The crowd was now in an advanced state of panic. Individual Wards raced around in mad circles, blindly pushing, kicking, screaming. Here and there a few Wards formed a wedge, tried to fight their way outward, but the Guards at the periphery of the crowd were firing, and so the wedges were hurled back by hordes of Wards just as frantically trying to escape the inward fire of the Guards. The crowd stampeded about mindlessly, like cattle before a prairie fire.
Johnson aimed a shot well wide of the human wall of Guard surrounding Khustov—it was, of course, essential that one of the League agents hit Solkowni by mistake.
The air was filled with screams and shouts, with the acrid smells of charred flesh, seared metal, melted synthetic. The Guards containing the crowd could do nothing effective—the League agents who were doing the shooting were effectively hidden in the panic-stricken mob milling all around them. But that did not stop the Guards from reacting as their conditioning and training demanded. They emptied their guns in the general direction of where they imagined League agents to be, savagely indifferent to the fact that they were only slaughtering hapless Wards. They were like dogs in a henhouse: they were after the foxes, and it n’t much matter how many of the chickens they were supposed to be protecting perished in the hunt.
Three lasebeams, in rapid succession, lanced into the same section of Guards at the periphery in a tight pattern. Two of them went down, and the others answered with a terrible fusilade of concentrated fire into a small area of the crowd. A great piteous moan went up from the Wards as they suddenly realized that the Guards were beginning to enjoy the excuse for carnage.
All according to plan. … Johnson thought triumphantly. Soon even Khustov’s personal bodyguards will stop thinking and start killing for kicks, and then one of ’em’ll notice when Solkowni. …
Now!
“Let’s get out! Let’s get out!” Johnson began to scream rhythmically. “To the street! To the street!”
And as they had planned, the other League agents took up the same chant, and in moments the Wards themselves were picking up the cry, down to the pounding, urgent rhythm of it.
“Over there!” cried Johnson, shoving the man in front of him. “Look, a break in their ranks! Let’s get out!”
Suddenly, a great wave cresting, the entire crowd of terror-maddened Wards broke and ran, a headlong, mindless charge, straight at the line of Guards cordoning them off from the street and safety. The apathetic, placid Wards of the Hegemony had been galvanized by fear into a savage mob.
Not fear, but feral bloodlust lit the gleaming eyes of the Guards as they braced against the charge. It was savage against savage, but the savages in the gaudy dress uniforms had the guns. They began firing into the mob at pointblank range. The massed lasegun fire of the Guards met the forward edge of the mob like a wall of flame. Scores of Wards screamed, blackened and fell.
Almost instantly, the charge broke and the panic returned and the Wards reversed themselves, began to rush blindly back toward the Ministry steps, where Khustov’s personal bodyguards awaited them with guns and animal fury.
This should be it! Johnson thought.
The bodyguards began firing into the mob, feral glazed eyes fixed hypnotically on their victims. Khustov himself crouched safely behind their great bodies, apparently secure in the knowledge that the unarmed Wards would never be able to breach the human wall surrounding him.
Seven of the Guards fired away mercilessly at the onrushing Wards, and now the charge began to falter in the face of their withering fire as Ward after Ward was charred into ruined ash. …
But the eighth Guard suddenly swiveled around and trained the barrel of his lasegun directly on Coordinator Khustov’s head. The other Guards were too engrossed in the slaughter before them to notice what was going on behind.
The plan was working! In another second—
But as Johnson watched in numb, mute amazement, Solkowni’s body was hit by at least five separate lasebeams, all but simultaneously, before he could fire. He had but a moment to stare stupidly upward as his whole body was crisped to ashes in less than a second. The husk of his body remained blackened and upright for a moment, then collapsed in a decomposing heap.
What in hell happened? Johnson thought wildly, too stunned to yet feel disappointment. That was no fluke. … Then he glanced upward, at the secondlevel street where six men were dashing past the dumbfounded television crew towards the secondlevel glideway. …
Khustov had screamed, and the Guards had whirled to stare woodenly at the heap of ashes on the steps.
