The Fellowship of the Hand

by Edward D. Hoch

  Crader could see the end of the corridor, where it intersected another, wider passageway. A man waited there in the shadows for them, his right profile showing smooth, nondescript features.

  “Are you Vikor?”

  “Yes. Come this way. Quickly!”

  He led them to the right, down the wider passageway, to an area Crader had missed on his first visit. There were sleeping quarters for the technicians, and even small apartments for those who lived here with their families. In some rooms as they passed he could see the artificial sunlight bathing the sparse furnishings in a sort of golden glow.

  A woman came out of one of the rooms and asked, “Are we in danger?”

  “No,” Vikor told her. “Go back inside and slide the door shut.”

  “How many are there here?” Crader asked.

  Walking slightly ahead and to his left, Vikor merely grunted. He did not seem willing to give out any unnecessary information.

  Presently they reached a widening in the passage, apparently designed as an underground recreation area. There was plastic grass in an odd shade of emerald green, and picnic tables clustered around a little stream. Artificial sunlight made it almost as bright as outdoors.

  “Sit down,” Vikor instructed them, motioning toward the tables. “We will wait here.”

  “The exit is nearby?” Crader asked.

  Vikor nodded. “Nearby.” He gestured toward a spiral stairway.

  “Will we be safe here?” Masha asked.

  “You will be safe as long as you stay with me,” Vikor said. “I will take care of you.”

  He turned to face Masha as he spoke, and for the first time Crader saw the odd tattooed design on his left cheek.

  18 GRAHAM AXMAN

  AT THE BEGINNING THE attack went well.

  Running along behind Euler Frost, carrying his laser rifle, Axman felt the old surge that impending combat always brought him. He had decided back on the farm that there was no point in opposing Frost openly for control of HAND. It was better to go along with him and attack the Nova complex. Anything could happen then. In the midst of the battle, Frost might even be killed or captured—and then the problem would no longer exist.

  The months in prison had changed Axman, as he would have been the first to admit. They had radicalized him, but in a particular way. No longer was he content to smash out at those institutions that would use the machines as a substitute for free will. Now he wanted to smash all institutions, beginning with the government which had imprisoned him.

  But there was time.

  First, the attack on Nova. Then, later, when he was fully in command again, he could turn his attention to the New White House.

  Right now, as the entrance to the underground city loomed up before them, his thoughts were on the battle of the moment. He could see that the level of the lake water had reached the lowest of the air intakes, which meant there would be some flooding below. And the open entrance was awash with shallow splashing as Euler Frost ran to it. Though the rain itself had stopped, water continued to empty into the lake bed.

  “Get that one!” he shouted suddenly to Frost as a head popped up in the opening. Frost fired a quick blast of his stunner and the man toppled back inside. Then they had gained the entrance, jamming the door so it couldn’t be closed.

  Frost glanced around, like a general surveying the battleground. “Sam!” he called to Venray. “Get ready with your hydrobombs. Graham—use the laser rifle on that communications relay!”

  Axman nodded and sighted along the rifle. It was no more effective, really, than a laser pistol, but its wider beam made cutting jobs go quicker. He squeezed the trigger and watched the beam shoot out to the distant hilltop, slicing through the supports of the relay tower. As the tower toppled over on its side, he released the trigger and followed the others inside. At least no one down below would be using a vision-phone or radio relay.

  Below ground they had forced open the doors of the elevator shaft and Venray dropped a hydrobomb inside. There was a thudding boom that seemed to shake the entire earth, filling the upper level with smoke and dust.

  “Masks on,” Euler Frost ordered. “We may have to use smoke bombs.”

  It was the Federal Medical Center all over again, only this time he wouldn’t be captured. This time it would be Euler Frost who took the fall.

  There was a series of dull thuds ahead as someone opened fire with a stunner. Frost had found the stairs by the elevator and started down. Sam Venray glanced over at Axman and said, “Stay close. We’ll need that laser.”

  “I’m right behind you.”

