Jonas and one of the remaining guards caught each other with almost identical shots—in the neck. Neither had time to scream as their charred heads fell from blasted necks.
Johnson rolled from cover and caught the last prone Guard between the shoulder blades with a lasebeam. The Guard gave one short, shrill scream and then the pumproom was quiet.
Johnson stood up, ran to the pumps. Smith, Wright and Poulson, the three surviving agents, followed him.
The five technicians stared at the armed men in a disbelieving daze. Jeremy Daid rushed forward. “Good work!” he shouted. “We’ve done it! We’ve done it!”
Johnson ignored Daid for the moment, turned to the cowering Maintenance men. “Behave yourselves, and no one gets hurt,” he barked. “One of you makes a move, we kill you all.”
He turned to Daid. “The air lines!” he said.
Daid nodded wordlessly, led him to the bank of pumps. Thin lead pipes led from the top of the center pump up to the ceiling and through it. “This one feeds air to the Council Chamber,” Daid said, pointing to the center pump.
Johnson took the vial of nerve gas concentrate from his pocket. “How do I …?”
Daid pointed to a fine-meshed wire grill on the face of the pump. “This is the intake duct,” he said. “Dump it in here, and I’ll close it off with this plastiseal. The pump’ll suck pure nerve gas into the air lines.”
Johnson uncorked the vial, spilled the liquid inside into the duct. Immediately, it began to vaporize, and the vapor was sucked into the pump. Daid slapped the sheet of plastiseal over the opening. The suction of the pump pulled the plastic sheet against the duct mouth, sealing it shut.
“We’ve done it!” Johnson shouted. “The gas should be hitting them right now!”
He grinned at his men. “We’ve killed the entire Hegemonic Council! That stuff works instantly. They should be all dead by now!”
“At last,” Wright began, “we’ve—”
“Look!” Smith shouted, pointing to the door. The heavy lead door was beginning to glow red-hot.
“The Guards!” Poulson shouted. “They’re burning through the door.”
Johnson felt a sickening, sinking sensation in his stomach. He had anticipated this moment from the beginning, but now it was really upon him. Now he was facing certain death only moments after total victory, trapped in a room from which there was no escape, the Guards burning down the door with laseguns, the corridor beyond filled with deadly radiation. … He found that he really wanted very much to live, now that there was so much more to live for.
Johnson stared woodenly at the door. The whole door was now glowing cherry red, and he could feel the heat clear across the room. But there was something in the back of his mind, something that. …
“Of course!” he suddenly shouted. “If they’re burning through the door, it means they must’ve sealed the Beams outside! If we can get past those Guards, maybe we can escape after all!”
He watched the door. The metal around the hinges was beginning to sag, to run like warm putty. …
“Let’s get some cover!” he ordere#8220;Hit’em as they come in.”
He motioned the five terrified technicians behind a pile of crates with his lasegun. The Maintenance men went prone behind the crates, too scared to move. Johnson himself crouched down behind some kind of spare ductwork lying in front of the bank of pumps. Daid scooped up one of the laseguns of the slain Guards, then joined the others.
Johnson and his men trained their laseguns on the door. The metal around the hinges was really flowing now, and the whole door was sagging inward.
“They’ll be sitting ducks as they come in,” Johnson said. “Open up as soon as the door falls and stand your ground. We’ve got cover here, and we can keep ’em out of this pumproom for quite a while. If we can cut down all the Guards in the corridor as they come in, we’ve got a small chance. They’ll have to reset the Beams in the corridor at the very least. Maybe the Beams in the rest of the building have been blown and resealed too. If they have, we may be able to fight our way to the street. …”
Johnson could not quite make himself believe what he was saying. Escape from the Ministry was almost certainly impossible. But at least they could go down fighting. They could take dozens, maybe scores of Guards with them. This would be a day that the Hegemony would remember and shudder at for as long as the tyranny endured, and perhaps it would ignite the Wards to—
The door bulged crazily inward. There was a sigh of metal, and the hinges gave way in a shower of molten lead, and the pumproom door crashed to the floor, spattering lead droplets into the air from its semiliquid far side.
