Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover
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“Well, so long, brother,” he told me. “So long. Be good, and love the Warden.”
Chapter VIII
In solitary, Warden Atherton and Captain Jamie began to ask me. Warden Atherton said to me:
“Standing, we know that the prisoners hide dynamite somewhere. Tell me everything that you know about it, or I’ll kill you in the jacket. You’ve got your choice—dynamite or a coffin.”
“Then I guess it is the coffin,” I answered, “because I don’t know of any dynamite.”
This irritated the Warden. “Lie down,” he commanded.
I obeyed. They laced me tightly, and gave me a hundred hours. Once each twenty-four hours they gave me some water. I had no desire for food, nor was food offered me. Toward the end of the hundred hours the prison doctor examined my physical condition several times.
But I got used to the jacket during my days. Naturally, it weakened me, took the life out of me; but I had learned muscular tricks for stealing a little space while they were lacing me. At the end of the first hundred hours’ bout I was worn and tired, but that was all. Then they gave one hundred and fifty hours. Much of this time I was physically numb and mentally delirious. Also, by an effort of will, I managed to sleep away long hours.
Then I was given irregular intervals of jacket and recuperation. I never knew when I was to go into the jacket.
And ever the eternal question was propounded to me: Where was the dynamite? Sometimes Warden Atherton was furious with me.
“These lean college guys would fool the devil,” Warden grumbled. “Standing, you hear me. I’m a man of my word. You’ve heard me say dynamite or a coffin. Well, take your choice.”
“Surely you don’t think I enjoy it?” I gasped. “There is nothing to confess. I don’t know about any dynamite.”
One compensation I learned. As one grows weaker one suffers less. The man already well weakened grows weaker more slowly. Unusually strong men suffer more severely from ordinary sicknesses than do women or invalids.
Morrell and Oppenheimer were sorry for me. Oppenheimer told me he had gone through it, and worse, and still lived.
“Don’t let them kill you,” he spelled with his knuckles. “Don’t let them kill you, for that would suit them. And don’t tell them anything.”
“But I don’t know anything,” I answered. “I don’t know anything about the damned dynamite.”
“That’s right,” Oppenheimer praised. “He’s the man, isn’t he, Ed?”
Jake Oppenheimer could only admire me for my fortitude.
During this first period of the jacket-inquisition I managed to sleep. My dreams were remarkable. Of course they were vivid and real, as most dreams are. What made them remarkable was their coherence and continuity. Often I was reading aloud to scientists carefully prepared papers on my researches. When I awakened my voice was still ringing in my ears.
Then there was a great farm, extending north and south for hundreds of miles, with a climate and flora and fauna largely resembling those of California. Not once, nor twice, but thousands of different times I journeyed through this dream-region.
In my dreams, I often got off the little train where the straggly village stood beside the big dry creek, and drove hour by hour past meadows. I watched my men engaged in the harvest, while beyond my goats were walking in the fields.
But these were dreams born by my deductive subconscious mind. Quite unlike them, as you will see, were my other adventures when I passed through the gates of the living death and relived the reality of the other lives.
In the long hours of waking in the jacket I was thinking about Cecil Winwood, the poet-forger who had put all this torment on me, and who was even then at liberty out in the free world again. No; I did not hate him. This word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings. I shall not tell you of the hours I devoted to plans of torture on him, nor of the diabolical means and devices of torture that I invented for him. Just one example. There was an ancient trick whereby an iron basin, containing a rat, was fastened to a man’s body. The only way out for the rat is through the man himself. Many of my pain-maddening waking hours were devoted to dreams of vengeance on Cecil Winwood.
Chapter IX
One thing of great value I learned is the mastery of the body by the mind. I learned to suffer passively. Oh, it is not easy! And it enabled me easily to practise the secret Ed Morrell told to me.
I had just been released from one hundred hours, and I was weaker than I had ever been before. So weak was I that though my whole body was one mass of bruise and misery, nevertheless I scarcely was aware that I had a body.
“Don’t let them kill you,” Ed Morrell advised. “There is a way. I learned it myself, down in the dungeons. You must be very weak first, before you try it. If you try it when you are strong, you will lose. I made the mistake of telling Jake the trick when he was strong. He thinks I am kidding him. Is that right, Jake?”
And from cell thirteen Jake rapped back, “Don’t listen to it, Darrell. It’s nonsense.”
“Go on and tell me,” I rapped to Morrell.
“That is why I waited for you to get real weak,” he continued. “Now you need it, and I am going to tell you. It’s up to you [27] . If you have the will you can do it. I’ve done it three times, and I know.”
“Well, what is it?” I rapped eagerly.
“The trick is to die in the jacket, to will yourself to die. I know you don’t understand me yet, but wait. You know how you get numb [28] in the jacket—how your arm or your leg goes to sleep. But don’t wait for your legs or anything to go to sleep. You lie on your back as comfortable as you can get, and you begin to use your will.
27
It’s up to you. –
28
to get numb – неметь (о конечностях)
“And this is the idea you must think to yourself, and that you must believe all the time you’re thinking it. If you don’t believe, then there’s nothing to it. The thing you must think and believe is that your body is one thing and your spirit is another thing. You are you, and your body is something else. You’re the boss. You don’t need any body. And thinking and believing all this you proceed to prove it by using your will. You make your body die.
“You begin with the toes, one at a time. You make your toes die. You will them to die. And if you’ve got the belief and the will your toes will die. That is the big job—to start the dying. Once you’ve got the first toe dead, the rest is easy. Then you put all your will into making the rest of the body die. I tell you, Darrell, I know. I’ve done it three times.
“By-and-by your legs are dead to the knees, and then to the thighs, and you are just the same as you always were.”
“And then what happens?” I queried.
“Well, when your body is all dead, you just leave your body. And when you leave your body you leave the cell. Stone walls and iron doors are to hold bodies in. They can’t hold the spirit in. You see, you are spirit outside of your body. You can look at your body from outside of it. I tell you I know because I have done it three times—looked at my body lying there with me outside of it.”