Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer (4 page)

They dug on. Marit sulked in the corner for a bit, but when Lwon kicked him gently and told him to take a turn at the digger, he did as he was instructed.

They dug, thirsting and frozen, for hours. ‘I’ve never felt so physically miserable,’ Mo announced to the group, finishing a shift with the digger, hugging himself and pressing
himself close to the fusion cell. ‘It is literally impossible that I could sleep. Sleep is simply an impossibility.’ But he fell instantly into unconsciousness anyway, and Lwon moved
his body away from the vent.

Gordius said: ‘we are going to die.’

‘This headache is enough to make me want to excavate my own skull with the digger,’ growled E-d-C.

There was nothing to do but go on. Their environment acquired a hallucinatory aspect. The dark grey walls. The way the continuous brightness of the lightstick laid a straight set of bars and
shafts and lines through the cluttered, dusty air of their space. At one point Jac thought the walls were sweating, and pressed his face against it to discover only icy dryness and bitter-tasting
dust. There were ashes lining the inside his throat. There was a throb to the fabric of spacetime. The box was not shut sufficiently tightly. The voice was leaking out. Jac listened to the voice,
or ignored it, indifferently. It hardly mattered. He was hours from death. They all were.

The drill ground on. Jac felt it inside his own teeth. There were microscopic people trapped in his teeth, clearing the space with minuscule diggers. His nerves sang.

His turn on the machine. He pressed it against the rock, and it moved through the material with a painful slowness.

Everybody’s lips were the colour of the walls.

‘Wait,’ cried Lwon. ‘Wait.’ He was poking his hand at the front of his digger, the skin on his neck twitching with micro-shivers. Jac had this thought: if I lean over and
turn the switch on his machine, the digger will devour his hand and arm, and he will die. He restrained the impulse, of course. He felt giddy, nauseous, freaky. Punchy, skittish. Ill, dry, dry,
dry.

Lwon was holding something in front of him. It looked like a piece of coal. ‘Ice,’ he said.

Lwon had hit a seam: some cometary body folded into the making of this rock billions of years ago, either dragged in by gravity, or arriving via random collision. Ancient
water, older than the oceans of Earth over which the Ancient of Days had brooded in the Book of Genesis. The frozen apotheosis of the origin of things.

They scrabbled enough ice for everyone from the wall. It was painful to suck on it, and it tasted foully of the gunpowdery dust with which it was mixed, but – enduring the cold of it and
ignoring the shivers – it was water, and water settled into their stomachs. With water came an awareness of profound hunger, and the seven of them raided the biscuits. Jac decided the best
bet was to crunch crumbs together with ground-up ice and take it into the mouth all in one go.

They ate and drank. They shivered and shivered. Nobody drilled for several hours. Instead they clustered together about the fusion cell and dozed, or simply hung there. They were too tired even
to celebrate.

Lwon soon roused them. ‘The biscuits will soon be gone,’ he said, forcing his shivering lips around the words. ‘Now we have the ice, we need to grow the spores, and that
won’t happen overnight.’ Sluggishly, they gathered ice and tried to arrange it near the lightstick. Microgravity made this hard, until Davide suggested gouging a trench in the rock and
packing it with ice.

This took several hours, and when finished there wasn’t enough ice to fill it, so Lwon took the digger back into the seam to extend it. Finally they were able to pack chunks of ice into
the trench. Everyone’s fingers were purple with cold. E-d-C broke open the first of the spore envelopes – they had only been supplied with three of them – and pressed the glucky
contents onto the ice.

‘Now, we wait,’ he said, trying to warm his hands again by hiding them in his armpits.

‘No,’ said Lwon. ‘Now, we
dig
.’

There was no day and no night. The light pole shone all the time. E-d-C started scratching a tally on the ceiling – no point in scoring it onto the rock, he observed,
since over the years ahead of them they were going to dig all of that away. He marked it by his own sleeps, figuring that from waking to waking was roughly one mondial day. Jac suspected that E-d-C
was a napper; that he might sleep ten times in two days, only ever brief periods, easily woken by the slightest jolt. But he didn’t say anything. It hardly mattered. And prolonged sleep was
hard for all of them, because it was so cold. Exhaustion would overtake them and they would slumber, but then after a short time their own shivers would wake them.

Soon enough E-d-C gave up bothering with his tally.