Instinctively, Johnson and his men were firing blindly and furiously as the door fell. But their lasebeams seared empty air—no targets, no Guards appeared in the doorway.
Then the air beyond the doorway was no longer empty. A heavy red mist billowed through the doorway, surged toward them, a great cloud of the stuff being pumped in under heavy pressure.
If advanced toward them in a solid front. Johnson lept up, with the others following him, backed up against the bank of pumps at the rear of the room, as the breathable air was inexorably forced back, back, constricted into an ever more limited area by the heavy red gas.
Johnson felt protuberances on the pump dig into his back, as he flattened himself against it, as the entire room filled with the gas.
Then he was enveloped, blinded by the heavy red mist. Futilely, instinctively, he held his breath until his lungs began to ache. He fought against the ever-growing pain in his chest, fought not to breath, fought and fought and fought until he could fight the reflexes of his own body no longer.
With a great shuddering sigh, he released the carbon dioxide in his lungs, exhaled deeply. …
And the red gas immediately forced itself into his lungs, a heavy, choking syrupy stuff that seemed to flow like molasses down hroat, through his nostrils, into his lungs, his stomach, his very bloodstream. …
He felt himself inundated in a vast velvet sea of treacle. … His vision began to go dim, his knees turned to jelly. Then the blackness enclosed him. He felt himself falling, falling, falling, a fall with no bottom that seemed to last forever. … He felt his consciousness fading as his body fell, whirling away into a cold black pit. …
He fought against it for a few wan moments, and then the last of his will evaporated, and he was a tiny mote, fading, fading, drifting into blackness, void. …
Nothingness.
“The servant of Order strives to force his enemy to accept the unacceptable. To serve Chaos, confront your enemy with the unacceptable—and he will eagerly choose any lesser evil you desire to make unavoidable.”
—Gregor Markowitz, Chaos and Culture
9
A SWIRL of blackness eddying the dark void. … A vortex of nothingness a shade less profound than the ocean of nonbeing in which he swam. …
Then the tactile sensation of firmness, of some substance beneath his buttocks and against his back. His body was seated in something … a chair. …
A moment of utter ecstasy seared through the clouded mind of Boris Johnson. I’m alive! he thought. Somehow, somewhere, I’m alive! Alive! Alive! Alive!
Then his vision began to clear, and a big white balloon floated in front of him, a balloon with long black hair … a balloon that smiled down at him. …
His vision went sharp, and his heart sank as his eyes focused on the face smiling down at him.
“So we meet at last,” said Vladimir Khustov.
“You … you’re alive!” Johnson stammered foolishly. He stared wildly around the room he found himself in. He saw the big walnut table before him, and the men seated around it … Gorov, Torrence, the whole Hegemonic Council staring at him, studying him as if he were some strange bug. … They’re all alive! he thought. I’ve failed, failed miserably! But how … ? How?
Khustov laughed. “I see you’re somewhat confused,” he said. “You expected us to be dead, eh? And n
o doubt when the gas overcame you, you thought you were dying yourself. But as you can see, the gas was an innocuous anesthetic, as innocuous as your own foolish plot, and we are all of us alive. Is not the surprise, in the balance, a pleasant one?”
“But how …? nerve gas …” Johnson mumbled forlornly. “You can’t be alive. … You. …”
“Come, come, even you must believe your own senses,” Khustov said. “We’re all very much alive. Your own foolish pride in your supposed cleverness is what defeated you, Johnson. You actually thought that one of your agents in such a critical position as the pumproom would go undetected! A most peculiar psychology—a man who believes what he wants to believe. It was all a trap, Mr. Boris Johnson, and you walked right into it. Once we knew that Daid was a League agent, we knew that you could never resist trying to kill us all, once we made ourselves available. We let you think you had an edge, a secret weapon within the Ministry, but that very knowledge on your part was our weapon against you. We simply let you go through with your plan, and sealed off the Council Chamber, using an internal air supply instead of the pumproom lines, and then … but you know the rest.”
