“And how would you get a lowering line suppose you had gone in without? You can’t send a message because your means of escape is cut off. Fire moves fast, as you’ll find, it swirls and gets behind you. It makes a wind, that’s a strange thing.” “It would do,” from Piper. Pye went on, “The man who loses his mental faculties is the one to get left. What’s left of him will be his axe and spanner, and the buckle of his belt. I’m not telling you a story, there’s the museum at Headquarters, you’ve only to ask the bastards there, and if you’re lucky, very, they’ll let you in. You’ll find the label with his name on they got from the number stamped on ’is axe.” “That’s right,” said Piper. “Well, all right,” said Pye, and continued, “you don’t want to fry, or do you? What would you do?” Piper said, “I would throw down me bobbin line.” “Yes, your bobbin line, carried in a leather pouch on the belt, one hundred and twenty feet of the best unpolished sash cord wound round a reel. Now, when you go to drop this bobbin line, don’t throw it out, or it will come back and smash the window directly below, and likely enough get caught up there. No, just drop it out quiet and easy, let the reel fall from your fingers, and you’ll find it will unwind lovely. One of your mates on the ground will bend you the lowering line on the end. Now then, when you have raised the old lowering line, what would you make do? Remember, you’re hot in where you are, you want to get out, you aren’t an Indian, you daren’t try the rope trick, though that’s just superstition that story, my father only gave me what he could afford, namely a working man’s ordinary education, but there’s nothing that is heavier than air can manage. Well, what would you do?” He did not pause here, he went straight on, still, so it seemed to Roe at the time, concealing the question to which he had already demanded an answer. “You want to get out, this is not such a wonderful world for some of us, but the instinct in the ’uman animal to save itself is stronger than the ruling class can credit, now then, suppose you were up there and inside,” then at last he brought his question out again, “what would you make fast to?” “Why, to the door, I don’t doubt,” Piper said, before anyone else had time to answer. “You would,” Pye said, and fell silent. He looked at his shoes as he sat on the edge of the table. Then he went on, “a door swings, it’s in the nature of them to swing, it’s on ’inges, what’s worse the landing outside is well alight, the door may be burned through, and Piper would go and make fast to the knob.” Now it would be the turn of the whole class to laugh. “To the bloody knob,” he continued, “with a lowering line an inch and an eighth in diameter made of best Manilla hemp and fourteen stone sliding down to the ground.” “I get what you mean,” the old man said. “You keep what you get to yourself,” Pye replied. “You’re dead, you’re a smell, you’ve fried.” Again they could all laugh. “Come on now, what is there in a bedroom?” After several suggestions he would get his answer. “Why yes, the bed. And round the middle part, bringing the bed up to the window, making fast to the middle where it will jam across the window frame. Not the foot, or the head, but the middle, the business part,” he concluded and everyone, including Piper, laughed their appreciation again.