Little People (32 page)

Next problem: how to get the elf into the box. Packing was the obvious place to do it; instead of a shoe, insert an elf. It'd have to be the left shoe, of course, because the left shoe went in first, with a fold of tissue paper to cover it and then the right shoe and its cover. Substitute an elf for the left shoe and he'd be out of sight if the box lid happened to slide off after it'd gone through the chute, or if some nosy scumbag of a human lifted the lid to inspect the contents.

The weight issue: now, maybe I was being paranoid about this aspect, but I could foresee problems if we just did a straight swap. Because elves weigh less than shoes, the packed boxes would come up light – not enough, perhaps to notice in the case of a single box, but we weren't contemplating single boxes, we were talking about a whole lorryload of them. None of us had a clue how many boxes went into each lorry, naturally enough (since none of us had ever been in the loading bay, or seen inside the cargo compartment of a shoe lorry), but say each lorryload comprised a thousand boxes. With a weight shortfall of something like 25 grammes per box, that made for a differential of 25 kilos – half a hundredweight – per fully-laden consignment. Would anybody notice a variation of that order? We didn't have the faintest idea, but it seemed reasonable to assume that if we turned a blind eye to it, chances were that someone would indeed notice and it'd be the factor that got us all found out and caught. Better, I figured, to take the extra time and effort, and get it as near gramme-perfect as we possibly could.

(Bear in mind also that the calculations so lovingly reproduced above posited an average-sized elf of standard sectional density. You and I both know that where individuals are concerned, the average is pretty well useless; build up a statistical definition of an average person and I'll bet you good money that half your sample will be shorter and lighter than the mythical Mr Average, while the other half will be taller and heavier. Weigh each individual elf, male and female, skeletally thin and grossly overweight, and make up the deviation from the norm with paper clips, packets of staples, typewriter rubbers and shagged-out pencil sharpeners. The easiest and quickest way to do the job is properly, because then you won't have to do it all over again. And so forth.)

All done in a sort of dream, needless to say, because the only way to rationalise this whole experience – being only six inches tall and trapped for life in a shoe factory with a whole lot of snotty elves – was to keep telling myself that really it was all just a dream (a thoroughly unpleasant dream, and that's the very last time I eat Canadian cheddar as a bedtime snack), that what seemed like months in the factory was just a few minutes of feverish REM sleep, and that any minute now I'd wake up and forget the whole thing by the time I'd pasted my toothbrush. As an explanation it made much more sense than the alternative – Occam's razor, and all that jazz - so, if it was all just a nightmare, it didn't actually matter what I did or what happened to me. If the scheme failed, so what? If I got caught and horribly tortured, it'd only be dream pain, and when I woke up I wouldn't be mutilated and crippled for life. Besides, it'd probably work, because in a dream the laws of physics are about as binding as speed limits to a cabinet minister. Nothing to worry about. All in the mind. If it's all going to be wiped from your memory as soon as you open your eyes, can it truly be said to have happened, existentially speaking?

All in all, it was going remarkably smoothly, apart from the obstacles and the disasters; too smoothly, of course. It's fair to say that the only well-oiled machines you're likely to encounter as you stroll through life are guillotines and out-of-control chainsaws falling on you out of tall trees.

Meet Sweetie-Pie. I don't for one moment believe that that was his real name – well, even his real name wasn't his real name, because his
real
name would've been something elvish on the other side of the line; suffice it to say that the only place in any dimension or continuum where Sweetie-Pie was called that was probably the inside of my head. Doesn't matter in the slightest.

Sweetie-Pie was foreman of the cutting room, and I called him Sweetie-Pie because, out of the several thousand miserable, unpleasant, unlovely bastard elves crowded together under our communal roof, he was beyond challenge or question the worst. I didn't like him much, and neither did anyone else.