Johnson was stunned beyond feeling even despair. The Hegemony had been ahead of him every step of the way! He had been such a fool, such a blind, utter fool!
“But why didn’t you kill me, Khustov?” he said tiredly. “Surely you don’t intend to let me go?”
Khustov seemed to be studying him earnestly. “Ah, but you’re too interesting to merely kill,” he said. “I don’t understand you, Johnson, and I want to. The Democratic League is through, utterly finished. Surely you realize that?”
Despite himself, despite his hate and loathing for Khustov and everything he stood for, Boris Johnson found himself nodding involuntarily in agreement. He was through, and the League was finished. But did it really matter? Had the League ever really had a chance? A handful of men against a government that ruled every square inch of the Solar System, every man, woman and child alive? He felt utterly futile, used up, even deluded. What made me do it in the first place? he wondered. How could I have believed it possible to destroy the Hegemony, with its Guardians and Guards, its bottomless resources, its total control …?
“I see we at least agree on one thing,” Khustov said. “The Democratic League is finished. It never was a serious threat, but I admit that you had a certain nuisance value. And there is no place for nuisances in the Hegemony of Sol. We must make certain that no such nuisance ever occurs again. That’s why you’re alive. I cannot understand why anyone would want to join a thing like the League in the first place, why anyone would want to disturb the Order of the Hegemony. And I want to understand this psychosis. We must understand it in order to breed it out of the race. Why, Johnson, why? I’m willing to listen. Tell me, just what in the world did you ever hope to gain?”
Johnson stared woodenly up at Khustov. What kind of question is that? he thought. It’s self-evident—isn’t it? Men will always fight for their freedom against tyranny, won’t they? Even a tyrant like Khustov should be able to see that! Shouldn’t he?
“The destruction of the Hegemony, of course!” Johnson snar “The end of this tyranny! Freedom for the human race!”
“The destruction of the Hegemony …” Khustov sighed, shaking his head. “But why? What would you replace it with?”
“With Democracy! With Freedom!”
Once again, Khustov shook his head incredulously. “But why?” he said. “What’s wrong with the Hegemony? Are there wars that kill millions of people as in the Millenium of Religion and Nationality? No! The order of the Hegemony has brought true peace for the first time in human history! Are people starving? Do the Wards suffer plagues? No! Men have never been so prosperous and healthy. No one starves, no one is even poor. The word hardly has anything but an historical meaning anymore. Peace, plenty, prosperity—even contentment! You above all others should know that the Wards are content with the Hegemony. The League existed for ten years, and how many Wards were you able to recruit? A handful of fools and neurotics! And soon, even neurosis and stupidity will disappear. We’ll breed them out of the race. We’ve brought about a Utopia! Order is all but total, and soon it will be total. Then the Hegemony will rule absolute over every rock, every planet, that the human race will ever know. The entire Solar System will be a paradise, not for a year, or a century, or a millenium, but for as long as Man endures. Why should even a fool want to destroy this? We’ve given Man everything he needs! What else is there?”
Despite his feeling of being totally drained, despite the knowledge that the very worst had already happened, Boris Johnson was surprised to learn that he could still feel shock. Khustov meant it! He meant every word of it! He didn’t think of himself as a tyrant—he was utterly sincere! It was the ultimate tyranny, the final triumph of total despotism—the despot himself was a prisoner of the system. He couldn’t even see that … that. …
“Is that all there really is, Khustov?” he said. “You really believe that? What about Freedom?”
“Well, what about it?” Khustov said blandly. “What is it but a word? Freedom from what? From disease, from poverty, from war? We’ve already achieved that. Or do you mean freedom to? To starve? To kill? To suffer? To wage war? To be unhappy? What is this freedom? What but a meaningless obsolete word! What a fool you are, to throw your life away for a word!”
