“It is a simplistic error to equate Chaos with what is vaguely called the Natural State. Chaos underlies the increasing entropy of the raw universe, to be sure, but it also fills every interstice in that most defiant of anti-entropic constructs—Ordered human society.”
—Gregor Markowitz, The Theory of
Social Entropy
4
THE SPIRES of the tallest buildings in Greater New York soared a mile into the sky, and there were scores of such man-made mountains. There were thousands of buildings—older skyscrapers, newer residences—over seventy stories high, and all these buildings were linked together at numerous levels by glideways and elevated streets and liftubes and droptubes, forming one vast multi-leveled aerial warren that stretched from Albany in the north to Trenton in the south, from Montauk in the east to Paterson in the west, from the clouds above to the original groundlevel below, a level ail-but indistinguishable from the scores of levels tiered above it.
But having pierced the clouds, having piled level upon level above the ground until the entire city was all but one unthinkable huge building, greater New York, unlike its ancient ancestor, stopped at groundlevel.
And below groundlevel was a vast underground labyrinth, a forgotten, hidden city of abaned subway tunnels, sewer mains, trans-Hudson tunnels and tubes, ancient grottos that had existed as far back as the forgotten American Civil War. This abandoned honeycomb beneath the city crossed the Hudson by the moldering Tube Tunnels, by The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the Metroway subway tunnel. All but forgotten by the Hegemony, totally forgotten by the Wards, erased from the history and guide books, unpatrolled by the Guards, bereft of Eyes and Beams, unmapped and perhaps unmappable, this subterranean labyrinth was the furtive citadel of the Democratic League.
Making his way along the abandoned subway tracks between the old 135th Street and 125th Street stations, the thin brilliant beam of his flash the only light in the all-enveloping velvet darkness, Boris Johnson savored a rare moment of utter security.
The subways were League territory. In fact, this underground city, and similar abandoned man-made grottos beneath Chicago and Bay City and Great London and Paris and Moscow and Leningrad and scores of other multi-leveled cities all over Earth, were all that stood between the Democratic League and extinction. Above was control, Guards, Beams and Eyes, paper checks. But a man could disappear into the underground ruins until the necessary papers were forged when things got too hot up above. Here arms could be cached, meetings held, papers forged, in security. No doubt the Hegemonic Council was aware of the uses to which the abandoned warrens were put, but to seal the myriad forgotten entrances, to install Beams and Eyes in every tunnel under every city, to patrol the tunnels, was clearly impossible. And to blast the tunnels shut would crumble the cities above at their roots, so honeycombed with the abandoned tunnels of centuries was Greater New York and the other huge cities.
The tunnels, like the League, were nuisances too picayune to justify the enormous expense of total elimination, and in that economic calculation lay the Leagued precarious safety.
Now Johnson reached the 125th Street station. Ahead, he saw a circle of flash beams lighting up the blackness of the station platform—the others had already reached the meeting place. Johnson scrambled up out of the right-of-way cut by a corroded metal ladder and stood on the station platform, amidst rotten remains of wooden benches, decayed vending machines, the cracked and pitted asphalt of the platform itself.
Stumbling over amorphous lumps of rusted metal, great chunks of buckled asphalt, he reached the circle of men that hunkered near the stairs that led upward to groundlevel and the sealed station entrance, covered with parkland, which the League had broken into, then covered again with a great divot of earth and grass, thus becoming one of the scores of hidden accesses to the subterranean maze beneath the gleaming city.
Twelve men hunkered in a circle, their faces illumined only by the light of individual flashes—ten New York Section Leaders, and two others.
Lyman Rhee, a pale, gaunt, ghostly creature who had spent the last five years beneath the city, who had committed the unthinkable crime of killing a Guard in full sight of a crowd of Wards, and who, marked by the bone-white skin and pink eyes of albinoism, could only remain alive here, hidden from view, like a pallid worm, a mole-man condemned to perpetual darkness. There were others like Rhee who lived in the subways, but none had lived underground longer, and none, so it was said, knew the maze so thoroughly. Rhee was the Section Leader of the small army of ghosts that haunted the hidden, forgotten bowels of Greater New York.
