Little People (33 page)

‘All right,' he said. ‘On your feet. Line up. Come on, let's be having you.'

We did as we were told, albeit slowly and awkwardly, thanks to the semi-plastic paint we were all wearing. Nobody even considered running away. Why bother? They'd only be caught and dragged back again, and in the meanwhile they could fall over and bruise their knees.

‘OK,' said Sweetie-Pie, facing the rows of dejected elves like a sergeant major. ‘This conspiracy of yours. How do I go about joining?'

Like I said, the only thing he could do: he couldn't hold us, he couldn't let us go, and once we realised this it was a fair bet that he'd be severely dealt with, if not by us then by Daddy George, for letting us escape. It took him a while to get this across to the more suspicious members of the conspiracy, a faction that made up about a hundred per cent of the membership; but once we'd got our heads around it, I have to admit that it made pretty good sense. We were all sitting a bit upset about the nasty shock, of course, not to mention the silver paint, but in the end we had to acknowledge that it was about the only method open to him of getting our undivided attention.

That was when it started to get depressing.

We explained our plan to Sweetie-Pie. He listened carefully, nodding from time to time to show he was paying attention, a properly serious expression smeared on his face like peanut butter on a slice of toast. When we'd finished, he nodded.

‘You're out of your skulls,' he said.

Understandably, I pressed him for details.

‘Won't work,' he replied, ‘simple as that. One, the dampening field goes all the way round. You try and get out in a shoebox, you'll wake up dead. If you're lucky,' he added, with a hint of doleful
schadenfreude
. ‘When you tried to get out the door – yes, of course, I know about that, what do you think I do all day, knit baby clothes? – when you tried the door, all you got was the minimum setting, 'cos He knows there's always some clever bugger who'll try and get out, and He doesn't want to kill the whole bloody workforce. Hard enough to meet the delivery dates with all of you alive; if He was to let you go frying yourselves all over the place, there'd never be any work done. But the rest of the field, He's got the power cranked up to max. There'd be a little blue spark, and that'd be you.'

‘Oh,' I said.

‘And another thing,' Sweetie-Pie went on, in the extra-mournful voice he used when pointing out really crass errors. ‘It's all very well you morons going around weighing each and making up the weight with paper clips and stuff, but didn't it ever occur to you that if you do that, the boxes are going to rattle like buggery? You ever heard of a shoebox that rattled?'

He had a point. It was a pity he insisted on shoving that point right up our self-confidence, but I guess he had the right.

‘And,' he continued, ‘that's not the worst of it, either.' He shook his head. ‘The boss, see. He doesn't want his customers putting on their brand new shoes and finding 'em full of invisible elves. Could give someone a nasty jolt, that. So He's got all sorts of scanning gear out there in the loading bay, and if there's an elf in the box, it sets off this alarm—'

‘My god,' I said, awed. ‘Elf detectors.'

‘Never used 'em, mind,' Sweetie-Pie pointed out. ‘Never had to. I mean, you lot are a pretty sad bunch, but at least you aren't dumb enough to think you could get out of here. Or at least,' he added, ‘up till now you haven't been. It only takes one smartarse to spoil everything.

Meaning me, naturally. ‘Fine,' I said. ‘So why were you in such a hurry to join us?'

He shrugged. ‘Thought you'd actually found a way that'd work,' he said. ‘Else, why's everybody suddenly got escape fever? 'Course, I was completely wrong. Haven't got a clue, the lot of you.'

My fellow conspirators were starting to look at me with less than friendly expressions on their little faces. ‘All right,' I said, ‘if you know so much about it, what would you suggest?'

‘Forget it,' he answered, with a sigh. ‘Can't be done, don't go breaking your heart over it. Oh, and before someone makes a fool of himself suggesting it, no, you can't switch off the field from inside the building, and you can't jam it or sabotage it either. All the controls and stuff are in a junction box on the north outside wall.'

There was a lot more of this sort of thing, all of it described with such miserable glee that you'd have been forgiven for thinking that Sweetie-Pie's real motive for joining up was to persuade us to forget about the whole thing and resign ourselves to the prospect of a life in the factory. But it wasn't like that, I'm sure. You couldn't have faked that triumphant told-you-so disillusionment in his voice. Besides, a few straightforward tests proved well enough that what he'd told us wasn't any kind of disinformation, it was the plain truth. Brand new form of counter-espionage: you infiltrate the enemy and tell him all your most closely guarded military secrets, whereupon he realises for the first time just how profoundly outmatched he is, and gives up. Not a bad idea, at that.

