Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (21 page)

I felt the far end come to rest on the branch. I paused for a moment to enjoy the wonderful feeling of relief, and then began to lower the near end slowly onto the ladder top. The branch appeared to be higher than the ladder: there should be enough clearance, but I watched the barbed wire carefully. The table came to rest on the ladder. I reached out and verified that there were several inches between table and fence. I paused again. I twisted and pulled at the table until I was sure that both legs were hooked over the limb, and then, tilting the table on one edge, I slid it further out and hooked one leg through a fork in the branch. I reached out and checked the clearance again. At least six inches.

The table was barely long enough. The near end overlapped the top of the ladder by just four inches, and I was afraid that when the branch was weighted down, it might pull the table off the ladder. I spent another ten minutes lashing the table and the ladder together with twine. I particularly wanted to get that right. In my mind I had a picture of myself being dumped onto the loops of barbed wire along the top of the fence, creating a sudden and dramatic deformation in them. The guards would find the effect curious, but they would not lack for a course of action. Presumably they would shoot until the wires sprang back to their proper shape again.

I set about making a final test of the structure. Climbing up the ladder to the penultimate step, I twisted around and gripped the edges of the table. Very carefully, I climbed up onto the unseeable tabletop and inched my way on all fours out to the middle of it. It was not a pleasant vantage point. I was crouched in midair, looking straight down on a barbed wire fence and, a few yards off in either direction, at two men with guns whose job it was to shoot me if I made a mistake. The structure, now that it was hooked into the tree, was more stable, but it still swayed and heaved with every movement of the branch. I was supported by something that I was absolutely unable to see and that therefore had for me a sort of hypothetical quality.

It is often better to move than to think. I slid my hands back down beneath the table just above the fence and then rocked up and down to make sure that there was still some clearance even with my full weight directly on top. Several inches. The guard to the right must have heard the leaves rustling. He looked up, but not particularly in my direction. I waited a moment and then crawled the rest of the way over to the branch and climbed out onto it. Home free.

I was tempted to keep going. I could see my way down through the branches to the ground. Not carrying anything, I would make no noise. I would be gone. I could see the men with their chain saws now only fifty yards away. They would not be long. And this was a tree they would certainly be cutting down. But I had done all that work, assembled all my equipment and supplies. I would need them. Without them I was finished anyway.

Returning over my bridge, I had to crawl backwards, feet first, so that I could get back onto the stepladder. When I was on the ground again, I checked the position of everything in the pyramid to make sure that nothing was about to slide out of the pile. Then, ridiculously, I stood back, as if to admire my work, in which I felt an anxious satisfaction. It was by now late afternoon. I had completed a difficult task, built something which, if it had been visible, I would have enjoyed surveying with pride. As it was, it remained more a private conceit than a public monument to my determination and ingenuity. And anyway there was no time. I had been working on my construction for two hours. I was tired, sweating, anxious, afraid. The chain saws were getting nearer. The Colonel might at any time figure out what I was doing. I had to keep moving.

I made three or four trips back to the beech tree, hauling back all seven sacks full of random objects, the tool chest, and the broomstick, and heaping them together under my pyramid. I kept an eve on the men in the building all the while, so that if one of them suddenly decided to check along the fence, I would be ready to leave everything behind and run for it.

When I had everything assembled, I took the smallest sack and, mounting the ladder, lifted it up onto the coffee table. I climbed up after it, pushed it carefully across ahead of me to the other side, and then climbed down through the tree to a branch from which I could lower first the sack and then myself to the ground. I carried the sack about twenty yards back into the woods and left it on the ground next to a particularly misshapen pine tree, which I was confident I would recognize. No time for a more distant or cleverer hiding place. I watched the ground in front of me as I walked, trying to avoid making any noise that might alert one of the guards, but by now the noise of the chain saws was probably too loud for that anyway.

I repeated the entire trip seven times, until I had everything safe in a large heap in the woods. It had taken nearly a full hour, and the nearest chain saw was now barely twenty yards away. I was sweating and trembling with the tension, but elated. I was nearly done here.

I climbed back over the fence and hurried to the building. There was not much time, and I had one important task left. The Colonel and his men were as I had left them, miraculously sitting in midair, working at invisible desks, walking about through the void, picking up and setting down objects which one could only try to imagine. Each of them had a clipboard full of information about their little, magic domain. The Colonel was right, I thought. It would be a sort of empire. The spectacle before me was irresistible. It would convince anyone that vast amounts of money should be budgeted, vast numbers of people assigned to the study of these extraordinary phenomena. And to the capture of the invisible man.

I went into Wachs’s office first and closed the doors. I was making noise, but I no longer cared. I grabbed all the loose sheets of paper I could find, crumpled them two or three at a time, and tossed them under the desk. Then I pulled all the books off the shelves, spread open the pages, and tossed them on top of the paper. Crouching down, I took the cigarette lighter from my pocket and held it lit to the edge of the pile until I felt the heat of the flame spreading through the paper. I moved around and lit the pile on the other side. I could smell the fire now. I waited until I felt the heat swell up and push at me and saw the air grow turbulent and distort my view.

I hurried out of Wachs’s office, closing the door behind me, and ran down the corridor, past the room in which the Colonel was sitting and past the laboratory, to an office at the other end of the building. This time I dragged the desk over against the wall before setting the fire, to make sure it would spread to the building. I was making a lot of noise, and all three men were looking in my direction now. On my way out, I set another fire in the reception room. I left the building with as much paper as I could carry.

When I got back to the fence I could hear that the chain saws were right there now. I spent another five or ten minutes crumpling paper and filling my structure with it, and as I mounted my exit stair for the last time, I set it alight. Bringing one of the folding chairs with me, I climbed up and over to the tree. There were men cutting underbrush right beneath me. I got the chair down and then crawled back out onto the table, cut loose the twine that tied it to the stepladder, and pulled it over into the tree. I could feel the heat from my burning tower of ladder and tables.

