Mr Hook's Big Black Box

Dwayne Carlisle: The Plan

I figured that it couldn't be too hard to get the lid off the crate and see what was inside. If the individual boxes had the year and the name of the society on them, I'd be able to just open Cassie's box without disturbing the others, and because I already knew the rules I wouldn't be distracted reading them. I could check that later.

I hadn't heard anyone coming into the building behind me. I'd run all the way from the Brassic, which felt like way further than I'd thought, but I still wondered if there was a chance I'd get back and convince everyone I'd gone out for a fag. I didn't smoke then, but I had before, and it would be easy enough to start again in such an exciting time. I would probably have been nervous enough to take up the habit again if I'd just seen the Box and hadn't already thought I knew what was inside.

We'd got the Box standing on its end in one corner, and I knew I didn't have the strength to even walk it across the floor. But with so many boxes the same size inside the time capsule, I hadn't heard any of them moving when we tilted it, so I guessed there must be some kind of shelves or compartments. I tried to pry the lid off, but couldn't get a grip. I knew that the last group of engineers fixing the AC had left a crowbar on the roof, though, and it was the work of a moment to dash outside and get it. I'd just pry the lid off, take the DVD and maybe keep most of the nails. If I left the lid not properly secured, maybe closed it with gaffer tape or something, it would be so easy to knock the Box and have an excuse to open it when we were moving to whatever more secure location the club had decided on.

I almost had a heart attack when I heard the door open. I thought somebody might have forgotten their coat or something, no way had I been gone long enough to worry anyone. I ducked into the space beside the Box, hoping they wouldn't see the rusted crowbar. It meant I was peering around the corner of the crate to see who had come in, but at least they wouldn't have a clue that I'd been cheating. I panicked for a moment, leaned over enough to slip the bar behind the Box, and then stuck my head out. Ferrari was already talking, so I was thinking fast to try and catch up with the thread of conversation.

"They want the Box," she was saying, "We need somewhere safe to hide it. They're blocked by the big fire door, but it won't take long for them to think of coming round the other way."

"I'll wedge the door at the other end," Marco shrugged, grabbing the heavy foam fire extinguisher off the wall outside, and turned back the way he'd come from. I knew that trick; the previous year they'd moved one extinguisher to the other side of a door, to discourage people from using it to prop the door open and it then getting wedged so the door couldn't be opened from the other side when they moved it aside. I'd never imagined using that as a way to defend the corridor, but it seemed to work now.

"What are you doing up here?" Ferrari asked, "Meeting's in the pub today."

"I... uhh..." I thought about saying I'd worried someone might open the box while we were away, but that wouldn't explain being half-crouched between it and the wall. "I lost my scarf. I thought maybe if we'd put the Box down on the corner, it might have been pulled off without me noticing." She just nodded, I thought she'd bought it. I was too flustered to think straight at that point, so I never even considered that anyone except me would be trying to sneak an advance peek inside the Box.

Marco returned after just a couple of seconds, without the extinguisher. I noticed that time that he had a rifle over his shoulder, and was quite out of breath. I could guess why for the latter: I'd deliberately locked the fire door behind me when I came upstairs, an automatic (and probably a little paranoid) reaction to prevent casual passers-by observing my interference with the Box. He was also pushing a trolley, one of the things that looked like lengths of aluminium tube welded together with two wheels on the bottom, that you might use for moving heavy cargo onto a truck if you couldn't afford a forklift.

"Wargames still not locking their room?" Ferrari asked. I'd seen that trolley before, we'd helped the Wargames Society to move some stuff down to the quad for a public display when they did their last recruitment drive. Both groups did a combination of reenactments and more geeky pursuits, so it was natural we were good friends, and their club room was two doors down on the other side of the corridor. I looked again at the gun, and assumed he'd picked up one of the wargamers' props while he was in there, maybe to scare off whoever was planning to come and take the Box off us. With a reason in my mind, I didn't think about it again. Marco just shook his head.

"Good thinking," I pointed at the little trolley thing, "If they're going to come looking for this, we need to have it elsewhere."

"Where, though?" Marco asked the obvious question, "I mean, if they're coming up here they're bound to check the society storage lockers on Westham. Getting it in a student room is going to be hassle, I don't think we could get it up the stairs. Your folks are only a few miles away aren't they, could we put it there?"

"I'll ask them," I nodded. It was quite some drive to Uncle Baker's farm, and he was conservative enough that anything about this situation would have him thinking we were all crazy. But having it somewhere I could get to quite easily would be convenient if I needed to open the Box without the others being around. I decided I'd make the call, anyway, and see how it went. "The big question is how we get it out of the building, if they're waiting for us by the elevators. Camp out here until they go away?"

"Probably not an option," Ferrari barked as if I'd just said something stupid. I wondered if I had; I was still prone to stupid gaffes in social situations, I could never guess what other people were going to do.

"There's no way we'll get this down the fire escape," Marco slapped the crate, which didn't budge at all, "or the stairs for that matter, even if we found a route they're not guarding. And they pulled the breakers on the elevators, we think."

"We could do the same, then," I grinned, a plan forming in my mind. I thought about it for a while, but my friends' impatience was almost tangible.

"I'll go to the South Plant Room," I explained, "You can take that thing out the fire exit, if you can get it through the door, and onto the roof. The old Science Department, when they had labs and stockrooms in the building, had its own lifts. I've used it as a shortcut before when the building's crowded. Like the freight elevator by the main entrance, it's on a separate circuit from all the passenger ones. But the Science Department elevator has its breakers in the Plant Room. So we could put the Box in the elevator on the roof, out of sight of anybody peering through the fire door, then send it down and I pull the breakers. They don't know where it's gone, they can come up to our room if they want, and nobody's going to look in an old freight elevator stuck between floors. I bet half the staff in that department don't even know it's still connected."

"Sounds like a plan," Ferrari nodded, "Let's do that. Maybe if they see it isn't here, they'll assume we got it out before they arrived, and then they'll be searching all the other storage spaces we might have access to on campus." I felt like she was going a bit over the top. They were only other societies, after all, and there was no way they were actually going to break into a college facility just to make us lose this competition. But that was her all over, whatever we did we had to win. It's like everything was life-or-death, big-picture thinking. Neither of us questioned that she was making the decisions here, when we were practically under siege and there might not be time to call Kris before the other societies were at the door.

Getting the crate out of the fire exit with only that little trolley was something of a hassle. To get it under the lintel, they had to lean the whole crate back, and then it was hard to keep it balanced. But there were two strong people, and I left them to it and went to the Plant Room. I'd been up here once in my first year, with a tutorial group for electrical engineering. The tutor had pointed out the differences between a real-world high power installation, and the models we might be more used to in an engineering lab. I remembered noticing that the Plant Room was accessed both by a ladder to the level below, and a door out onto the rooftop. Any engineering work that required access here would probably involve some of the machinery on the roof too, so it made sense that way. The outside door was secured only with a padlock, and just about anybody who'd done a minor in physical engineering could tell you how easy those are to break with the right tools. All you need is leverage.