  Below, when they reached the main level, the sight was staggering. Huge rooms, their walls covered with computers and teleprinters and information retrieval systems. Wires and lights and telescreens. The very latest in cathoid ray equipment. And all bathed in constant light from radiant ceilings.

  “I’m impressed,” Axman shouted to Frost over the thud of the stunners.

  “Get to work with the laser. Sam, plant your hydrobombs.”

  But it was not to be quite that easy. Ahead, counterattacking through the smoke and haze, came a score of armed technicians. Some carried stunners, and at least one had an old-fashioned bullet-firing revolver. There was a single shot from it and the man on Axman’s right screamed and toppled backwards, grabbing at his chest.

  Sam Venray cursed and went down on one knee, hurling a hydrobomb like a hand grenade at the nearest machine. There was a fiery blast as the bomb went off, then a shower of sparks from the electrical fire.

  “Smoke bombs!” Frost shouted, seeing another of his men topple before the counterattack.

  In the instant before the smoke closed in, Axman aimed his laser rifle and cut through the stomach of the man with the revolver.

  “Don’t kill unless necessary,” Frost yelled at him and turned away.

  “That was necessary.”

  He shifted the laser ever so slightly, targeting Euler Frost’s back in the sights. Then the smoke closed in and he lost him.

  “This way,” Sam Venray said after a moment, reaching out to guide him, and Axman wondered if the black man had X-ray eyes that penetrated the smoke. Then he realized that some of the HAND people were wearing night-goggles, and he wished he’d brought a pair himself.

  Venray finished attaching hydrobombs to each of the computer banks and then pulled Axman along down a corridor that led deeper into the underground city. Frost already stood before a locked metal door marked EXECUTIVE OFFICES.

  “Use the laser,” he ordered Axman. “I think they’re inside.”

  The beam cut quickly through the metal, circling the locking mechanism until it fell away. Then Axman used the barrel of the rifle to slide the door open.

  It was a massive office, with white foam chairs and a large desk console at one end. There were two men inside, both holding laser pistols. When Axman saw them, he started to swing his own rifle around, but the man with the short black beard fired first, slicing the barrel of his weapon.

  “Those rifles make an easy target,” he said calmly. “Stand where you are.”

  Euler Frost stepped forward. “You must be Jason Blunt. We meet at last.”

  “Frost?”

  “Yes.” He turned to the other, a slim, pale man, and said, “Stanley Ambrose, I presume. We never had the pleasure of meeting during my stay on Venus.”

  Ambrose bowed slightly, his grip steady on the laser pistol in his right fist. “You presume correctly. And this is my first meeting with the forces of HAND.”

  “And your last,” Euler Frost said. “We’ll give you an opportunity to clear everyone out of here before we blow it all up.”

  “But we seem to have the lasers,” Ambrose pointed out, gesturing to include Jason Blunt at his side.

  “My men have wired hydrobombs to all your machines. If you kill us they’ll be detonated by radio waves and this whole place will go up—or down, as the case may be.” He let his eyes travel to the radiant ceiling.
<
br />   “The city was built to withstand bombing,” Jason Blunt said. “You forget it was originally a missile defense command post. And hydrobombs are only effective within a concentrated area of a few feet.”

  “Shall we test it, then, against the force of twenty hydrobombs?” Euler Frost’s voice was filled with confidence.

  For a moment Axman thought it would be a standoff. But then one of the HAND men ran in, splashing through the shallow water that was beginning to collect in the corridor. “Army rocketcopters landing above!” he shouted. “Should I blast the computers?”

  Jason Blunt turned and drilled him through the middle with a laser beam. In the same instant, Sam Venray dropped to his knees and flipped the half-empty backpack of hydrobombs directly at Blunt and Ambrose.

  Frost moved in and Axman followed, using his damaged rifle as a club. Ambrose turned and ran as the hydrobombs scattered across the floor. Blunt, unnerved and uncertain, tried to bring his pistol around for another shot but Axman hit him across the temple with the rifle butt.

  “Are those timed?” Frost yelled to the black man.

