Chapter 12

At dinner time, the summoned individuals gathered around the signal fire. Each was guarded and all glanced furtively at one another. It was Sawyer who spoke first. He had drawn himself to the meeting with some difficulty, and he was conscious of the pain in his battered face and body. But his bruises had not crippled his tongue. "Thirteen of us," he said. "I hope we're not modeling the last supper. Who's supposed to be our Jesus?"

His mockery was not wholly unwelcome. It seemed to cut through the tension that had blanketed the council, but his analogy had also accented a worrisome possibility: only dark nights seemed to stretch out ahead of them, nights that promised soul-wrestling, sweat, anguish, reluctance, betrayal, and blood.

"You, Sayid?" The Southerner drew out the question slowly while turning his severe eyes on the Iraqi. "The God-complex certainly fits."

Sayid did not answer. It was Locke who spoke instead, quietly, like a sage dispensing wisdom. His spirit, however, was anything but sage-like. It was tossing restlessly within as his gaze came to rest on Jack. "The better question is: who's our Judas?"

Jack did not ignore Locke's implication; he simply failed to observe it. He announced, "The reason I called this meeting tonight…"

Sayid and Ana both sat wordlessly as they allowed Jack to assume command. Ana humored him as a woman who, for all her austerity, understood the occasional benefits of stroking a man's ego. Sayid tolerated his authority as a soldier who comprehended the necessity of sometimes laboring under inferior superiors. It was not that he did not respect Jack for what he was and what he had done for the survivors; but he thought the doctor sometimes overextended himself and failed to understand the concept of comparative advantage. There were times when it was best to defer to others. The Iraqi would not seek to question Jack's judgment with regard to the treatment of a patient; why must Jack question his with regard to interrogation or the training of armies?

Sayid had to admit to himself, however, that Jack did better than he could have done to get the group talking in an organized manner. There was something of the natural leader in the man, for all his inconsistency, and Jack was broadly liked. That he was liked was his strength, Sayid thought, but that he needed to be liked was his weakness. Sometimes a leader must endure the spite of those whom he attempted to guide.

Sayid listened intently as Jack directed each person in the circle to relate whatever he or she knew of the Others, Dharma, the monster, the transmission, Rousseau, the hatch, and the island. For now, the Iraqi did not interrupt with questions. He could see each face dimly in the firelight, and he observed how the features of the survivors contorted with surprise, realization, concern, and speculation as each new bit of information was revealed. He was himself shocked to learn how little he had known.

When the last person had spoken, an oppressive silence surrounded the council. Even Sawyer looked too awed to speak; if he had any sarcasm to dispense, he could not at the moment bring himself to voice it.

Surprisingly, it was not one of the self-appointed group leaders who stirred the stillness. Claire spoke hesitantly, almost like a child asking her father if there were monsters in the closest: "So, what's happening to us? Are we a part of some kind of medical experiment?"

"It would appear so," rose Eko's booming voice. "The question is why."

"No," rejoined Sawyer, "the question is—how the hell do we stop it? I don't care why Dharma is doing what it's doing. I care that I not stay trapped in a maze like some lab rat."

"Yet knowing why may help us to stop it," suggested Sayid. "The more we know about Dharma's experiment—assuming there is an experiment being conducted—the more leverage we will have to resist and, eventually, escape." They had all seemed to switch smoothly from talk of rescue to talk of escape. It was a revealing transition, if a largely unobserved one. "And there is one person who likely knows more than we do: Henry Gale."

"We don't know Gale is with Dharma," hastened Jack.

"We have plenty of reason to suspect it," insisted Locke. He did so more to oppose Jack than because he agreed with Sayid. He himself had begun to wonder about Gale's complicity. And even if Gale was with Dharma, did that make him evil? If they were all guinea pigs, was the experiment necessarily malicious? Locke had the use of his legs now, didn't he? The island had given him that, at least. He hated to think this mystical place was but one grand laboratory, but if it was, the experiment was healing him.

Yet Locke couldn't let Jack usurp authority over him. He felt he must side with Sayid before he lost his grip on things, before Jack assumed responsibility for everything. If Locke allowed that to happen, the doctor might even insist they stop pressing the button. Sayid at least wouldn't do that, would he?

"He's certainly got a made-up name, anyway." Sawyer stretched out his legs in front of him and leaned back on his hands as he spoke. "The wizard ought'a be able to reveal something."