The biscuits were all gone, but the ghunk had not yet bloomed from black to green. Davide tried eating the black paste, but ended up throwing it up. ‘So it doesn’t taste like
caviar?’ Lwon asked, sarcastically. ‘Be patient, boys! It’s the
green
stuff we want,
green
is the ghunk with all the necessary nutrients. It won’t be long
now!’

They went hungry. There was at least water, now; ice from the vein they had discovered, to augment the dribbles from the spigot of the scrubber.

Davide gave up his exercise regimen. He simply didn’t have the energy.

It was still shiveringly cold, all the time. They kept the fusion cell continually on, heating at the top of its range; but its range had been deliberately limited by the Gongsi, and although it
put out some small warmth the rock around was so very cold that it chilled the air. ‘We’re not going to warm our air pocket until we’ve raised the temperature of this whole
blocking
rock
,’ growled Mo. Gordius started to say that, since rock was a poor conductor, they wouldn’t need to heat the whole thing; just enough of the rock immediately around
them to insulate them from the larger cold. But the others yelled at him, and Marit threw a shard of stone with a baseball pitcher’s force and accuracy straight at his head. It cut a
<>-shaped gouge in Gordius’s forehead. Blood beaded out. This made Jac angry. ‘What are you doing?’ he yelled. ‘Hey!’ The others had never seen the legless man
angry before, and decided to find it richly amusing. Gordius had gone silent and pale. Jac tended the big-fellow’s wound, pressing the corner of his tunic until the bleeding stopped.

‘I think that upset
you
more than it did him, Leggy,’ taunted Marit. ‘You in love with the fat boy, or something?’

‘He was explaining the problem of heating this space,’ Jac replied. ‘It’s no reason to cut his skin.’

The others laughed some more, and gave up.

They didn’t understand the situation, anyway, Jac thought. The slow action of the fusion cell was heating such of the icy rock as
was
exposed to the air. But every day they cut away
precisely that rock, and ejected the gravel to space. They were, he reflected, inadvertently working to keep their own environment chilly. Still: there was nothing they could do about that, except
endure it.

They went hungry for days. This did nothing to improve their tempers. But finally, one day, one batch of ghunk went green.

The first meal was special. As they ate it, the group almost approached a kind of camaraderie. The first crop of ghunk was plentiful enough for everybody to have as much as they liked, and it
tasted – well, it tasted like the starvation had been pushed away to arms’-length again. Stomachs shrunken by hunger were soon filled; and afterwards everybody hung in space or lay
against the wall, hugging themselves to try and stay warm. From time to time, somebody would go to the scrubber’s spigot and gather a bundle of glass beads of water. ‘Can we modify the
spores?’ Davide asked, after a while. ‘Tweak them? Encourage them to make alcohol?’

Nobody answered, so Gordius, looking timidly from face to face as if expecting immediate rebuke, said: ‘theoretically it ought to be possible. But I’d bet you a credit to a crater
the strain they’ve given us has been gene-tagged to block developments like that.’

‘That
would
be just like them,’ E-d-C agreed, placidly. ‘Not that it would cost them anything. What do
they
care how we wait out our time here? Drunk for eleven
years straight – or enforced sobriety – it’d be the same to them. They choose the latter because it is more cruel. That’s all.’

‘Cruel isn’t right, I think,’ suggested Jac. ‘It’s business, not sadism.’

Marit laughed at this, as if to say;
you see a difference
? And E-d-C growled: ‘there you go again, defending them.’ But Jac went on: ‘none of this is random, none of it
is careless. They’ve done this with thousands of prisoners. Tens of thousands, probably. They’ve been doing it for decades and decades. They’ve got it down to a fine art. This is
how
they extract the maximum productivity out of – us. This is how they ensure the asteroid has been most thoroughly mined and worked through.’

‘We put all the labour in. Then at the end they take it away, sell it and pocket our money. It makes a man want to mess the whole rock
up
,’ said Mo. ‘Just to spite
them.’

‘Jac’s right,’ said Gordius, emboldened by the success of his previous contribution to the exchange (success being measured, of course, in the absence of physical assault).
‘If we mess up their rock, we’re only messing up our own environment, only hurting ourselves. There’s nothing we can do. They’ve got us very neatly stuck.’

