Sunday, 9 October 2016

Citizeness No.2


    Your intervention was quite timely, had you been a moment or two later, and you might have been too late to save Number 6. After all Number 6 would have died first rather than talk and give away any information. But I cannot help but wonder why the doctor, using Number 42 as a communications medium, didn’t want any details, just headings from Number 6, of the files he’s seen, the projects he knows about. I wonder why the doctor didn’t ask Number 6 why he resigned, if he was so cocksure that his technique was going to work? But you knew different, that Number 6 isn’t like all the others, you can’t force it out of him, that there are other ways………….. after all Number 6 has a future with The Village!
   You and the Observer-Number 240 seemed to be rather chummy, in fact at one pint she reported to you direct about how she couldn’t find Number 6. And she, according to you, is your best Observer! In fact she was so good, she allowed herself to be followed by Number 6 to the Town Hall. But let me ask you, did the Guardian hamper Number 6 in following Number 240 at your request, or was it operating on its own initiative? I wish you would say.
   And that time you attempted to fix Number 6 up with a date with one of those three young, attractive, and unattached ladies. You never expected Number 6 to act on your suggestion did you? The man’s far too independent for his own good……ah but you realized that and had been one step ahead of Number 6 all along, and why you had Number 240 sat on her own at a table close by. You knew instinctively that Number 6 would reject any of the three ladies you chose to fix him up with for a date for Carnival, and would rather choose the first young lady he came across, that just happened to be Number 240!
    Number 6 never did give you that termination order against Roland Walter Dutton, did he? He was given it by a medical officer, and instructed to pass it on to you. But he didn’t, he simply dropped it on that shelf in the mortuary, where he left the white coat he was wearing. Perhaps by doing that, he thought he would be saving Dutton’s life. But as it turned out he was too late anyway, Dutton was as good as dead, perhaps his fate was worse than death! You didn’t ask him what he had in his hand, other than the key to the mortuary door. I would have expected it to come as a shock to you when he announced that Roland Walter Dutton is a man who was scheduled to die, because how did Number 6 know that? You certainly didn’t, because you were not given that termination order. And yet you were happy enough to see the Prisoner sentenced to death. The judges sentence in the name of the people, the people carry out that sentence in the name of justice. Justice, from an angry mob, who were no better than a lynch mob seen in ‘Living In Harmony’ when they strung up Cathy Johnson’s brother from the hanging tree. But then you wouldn’t know about that would you, you were long gone by then! But you did know that nothing would come of it, the Prisoner being chased by an angry screaming mob. After all, previously you had said that Number 6 had a future with The Village. Who told you that, Number 1, or the masters at the other end of the teletype? Number 6 isn’t expendable like Dutton. And yet, if during that chase through the Town Hall, if the Prisoner had tripped or stumbled, or there hadn’t been that trapdoor in the floor, the angry mob having laid hands on him may well have……………well perhaps its best not to think of that.

Be seeing you

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