Which, Johnson thought, he may very well now be. The Guards had no personal loyalties, only paranoia and absolute conditioned obedience to the will of whoever ran the Hegemonic Council. Khustov seemed to have realized this, for he had not said a word or tried to countermand Torrence’s orders again during the entire trip across the dome to the airlock entrance.
Now, walking the last yards to the inner airlock door, surrounded by Guards, Khustov’s shoulders drooped, his face was pale and lifeless; he seemed a broken man. In a sardonic way, Johnson found himself empathizing with the former Coordinator. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory—they had both felt it in the past hour. And now they were both going to. …
To what? Johnson thought. The Brotherhood of Assassins makes no sense. They save Khustov, they save Torrence, and now they save me from the Hegemony … but they capture Gorov and Khustov too! Why Gorov? Why Khustov? Why me? Why any thing?
Johnson found that he felt no fear. Having tasted victory, defeat and salvation in such rapid and dizzying succession, he could feel nothing at this point, nothing at all. His world, his life, was in ruins and now he was ready to face anything with a fearlessness born of total indifference. When you’ve got nothing, he thought, you’ve got nothing to lose.
Now they were about ten yards from the inner airlock door. The Guards halted, and the Captain brusquely shoved the prisoners forward. “We stay here,” he grunted. “You go over to the intercom and tell ’em that you’re here.”
Johnson, Khustov and Gorov stood by the airlock door, not knowing which would be the least peculiar spokesman—Johnson, the prisoner of one side being handed over to the other; Khustov, the presumed enemy of the Brotherhood; or Gorov, who seemed to be in the same position as Khustov.
“Come on!” the Guard Captain shouted. “We’ve only got a few minutes left. One of you move!”
Johnson and Khustov glared at each other, as if each were daring the other to assume command of the situation. But it was Constantine Gorov who finally pressed the communicator stud and said: “This is Councilor Gorov. Johnson and Khustov are here with me.”
“We are transferring the explosive from the inner airlock door to a wall so we can open it,” a voice said through the intercom, a voice that, though distorted by the radio, seemed to Johnson strangely familiar. “The other bomb will remain in place and both can be detonated in a moment if there are any tricks. Any Guards that are with you must leave the corridor. If any Guards are visible when the airlock opens, we’ll destroy the dome and everyone in it.”
The Guards moved off with ill-concealed haste, disappeared around the corner of a cross corridor.
Then the inner airlock door slid up and open.
“Inside! Quickly!” a voice ordered from within.
Johnson, Gorov and Khustov entered the airlock, and the inner airlock door immediately slid shut behind them.
With his newfound indifference, Johnson noted the body of the slain Guard, the wad of plastic explosive stuck to a wall, the four spacesuited figures in the airlock. Then his capacity for shock was abruptly restored as he saw the face of the leader of the Brotherhood group through his spacesuit visor.
“Arkady!” Johnson croaked. “You! The Brotherhood. …”
It was the ultimate absurdity, the final demonstration of the futility of all he was, all he had been, all he had ever tried to do. Arkady Duntov a member of the Brotherhood! His most valued lieutenant, the man with all the plans! Arkady Duntov!
Things that had been mysteries suddenly became clear. How Duntov, who seemed so ordinary, had come up with so many complicated schemes. … How the Brotherhood had known of the League’s plan to kill Khustov … and to kill Torrence … and to assassinate the Council. …
Old mysteries disappeared, revealing … only greater confusion! Why? Why? Why? What was the Brotherhood’s game? What did all this mean …?
“Why, Arkady, why?” he muttered.
Duntov, he saw, was looking straight at him, yet seemed to be staring through him. “No time for talk now, Boris,” Duntov said. “Into those spacesuits.” He pointed to the rack of empty suits along one wall of the airlock.
Johnson, Gorov and Khustov began to don the spacesuits. As Johnson pulled the helmet over his head and was about to close the visor, Duntov turned to him, met his gaze, and said, “I want you to know right now, Boris, in case … in case anything should go wrong, that though we’ve never really been on the same side, we’ve been fighting for the same things all along.”