  “Not yet,” Venray grinned, scooping up the fallen hydrobombs. “But it sure worried them!”

  “I’ll go after Ambrose,” Axman said, but as he reached the corridor he realized the hopelessness of the task. The pale man had already disappeared into the smoke.

  He turned back into the room and saw that Blunt was on the floor, dazed by the blow, with blood from a scalp cut speckling the shaggy white rug.

  “There must be another way out of here,” Euler Frost reasoned. “Blow the machines, Sam, and we’ll take our chances. Another five minutes and it’ll be too late.”

  The sound of the stunners reached them, and Venray called from the doorway. “It’s already too late. The Nova technicians are counterattacking, dismantling the bombs!”

  “Do what you can!” Frost ordered. Then, to Axman, he said, “Come on!”

  “What about Blunt?”

  “Leave him.”

  “It’ll be safer to kill him now.”

  “Leave him, I said!” Euler Frost barked. “I told you we don’t kill unless necessary.”

  He bent to scoop up Blunt’s fallen laser pistol and then ran into the corridor with Axman following.

  As they watched, one of Venray’s hydrobombs exploded in a burst of liquid fire, tearing the front from a million-dollar computer and leaving it a mass of mangled wreckage and crackling, arcing wires. The force of the explosion knocked loose panels from the radiant ceiling, which were dropping among the dead and wounded in the smoke-filled chamber.

  “Troops coming down the stairs,” Venray warned. Two more computer banks exploded, but then he cursed and said, “I can’t set off the others! The short circuits are interfering with my radio waves.”

  “This way, then,” Frost decided. “Ambrose ran down here somewhere. There may be a way out.”

  They fought their way through the smoke, splashing through occasional puddles of water. Axman had picked up a fallen stunner, discarding the ruined laser rifle, and he held it ready as he ran. Once, when a white-suited technician lunged at them from a cross-passage, he downed the man with a close-range blast.

  “We’ll be lost in here,” Axman said as they ran on. The smoke was clearing now, but there seemed nothing ahead but more passageways and rooms.

  They passed another row of smaller computers, built into the rocky walls of the corridor. Venray paused long enough to attach hydrobombs to two of them, with a wire strung across the passage about a foot off the floor. “If they come following us, they’ll get a surprise,” he said with a chuckle.

  They started to move off, but suddenly Frost hesitated. “No,” he decided, “unhook it, Sam. There are still HAND people back there. We might kill our own men.”

  Sam shrugged and did as he was told. As he bent to his task, Axman went to help, and carefully slipped one of the hydrobombs into his own pocket. It could come in handy later, and it was much more effective than the stunner he carried.

  They hurried on along the passage, past separate cubicles that were obviously living quarters. “Zone seven,” Frost said, reading a wall sign. “On the chart in Blunt’s office, zone seven was the outer one, at the very back of the complex. There was some indication of an exit here.”

  “I sure hope so!” Venray said. Behind them, far in the distance, the thud of stunners echoed.

  “Somebody up ahead,” Axman cautioned. They were coming to a widening in the passage, a recreation area with artificial grass underfoot. He could see a group of people half hidden by the picnic tables and chairs of the underground park. There were three—two men and a woman.

  “Hold up,” Frost said. “I recognize one of them. It’s Carl Crader!”

  “So it is,” Axman agreed. His hand closed around the hydrobomb in his pocket. To kill Crader might be a real bonus, even more than killing Euler Frost.

  Then suddenly there was another voice behind them. “Walk slowly, hands up, or you’re dead!”

  Axman turned just far enough to glimpse a man with an odd tattooed design on his left cheek. He was covering them all with two laser pistols.

  19 MASHA BLUNT

  SHE HAD NEVER BEEN so terrified in her life.

  The waiting in the silent, man-made park under the earth, with the rays of some artificial sun beating down upon them, had been bad enough. But now suddenly the threat of violence emerged again. The man with the tattooed face had heard someone approaching and had hidden himself in a service closet along the passageway. When the three men passed, he stepped out, covering them with laser pistols.

