Philips could directly see the men’s lips from where he stood so martins didn’t need to translate for him.
Martins turned and looked at the clock on the administration block, it was almost half past seven.
The sun stayed hidden and the weather stayed cool, it was difficult to bring together such beautiful surroundings with some of the things Zell had told him; the drownings, the beatings, the hole.
As he scanned the horizon, he noticed there were thousands of red objects floating on the surface of the water in all directions, he wondered what they were.
Zell hadn’t mentioned them, they were gathered in the curve of the ‘U’ shape, facing the hills, so it was not possible to see where the water body started and ended, martins made a mother note to find out where the open ends of the ‘U’-shape led to.
“You will now perform tasks which will be used to sort the teams,” martins heard Clunky say. “You will then either join the water-boys in dormitory ‘A’ or the surface-boys in dormitory ‘B’.
“…. each of you will perform two tasks and how well you do at these tasks will determine where we put you,” Shorty added. “One half of you will start with task one and the other half with the second task.”
The group was split into two equal halves, Philip and martins were in the group taking task one, they were curious about what the task was, martins also wondered if the two men had noticed him signaling to philp, It didn’t look like it, they would have insisted on knowing what was going on.
A few minutes later, the boys knew what their task was, they were asked to change out of their clothes into swimming trunks and a pair of google that had been provided.
The twelve of them on the swimming task were taken away by Clunky to a pool of some sort in another corner of the yard, martins noticed the lobsters that Kay at the bottom, they looked quite big and frightening.
“I think they are going to ask us to catch those lobsters and see who comes up with the most,” martins signalled to philp.
“At the bottom of this pool are plastic lobsters similar to what we farm in this place. You will dive into the pool one at a time bringing up ten of those lobsters and place them in this basket. Any questions?”
There was absolute silence, the only sound one could hear was the whispering of the wind in the trees above them and the occasional calls of the wild bird in the woods beyond.
Otherwise, the place was calm as a convent, clunky signalled to the first boy in the queue, he was a lanky lad who looked older than he actually was.
“I will count down from three to one and shout go. You will then dive into the pool and quickly bring up ten of the plastic lobsters as quickly as you can,” Clunky ordered. “I will be timing you with the stopwatch”.
“Yes boss,” the lad cheerfully replied enjoying the fun aspect of the task they were about to perform.
“Three, two, one, go!”
The lad stepped forward and took a dive into the pool, eleven other lads cheered him on, the children in them overcoming any fears they had for the beautiful place and the strange happenings within it.
The results of the task were surprising to many but not to martins, they couldn’t understand how a guy who was deaf and dumb could win in both tasks.
Philip was smarter than he was, same way he was smarter then his brother Zell, and martins figured he was smarter than most of the other guys they had come on the trip with.
Philip had collected his ten lobsters almost twice as fast as the second person could, martins was not a terribly good swimmer so he didn’t do very well on the task. Lots of lads were way better at diving as harvesting those lobsters than him.
With the logics tasks, martins came in second after Philip, he finished the task a couple of minutes slower than he did, and they both managed to finish the task, almost fifteen minutes faster than the lad who came in third, now the instructors were faced with a dilemma.