Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

I counted numbers, I imagined chess-boards and played both sides of long games. I tried, and tried vainly, to split my personality into two personalities and to play one against the other. But ever I remained the one player.

And time was very heavy and very long. I played games with flies, with ordinary house-flies; and learned that they possessed a sense of play. For instance, lying on the cell floor, I established an arbitrary and imaginary line along the wall some three feet above the floor. When they rested on the wall above this line they were left in peace.

When they passed that line I tried to catch them.

Of the dozen or more flies that lived with me, there was only one who did not care for the game. He refused steadfastly to play, and very carefully avoided the unsafe territory. He never played with the other flies either. He was strong and healthy.

Believe me, I knew all my flies. Oh, each was distinctly an individual—not merely in size and markings, strength, and speed of flight. They were differentiated in the mentality and temperament.

I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. Moreover, I could tell in advance when any particular fly was beginning to play.

But the hours were very long in solitary. I could not sleep them all away. House-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with a man’s brain; and my brain was trained and active. And there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran abominably on in vain speculations.

The world was dead to me. No news of it filtered in.

The history of science was making fast, and I was interested in a thousand subjects. The very thought of science just beyond the prison walls and in which I could take no part, was maddening. And in the meantime I lay there on my cell floor and played games with house-flies.

And yet all was not silence in solitary. One day I heard, at irregular intervals, faint, low tappings. Continually these tappings were interrupted by the snarling of the guard.

The matter was easy of explanation.

I had known, as every prisoner in San Quentin knew, that the two men in solitary were Ed Morrell and Jake Oppenheimer. And I knew that these were the two men who tapped to each other and were punished for doing so.

The code they used was simple. There came a day when I listened to two clear sentences of conversation!

“Say—Ed—what—would—you—give—right—now—for—the—paper—and—tobacco” asked the one who tapped from farther away.

I nearly cried out in my joy.