Obviously, conscripting him into the escape committee was about as sensible as buying prime time advertising on FM radio, so we didn't; we made a point of keeping him well away from anywhere we happened to be when we were doing escape stuff. In retrospect, of course, that was our fundamental mistake. In order to distract his attention, you see, we sent elves to engage him in conversation, tell him miserable stories (jokes just weren't in fashion in the factory), show him faded and crumpled postcards of large hotels in Barcelona that we'd excavated from long-forgotten desk drawers, and generally make him feel loved and wanted.

Which, of course, he wasn't, neither of them. Now, when the most unpopular person in the community suddenly finds himself the centre of a Parisian-style salon, with folks standing in line to canvass his views on everything from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to Elfland Wanderers' chances in the League –

(Elf football is stunningly boring, in any case; competition implies conflict, conflict is just a fancy euphemism for violence, violence is not the elven way, so football matches in Elfland consist of twenty-two elves carefully avoiding the ball while discussing the aforementioned Heisenberg uncertainty principle)

– he didn't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that something was going on. As it happened, he was a rocket scientist, like ninety per cent of all elves. He began to suspect.

As you can probably appreciate, the position of a foreman in a slave-labour camp tends to be a little awkward, with more grey areas than a black-and-white movie. Management (in this case, Daddy George, who never visited the place and whose only contact with it was via a bewilderingly complex labyrinth of rerouted e-mails) doesn't trust him as far as he's sneezable through a blocked nostril, Sweetie-Pie's fellow-workers, needless to say, trusted him rather less than that. His authority was underwritten, at least in theory, by an unspecified number of unidentified human heavies who'd be summoned and sent in with baseball bats at the first sign of insurrection or civil disobedience. But we'd never seen them, because nobody had ever dared do anything that might cause them to be summoned, and there were certain practical objections, such as how they'd be supposed to see us if they ever were called in, that cast more than a little doubt on their very existence; and we were all morally certain that prominent among the leading sceptics was Sweetie-Pie himself. Not that any of us would've been prepared to call his bluff on this point, at least not before the escape project got under way; but Sweetie-Pie had to face the fact that if he was too heavy-handed in his approach he could easily find himself backed into a corner where he'd have no option but to send for the storm troopers, and if it turned out that there weren't any after all, he'd find himself in a distinctly awkward position, probably on top of something hot and sharp.

On the other hand, he couldn't very well do nothing at all, just in case we really were planning a rebellion or a mass breakout. Somehow, therefore, he had to get across the idea that he was onto us and closing in like wolves around a small, broken-winded piglet, while at the same time finding a way to avoid committing himself on the subject of precisely what he was closing in with. It was a pretty tactical problem, and anybody even slightly less miserable would probably have relished the challenge.

He resolved it, eventually, by the time-honoured method of cornering one small, timid, feeble-minded conspirator and telling her that she (and she alone) had a slim chance of avoiding the hideous fate in store for the rest of the conspirators, provided that she gave him all the relevant names, times and places by way of corroborative evidence. Not that any further evidence was needed, he had enough already to have the whole workforce clapped in irons, but it saved time and paperwork if there was just the one signed confession instead of a cellarful of affidavits and witness statements that the prosecution would have to spend days piecing together. Her choice, he pointed out; if she didn't want to cooperate he could easily find someone else, or simply not bother, but if she wanted to help she'd have to do it straight away, since he was on a fairly tight schedule –

Can't really blame her, of course, the treacherous bloody cow. Ask yourself what you'd have done in her shoes, and if your answer isn't
exactly the same as she did
, award yourself three bonus points for outstanding moral fibre, and five thousand anti-points for stupidity, survival-instinct deficiency and lying to yourself. In the event, I gather, she lasted about three times as long as I'd have done before breaking down sobbing for mercy – a full fifteen seconds, though three of those seconds were taken up with a loud sneeze, and I don't think that should be allowed to count.

The first we knew about it was some time later. We were in the stockroom, weighing the elves who were going out with the first escape party. I wasn't one of them, it goes without saying. No, I'd come over all noble and self-sacrificing and given away my reserved space to some pathetic loser or other. Me all over. Quite.

