, trows, dish-shoes. None of them were in
cold-weather gear. Their breath burst from them in great cloudy bursts like ectoplasm; their eyelids kept sticking together as the moisture froze. Working helped a little; and a couple of them
imitated Davide’s exercises: furious running up one wall and down the other. At other times they clumped together, scowling, for shared warmth.

The cold was very hard to bear, but the thirst was worse. The dry air and the effortful labour of drilling parched their mouths; their tongues felt like dry horns, the roofs of their mouths were
swollen and hard and caked in dust. Their muscles ached from operating the machine, or else from the constant shivering. The seven of them bickered amongst themselves constantly, and there were
occasional flare-ups; but nobody had the energy to pursue it. Rock crumbled laboriously from the biting parts of the drills. They stopped continually, examined the face of excavation and checked
for ice. It was only rock, nothing but rock.

‘Days,’ said Lwon. ‘Without water, we won’t last more than that. We may not even last that, given that it is so
cold
.’

But Jac was right; one of the side-effects of the scrubber clearing CO2 from the air was a thin trickle of water from a spigot on the cylinder’s side. It was barely enough to wet a single
tongue, let alone supply seven labouring men with sufficient fluid. And given that fact, it possessed the potential to focus strife amongst the seven of them to dangerous levels.

Lwon announced that they would take turns at this trickle, and although Marit loudly challenged his right to make this announcement, everybody agreed. There was no other way. Davide went first,
and then Lwon. But it took many hours for the spigot to refill, and with each person to wet his whistle the mood of the group as a whole became more sour.

Matters came to a head quicker than Jac expected. Ennemi-du-Concorde broke off digging and floated towards the spigot. As he approached the scrubber, Marit said: ‘I am next. You take your
turn – after me.’

Without so much as looking at him, E-d-C growled: ‘try to stop me and I’ll tear your jaw off.’

E-d-C lifted the massy, weightless scrubber in both hands to bring the spigot to his mouth. At once Marit struck. He launched himself from the wall with both legs and collided hard with E-d-C.
The two men spun about in an arc, pivoting over the sliding scrubber. But the space was so confined there was hardly any room for them to scrap. E-d-C’s spine smacked audibly against the
wall. Marit started landing blows, like a boxer at close quarters, in at E-d-C’s ribs and stomach. Jac could see that he was holding a piece of rock in his right hand.

But Lwon acted with impressive speed. He was on Marit’s back almost at once, calling to Davide to help, and in moments the two of them had disengaged the struggling Marit. In the course of
this, Davide received a stone-holding fist blow on the side of his head, and this did not improve his mood. But then E-d-C swam over to join in, and the three men began pounding Marit.

This punitive battery didn’t last long. The next thing was that Marit, solus, was rotating slowly in the middle of the space, curled into a ball, coughing and shivering. He was a human
spindle, and he was drawing a thread of tiny red beads about himself. The thread was coming from his mouth. E-d-C took what little water was in the spigot into his mouth, and, watching him, Jac
felt the dryness in his own mouth that much more intensely.