Johnson smiled as he saw that the twelfth man was indeed Arkady Duntov, his right-hand man, the closest thing he had to a friend. A man so plain and ordinary that he was not even on the Hegemonic Enemy list—and yet a man who always seemed to come up with surprising information and plans, as if he had access to some hidden store of wisdom beyond his own seemingly-modest mental resources. Johnson did not understand the blond, broad-faced Russian, but he valued him as one of the most useful agents the League had.
Heads nodded and greetings were muttered as Johnson stepped within the circle, hunkered down above the cracked, grimed asphalt of the station platform.
“Well I suppose you all know what happened on Mars by now,” Johnson said glumly.
“The tv and the fax sheets all say that the Brotherhood tried to kill Khustov, not us,” Luke Forman said, his black face etched to a mask of ebony confusion by the light of his flash. “What happened, Boris?”
Johnson grunted. “What do you think, Luke?” he said. “The Brotherhood actually saved Khustov, and then the Council must’ve decided that it would be better to blame the Brotherhood for the attempt. The Wards think of the Brotherhood as a natural calamity, so it’s better for the Hegemony to blame them than to admit that we can be dangerous. You know the official line on us—we’re a joke, an amusement to be reported with the sports results, if at all. If we had killed Khustov, they would’ve had to change their tune, but as it is. …”
“We’re right back where we started from,” Mike Feinberg said, grimacing.
“Which is exactly nowhere,” Manuel Gomez added. “Membership is decreasing. The Wards are getting fatter and happier every day. More Eyes and Beams everywhere. And we can hardly make anyone aware that we exist. I hate to say this, Boris, but at times like this, I wonder if we’re even right. No more war, the standard of living going up, everybody happy. … Maybe we should break up the League and just try to live with it—get ours while we can. Do we even know what this Democracy we’re busting ourselves for really is? Maybe it’s just a word. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
“Come on Manny,” Johnson said, forcing a tone of certainty into his voice. “We all know what Democracy is. It’s … its being able to do what you want, how you want, and when you want to do it. Democracy is everyone doing what’s best for himself, not having other people, or the Guardian running every minute of his life.”
“If everyone does what he wants,” Gomez said, “then what happens when desires conflict?”
“Er … the majority rules, of course,” Johnson said vaguely. “The majority has to go along for the good of all.”
“That doesn’t sound a hell of a lot different from the Hegemony.”
Johnson frowned. This kind of talk was getting them nowhere. The time to worry about just what Democracy was was after the Hegemony was destroyed and there was leisure to argue about the fruits of victory. And that was a long, long way off. Action was what counted now. Too much thinking about ends led only to confusion. …
Lyman Rhee expressed Johnson’s unvoiced thoughts. “This is not the time to discuss trivia,” the albino said shrilly. “For five years, I’ve rotted in these tunnels, and there are scores like me. Democracy is when we can come out into the sunlight again; That’s good enough for me, and it should be good enough for you.”
“That’s exactly the point,” Johnson said. “We’re all rotting in one
kind of darkness or another. Democracy is light, and we can’t expect to see what that light can show us until we have it—and we won’t have it until we bring down the Hegemony. Now we’ve got to plan our next step.”
“I don’t see where we have much choice,” Gomez said. “We don’t have the men to start a real revolution, and even if we did, we couldn’t get the Wards interested because the Hegemony controls all the media and keeps the Wards fat and happy. Way I see it, all we can do is keep trying to kill Councilors. If we succeed, at least then they’ll have to take us seriously, and then maybe some of the Wards will start to think. …”
Most of the men nodded in agreement.
“You’re right, of course,” Johnson said. “The question is, which Councilor, and where and when and how. Gorov? Steiner? Cordona?”
“What does it matter?” Rhee said. “A Councilor is a Councilor.”
“Perhaps not,” Arkady Duntov said. Johnson studied his broad features, wondering if Duntov was about to come up with something again.