"The wizard?" asked Kate with a half-derisive, half-flirtatious smile. She was sitting rather close to Sawyer, and she now shifted position, allowing an arm to brush against his as she did so. He didn't react the way she wanted him to. He behaved as if she hadn't made the gesture.

"Yeah, the wizard," he said. "You know, in the Wizard of Oz."

Sayid, who had at first been inclined to dismiss anything Sawyer said as superfluous, now looked at him with interest. "What is the relevance of this wizard of oz?"

"It's a book," answered Sawyer, who had read quite a number of them. He had feigned to do so out of boredom, but boredom could not explain his voracious appetite for the written word. But whatever effect literature had on his mind or spirit, he would not reveal. If someone had asked him what he thought of Moby Dick, he would have said, "It's about a whale," and he would not have mentioned that he had read it three times, sometimes late into the night.

"Henry Gale is the name of the uncle of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz," Sawyer explained pedantically. When the blankness in Sayid's face did not abate, the Southerner continued, "Okay, so it's a bit misplaced to call Henry Gale the wizard. He ain't the wizard. He ain't the guy behind the curtain who makes all the scary noises. But in the book, Dorothy and her dog Toto find themselves in the land of Oz and make some pals who go looking for this mysterious wizard. When they get to where the wizard's supposed to be, Toto knocks over a screen. And there's nothing but a little man there, a man who came to Oz from the Midwest in a hot air balloon. Sound familiar?"

Sayid's mouth fell slightly agape. He was surprised not only by the tale but by the fact that Sawyer's knowledge was proving so unexpectedly useful.

"Anyway," continued Sawyer, "when the guy first came to Oz, the people saw the letters O and Z on the balloon, and they assumed this Midwesterner was their king, and they built the Emerald City. Soon this balloon man decides to keep himself anonymous by calling himself the wizard and hiding behind a curtain and using special effects. It's the same story here. It's all theatrics and smokescreens."

"Like the theatrical paint we found," said Kate excitedly. "And the false beard." She looked at Sawyer with a bit of pride, as though his insightfulness was her own. "It's all theater. None of it's real. Not the monster, not the Others—none of it."

"And someone's behind it all," said Sawyer, ignoring her contribution. "Claire remembers Ethan and some lab coat talking about a certain 'he'. Well whoever he is, he's our wizard."

"And the thing Eko saw," said Libby, for the first time breaking into the conversation, "the thing Locke saw, the thing that tore down the trees, the thing that killed the pilot…all of them could be stage effects of some kind. Something mechanical—something controlled by remote. And all of this complex pretense seems to suggest that the experiment" —they all appeared to be accepting the theory of an experiment now, and no one had suggested a better explanation for the events that had befallen them—"is psychological rather than medical."

"Yet Rousseau spoke of a sickness," replied Sayid. "And Claire recalls having the baby inoculated against some sickness. This would suggest a physical, medical experiment. Perhaps Dharma's only intention for fabricating the monsters and the Others is to keep us from escaping the laboratory."

"And the button?" asked Locke, raising the issue for the first time and cinching the fear that had begun to knot in his stomach—the fear that the rest would now fail to take the button seriously. He would not have mentioned it, but he had to know what they were thinking; he had to brace himself to defend the computer if necessary.

Libby's response was just what Locke was hoping to avoid. "Psychological," she said as though the evidence were irrefutable. "They want to see if we'll keep pressing it."

"Maybe not," suggested Ana. "It could just be a way to keep us busy, keep us distracted from trying to escape the island. It doesn't mean they're testing us…just preoccupying us."

"Well," came Sawyer's loud drawl, "I'm with the shrink on this one, 'cause I gotta go by the book."

"What happens in the book to suggest a psychological experiment?" asked Sayid.

"Okay," answered Sawyer, "so Dorothy's friend the scarecrow thinks he's got no brains, and the lion thinks he's got no courage, and the Tin Man thinks he's got no heart…but the wizard knows they've had these things all along, even if they don't believe it. So he gives them some medicine he says will give them all these things, but it's nothing but a placebo. Just a placebo, and…abracadabra… …mind trick…the scarecrow's got his brain, the lion's got his courage, and the Tin Man's got his heart."

"Then what?" asked Sayid as he leaned forward anxiously.