‘What about up?' I remember suggesting, rather desperately, during one of our rather tragic brainstorming sessions. ‘Or are you going to tell me he's booby-trapped the roof as well?'

‘One of the first things He did,' Sweetie-Pie replied. ‘On account of, it's exactly the sort of thing He'd expect you lot to try. So yes, the roof's wired to buggery, and so's the floor, and the drains. And whatever you do, don't try crawling out through the ventilator shafts. He's got stuff hidden in there'd give you screaming bloody nightmares just thinking about it.'

I sighed. ‘All right,' I said, ‘what about overloading this dampening field thing? If enough of us were to try getting through a door at the same time—'

‘You'd be vaporised,' Sweetie-Pie replied, with an unwholesome glint in his eye that suggested that this might not be a bad thing, especially if one of the unfortunate souls reduced to his component atoms happened to be me. ‘Bloody clever system – the more load you put on it, the higher the setting it adjusts itself to. I s'pose you might just overload it if you all tried leaving at once, but that'd sort of defeat the object of the exercise.'

‘We could blast a hole in the wall,' put in Spike. (You remember Spike: small, ingenious female elf with an attitude problem, figured out how to do the weighing stuff.) ‘I've been thinking about that, actually. That stuff they make the polycarbonate trainer soles from, I reckon that with a bit of time and some improvised lab equipment, I could get nitrocellulose out of that. Explosive,' she explained. ‘We could blow the east wall out, where the masonry's not as thick as in the rest of the building. Don't tell me this dampening field'd still work if we took the wall away.'

Sweetie-Pie nodded gravely. ‘You could do that,' he said. ‘You could blow up a wall, no problem. Only trouble is, if you do that you'll set off the explosive charges stashed in the wall cavities, just in case someone ever find out about this place and he needs to get rid of the evidence in a tearing hurry. Nice idea, but I wouldn't try it if I were you.'

You can tell how much Sweetie-Pie's thoroughly depressing revelations had got to us from the fact that Spike didn't even argue; she just shrugged, muttered, ‘Oh, screw that, then,' and went back to doodling symbolic logic equations on the concrete floor with a rusty nail. Someone told me later that her doodling was a breathtaking insight, a melting-down and recasting of the most basic conventions of mathematics that would finally allow Fermat's Last Theorem to be fully evaluated in a simple expression that could be easily understood even by a Californian high-school teacher. Presumably that meant she'd done something clever, but don't ask me what. I'm only a double Nobel laureate, for crying out loud.

‘Oh well,' someone said (can't remember who; some elf or other), ‘that's that, then. We stay here and rot. Well, you can't have everything, I suppose.'

Nobody said anything, and the meeting decomposed. (‘Broke up' is too vigorous a term to describe the aimless way they all drifted off, shoulders drooping, heads lolling off necks, little heels dragging, like a bunch of Action Man dolls who've just learned that the ceasefire is now official.) The general unspoken consensus seemed to be that the great escape was off, postponed indefinitely because of lack of interest. I found this extremely annoying.

– All right, yes: I'd ended up here because I got caught, not because I'd actually carried through on my early resolve to rescue all the prisoners and bring 'em back alive to the promised land, like Rambo Moses. But it was that initial spurt of heroism (heroic as two short planks, me) that started off the landslip in my fortunes that ended up with me getting my collar felt, so in a sense I was there because of them, I had put myself in harm's way for their sakes, and to have them give it up as a bad job simply because escape was impossible and resistance was futile struck me as gormless cowardice of the worst possible sort. I'd have turned on my heel and stormed out in a huff if it hadn't been for the containment field and the booby-traps.

It was time I was back at my post on the conveyor belt; heroes of the revolution may enjoy a certain degree of latitude in matters of timekeeping, but leaders of failed uprisings had better be in their places when the whistle goes, or the foreman will want to know the reason why.
Damn,
I thought,
it shouldn't be like this.
After all, I'd managed the really difficult bit, getting all those pathetic, terminally apathetic losers to get off their bums and do something. Failing at this point was tantamount to having threaded my way through the labyrinth of doom and climbed the sheer cliff face to the temple housing the golden fleece, only to be turned back because I didn't have the right change for the ticket machine.