“The man we should kill is Vice-Coordinator Torrence,” Duntov said. “Everyone knows he wants to be Coordinator, which makes him Khustov’s enemy. If we kill Torrence, everyone will start to think. Is the Brotherhood the enemy of the League? Was Torrence aligned with the Brotherhood? If the Brotherhood is supposed to have tried to kill Khustov, and then Khustov’s enemy Torrence is killed, the Council can’t blame that on the Brotherhood! They’ll be forced to give us the credit!”
Where does he get it from? Johnson wondered. For Duntov clearly was right. If they could kill Torrence now, Khustov’s cleverness in blaming the attempt on his life on the Brotherood would backfire. He would be forced to blame Torrence’s death on the League—or it would be blamed on him!
“Isn’t Torrence supposed to speak at the museum of Culture here next week?” Johnsonsaid. “He’s the easiest Councilor to get to because he’s always making public speeches, trying to undermine Khustov. Now how do we go about … ?”
“The Museum is at groundlevel!” Rhee suddenly exclaimed. “Yes! Yes! And there’s a subway station right under the auditorium. They’ll be guarding Torrence heavily, but they won’t think to. …”
“Just how close to the auditorium is this station?” Johnson asked.
“There’s an old entrance right under it!” Rhee said. “The Museum was built when there used to be a big plaza, above the 59th Street station. There were many exits. They just sealed the exits with plasteel when they razed the plaza and built the Museum right over the old station. The auditorium’s right on top of one of the sealed exits. A foot or two of plasteel—that’s all we’d have to go through to get into the auditorium.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Johnson said. “We don’t even have to get into the auditorium—just put a nice bomb under the floor. Torrence will never know what hit him. We’ll meet in the 59th Street station—you, Rhee, of course, and me, and … Feinberg, you’re our best explosives man, you bring the stuff. We’ll—”
“What was that?” Forman suddenly shouted. The shout echoed down the subway tunnel, echoed and echoed … and the echoing did not die away. …
And Johnson heard the echo of Forman’s shout become the hollow, staccato sound of feet coming toward them from downtown, in the roadbed cut to the left of the platform—many feet, close, and coming closer.
“Kill the lights!” Johnson hissed, extinguishing his own flash and drawing his lasegun. The footfalls came closer in the now-total darkness, seemed to increase their pace.
“At least twenty men,” Rhee hissed in Johnson’s ear. “In the station now! Listen! Hear how the sound changes as they emerge into the greater volume of the station! Ten … thirteen … seventeen … twenty-two. … That’s it, twenty-two of them.”
“Do you think they’ve heard us?” Johnson asked.
Rhee laughed softly. “Sound carries for miles here,” he whispered. “If we heard them, they heard us.”
“Keep your lights out,” Johnson ordered. “If they turn theirs on first, they’ll be sitting ducks—and vice versa.” He searched his mind, tried to remember the layout of the station in the pitch darkness.
“The roadbeds are about six feet below this platform,” Rhee said. “If we drop down into the opposite cut so that the platform is between us and those Guards, we’ll be hidden from them.”
̶Okay,” Johnson said, easing himself over the lip of the platform and carefully lowering himself down onto the rotten wooden ties and corroded rails that floored the roadbed cut. “Make it quiet. If we sit tight enough, maybe they’ll pass us.”
Quickly, the League agents slipped over the edge of the station platform and down into the roadbed cut as the footfall sounds came ever closer. … Now they seemed to be nearly opposite them, in the roadbed cut at the other side of the platform.
Johnson held his breath, not daring to make the slightest sound. The Guards in the opposite cut made no sounds, other than the sounds of their feet, and kept their flashes dark.
Then Johnson heard soft grunts and the sounds of men pulling themselves up onto the platform. From the platform, he realized, the Guards could use their flashes and see the entire station. But they would have to expose themselves to do it. …
Johnson tightened his grip on his lasegun.
Suddenly the platform before him was bathed in light. His eyes struggled to adjust for a moment; then he saw five Guards carrying flashes in one hand and laseguns in the other standing above him on the platform, not ten feet away.
Before Johnson could give an order, Forman and Gomez and several others he could not make out opened up with their laseguns. Cruel lances of intense red light speared the Guards on the platform. They screamed, blackened, collapsed in smoking heaps. Their flashes, still on, fell every which way, striping the darkness with crazily intersecting beams of light, dotting the gray tunnel walls with bright yellow circles.