“H can you say that? After all the monkey wrenches the Brotherhood has thrown into our plans!”
“I wish I could tell you,” Duntov said. “I wish I understood it more fully myself. But we’ll be taking you to someone who can explain far better than I. Someone who … who I trust completely, who you can trust too. Robert Ching can make you understand. … Now let’s get out of here!”
Duntov opened the outer airlock door, and Johnson winced at the cruel glare, even through his heavily polarized visor. The Brotherhood men formed a cordon around the prisoners and they set forth across the tortured Mercurian landscape.
Duntov led the party across the saucerlike plain on which the dome was built, skirting pools of molten lead, treacherous pits of powdered rock. As they neared the lip of the great depression, another Brotherhood party, seven men, joined them, and they all entered the mouth of a canyon which led into the jumbled, twisted hills that rimmed the plain.
They trudged on in silence, and Johnson barely noticed the fetid heat mounting inside his suit. It didn’t seem to matter; nothing seemed to matter. He felt like the pawn of forces he could not see, could not comprehend. He wondered if anything he had ever done had really been his own doing. Everything seemed to be an illusion, of one kind or another. But the central mystery, the only thing that he was able to care about at all, was: What was the Brotherhood of Assassins? Whose side were they on? What were they trying to do?
Fianlly, they reached a small, silvery ship hidden in a great jumble of huge boulders. Duntov opened the airlock door, and they all climbed inside.
As soon as the outer airlock door was shut behind them, before he had even unsuited, Duntov said, “Got to get out of here fast! Guard them while they unsuit, and get them to the Cocoons as soon as possible. I’ll get us ready for immediate liftoff.” Then he was gone into the interior of the ship and the three prisoners were alone with the ten silent Brotherhood agents as they unsuited.
After they had unsuited, three of the Brotherhood men, laseguns drawn, led them to a small cabin with eight Gee-Cocoons.
“In!” one of them ordered curtly. Johnson climbed into a Cocoon, and Khustov and Gorov into two others. Only when they were thoroughly secured in the stress filament packing did the Brotherhood men climb into their own Cocoons.
Then a klaxon sounded, and Johnson felt a weightless, floating sensation as the antigravs cut in.
And the ship lifted off to whatever strange destination awaited them.
The ship continued to accelerate, and Johnson was pushed gently back in his Cocoon, the nest of stress filaments cradling him and, strangely, relaxing him somewhat.
Perhaps it was just the forced inactivity, perhaps merely the passage of time, but bit by bit, he felt his shocked lethargy leaving him. The life he had lived, his ten years in theDemocratic League, was ruined, over, done with. There was no going back; there was nothing to go back to.
Yet Boris Johnson felt a certain buoyancy, an interest in what the next moment might bring, creeping up on him. The Hegemonic Council had completely outwitted him, true, played him for an utter fool. But the Brotherhood of Assassins had made the Council look even more foolish—the Hegemony wasn’t invincible, it wasn’t invulnerable.
He glanced across the aisle at Vladimir Khustov, pale, slack-jawed, dull-eyed in his own Cocoon. The Hegemonk Coordinator had lost more today than he had—Khustov had had more to lose in the first place. Khustov had been top dog, and now he was nothing, a thing at the mercy of the
incomprehensible Brotherhood. At least I had nothing more to lose than a conspiracy that was doomed to failure from the beginning, he thought.
He began to wonder if, in fact, he didn’t owe the Brotherhood a certain debt of gratitude, if he hadn’t known that the Democratic League was futile all along. Perhaps he had fought on simply because there was nothing else to do, no place to go.
And now the Brotherhood had freed him from his past. Perhaps Arkady had really been telling the truth—maybe they were both fighting for the same thing. If so, the Brotherhood was certainly better at it. They had lasted for centuries, they had infiltrated the League and used it as a pawn, and they had at least one spaceship. … If the Brotherhood really was on the side of freedom, perhaps there would be a place for him in it. It was the fight for freedom, after all, that really counted, not who led it. And, Johnson was forced to admit, if the Brotherhood really was fighting for freedom, whoever was running it certainly seemed to know his business better than he did. …
Boris Johnson felt like a slate, wiped clean and waiting for fate to write upon it what it would. It was not an altogether unpleasant feeling. It was, in fact, that for which he had fought—the rarest of all feelings in the Hegemony of Sol—freedom.