“It’s not just a word!” Johnson insisted shrilly. “It’s … it’s. …”
“Well?” said Khustov. “What is it then? Do you know? Can you tell me? Can you even tell yourself?”
“It’s … it’s Democracy … when the people have the government they want. When the majority rules. …”
“But the people already have the government they want!” Khustov exclaimed. “They want the Hegemony. The Wards are happy.” He glanced at Jack Torrence, who was watching the proceedings with a srimace on his face. “Could it simply be,” he said, “that you want to rule for your own pleasure, like … like certain others I could name? Isn’t that it, Johnson? Isn’t that really it? Aren’t you the one who wants to be a tyrant? Aren’t you the one who wants to thwart the desires of the Wards? Don’t you want to force on them something they don’t want?”
Johnson was silent. Khustov had to be wrong! Freedom was … right. The Hegemony was … wrong. Anyone could see that? Couldn’t they? It just was! But … but …
But Vladimir Khustov had opened a yawning pit before him. He had never thought that his will to overthrow the Hegemony could have personal motivations before. He knew that Freedom and Democracy were right, and the absolute rule of the Hegemony wrong, he had always known, and he still felt it, deep in his guts.
But for the life of him, he could not verbalize his reasons, even to himself. Had his whole life been a lie? Was Khustov right? Had he thrown it away over nothing?
Why? Why? Why?
Arkady Duntov winced in the cruel glare, polarized the faceplate of his spacesuit even darker. It was hot in the suit—even this specially modified spacesuit couldn’t keep a man alive on the Mercurian dayside for more than four hours.
But four hours would be more than long enough.
Duntov half-turned, looked behind him. Ten men stood in the harsh black shadow of the ship, dark clumsy figures in heavy spacesuits, the helmet visors all but opaqued. Laseguns hanging in holsters from their belts, two of the men carrying large backpacks. He motioned to his men and they started forward to join him—radio silence must be maintained until the time for the ultimatum came. The whole mission had been gone over a thousand times, and by now even hand signals were hardly necessary.
Duntov checked the straps holding the powerful auxiliary transceiver to the back of his spacesuit, and then plodded heavily forward into a nightmare landscape.
Everywhere were great cliffs of jagged rock, huge solitary boulders eroded into twisted crazy shapes by the thin atmosphere of partially ionized gasses. The ground, if one could call it that, was littered with millions
of rock splinters cracked from the cliffs and boulders by the alternating blistering heat of the Mercurian day and the bitter cold of the Mercurian night. Treacherous ponds of powdered rock alternated with pits of molten lead under the cruel glare of the neaby solar furnace, which, if looked directly upon, even through a heavily polarized visor, would burn out a man’s retinas in a moment.
Duntov led his men through a narrow defile between two sheer cliffs, sidestepping a pool of lead that bubbled torpidly just beyond the mouth of the canyon. The suit temperature was rising, inching towards the unbearable.
The Mercurian surface, Duntov thought, the most inhospitable place in the Solar System that men could wk on. Only the surface of a gas giant could be more deadly. …
And, he thought, all the better for us.
He reached the far end of the canyon, and looked down and across a broad, saucerlike plain—perhaps what was left of some huge impact crater. In the center of the huge depression, amidst giant eroded boulders, pits of molten lead, millions of rock splinters, like a great pearl in a garbage heap, sat the hemispherical permaglaze environment dome that was the sole habitation of men on Mercury. The monstrous sun, upon which Duntov dared not gaze, turned the permaglaze dome into a shining bubble of bleak fire, a defiant, synthetic, human thing in a lifeless inferno.
And hence, terribly, utterly vulnerable. The dome had only two airlocks—the main one, at the far side of the dome and out of sight, servicing the small spaceport, and another that Duntov could make out directly ahead of him, an emergency exit that was a gesture of futility, for if the dome was holed, every human being on Mercury would face swift and certain death. No doubt, Duntov thought, the second airlock was there simply to allow access to the spaceport in case something happened to the primary lock.
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