A Hundred and Twenty Days

The cart was loaded before the morning was out.

One cart. Two horses. One driver. No guards.

Four wooden crates on the bed. Glass cylinders inside them.

Marlow opened one and counted. Thirty. Four crates, a hundred and twenty tubes.

“One a day, sir. Sixty days out, sixty days back. A hundred and twenty days' worth exactly,” Silas said.

“It won't take sixty days out. Six days to the drill site by horse.”

“Six days to the drill site, yes. The town lies beyond it.”

Marlow counted on his fingers.

Six days to the drill site. Two more to the outpost. Twenty-three more to the town. Thirty-one in all.

Sixty-two there and back. Out of a hundred and twenty days, fifty-eight left over.

“There's extra.”

“Yes. A great deal extra.”

“You made it too much on purpose.”

“Too much troubles no one, sir. Too little, and there is one man who is troubled.”

The way this man put things was always correct, and always infuriating.

＊

Before he left, he went to that room one more time.

The wall was the same wall as yesterday.

“Let me check one thing.”

“Please.”

“The man at the bottom of the shaft. Bringing him up. Has the order gone out?”

“It went out yesterday. It reaches the drill site in six days.”

“Same day I get there.”

“Yes. It is traveling on the same cart.”

Marlow remembered the thin sheaf of paper lying beside the crates on the cart bed.

So that was it.

Nine years' worth of an answer, set down next to a hundred and twenty glass bottles.

＊

The road out was not the road he had come by.

On the morning they left, Marlow went once to look at the mouth of the hole he had climbed.

There was a railing, with letters on it he couldn't read. Inside it was dark. There were twelve thousand six hundred and some rungs. At nine hundred meters there was one bone and eleven empty tubes.

Three of those he had lined up himself.

“We will not be using it again,” Silas said behind him.

“Why not.”

“Because there are no plans to use it, sir.”

“Nine years you people said that.”

“Yes. For nine years we said so.”

＊

The cart made forty kilometers a day.

Three times walking pace. The wasteland that had taken him twenty-three days to cross, the horses shaved away as if that were the ordinary thing.

Marlow sat on the bed and thought about the distance he had spent thirty days climbing.

Three thousand eight hundred meters. A cart runs that in two hours. Change nothing but the direction, and two hours becomes thirty days.

“Can I ask you something.”

“Please.”

“Why are you an official.”

Silas thought about it a moment, the reins still in his hands. It was the first time Marlow had seen the man think.

“My father was an official, sir.”

“That's all?”

“That is all. Forgive so dull an answer.”

“No.”

Marlow thought the dullness was the truer thing.

It went down easier than the story about a calculating machine that had been running for three hundred and forty years.

＊

On the third night, by the fire, Marlow opened one of the tubes.

He cut the back of his hand and let it drip. The cut closed at once.

Silas watched from across the fire. His glasses were off. Without them his face was only a tired man's.

“Does it hurt?”

“It doesn't. That's supposed to be the problem.”

“Is that so.”

“How many men have you watched do that.”

“Fourteen, sir.”

“Did you put them all in the cage?”

“Four, sir. Since I took the post.”

A branch in the fire gave way.

“None of the four said anything. I would say, please step in, and they would step in. That is all.”

“Ever think about stopping it.”

“I have.”

“You didn't.”

“I did not.”

Silas put his glasses back on. With them on, his face went back to the one where only the eyes smiled.

“Mr. Kane. I do not consider myself a wicked man. That is the difficult part.”

＊

At noon on the sixth day, a line stood up on the horizon.

A thin line. Straight, and with nothing around it, thinner still.

It was an iron tower sixty meters high.

Marlow stood up on the cart bed. There was no need to stand. You could see it from three kilometers off.

“Please sit, sir. It jolts.”

“Shut up.”

Marlow did not sit.

End of Chapter 22