  “They’re the leadership of HAND,” Carl Crader said, hurrying forward. “Euler Frost and Axman. I don’t know the black man.”

  At Masha’s side, Stevro grunted and spoke in a low voice. “This might be our chance to get away, my dear, if you want to go. There’s a spiral stairway over there, leading up through a metal shaftway. That man Vikor said it was the way out.”

  But she didn’t know what she wanted. Watching Vikor disarm the three from HAND, she thought for a moment that the worst was over, that they might still all make it out of this place alive.

  But then, with a sudden movement almost too quick to follow, the man Crader identified as Axman leaped forward, grabbing Euler Frost as a shield.

  “All right, Crader!” he shouted. “This is a hydro-bomb. Call off your man or we all die.”

  “Don’t be a fool,” Frost said, struggling to free himself from Axman’s grip.

  Carl Crader was walking forward, ignoring Axman’s threat. “You wouldn’t use Euler for a shield, Graham. HAND needs him too badly.” He motioned Vikor away, but the tattooed man still held his lasers.

  “HAND doesn’t need him at all! Go on and kill him—it’ll save me the trouble later!”

  “Give me that hydrobomb, Graham,” Crader said, reaching out his hand.

  Graham Axman snarled and pushed Frost forward into Crader. He stepped back and was raising his arm to hurl the hydrobomb when suddenly it exploded with an ear-splitting roar, drenching Axman in a sea of liquid fire.

  Within seconds there was nothing left of him but a heap of flames, burning brightly against the emerald green of the artificial grass.

  The blast of the hydrobomb had knocked Masha down, but she struggled to her feet and hurried to help the others. No one seemed badly hurt, although Crader and Frost, closest to the explosion, were bruised and shaken as they stood up.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” Crader said, inspecting a minor blast burn on his hand, “but I’m certainly thankful it did.”

  Euler Frost glanced over at the black man. “Sam?” he questioned.

  Venray nodded and produced a tiny transistorized device from his pocket. “I set it off with a radio wave. Hated to do it to Graham, but it was him or us. He was really crazy.”

  “Yes,” Frost said, staring down at the burning heap. To Masha he looked as if he’d lost an old friend.


  “I can still hear stunners,” Crader said.

  Frost turned to him. “Your people again. The troops to the rescue.”

  “Where’s my husband?” Masha blurted out. “Have you killed him?”

  “He was alive the last we knew. Just a bump on the head.”

  Venray looked uncertainly at Vikor, who still held his laser guns. Then he said to Frost, “We’d better keep moving.”

  Frost nodded. “We’re going out the other exit, Crader.”

  But the CIB director shook his head. “I let you escape once before, Euler, after the attack on the medical center. This time you stay. Perhaps you can convince a court of law that your cause is just.”

  “Axman didn’t convince anyone.”

  “Axman didn’t try.”

  Frost turned to the black man. “Go on, Sam. I’ll stay here.”

  “You’ll both stay,” Crader said. “There’s a great deal to be explained here, and until it is, no one is leaving.”

  There were shouts from along the passage, and the sound of others approaching. Masha wondered who it would be this time—more of HAND, or the army troops, or maybe even her husband and Ambrose? Whoever it was, she wanted to get away from here, wanted to go back to the island, where life was so much simpler.

  She saw Jason first, leading the way, and after that she saw no one else. Her vision blurred with tears and for the first time in her life she realized that she really loved the man for all his faults. What had started as mere sexual attraction back in New Istanbul had grown into something much more.

  Now, seeing the spots of blood along his temple, she wanted to run to him. But before she could move, Crader called out, “Earl! Over here, Earl!”

  He was calling to a younger member of the party, a handsome man who wore smoke goggles and carried a stunner. But even as she saw him, backed by a dozen battle-ready troops, she felt a sudden yank on her arm that spun her around, off balance.

  “That’s him,” the man named Earl shouted. “The one with the tattoo! He tried to kill me at the zooitorium!”