CHAPTER 5

At each stage of his imprisonment he had known, or seemed
to know, whereabouts he was in the windowless building.
Possibly there were slight differences in the air pressure.
The cells where the guards had beaten him were below ground
level. The room where he had been interrogated by O’Brien was
high up near the roof. This place was many metres underground, as
deep down as it was possible to go.
It was bigger than most of the cells he had been in. But he
hardly noticed his surroundings. All he noticed was that there were
two small tables straight in front of him, each covered with green
baize. One was only a metre or two from him, the other was further
away, near the door. He was strapped upright in a chair, so tightly
that he could move nothing, not even his head. A sort of pad
gripped his head from behind, forcing him to look straight in front
of him.
For a moment he was alone, then the door opened and O’Brien
came in.
‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I
told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The
thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’
The door opened again. A guard came in, carrying something
made of wire, a box or basket of some kind. He set it down on the
further table. Because of the position in which O’Brien was
standing. Winston could not see what the thing was.
‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or
by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are
cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’
He had moved a little to one side, so that Winston had a better
view of the thing on the table. It was an oblong wire cage with a
handle on top for carrying it by. Fixed to the front of it was
something that looked like a fencing mask, with the concave side
outwards. Although it was three or four metres away from him, he
could see that the cage was divided lengthways into two
compartments, and that there was some kind of creature in each.
They were rats.
‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world
happens to be rats.’
A sort of premonitory tremor, a fear of he was not certain
what, had passed through Winston as soon as he caught his first
glimpse of the cage. But at this moment the meaning of the masklike attachment in front of it suddenly sank into him. His bowels
seemed to turn to water.
‘You can’t do that!’ he cried out in a high cracked voice. ‘You
couldn’t, you couldn’t! It’s impossible.’
‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic that
used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in
front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was
something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you
knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was
the rats that were on the other side of the wall.’
‘O’Brien!’ said Winston, making an effort to control his voice.
‘You know this is not necessary. What is it that you want me to
do?’
O’Brien made no direct answer. When he spoke it was in the schoolmasterish manner that he sometimes affected. He looked
thoughtfully into the distance, as though he were addressing an
audience somewhere behind Winston’s back.
‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There are
occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to
the point of death. But for everyone there is something
unendurable — something that cannot be contemplated. Courage
and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is
not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep
water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an
instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For
you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you
cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is
required of you.’
‘But what is it, what is it? How can I do it if I don’t know what
it is?’
O’Brien picked up the cage and brought it across to the nearer
table. He set it down carefully on the baize cloth. Winston could
hear the blood singing in his ears. He had the feeling of sitting in
utter loneliness. He was in the middle of a great empty plain, a flat
desert drenched with sunlight, across which all sounds came to
him out of immense distances. Yet the cage with the rats was not
two metres away from him. They were enormous rats. They were at
the age when a rat’s muzzle grows blunt and fierce and his fur
brown instead of grey.
‘The rat,’ said O’Brien, still addressing his invisible audience,
‘although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will
have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this
town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the
house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also
attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in
knowing when a human being is helpless.’
There was an outburst of squeals from the cage. It seemed to
reach Winston from far away. The rats were fighting; they were
trying to get at each other through the partition. He heard also a
deep groan of despair. That, too, seemed to come from outside
himself.
O’Brien picked up the cage, and, as he did so, pressed
something in it. There was a sharp click. Winston made a frantic
effort to tear himself loose from the chair. It was hopeless; every
part of him, even his head, was held immovably. O’Brien moved
the cage nearer. It was less than a metre from Winston’s face.
‘I have pressed the first lever,’ said O’Brien. ‘You understand
the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head,
leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage
will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets.
Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to
your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes
first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the
tongue.’
The cage was nearer; it was closing in. Winston heard a
succession of shrill cries which appeared to be occurring in the air
above his head. But he fought furiously against his panic. To think,
to think, even with a split second left — to think was the only hope.
Suddenly the foul musty odour of the brutes struck his nostrils.
There was a violent convulsion of nausea inside him, and he
almost lost consciousness. Everything had gone black. For an
instant he was insane, a screaming animal. Yet he came out of the
blackness clutching an idea. There was one and only one way to save himself. He must interpose another human being, the BODY
of another human being, between himself and the rats.
The circle of the mask was large enough now to shut out the
vision of anything else. The wire door was a couple of hand-spans
from his face. The rats knew what was coming now. One of them
was leaping up and down, the other, an old scaly grandfather of the
sewers, stood up, with his pink hands against the bars, and fiercely
sniffed the air. Winston could see the whiskers and the yellow
teeth. Again the black panic took hold of him. He was blind,
helpless, mindless.
‘It was a common punishment in Imperial China,’ said O’Brien
as didactically as ever.
The mask was closing on his face. The wire brushed his cheek.
And then — no, it was not relief, only hope, a tiny fragment of
hope. Too late, perhaps too late. But he had suddenly understood
that in the whole world there was just ONE person to whom he
could transfer his punishment — ONE body that he could thrust
between himself and the rats. And he was shouting frantically, over
and over.
‘Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what
you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me!
Julia! Not me!’
He was falling backwards, into enormous depths, away from
the rats. He was still strapped in the chair, but he had fallen
through the floor, through the walls of the building, through the
earth, through the oceans, through the atmosphere, into outer
space, into the gulfs between the stars — always away, away, away
from the rats. He was light years distant, but O’Brien was still
standing at his side. There was still the cold touch of wire against
his cheek. But through the darkness that enveloped him he heard another metallic click, and knew that the cage door had clicked shut and not open.