Suddenly, the crowd burst through the rings of officers. They were past the patrol cars, which had not begun shooting the sponge bullets because the officers were in the line of fire, too. The protestors boiled out of the plaza, charging the deep ranks of ganks at the junctions of plaza and thoroughfare. Many of these went down. So did many demonstrators. But most of these got up and ran on. The general was standing up in his open car and was blaring at them to halt and submit to arrest. Then someone, it looked like a woman to Duncan, rammed a cattle prod, taken from a gank, against the general’s belly. He dropped the bullhorn, doubled up, clasping his belly, and fell out of the big car. He disappeared into the melee.
In a short time, at least three-quarters of the demonstrators had fled down the streets. The rest were either lying motionless on the plaza or were being subdued by the ganks. These were dragged off to the public emergency stoners along the edge of the plaza. But the supply of stoners could not meet the demand, and the ganks quit using them. The ganks wrestled the rest of the protestors to the floor and taped their wrists behind them. A spray of TM in the face of each prisoner knocked them out.
“Not bad for a beginning,” Duncan said. “Relative to the entire population, the demonstrators were few. But as time goes by, the mobs’ll get bigger and more violent. I hope so, anyway.”
Sarah-John said, “For God’s sake! My husband has passed out! How in hell could he with all that going on?”
She rose unsteadily from her chair. “He never could drink much. Maybe I better get him to bed,”
She pulled Shurber up from his chair.
“Watch this!” Duncan said. “I don’t believe it! The demonstrators are coming back! This is better than I’d thought it’d be!”
Here came the red-dyed horde, running as fast as they could out of the avenues down which they had fled and toward the ganks. Though the ganks were surprised, they gathered in disciplined ranks in the center of the plaza, thus reversing the original situation. The patrol cars moved back, half-turning, and then forward so that the fixed sponge guns on the hoods pointed at the streets. The tank turrets of the watertanks revolved toward the advancing mass.
The protestors now had cans in their hands, Duncan supposed that they had had them when the demonstration began, but they had kept them under their clothes. Perhaps they had not had the courage to use them then. But now the young citizens were as red with rage and defiance as the dye on their skin and robes. While the majority charged the organics, many climbed the monitor posts and sprayed a black liquid on the screens. Others shot their sprays into the faces of the officers.
The general had managed to climb back into his command car with his bullhorn. He was bellowing something. Duncan could not understand the words, which were drowned out by the hellish din.
The mob was also spurting the black bond-spray on the wallscreens of the buildings around the plaza and on the portable cameras of the TV news crews. Many of the screens Duncan was watching went dark.
“Black them all out!” Duncan cried as he rose to his feet. “Give it to them, the swine! Show them you’re not a bunch of sheep!”
Snick also rose from her chair. She cheered.
The lights went out.
16
Duncan said, “What the…?”
He looked at the luminous face of his wristwatch. Exactly 7:11.
Sarah-John Tan’s voice came from down the hall. “Oh no! The power’s gone off again!”
Duncan spoke the words to reactivate the wallscreens. They did not spring into glow. Nor did the front door open in response to the spoken code.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, “there’s a flashlight or candles in today’s PP?”
“Don’t bother asking Sarah-John,” Snick said. “I’ve checked out everything in their closet. They don’t have any.”
The air seemed to be dying. It pressed thick and warm on him. He moved toward the wall, touched it with the fingers of his outstretched hand, and began to move along the wall. Then he bumped into Snick.
Sarah-John Tan had groped her way to the living room. Guided by Snick’s voice, she found the sofa. Duncan by now was also on the sofa. He smelled her perfume and the underlying odor of her nervous sweat.
She said, “Lem’s passed out on the bed, the lucky son of a bitch.”
“I wonder what could have happened?” Snick said. “We didn’t mess up the power plant this time. Another subversive group we don’t know anything about?”
“I doubt it,” Duncan said. “Maybe it’s an accident.”
He did not believe that. Perhaps, he thought, the government did it. With power off and the only light available coming from the gank vehicles, the demonstrators will be helpless. They’ll be busted up easily, run away. Turning the electric power off seems like a very drastic measure, but the government is capable of doing it. It won’t take the blame, though. It’ll put the responsibility on something or someone else.