“Up the steps, you cretins!” Khustov roared, his face livid with rage and fear. Encircled by his now wary bodyguards, the Hegemonic Coordinator retreated safely up the steps.
The six running men on the secondlevel street reached the glideway just as Khustov was about to enter the Ministry. Just before he stepped on the outer glideway strip to be whisked away to relative safety, the last man tossed something rounded and silvery into the air.
A bomb? Johnson thought dazedly.
But then he could see the tiny rotors holding the bomb in the air as it flew low over the crowd. It was a bomb, all right, an annunciator bomb. But annunciator bombs were only used by the Democratic League! The League, and—
“Coordinator Khustov’s life,” boomed the hollow, amplified voice of the annunciator bomb, “has been saved, courtesy of the Brotherhood of Assassins.”
“In a place with no past there is nowhere to conceal the future from the present.”
—Gregor Markowitz, Chaos
And Culture
2
BORIS JOHNSON tossed his lasegun away into the crowd, half out of disgust, half as an automatic precaution—Khustov was safe, and now the lasegun could only serve to identify him as one of the would-be assassins. It looked as if the other League agents were doing the same, for now the only firing was coming from the cordon of Guards, and in a few moments even they realized that whatever had happened was over, and they too ceased firing.
The Guards tightened up their cordon, forced the now-quieting crowd closer back against the Ministry steps, held the Wards within a firm semicircle of guns. They seemed to be waiting for someone or something. …
The Brotherhood of Assassins! Johnson thought with almos petulant bitterness as he felt for the false identity papers in his pocket. Why? What had made the Brotherhood save Khustov?
But then, who really knew anything of real significance about the Brotherhood? The Brotherhood of Assassins was supposed to have come into being three hundred years ago, at about the same time that the American-dominated Atlantic Union had merged with the Greater Soviet Union to form the Hegemony of Sol.
In the beginning, the Brotherhood had seemed to be some sort of resistance movement. They had assassinated three out of the first seven Hegemonic Coordinators. They had killed something like a score of Councilors. They had planted the fusion bomb which destroyed Port Gagarin.
But after a decade or so, the pattern of Brotherhood activity seemed to have become insane. They saved the Umbriel colony when a freak meteor storm holed the dome, but then they turned around and blew open the dome on Ceres, murdering the entire population of the only inhabited asteroid. They began killing Wards, seemingly at random as well as Hegemonic officials and Guards. There was no logical pattern—it was as if they were followers of some archaic cult from the Millenium of Religion, some superstitious dogma with no meaning for the uninitiated.
And now, for no visible reason, they had saved Khustov.
An aircar landed just outside the ring of Guards, and a man stepped out, dressed in the plain green fatigues that the Guards normally wore. But he was not the ordinary huge, tough-looking Guard. He was short, slight, almost whispy, and there was an abstracted, far-away look to his pale blue eyes.
Johnson grimaced, for this was exactly what he had feared the most—they had brought in an Edetic.
Johnson was carrying two sets of forged identity papers. One set was for “Samuel Skla
r,” a merchant who had a travel pass from Earth to Phobos and back. “Sklar” could never officially be on Mars. While on Mars, Johnson was “Vassily Thomas,” a Maintenance worker in the Ministry of Guardianship. Thus, even if Johnson’s presence on Mars should be discovered, the Guards would be searching for “Thomas,” while once back on Phobos, Johnson would be home free as “Sklar,” who would never have even been on Mars.
But now all bets were off.
For the frail-looking Guard who had just arrived was an Edetic, a man with a carefully selected and conditioned faculty for total recall. He would have memorized the complete description of every Hegemonic Enemy, and no such Enemy, no matter how good his papers, could fool the Edetic’s photographic memory.
And Boris Johnson, as head of the Democratic League, was Hegemonic Enemy Number One.