I took a last look at the building. The three men were running through the building now, and you could see from the way they moved that they were in a state of agitation near panic, although, floating in thin air, their gestures seemed exaggerated, almost ridiculous. Morrissey was still upstairs, and I wondered if he was trapped. The air above the building was visibly turbulent. When I descended the tree, there were two men with chain saws standing a little apart from it and looking at it appraisingly. I went to my hoard and set about lugging it further into the woods, where there would be less chance of discovery. When I had moved everything to a new point fifty feet away, I paused and rested for several minutes. I was quite confident now that I had escaped. The odds had swung around in my favor — for the moment at least.

There were sirens now. They seemed to be entering the enclosed area. Suddenly there was a deep, resonating boom behind the fence, as if something had exploded, and the sky above MicroMagnetics seemed to shudder. I saw a patch of flame high up where fire had spread into the visible trees beyond the building. I hoped it would continue to spread and obliterate any sign of my escape. I returned to my work, moving my things in stages until I had everything neatly stored ten feet in from the road on the other side of the wood.

Behind me the sky filled with the sound of chain saws and sirens and turned a brilliant orange from the burning trees and the sunset. Standing there alone in the woods, my heart pounding and my body shaking from fear and exhaustion, MicroMagnetics and all the extraordinary things I had seen — and not seen — already seemed remote and unreal, a receding dream. There was, nevertheless, the preposterous, terrifying, inescapable fact that I was invisible.

F
or perhaps half an hour i sat trembling beside my invisible possessions and rested. I was on the edge of a road that seemed barely important enough to justify the faded white line painted down its center. It was wooded on both sides. To the right it seemed to run back toward the entrance drive of MicroMagnetics. To the left there was no particular reason to believe that it led anywhere. In the time I sat there, the only vehicle I saw was a state police car. It passed slowly, heading toward MicroMagnetics. Several minutes later it reappeared, heading in the opposite direction at the same deliberate speed. In another ten minutes it cruised past again, and I understood that it was patrolling the road.

I felt, I suppose, like any escaped prisoner: elated at having scaled the prison walls but terrified by the lack of refuge in the world beyond them. It seemed safer, therefore — almost comforting — to sit and contemplate what I had escaped from rather than what I had escaped to.

I had certainly precipitated a great deal of activity. I could hear siren after siren howl up to the other side of the enclosed area and then become abruptly silent. They must be admitting even the fire engines very cautiously through the gate. They had not lost interest in me. The whine of the chain saws persisted as they continued clearing around the outside of the fence, and every now and again I heard an unpleasant burst of automatic gunfire. Perhaps they were shooting animals fleeing over the fence from the fire.

I hoped the fire would be a success. I hoped it would utterly consume the building and every invisible object in it — everything that could make my existence credible. There seemed to have been some sort of explosion, which was promising. Who would believe the Colonel now, without that building? I thought of fires I had seen and of how little had remained, even of those objects which we customarily think of as un-burnable. I hoped the fire would spread for miles until they had trouble even locating the site of the building. The more confusion and destruction, the safer I would be. Whenever the chain saws paused, I could hear people shouting and large vehicles moving. Certainly this fire, at its center at least, would present the fire fighters with some peculiar problems. I wondered how the Colonel would deal with it. No doubt he was doing the very best job that could be done, with unimpaired efficiency and self-control — despite what must have been unimaginably intense feelings of disappointment. Not to mention rage.

That was, of course, a problem. I had been telling myself all day that I was keeping all my choices alive. At any time I could change my mind and present myself to the authorities.
(I’ve been thinking things over, and I’ve decided to put myself in your care after all. It isn’t that there was ever really any doubt in my mind — I just needed to get my thoughts in order, if you know what I mean, and I’m extremely sorry about any inconvenience I may have caused…
) That was the thing. The inconvenience had swelled to rather monstrous proportions in the last few hours. As I watched the flames fill the darkening sky and thought of Tyler on the stretcher and wondered whether the others had all got out of the building, I considered that my range of choices was perhaps not so broad after all. I felt myself shuddering. For a moment I thought I might vomit.

I got quickly to my feet and walked out to the road. Important to keep moving. I wondered what was in Jenkins’s heart at the instant when he comprehended that the building was on fire. Forget that for now. Keep moving. I stood on the edge of the road and studied the place where I had left my invisible baggage, memorizing the sequence of trees and shrubs and the angles of the branches. I wanted to be absolutely sure that I could recognize the spot, even in the dark.

What I needed urgently was a car that I could load up with my possessions and drive away. The saws were still going, which meant that they were still working at keeping me inside, but any time now Jenkins might find the remains of my bridge over the fence — or simply decide that it would be prudent to assume that I could have escaped. He would begin to search, or even enclose, a larger area. And if they did determine where I had crossed over the fence, they might find my possessions beside the road quite quickly. It would be safer to get as far away as possible to search for a car, but there was no time. From the look of the road, I might walk for miles without finding anything, whereas I knew that there must be an extraordinary number of vehicles at the MicroMagnetics site, many of them probably unattended.

I set out, walking back towards the entrance to MicroMagnetics, keeping on the left edge of the road in order to be absolutely sure that I would see any vehicle coming toward me. No one was going to swerve to avoid me. A red pickup truck came up from behind and passed me. I was relieved to see that the road had not been closed off to civilian traffic. The two occupants were staring up over the treetops at the glow of the fire in the distance, and the truck slowed until it was barely moving. When the patrol car reappeared, its roof lights began blinking in a threatening pattern, and it pulled up directly behind the truck, twenty yards beyond me.