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hands. He turned the pack over to examine the red wafer that was both a fuse
and a timer.
But the wafer was gone.
Cully stared at the place on the plastic wrapping where it should have been.
Abruptly then, he recognized what had happened. The pack had already been
opened. His guards must have routinely opened it and spread the cards outgoing
through the motions of seeing that nothing useful to their prisoner or
dangerous to them was concealed in the deck. Finding none, they had resealed
the wrapping with a small piece of ordinary plastic tape.
The deck was still as potentially explosive as ever, but for Cully, without
the fuse, it was just another deck of cards. Thoughtfully, Cully swept cards,
spools and everything aside and lay down on the bed, closing his eyes.
For a little while he dozed& and then his mind came to, once more in working
order. He got up and called the guard.
"Yes, Mr. When?" said the guard, opening the cell door.
"Listen " said Cully, smiling engagingly. "How about something green around
here to cheer up the place? Some potted plants or something& "
"I'll see!" The cell door closed with a clash. But less than an hour later it
opened again, and the guard came in with a flowering salmon-pink geranium in a
heavy ceramic bowl filled with earth.
"That's more like it," said Cully. "Put it on the writing table there." He
went back to laying out four hands of cards on the bed, two up and two down,
for Frontier bridge. The cell door closed again with a clash. Cully sniffed
the spicy geranium odor filling the small room appreciatively.
He spent the rest of the day reading and playing cards. Once the lighting
panel in the ceiling dimmed for the night, however, he gave up and lay down.
The pack of cards was scattered over his bed. Uncaringly, almost petulantly,
he swept them all off the covering blanket onto the floor near the head of his
bed, so that they fell down the narrow crack between it and the writing table
alongside. Then he stripped down to his shorts and undershirt and crawled in
between the bed-sheets, pulling the top sheet high up around his neck and
turning his back to the lighted panel above the rest of the room. For perhaps
half an hour after that, he stirred restlessly under the sheet; but eventually
his breathing deepened, became steady, and he lay still.
For the rest of the nighttime period, as far as any invisible watchers were
concerned, Cully slumbered on, hunched in his own deeper shadow with his face
to the writing table, and his back to the dimly lighted panel in the ceiling.
Several times during these darkened hours he stirred and got up from his bed
to refill his bedside drinking glass with water from the lavatory area behind
the partition. On each occasion, after he had drunk, he refilled the glass and
carried it back with him to his bed. There he set it down on the floor in the
narrow space between his bed and the writing table, and from time to time his
stirrings under the sheet indicated that he roused himself enough to moisten
his mouth and throat from the water it contained.
So much for what was to be observed. However, below the screen of the top of
the writing table, in the shadow there, Cully was very busy. He had not begun
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
to work until after nearly three hours of feigned sleep. But, at the end of
that time, and with the least possible amount of betraying motion in the rest
of his body, he had carefully set about the business of unscrewing the inmost
of the two hollow, metal legs of the writing table next to the bed.
At first the leg had stuck and resisted his efforts to unscrew it. But
gradually, with a fit of feigned tossing in his sleep, he had been able to
bring enough leverage to bear to break it loose. After that, it was only a
matter of turning it patiently, inch by inch, until the threads within its
upper rim parted from the threads of the metal screw end in the table frame.
Once loose, he had carefully removed it, being equally careful to maintain the
balance of the table upon the three legs still upholding it. Propping the
removed leg upright, with its end held, but hidden in the crook of his left
elbow, he went to work with his right arm and teeth on the Frontier-made
playing cards that had been brought him.
Working slowly and carefully, one by one he shredded the cards with teeth and
fingers, and soaked the shreds in the water of his drinking glass. When they
were thoroughly wet to the consistency of workable papier-mâché, he began
stuffing them into the hollow interior of the metal leg, mixing them in with
several handfuls of earth stolen from the potted geranium and enriched by
scraps of half-masticated food from his dinner.
It was a long night's work, to fill the leg. When he was done, only five of
the cards remained unshredded. Carefully, he began to screw the metal leg back [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]