Prisoner of Glass by Mark Jeffrey Read Free Book Online

vegetables or something.   When it came to her turn, Elspeth accepted her basket silently, as the rest had done, and slung it around herself and followed the company deeper into the neat rows of growing things.
    When she reached a patch of cornstalks, the guard barked an order, and immediately everyone began picking the corn, harvesting long, healthy green ears into the baskets.   Elspeth watched how it was done and quickly began doing the same.
    For long time, she moved like a robot, emotionally exhausted, almost thankful for a mindless repetitive task.   Several times, she’d attempted to strike up a conversation in low tones with a fellow prisoner — only to be shushed by the guards, or given a steely-eyed refusal from the inmate.   The corn wasn’t high enough to hide a stealthy verbal exchange.  
    So it was here, she reasoned, that all of the prison’s food was grown.  
    But as the minutes melted into hours, she couldn’t help but notice something strange.
    The ground out of which the corn grew was dry as a cough.   It was dust, sand, cobweb and rock.   Usually, hothouses like this simulated tropical environments — they were moist and damp.   And actually hot.   There should have been condensation everywhere.   She should have been soaked by now.
    But she wasn’t.   This place was bone-chattering cold, like the rest of the prison.   She had to keep moving to stay warm.
    And there were no lights.   Oh, sure, there was some ambient flickering in here, just like in the rest of the prison, coming from some vague and undefined source.   But there should have been white hot panels of thousand-Watt bulbs everywhere, blasting ultraviolet radiation on the greenery.   These plants needed either sunlight or artificial sunlight to grow, and here there was neither.
    So how were they growing?  
    And there was no water, no irrigation of any kind here that she could see.   She had figured there would be pipes snaking around the ground in the cornfields — pipes that powered sprinklers that came on at night or something — and that sooner or later she would run into one.  
    But no.   Nothing.   Nada, zip.
    She looked up.   The top of the cavern was merely rock: there was no sprinkler system there either: there would be no moisture raining down from the artificial skies.  
    Impossible!
    This whole place was impossible.   It defied her medical knowledge, her scientific knowledge.   She refused to accept it.
    There was simply no way green plants of any kind should be able to grow in an underground cavern, with no water and no sunlight, period, end of sentence.

    AT MID-MORNING, Elspeth was told she and her group would move to different location in the vast underground farm.   Along the way, they passed several flower beds that appeared to be tropical orchids.   Impossible flowers growing in impossible conditions.  
    Then, they encountered a group harvesting coconuts.   These prisoners were being made to climb the slender palm trees and throw the coconuts down from the top.   To her dismay, Elspeth saw that the majority of these prisoners were children.   One, in fact, was the same small Indian girl she had seen earlier — the same one that had a cell very near her own.  
    The girl looked up, adjusting the folds of her garments and headdress.   The clear sharp whites of her eyes pierced the gloom, making her momentarily resemble a famous National Geographic magazine cover, her steel gaze driving into Elspeth’s soft moon-blue eyes insistently.
    Then she looked away and the circuit was broken.
    The Indian girl scampered up the long neck of a palm tree and vanished between its fronds, tossing the coconuts down for the others to collect.  
    Elspeth turned and made her way along the path.

    THE PRISONERS WERE given water, and then shown an apple orchard.   New wicker baskets were dispensed, and the hard work of picking apples began.   But this time, it was easier to speak in low whispers and hide