Well, that was the theory.
Only they found themselves now in a place, and with a job in hand, that made nothing of all that. It might never have been. They had fallen out of that world. Muscle and bone, that was all they had to work with now. An eight-pound hammer, a length of steel, and whatever innovative technology they could come up with on the spot for breaking stone.
Some of these men had been storemen and book-keepers. Others were shearers, lawyers’ clerks, wine-tasters, bootmakers, plumbers’ mates, or had travelled in kitchenware or ladies’ lingerie. They had had spelling drummed into them, the thirteen-times table, avoirdupois and troy weight. ‘You’ll need this one day, son. That’s why I’m caning you,’ a lady teacher had told more than one of them, when, after getting up at four-thirty to milk a herd, they had dozed off at their desk. They were all labourers now. Someone else would do the calculations. So much for Mental! The number of inches a pair of drillers, working closely together with hammer and steel, could drive through sheer rock in ten or twelve hours a day. The amount of rubble, so many cubic feet, that could be loaded, lifted and borne by a man who had once weighed thirteen stone, now weighed eight and was two days out of a bout of malaria. All this to be balanced precisely against the smallest amount of rice a man could work on before he was no longer worth feeding and could be scrapped.
The work was killing. So was the heat. So, once they started, were the rains. But they also suffered from amoebic dysentery, malaria, including the cardiac variety, typhoid, beriberi, pellagra and cholera.
The doctors among them diagnosed these diseases, but that didn’t help because they had none of the medicines they needed to cure them, and it didn’t help a man to know that the disease he was dying of was pellagra, any more than it helped to know that the place he was dying in was called Sonkurai. The name, however exotic, in no way matched the extraordinary world his body had now entered, or the things it got up to, as if what it had discovered up here was a freedom to go crazy in any way it pleased.
Only one thing set them apart from the other coolies who for centuries had done this sort of work for one empire and then the next. They knew what it was they were constructing because it belonged to the world they came from: the future.
It was as if someone, in a visionary moment, had seen a machine out of the distant time to come, a steam engine, and had set out with only the most primitive tools and a hundred thousand slaves to build the line it would need to move on if it were to appear. If you could only get the line down, then the machine would follow — that was the logic. It was true, too. In this case it would happen.
So, if they could only finish the line and link up all the sectional bits of it, they would have made a way back out of here to where they had come from: the future. When the engine came steaming round the bend, its heavy wheels perfectly fitted to the track, the sleepers taking its weight, its funnels pouring out soot, they would know that time too had been linked up and was one again, and that the world they had been at home with was real, not an unattainable dream.
5
THE FEVERS CAME on every ten days.
The first time he was hit Digger looked up out of his delirium and saw Vic was there; squatting on his heels like a child and with a quick, animal look in his eyes. He was spooning rice up from a dixie, shovelling it fast into his wet mouth. Between his feet was a second dixie. Empty. When he saw Digger was watching he stopped feeding a moment and just sat, his eyes very wide in the broad face. Then, without looking away, he began to feed again, only faster.
‘That’s my rice he’s eating,’ Digger thought. ‘The bastard is eating my rice.’ But his stomach revolted at the thought of it. ‘Well, let him!’
When he woke again, Vic, a little crease between his brows, was sponging him with a smelly rag. He wore a look of childish concern, and Digger thought: ‘That’s just like him. Steals the food out’v a man’s mouth, an’ the next minute he’s trying to make up to him by playin’ nurse. Typical!’ But the dampness was so good, so cooling, and the hands so gentle, that Digger closed his eyes again and drifted.
What puzzled him was the utter candour of Vic’s look when he had caught him like that with the second dixie. He didn’t try to cover up. He wasn’t ashamed. There was something in that look Digger did not want to let go of. Some truth he needed to hold on to. He worried at it.
It was so different from the look he wore when he was offering you some bit of a thing as a gift. He would look sly then, calculating; but when he was stealing the food out of your mouth you saw right through into the man. It was an innocence of a purely animal kind, that took what it needed and made no apology, acting on that, not on principle.
Digger saw there was something to be learned from it: a hard-headed wisdom that would save Vic, and might, when the time came, save him as well.
The time came almost as soon as Digger was on his feet again and could go out to work. The fever took Vic now, and it was Digger’s turn to eat the second dixie, hold Vic when he raved, and use the cloth.
There was an affinity between them that was almost comical. When the one went down with it the other was well, time and about, ten days at a stretch. Vic accepted it as a fact of nature, a utilitarian arrangement that was good for both of them. Digger resisted at first — he had something against this cove that was fundamental — but when the fever struck him he had no option.
Their natures, though wildly out of order in other ways, were matched in this. They were made for one another. Digger was struck by the irony of it, but they were in a place now where ironies were commonplace.
Under the influence of this arrangement — the close physical unit they formed, the right on occasion to eat the other man’s rice, the unpleasant and sometimes revolting duties they had to perform for one another, and which Vic especially carried out with a plain practical tenderness and concern you would not have suspected in him — under the influence of all this, there grew up between them a relationship that was so full of intimate and no longer shameful revelations that they lost all sense of difference.
It wasn’t a friendship exactly — you choose your friends. This was different; more or less, who could say? There was no name for it.
The old bitterness died hard in Digger. Vic knew that and accepted it. It seemed to Digger at times that Vic sought him out just because of it. But that was his business.
There were days when they couldn’t stand the sight of one another. That was inevitable up here. They were always on edge. The petty irritations and suspicions they were subject to in their intense preoccupations with themselves made them spiteful and they would lash out in vicious argument. Digger was sickened by the hatefulness he was capable of. And not just to Vic either, but to poor old Doug as well. He would crawl away, humiliated and ashamed.