‘Still,’ said Mo, stretching, and talking in an expansive tone. ‘There ought to be a way we could . . . let’s say, near the end of our sentence, drill new tunnels that
compromise the rock’s integrity in some way. Not to actually cause us danger, just to make it impossible for the Gongsi to sell it on.’ When nobody replied, he added. ‘Like, lots
of shafts
near
the surface – or.’ But then he laughed, and added: ‘It’s never going to work! There
is
nothing we can do. They’ve set us on the cable and
we got to ride it all the way along! Though they’re bastards, you got to admire their cleverness!’

‘I don’t like to think there’s nothing we can do,’ said Davide, darkly.

‘Come—’ said Mo. He was near enough to Davide to be able to reach out and slap his flank. ‘Don’t fight it! You’ll only fret yourself to pieces. Eleven years
isn’t
so
long. We have food now, we can keep busy, with the drills. Before you know it we’ll be free.’

But Davide shook his head. ‘You want to make yourself into a drone, you go ahead. I refuse to accept that they got me beat. There has to be a way out of this cell.’

‘For instance?’ asked Lwon.

Everybody looked at Davide. He blushed, his dark skin going a red-granite colour. ‘Agents of folly,’ he said, turning his eyes to the wall. ‘All of you.’

‘Drill through to the outside,’ said E-d-C, grinning, ‘take a deep breath, and jump through? Is
that
it?’ It wasn’t so very funny, but it made Marit and Mo
laugh, and Gordius followed a few beats later. ‘A
real
deep breath?’ E-d-C pressed. ‘Jump all the way back to Earth?’

‘Bit of re-entry heat,’ Marit put in. ‘Warm us nicely.’ They
were
all shivering.

Davide, finally, was goaded into replying. ‘There’s no way off without a ship, sure’ he said. ‘But who says the first ship that comes by has to belong to the
Gongsi?’

‘So you’re going to signal a ship?’ asked Lwon, his voice level and serious. ‘You have a transmitter somewhere secreted about you, do you?’

Davide stared furiously at him. ‘Or even if the first ship that comes along
is
the Gongsi retrieval vessel,’ he said, shortly. ‘Even if we
do
have to wait eleven
years – why should we just troop aboard meekly and go back to 8Flora? Eh? Why not
take
the ship?’

‘Take it . . . how?’ Lwon gave the impression of somebody who genuinely wanted to know.

‘There’s metal in this rock,’ said Davide, turning his eyes to the wall again. ‘There must be. Why not extract it, and make weapons from it? Then when the Gongsi team
land to collect us – bam! We take them
and
their ship.’

Nobody spoke for a while, until Lwon did. ‘A plan,’ he conceded. ‘But there are at least three-bit problems with it. How do we turn this ore into metal? Smelt it?’

‘Smelt it,’ repeated Davide, perhaps agreeing with Lwon, or maybe blankly questioning his words by repeating them.

‘We were wondering why the fusion cell has its threshold set so low – yeah? Wouldn’t it be
nice
to warm this place up more than we’re managing – yeah? Well
maybe this is why the Gongsi has set it up the way they have. If they gave us unlimited heat that’s precisely the sort of thing we’d be doing: smelting, forging big-old swords, making
ourselves troublesome for the retrieval crew.’ He shook his head. Dust came off his beard and swirled slowly through the air both sides of his face. ‘They’re ahead of us
there.’

‘There has to be
something
we can do,’ insisted Davide.

Jac spoke up. ‘Metal may be beyond us. But what about glass?’

‘Hah!’ said E-d-C. ‘This again? You still want
windows
, Leggy?’

‘It’s just that I’ve noticed, during my shifts on the digger,’ Jac said, ‘when I’m digging through silicates – I’ve noticed that I get beads of
glass. They’re thrown off by the friction, I guess. Well, mightn’t there be a way of . . .’

‘You know the difference between
ingenious
and
clever
, Leggy?’ Davide broke in. ‘Maybe you’re the first but you surely aren’t the second. Think it
through
. What good are glass beads? If we can’t generate the heat to smelt metal, how can we generate the heat to work glass? And if we made a window – how could we fit it into
the side of the stroid? How, exactly, would we cut out a window frame without losing all our air? And even if we could? Say we’re talking about a piece a metre wide – sand-glass would
be so full of impurities it’d crack at the slightest knock or deformation. It would be a suicide portal.’