Sawyer almost laughed to see him on the edge like that. The Iraqi looked like a boyscout hearing his first scary story around a campfire. With a wide grin spreading out beneath his broken and reset nose, Sawyer answered, "The wizard promises to take Dorothy home in a hot air balloon she sews from green silk. He leaves the Scarecrow to rule in his place. But Dorothy loses the dog. She goes chasing after the damn dog—"

At this, Sayid felt his throat constrict and he tried to brush away all thought of Shannon's pursuit of Vincent…

"—and she misses the balloon. It breaks off with just the wizard in it. Then Dorothy has all sorts of other grand adventures" —Sawyer spoke the word "grand" with sweeping sarcasm—"and she finally gets home by tapping together her silver shoes. She had the power to get home all along and didn't know it."

"Wish we had that power," said Hurley gloomily.

"Perhaps we do," suggested Eko. His voice was more subdued than usual, but it still carried itself regally in the air and fell on every ear.

"Gotta take the power," said Sawyer. He had heard Eko, of course, but he had dismissed the priest's primitive optimism. "Either way, they're screwing us—our minds, our bodies—whatever they're messing with, I don't want them messing with it. So, Torquemada,"—he turned abruptly to Sayid—"why don't you and Uncle Gale have a little chat tomorrow morning?"

"I have every intention of interrogating him," Sayid assured him.

"Then I'm observing," insisted Jack.

"Very well," Sayid replied grimly. He thought Jack's presence would be a deterrent, but it was better than having to fight him about the issue. At least now he would be able to talk to Gale without anyone dragging him from the room. And perhaps Jack would be put at ease when he saw that Sayid had no intention of resuming his former force. "But you say nothing. Nothing."

"Fine," agreed the doctor.

"If the object of the experiment is psychological," said Libby, not willing to leave the discussion so unresolved and desirous of fleshing out her own thoughts, "what might they be trying to accomplish? If Gale really did borrow the details of his story from the Wizard of Oz, if the bookreally is some kind of metaphor for what they're trying to do to us, then maybe they think they're making us into better people. And maybe that's why they took the children—because the children are young and impressionable: not quite blank slates, but not as fixed in their ways as adults."

Sawyer snorted. "Sounds more like The Island of Dr. Moreau. Playing God to turn beasts into men, and damn the pain it requires."

"The Island of Dr. Moreau?" asked Sayid.

Sawyer reveled in the way the Iraqi was looking to him—to him—for enlightenment. But he wouldn't satisfy the man's curiosity. Instead, he scoffed, "Damn, Mohammed, what did you read in your English classes, anyway?"

"Jane Austen."

Sawyer let out a great guffaw. "Jane Austen? Priceless. Oh, that's classic. Did you have to read her books aloud? Did they make you feel all warm and fuzzy?"

Now Sayid allowed the Southern's derision to creep like a parasite beneath his skin. He regretted that he could not seem to prevent Sawyer from riling him, but he pressed his teeth together tightly and fired back, "The books are satires."

"I read that book," chimed in Charlie, happily freeing Sayid from any further response. "Yeah, The Island of Dr. Moreau," continued the musician. "Yeah. It was creepy all right. And he was wrong, that guy. That Moreau. He thought he was doing good, but…bloody creepy."

Jack seemed to want to reign in the tangential direction of the conversation. "So our next step is for Sayid to talk to Gale, under my observation." Jack didn't notice Locke's eyes shift in disgust as he looked away at the surf undulating listlessly against the shore. The doctor concluded, "We'll all meet again tomorrow night? See what we can figure out then?"

There was a mumbled chorus of agreement, and people began to draw away to their separate shelters only to stay awake with their separate thoughts. As Sayid lay in his tent later that night, he thought of all the things they had not yet discussed. If there really was a master plan, a human order behind the chaos that had enveloped them, how and why had they become a part of it? If the island was an immense laboratory, how had Dharma ensured that the plane would crash here or that anyone in particular would survive? Yet Ana had insisted that the abductors had a list of names of specific people they wanted to capture. Had they compiled that list only after the crash, by living among the survivors as Ethan and Goodwin had done? Or had their agenda extended farther into the past? Had someone on that plane brought it down?

Sayid had not reacted to Locke's quiet comment about a Judas among them, but it was a consideration that now entered his mind. They had rooted out Goodwin. They had rooted out Ethan. The men were not on the manifest. But what if there were another traitor who was on the manifest, who had orchestrated the plane crash, who had managed to survive it, and who now labored beside them and feigned to help them?