Now Johnson saw what the Guards were doing. They were slowly and methodically passing the Wards out of the cordon, one by one past the unblinking gaze of the Edetic. It would take hours to let all the wards out at this rate, but the Guards had all the time in the world, and since no one could leave without passing the Edetic, they could be sure that they would capture every one of the League agents.
Johnson knew that there was no safe way past the Edetic.
But maybe. … Johnson could not help smiling, despite his predicament. Where was the last place the Guards would look for a Hegemonic Enemy but in their own headquarters! which was what the Ministry of Guardianship really was. The new Mars Master Guardian, the central computer for the whole planet, was buried somewhere in the bowels of the Ministry, but the rest of the building served as headquarters for the Martian Guards. If he could somehow get up the steps and into the building. … Well, there would be problems enough once inside, but at least he would escape the Edetic.
Using knees and elbows, Johnson made his way through the crowd to the podium at the foot of the steps. With the sour air of Maintenance men since time immemorial surveying such messes, he bent down and prodded the fused metal and melted plastomarble at the base of the podium.
As he saw a scowling Guard approach, he began to curse and mumble loudly to himself. “Damned thing is fused solid! Damnfilthy mess! Take five hours to—”
“What do you think you’re doing?” barked the Guard, training his lasegun on Johnson.
“What am I doing? What kind of stupid question is that? Maybe you think I can clean up this mess with my bare hands? This is a real bitch here! It’s fused solid, man! Take a torch to cut it loose, and a thermogun to reform the plastomarble. A half-day’s work at least!”
“Maintenance jerks!” the Guard grunted. “Don’t just squat there looking stupid! Get to work on this mess!”
“Told you,” Johnson whined. “Can’t very well do anything without a torch and a thermogun.”
“Well then why in blazes don’t you go and get ’em?” bellowed the Guard.
“You fellas seem to be keeping everyone out of the building,” Johnson muttered, sullenly triumphant.
The Guard shook his head knowingly. “You slobs’ll use any excuse to get out of doing a little work!” he said. “Now you drag your tail up into the Ministry and get your torch and thermogun and get to work on this, and you do it now!”
“No need to get excited,” Johnson whined with the wounded expression of the apprehended goldbricker. “I’m going, I’m going.”
He climbed up the Ministry steps under the filthy stare of the Guard and entered the building through the service entrance, a small doorway to the left of the great arched entranceway.
As he stepped inside, he permitted himself one small laugh; there would be no opportunity for gloating inside the Ministry. The lls here, as in every other public building, and an ever-increasing number of private ones, were filled with Beams and Eyes. It was said that even the wrong expression on your face could mean instant and certain death.
The door opened directly into the Main lobby. Since the building had just been officially opened, the lobby was virtually empty except for a few scattered Guards, who were accustomed to looking through Maintenance personnel as if they weren’t there.
The escape route was simple—about fifty yards across the lobby to the bank of elevators, take an elevator to the third floor, and then leave the building through the second-level street exit. Once on the secondlevel street glideway, Johnson knew he would be far away from the Ministry in minutes. Surely the few Guards in the building would not notice the comings and goings of a mere Maintenance man. …
Nevertheless, Johnson’s palms were clammy with fear as he started across the lobby, for he had not gone ten feet when he had to pass the first Eye. The Eye was deceptively inconspicuous—nothing but the small glass lens of a television pickup set flush with the wall and the even smaller grid of a microphone directly behind it. The camera and mike fed directly into the Mars Master Guardian, the great computer which administered the Code of Justice locally. The Prime Directive programmed into the Guardian was, so it was said, “Anything not Permitted is Prohibited.” What this was supposed to mean in practice was that the rest of the Hegemonic Code was a long list of what a Ward could do in a given area, so-called Permitted Actions. Anything which did not fit the list of Permitted Actions programmed into the Guardian was an Unpermitted Action—a crime. All crimes were punishable by death.
And trial sentence and execution were instantaneous.
