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Wednesday 25 January 2017

A Favourite Scene


   In ‘Hammer Into Anvil, when Number 2 is questioning the behaviour of Number 6, after playing a recording of a telephone conversation between Number 249 and Number 6.
   Number 2 “Perhaps you’d explain.”
   Number 249 “I can’t, I’m as much in the dark as you are.”
   “Are you? You don’t know who it was who telephoned you?”
   “No.”
   “It was Number Six.”
   Number 2 goes on to demonstrate at great length that it was the voice of Number 6, using an oscilloscope. Voices are apparently like fingerprints, no two are the same. Even if the voice is disguised the pattern doesn’t change. Number 2 goes on to show the psychiatrist the voice pattern of his telephone caller. And then the voice pattern of the single word “you” taken from a routine interview with Number 6. This is put on the wall screen, and the tape of the doctor’s caller is run again. If the word “you” is identical to the other on the screen the patterns will lock.
   So it was Number 6 who telephoned Number 249 head of Psychiatrics, who still pleads his innocence who hasn’t the faintest idea. And at this time he isn’t preparing a report on Number 2’s mental health, well not at the moment he isn’t. I’m not so sure about afterwards! And Number 6 didn’t see the doctor later, so why did he ring him? The doctor has already told Number 2 he doesn’t know.
   Number 249 being a psychiatrist, so would he say that Number 6 was mad? Well not according to their records. So Number 6 must have had a reason for telephoning him, didn’t he, what was it?
   “Why don’t you ask him?”
   “Would you like to sit in this chair?”
  
“I was merely suggesting…….”
   “Don’t tell me what to do!”
  
I love those two lines, Number 2 goes right off the rails when the doctor makes his suggestion that he should ask Number 6, then he calms down and tells the doctor he can go.
   This isn’t the last time Number 2 will go off the rails, he does it in the Control Room when he replaces Number 26 as Supervisor, and even more so when he accuses Number 14 of being a traitor. I like to think that after his mental breakdown, and Number 6 having forced Number 2 to report his own breakdown in control to Number 1, that he then falls into the hands of the psychiatrist, and ends up on the hospitals psychiatric ward weaving wicker baskets!

Be seeing you

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