But the Guards still down in the cut had spotted them. Using the platform between themselves and the League agents as cover, they began firing their laseguns over the heads of the League agents.
Johnson ducked down below the lip of the platform as a lasebeam seared the air inches from his head. By the deadly red flashes of the lasebeams tracing patterns of fiery death above their heads, Johnson could see all his men crouching low on the roadbed. They were pinned down. The Guards were pinned down too—Johnson lifted the barrel of his lasegun over the lip of the platform and got off a quick blind shot—but the Guards could expect reinforcements.
“We’ve got to get out of here. …” Johnson muttered.
“Listen!” Rhee said beside him. “More Guards coming up from the south, lots of ’em!” Over the hiss of the laseguns, Johnson could sense a faint, far-off rumble, a rumble that was felt more than heard, approaching like a pressure-wave up the tunnel.
“We’ve got to split up!” he said. “Half of you head south, rest of you come north with me. As soon as you come to a branch tunnel, split up again. They can’t follow all of us. Don’t try for an exit until you’re sure you’ve lost ’em.”
Johnson led Duntov, Rhee, Forman nd two others he could barely make out in the laser-lit semidarkness north up the roadbed cut, crouching low to escape the lasegun fire. As they ran along the old roadbed, stumbling over ties, he heard the Guards shouting behind them, men climbing over the platform, then the sound of running feet directly behind them.
“Faster! Faster!” he shouted breathlessly as he ran. “We’ve got to get to the next station before they catch up!”
They ran through the cut, out of the station, and into the narrower, now-all-but-pitch-black tunnel, tripping over tracks, ties, switches. Behind, they heard the inexorable footfalls of the pursuing Guards, saw the way before them by the dim light of their far-away torches.
About two hundred yards up the tunnel, Rhee whispered, “Junction! Left tunnel is the old express tunnel, goes right to the 145th Street station. Right tunnel passes the 135th Street station. Let’s split up he
re. If we’re lucky, they’ll only follow one group.”
Rhee took Johnson’s hand, led him into the deeper darkness of the righthand tunnel. The moleman’s hand felt moist and unpleasant in his, and Johnson grabbed someone else’s hand, dragged him along behind himself and Rhee. The others took the lefthand tunnel.
He heard the hiss of laseguns behind him as they dashed further up the tunnel, then screams, more hisses. The Guards were fighting with the other group. Did that mean … ?
No! He heard footfalls behind him, coming closer. And circles of light from the Guards’ flashes danced over the walls of the tunnel not too far behind them. The Guards had split up too!
Lungs aching, Johnson forced himself to run harder as Rhee half-dragged him and the man behind puffed and panted.
Suddenly, Rhee came to an abrupt halt.
“What the—?”
“Listen,” the albino said. “Ahead of us! More of them, heading south right for us. We’re trapped!”
“Maybe we can fight our way past the ones in front,” the third man suggested, and from the sound of his voice, Johnson knew that it was Arkady Duntov.
“There’s at least a dozen of ’em,” Rhee said. “Can’t you hear?” He tittered nervously. “But of course you can’t! We’re finished—no, wait! There should be one nearby. …”
He pulled Johnson along in the darkness, and Johnson dragged Duntov behind him. Rhee seemed to be feeling along the wall with his free hand as he ran. …
And then, there before them was a square of gray, a tiny patch of wan light in the pitch darkness.
“Ventilating duct,” Rhee said.220;Comes up in the groundlevel street. If we’re lucky and there’s no one around up there, we should be able to get out. Take a look.”
Johnson stepped into the square of light. A shaft about two feet square angled up at about 45 degrees toward the street. Johnson pulled himself up into the shaft, scrambled up the slime-coated concrete, using his elbows and knees to wedge him firmly against the slippery walls. About eight feet up the shaft ended in an ancient, corroded iron grill. Holding his place in the shaft by spread-eagling his legs behind him, Johnson poked away the amorphous filth around the grill and looked through.
Agent of Chaos M Page 5