Directly below the Eye was a tiny lead plug, also set flush with the wall. This plug sealed a lead cylinder, a Beam, which was recessed within the wall and which contained a deadly radioactive isotope. The Beams too were circuited directly into the nearest Guardian.
Thus, “Justice” had been reduced by the Hegemony to air automatic reflex arc. An Eye continuously fed observations into the nearest Guardian and the Guardian continuously checked the data against its list of Permitted Actions. It was said that if any action, no matter how trivial, proved to be Unpermitted, a signal automatically went to the Beam below the Eye that had reported it. The lead plug was blown out, and the area filled with deadly radiation. The reaction time of the system was under one second. Whether it was really true, that the Guardian would kill a man for any Unpermitted Action, that such a program could actually be put into a computer, Johnson did not know. But he did know that many, many Wards had died in seemingly innocent circumstances. …
Johnson passed the first Eye and noted somewhat distantly that he was still alive. If what the Hegemony said about the Beam and Eyes was true, then it would be so easy to make a fatal mistake—a rebellious look, an item of nonstandard equipment, a blunder into some zone where Maintenance personnel were not supposed to go. The hell of it was that the number of actions which would not cause the Guardian to pop a plug was quite finite, while the actions that would result in de were literally infinite in number. And if the Hegemony was lying about the Guardian, it was even worse, for then death might come for no reason at all!
The Beams and Eyes were spotted at ten foot intervals, which meant that he would have to pass five of them before he reached the elevators. One was already past; now he passed another, with a studied air of casual indifference that he hoped was not too exaggerated—for attempting to fool an Eye would be in itself an Unpermitted Action!
The Beams and Eyes were in virtually every public building in the Hegemony: stores, theaters, flics as well as government buildings. Just about everywhere indoors—the radiation from the Beams would tend to scatter too much outdoors and the “criminals” would have a decent chance to flee as the plug was popped—except in private residences. And there was a rumor going around that the Council was about to decide to install Beams and Eyes in all new dwellings. If it were true, it would mean the end of just about the last bit of privacy a Ward could know. …
Johnson passed the third Eye … the fourth. … Now there was only one Eye between him and the elevators. It was located right above the bank of three elevators, apparently so that it could prevent unauthorized personnel from using them. T
his would be the trickiest part of all. …
As he approached the middle elevator, Johnson took a rag out of a coverall pocket. Humming to himself, he began to polish the brass fittings outside the open elevator. Then, with the polishing rag still in his hand, he casually stepped inside and immediately began polishing the inside doorhandle.
I’m still alive! he thought triumphantly. It’s working!
Then, as he was about to reach out and push the button for the third floor, he happened to glance upward, and his heart sank.
There was a Beam and an Eye in the ceiling of the elevator!
There’s got to be a way to. … It’s risky, he thought, but I’ve got no choice.
He finished shining up the doorhandle and began to polish the small console of floor buttons. As he passed the rag over the buttons, he pushed “three” with his thumb, through the rag.
As the door closed and the elevator began to rise, he jumped backward in what he hoped was well-feigned surprise. Then he shrugged, and went on with his polishing. He held his breath for long moments as the elevator rose. …
The Eye was fooled. The Beam’s plug didn’t pop!
The elevator stopped at the third floor and the door opened. Johnson gave the button console a final touch with his polishing rag and then stepped casually out of the elevator.
As he made his way down the corridor to the secondlevel street exit, he suppressed a sigh of relief. It was working. The worst was over. Apparently not even the Guardian itself took much nice of the puttering of a Maintenance man!
After traversing what seemed like a mile long corridor under the scrutiny of what seemed like a million Eyes, Johnson finally found himself outside the Ministry on the short ramp that led from the building to the secondlevel street. If he could get to the street itself without being noticed, he could simply skip across the accelerating strips of the glideway to the central express strip and be whisked miles away in minutes, hidden amidst crowds of Wards. …
Agent of Chaos M Page 2