Don't get the idea that we hadn't given any thought to what might happen if we got busted; far from it. But one thing we were relying on, not unreasonably if you ask me, was the element of lack of surprise. Remember, in our terms the factory was vast, the size of a small country, and all the rooms were enormous. This meant, we figured, that sneaking up on us without us seeing the bogeys coming a long way off was pretty much out of the question. Also, talking about seeing people, humans couldn't see us, unless Daddy George had come up with another of his scientific marvels. Consequently, if they were coming to get us, we figured we'd have plenty of time to abandon whatever we were doing and run like blazes for the sort of cover in which it's very difficult indeed for a full-size human to detect and evict a tiny invisible elf.

Not much wrong with that line of reasoning, though I do say it myself, and that's probably why Sweetie-Pie didn't try the direct approach (that and a distinct lack of human security guards, if you ask me). Instead - well, you have to give him credit for a little genuine ingenuity, because his solution was pretty damned smart.

One minute we were standing there watching the balance swaying gently towards equilibrium, with an elf on one side and a saucerload of miscellaneous stationery on the other. The next, the air suddenly grew unnervingly thick, and it started monsooning shiny metallic paint, great splodgy dollops of the stuff falling out of the air and flooding us, like incie-wincie spiders when the rain set in. Once the paint hit you, that was it; you went out like a light. In my case, I vaguely remember thinking,
So this is what it's like to get rained on by a cloud with a silver lining.
Fortunately, before I could take that theme any further, I blacked out.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I
don't think I was out for very long; just long enough for the paint to have dried into that gooey-sticky state where it's at its most objectionable. I was still on the stockroom floor, and my fellow conspirators were all around me as I woke up, lying where they'd dropped – like the closing moments of a Tarentino film set in Toytown.

Clever old Sweetie-Pie. He'd sprayed paint all over us through the sprinkler system. It struck me as a smart effort at the time, but it was only much later that I found out just how clever the strategy was.

When I came round and remembered what had happened, I immediately assumed – I think we all did – that the purpose behind the paint job was to make us all visible, so that the human security thugs would be able to see and arrest us. This wasn't even remotely the case – partly because the paint didn't make us even the tiniest bit visible (as far as humans were concerned, any paint that hit an elf vanished instantly; I guess that with a computer linked to a bunch of CCTV cameras, you could've used the patterns caused by disappearances of paint blobs to chart where we were when the sprinklers started up, but that wouldn't have been any practical help, since there was plenty of time to move a yard or so after the paint landed and before we blacked out) and partly because there weren't actually any guards to see us even if the paint thing
had
worked. The simple fact of the matter was that we hadn't been caught at all, but that Sweetie-Pie had cunningly tricked us into believing we'd been caught – just as good as the real thing, and in many respects even better. If you're convinced you haven't got a hope in hell of escaping, you don't bother trying. That was the security policy on which the whole enterprise was based – typical Daddy George: why spend money when you can cheat?

But of course, we didn't know . . . And while we were still twitching and groaning and rubbing our eyes and feeling - well, pretty much the way I always feel after I've just woken up, but I'm the archetypal Not A Morning Person – there was Sweetie-Pie, stomping up and down between the slumped carcases and shouting in the very finest traditions of law enforcement through the ages; and the gist of what he was shouting was,
You're nicked
.

With hindsight, it's worth considering the situation from his point of view. He'd just unmasked a conspiracy, but he still didn't know what we'd all been conspiring to do (except in the most general terms; I don't suppose he thought we were all skulking furtively about in order to plan his surprise birthday party) and as for what he was supposed to do with us next, I'm fairly sure he didn't have a clue. Having us all savagely executed wasn't remotely feasible, but if he didn't have us savagely executed, that'd be as good as admitting his severe lack of resources. On balance, therefore, I think he did the only thing he could do, in the circumstances.