I was missing something, I knew that; something right down deep, something fundamentally important but so simple I was taking it for granted. All I had to do was recognise it for what it was –

I waited, but it didn't come. Maybe I was wrong after all, maybe there wasn't a way out, and I had just been wasting my time and raising everybody's hopes with nothing to show for it. Now that was just plain cruel, because I wasn't that sort of person. Me, a leader; me, the type that gets people moving, shapes destinies, sets off revolutions. As if. The very fact that I'd started this idiotic conspiracy only went to show it was doomed from the outset, like a literary quarterly in Australia.

And what had I done to deserve all this, and what was I being punished for? All my life I'd been the meek, patiently waiting to inherit the Earth –

(If the meek ever do inherit the Earth, by the way, you can be sure that they'll dutifully pay the inheritance tax and the capital gains tax and the stamp duty, and the thought of trying to dodge any of the due taxes will never even cross their minds; with the result that after the lawyers and accountants have had their bite out of what's left, all the meek will actually inherit is the unfashionable south-western quarter of Madagascar . . .)

Not fair
, I thought,
not fair at all. What did I do? Why me?

Why me?

And then it all clicked into place, like a jigsaw you've been staring at for three-quarters of an hour and suddenly you realise that if you turn round the little knobbly-edged bit, it'll go.
Why me?
Because nobody else could do it, was why. Fancy not realising that from the very start.
That
was what I'd been doing wrong. I'd been a man sullenly trying to bash a screw into a block of wood with a butt of a screwdriver while bitching about the poxy useless hammer I'd been issued with. I'd missed the point by such a wide margin that I'd got myself impaled on the next point across.

All I had to do was be myself, the person I was meant to be all along. You see, I wasn't born to be anybody important, clever, successful or even interesting. I was supposed to be an insignificant, unimportant nonentity – I'd have been good at that. Instead, I was a Nobel prizewinner, a major shareholder in one of the world's biggest multinational corporations, the sole bridge between human-side and Elfland, the chosen one who'd lead the enslaved elves out of servitude. Either I'd misunderstood myself completely (but come on, you've shared my company and been inside my head for a while now, you don't need me to tell you there simply isn't enough in me to misunderstand) or the officer in charge of the duty roster had screwed up on a pretty staggering scale; or the duties, privileges, station and responsibilities I'd been called to demanded precisely the sort of person I was.

Maybe this was a battle that only a total loser could win.

The elves took some convincing, but you don't want to take any particular notice of that because the elves would've argued the toss if they'd been aboard a sinking ship and someone had suggested they get into the lifeboat. I convinced them, somehow. God only knows how I managed it. I mean, if I'd been one of them, I sure as hell wouldn't have convinced me.

Setting it all up only took about half an hour. If we'd done it properly so it'd have worked, it would probably have taken over a month, but we didn't need it to work. In fact, that was the very last thing we wanted to happen. The hell with stuff working. Stuff working is for winners.

Spike did all the wiring, while Sweetie-Pie showed me how to use the phone. It wasn't a regular phone, of course; it was more of a real-time digital video link, with special enhancements so that Daddy George could see an invisible elf on his screen, but all the elf at our end could see was a grim-looking loud speaker with a steel grille over it to prevent sabotage and vandalism. He wrote down the access codes for me on a piece of paper, told me which buttons I had to press, and which ones had to be held down when and for how long. I reckon flying the space shuttle would have been a piece of cake compared with making a quick call on Daddy George's special phone. Once I'd finally got the hang of the system (it took a while) all that remained was to get everybody else safely out of sight. This meant forcibly rounding up and herding all the hyper-miserable types who were still refusing to have anything to do with the escape project; they didn't fight or anything, but it all took time and effort when we couldn't be doing with the extra hassle, and the whole thing got very tiresome indeed. Sure, Moses had his problems along the way, but I'll bet he didn't have to put up with two dozen snotty elves from Cutting (and if he had, there'd have been no Exodus, and Egypt'd be knee-deep in extra pyramids).