His hands were raw and bleeding. His first thought was that the guards would know something was wrong when they saw his hands. He was down on his knees in foul-smelling dirt, but his head scraped the low ceiling. He was digging mechanically with his bare hands. He had had a shovel, but it had been lost in a slight cave-in.
"Hey, Lonnie!" a harsh whispering voice called. "Stop dreaming, for cryin' out loud. If we don't do it tonight, we'll never get another chance. Forbish is out."
"What do you mean he's out?" called back Horner, whose name now seemed to be Lonnie.
"You know what I mean. Out. Another cell-block. Forbish got a mouth like the Holland Tunnel. What I mean, if he ain't here to cash in on the deal, he's gonna spill it. And fast. How you comin'?"
"I'm digging," Horner responded. "I'm digging ... and digging." He was doing that, all right. The work should have been tremendously tiring, should have exhausted Hugh Horner in his run-down forty-seven-year-old body. But he found it almost exhilarating. He looked at his hands. Dirty hands, and bloody. But large—larger than they should have been. Horner had had small hands, almost delicate hands. He dug and dug, thinking.
Either it was another reserprine dream—or he wasn't Hugh Horner.
Then was he the man whom he'd selected—more or less at random? But that wasn't possible, for the man in question had been in the Bodies, Inc. establishment on Long Island—unless, somehow, that had merely been a projected image of the man, like three-dimensional television. Then ... where was he?
"Want me to take over, Lonnie?" demanded the harsh whisper. For the first time, Horner realized that it was not close by. It was a loud whisper and it came from a considerable ways off. Wanting time to think, Horner said, "Yes. All right."
He backed out of the tunnel slowly, awkwardly, his body stiff. Stiff, but not painful. Hugh Horner's limbs would have ached terribly in this cramped position, but Lonnie's did not. Lonnie scurried more rapidly now—backwards and not minding it at all—out of the tunnel. The walls of the tunnel, Horner observed, were of bare soft earth. If his elbows or knees struck them, some of the earth sifted down, and sometimes a rock. He had the sudden impression that the tunnel had been dug over a considerable period of time with crude implements or by hand.