green sentry box

The green sentry box is the automated guardian of the Topeka downunder, a low, green, boxlike machine that runs on tracks and serves as the underground civilization's first line of defense against surface intruders. It is the machine that captures Vic the moment he steps off the access dropshaft, the instrument of his imprisonment, and finally the object he destroys in a single gunshot to win his freedom. More than a mere security device, the sentry box embodies the downunder's sterile, controlled order and its hostility toward the solos of the blasted surface world.

Design and Function

The green sentry box is a squat, four-foot-high machine that rolls on tracks, with cables ending in mittens instead of arms and a single large glass eye at the front. When it seizes Vic, it hoists him onto its square flat top, holding him with those cable-mittens so that his sneakers almost touch the ground but never quite do. It is strong enough to carry him bodily through the streets of Topeka, and its glass eye proves resistant to his kicks, refusing to break when he tries to smash it. The machine is operated remotely or by a controller: when Aaron, one of the downunder's men, steps behind the box and clicks something, the cable-mittens suck back inside and Vic is released. The sentry box is thus both a physical captor and a tool of the downunder's human authorities, who direct it with a simple mechanical action.

Capture of Vic

The green sentry box first appears at the moment of Vic's arrival in Topeka. Having descended the access dropshaft and taken in the vast, enclosed town stretching twenty miles across beneath a ceiling an eighth of a mile overhead, Vic feels his throat tighten and his hands go cold with panic, and he turns to get back into the dropshaft. It is then that the machine grabs him. Vic immediately suspects the girl Quilla June, whom he had been tracking from the surface, and the sentry box hauls him off into the town, past residents sitting in rockers, raking lawns, painting white stripes down the middle of the road, and listening to oompah bands, all of them watching him go past on the metal machine. The box carries him through the business section and into a shopfront marked with the words BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU, where half a dozen men and old men, plus a couple of women, are waiting for him.

Role in the Downunder

The sentry box is not merely a one-time captor but a constant presence during Vic's imprisonment. After his release at the Better Business Bureau, the downunder's residents give him the run of the town as long as he keeps his manners and attempts nothing sudden, and the green sentry box is always somewhere nearby, a silent reminder of the consequences of defiance. It is the visible enforcement of the downunder's rigid, sterile order, the mechanical counterpart to the artificial food that tastes like chalk and dust and the suffocating politeness that Vic finds enough to kill a guy. The box's constant proximity contributes to Vic's psychological deterioration, as he feels the tin can closing in on him and the weight of the earth overhead, and it is only when he remembers the poodle he once fed to Blood and realizes there must be other ways out of the downunder that he begins to plan his escape.

Destruction and Escape

When Vic finally makes his move, the green sentry box becomes the central obstacle. Stepping out of the shop with Quilla June, he finds the box coming on like a whippet, its cables out and the mittens replaced by hooks. Vic drops to one knee, wraps the sling of his .30-06 around his forearm, sights clean, and fires dead at the big eye in the front. The single shot hits the eye, and the machine explodes in a shower of sparks, swerving through the front window of The Mill End Shoppe, screeching and crying and showering the place with flames and sparks. The destruction of the sentry box is the turning point of the escape, but it also leaves Vic momentarily vulnerable: when he turns to grab Quilla June, she is gone, and the vigilantes are coming, Lew hobbling along with his cane. The shots that follow come from the .45 Vic had given Quilla June, as she fires into the mob from a second-floor porch like a professional.

Significance

The green sentry box is a concentrated symbol of the downunder's nature. It is a machine of order and control, efficient and impersonal, that treats a human being as cargo to be hoisted and transported. Its destruction marks Vic's rejection of that order and his assertion of the surface world's chaotic freedom over the underground's sterile safety. The box's glass eye, which resists Vic's kicks but shatters under a single well-aimed bullet, suggests the fragility of the downunder's defenses when confronted with determined violence. And its constant presence during Vic's imprisonment, always somewhere nearby, makes it the physical embodiment of the claustrophobia that nearly breaks him, the mechanical guardian of a canned existence that Vic ultimately refuses to accept.