Now the ship seemed to be changing course, and a large viewscreen came to life in the front of the cabin. Mercury, a yin-yang sphere of dead black and gristly brightness filled most of it, but Johnson could just make out two motes rising from the dayside, near where the environment dome was located.
“We’re being followed,” the voice of Arkady Duntov said over the ship’s intercom. “Two heavy cruisers.”
Vladimir Khustov’s face suddenly came alive. He smiled smugly. “You cannot hope to escape two cruisers,” he said. “Why not save yourself some trouble and surrender to me now? I promise that I will see to it that things go easier with you. Frankly, it would place me in a better position with the Council if you surrendered to me than if I had to be rescued. Give me that advantage, and I’ll repay you when I’m restored to the Coordinatorship.”
Duntov, unseen, laughed. “The Hegemony hasn’t exactly encouraged scientific development,” he said. “You lost your best spaceship designer quite a while ago, Dr. Richard Schneeweiss. The Brotherhood30; acquired his services. This ship has certain modifications that should allow us to counter the cruisers’ superior speed and firepower. Besides, if I were you, Khustov, I’d be rooting for us to escape. I somehow doubt that those ships have orders to capture us alive.”
“I fear he’s right, at least about the orders that Jack Torrence has issued,” Gorov said. “We both know his ambitions, Vladimir. He has ever reason and every excuse to order this ship destroyed on sight. With you dead, he’d be certain to permanently secure his position as Coordinator. I just hope our captors are as right about their ability to escape as they are about what goes on in Torrence’s mind.”
Johnson grinned as he saw the play of emotions on Khustov’s troubled face. Khustov knew Torrence all too well, and now he was forced into hoping that his captors could elude his would-be “rescuers”!
The scene on the viewscreen changed: the screen grew very dark, and even the stars seemed to fade. … Then, as a great fiery globe came into view, Johnson saw why. The camera filter had been polarized to near opacity as the ship came around and headed inward, straight toward the fearful ball of raging plasma that was the sun.
The sun grew ever larger in the viewscreen. Sunspots like great spots of black mold became visible as the ship swept inward from Mercury’s orbit.
“We’ll be incinerated!” Johnson finally shouted. “We can’t survive much closer to the sun!”
“Exactly what the commanders of those cruisers will think,” Duntov said over the intercom. “But this ship has a new heat shield that Schneeweiss developed. It’s like some kind of thermocouple device. The entire outer hull is a superefficient solar energy converter. It powers a pumping and cooling system that circulates liquid helium through a capillary system in the inner skin of the hull—and the hotter it gets outside, the more efficient the system becomes. Real neat—it uses the heat of the sun to cool the ship.”
The sun grew larger and larger; now it filled almost the entire screen. Johnson had never heard of a ship approaching this close to the sun. Yet the interior temperature stayed comfortable. The cooling system, however it worked, was certainly doing the job.
“I think they’ve spotted us,” Duntov said. “But it won’t do them very much good. We’re between them and the sun. This close in, radar won’t work, their laser-rangers will be whited out and visual tracking is impossible.”
“You can’t stay in here forever, you fool!” Khustov said. “As soon as we turn around, they’ll spot us. They’ve got us trapped up against the sun.”
“Then we’ll just have to vanish, eh?” Duntov replied.
The ship continued to drop toward the sun. A great solar prominence fountained from the sun several million miles to the left of the ship, a monstrous goutof plasma that reached beyond the ship’s trajectory. Lord, we’re close! Johnson thought as the viewscreen fuzzed from solar static. Down, down, down, toward the awesome solar furnace the ship sped. …
Then the bloated disc of the sun stopped growing—but it did not wane. Johnson could still feel the ship accelerating, yet they were neither approaching nor retreating from the sun now. …
All at once, Johnson realized what Duntov was doing. He was putting the ship into a cometary, parabolic trajectory around the sun, using the ship’s drive and the sun’s enormous gravity to whip it around the sun like a stone on a string, putting the sun itself between the ship and its pursuers.
Johnson’s guess was confirmed a moment later as the ship’s rate of acceleration increased, continued to increase, as the sun caught it and whipped it around its equator, very much like a comet. … The ship maintained its distance from the sun as it continued to accelerate. They were in the proper parabolic orbit, and this close in, the sun was a double ally, it made it impossible for the cruisers to track them, and the sun’s gravity added to their velocity as it whipped them, comet-wise, around it to the far side. They would indeed vanish! The Hegemonic commanders, not knowing about the new heat shield, would assume that they had risked coming too close to the sun and had been vaporized, when they failed to detect the ship turning around and trying to sneak past them. They would not be likely to suspect that the ship had in fact swung around Sol—since that was a maneuver of which their own ships were incapable, and the Hegemony was utterly confident that its equipment was the best available.
And yes, now the sun was offset from the center of the screen as open space appeared to the left of it. They had begun to swing around it …
The sun became a half-disc, then a fat crescent on the right side of the viewscreen, then a thinner crescent that grew even smaller. … They were around it now, it was all but behind them. …
And now it was behind them as the thin crescent line on the right edge of the screen disappeared, and the polarization of the camera filter was decreased … and the stars came out.
“Home free!” Duntov said. “Next stop—Brotherhood headquarters!”
Despite the repugnancy of the situation, Constantine Gorov found himself trying to engage the Brotherhood agents in conversation—as much out of boredom as curiosity.
Wherever they were going, it was a long trip, and Khustov’s conversation consisted mainly of grunts. Boris Johnson was quite willing to babble on—and did so at every opportunity—but the man was a fool, and Gorov knew as much about the Democratic League as he cared to, and then some.
But the Brotherhood of Assassins was quite another matter. These Brotherhood agents either had a very exaggerated sense of secrecy, or they were all totally ignorant. He had tried to open them up by quoting Markowitz’ Theory of Social Entropy, and even some of the man’s more obscure works, such as Culture and Chaos, but all he had gotten for his pains were blank stares. Could it really be that these men we
re ignorant of the doctrine which they served? Most curious … it had a certain parallel with the Millenium of Religion. Then too, there had been believers who fought on the sides of the various dogmas, not because they were convinced of their accuracy, but simply because they Believed—without having any really sophisticated knowledge of exactly what it was that they believed in. A curious mental style indeed!
Perhaps this leader of theirs … Gorov thought as Duntov entered the cabin, stood idly in the front of the room. Gorov got out of his Cocoon and walked over to Duntov.
“You seem like a reasonably intelligent individual,” Gorov began earnestly. “How can you really believe that the theories of Markowitz will actually enable you to overthrow the Hegemony? I must grant that his theories have a certain internal consistency, but it seems to me that the factor which invalidates them empirically is time. Markowitz never mentions time limitation in his discussion of the Order-Chaos paradoxes. That is, while I must concede that given infinite time, any ordered society must be destroying by the spiraling paradoxes, it seems that Markowitz ignores the fact that the evolutionary span of the human race is itself finite. Or do you have access to additional works we don’t know about?”
Gorov saw that the Brotherhood leader was staring at him utterly bewildered. “I … uh … haven’t read much of Markowitz,” Duntov said. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Incredible! Gorov thought. Simply incredible! Even the leader is an utter ignoramus!
“You mean to tell me that you’ve given up all the advantages of a loyal Ward of the Hegemony without even knowing what you’ve given them up for?” Gorov exclaimed.
Duntov squirmed. “It’s … it’s just that there’s something missing in the Hegemony,” he said. “I’ve felt it as long as I can remember. The Brotherhood seems to have what’s missing—we call it Chaos. I can believe in Chaos, and that makes me … makes me … makes me feel, well, taken care of.”
“And just what is this Chaos that gives you such a sense of security?”
Agent of Chaos M Page 14