Sarah-John, sounding as if she were close to panic, said, “It was terrible the last time. We woke up on Wednesday and thought at first it was Tuesday again. But when all the other days stepped out of their stoners, we knew something was very wrong. We couldn’t get out of the apartment for a long time. The ganks had to burn out the locks. We were told we’d have to evacuate the city. The streets were jampacked, of course, and…”
“That was then,” Snick said. “We know all about it.”
“You weren’t in that godawful mess,” Sarah-John said.
“I don’t think the power’ll be off very long,” Duncan said. “Let’s just wait and see, be calm, take it easy.”
“It’s too bad the lock was replaced,” Snick said. “It may take hours before the ganks get here to burn it out. We may have to do it ourselves, and how can we explain that to them?”
“It may not take nearly that long,” Duncan said. “The situation’s different now. Only today’s citizens are destoned, so there’ll be only one-seventh the number there was then. There’s only one-seventh using up the oxygen, too, so the air should last longer. And there are a hell of a lot more ganks present than then. We’ll wait.”
He could almost hear Snick fidgeting. She was action personified and loathed sitting until something happened. If events were going to be launched, she wanted to be the launcher. On the other hand, her inborn impatience had been tempered by a stern discipline and long experience as an organic officer. She would not do anything rash unless the situation forced it.
An hour passed very slowly. The seconds seemed to seep down through the increasingly warmer and heavier air and settle over them like tiny dead insects. The four talked fitfully with long silences between the sentences, which became more and more short and jerky. Duncan finally rose from the sofa. “We’ll have to burn out the doorlock.”
Shurber’s voice came then from down the hallway.
“What the hell is going on?”
Tan got up and groped her way from the living room.
“Don’t panic, Lem!” she cried. “The power’s off again!”
Shurber’s voice became shrill. “Not again!”
Presently, Tan and Shurber groped and stumbled into the living room. He cursed when the situation was explained to him but was silent after that.
It seemed to Duncan that his theory that the government had cut the power was wrong. Surely, the demonstrators had long ago been dispersed or run down and arrested. Where would they hide? The doors of their apartments were locked, and they could not get into them. They could not claim that they were innocent citizens who had been in the streets when the power went off. The red dye would reveal their guilt.
Unless, he thought, the government was really going to shove it all the way up the asses of the citizens. It would make them suffer so much that they would resent—hate—the persons seemingly responsible for the blackout. These would not have caused it, but the government was going to blame them. He and Snick were going to be named as the culprits.
What would the government�
��s story be? That Duncan and Snick, the psychopathic outlaws, crazed subversives, had once more attacked the Baldwin Hills plant and destroyed the converter-generators? No. It could not do that if it planned to turn the power on again soon. More likely, the government would state that the outlaws had somehow managed to insert a shutdown command into the system. And it had taken the engineers a long time to trace the command down and cancel it.
He was dry and very thirsty. The water did not run in the faucets, but he and Snick had groped into today’s PP kitchen cabinet and found the bottles of fruit juice that Tan and Shurber had gotten at the grocery market. All four had managed to empty these bottles. That would normally have been more than enough. But now he felt as if the air were no longer a pile of dead insects. They were very much alive and were sucking his body fluids out.
He felt along the wall toward the doorway. He would find the area in which the locking mechanism was and bum it out. To hell with the consequences. He had to get out before he died of desiccation or oxygen starvation, whichever came first. He had just pulled his gun out of his belt when he was startled by a rapid and hard knocking on the door. He put his ear to the wood and heard, faintly, “Organic department! Knock if you hear me!”
Duncan rapped the door with the butt of his gun, then applied his ear again to the wood.
“Stand back! We’re burning out the locks!”
A dim red spot appeared on the door at the area of the enclosed lock mechanism. The spot became larger, and Duncan caught a whiff of smoke. A violet beam shot through a small thin hole, then followed a curve. The beam disappeared. There was a loud bang, and the cutout section flew inward, hitting the floor, its edges still smoking. The odor of burning wood filled the room. Another beam, that of a flashlight, shone through the hole, making the darkness into a twilight outside the circle of its light. A voice amplified by a bullhorn entered through the hole.
Duncan strode toward the hall, guiding himself by the light. He said, “Thea, follow me! Tan, Shurber, you stay here!”
They got to the bedroom doorway just in time. The door slid inward, and a loud male voice said, “Stay inside for now! We don’t want the streets crowded. We have work to do.”
“Thank you, Officer,” Tan said.
Duncan and Snick waited for a minute, then came to the doorway. Tan and Shurber were standing in it and breathing deeply. But the street air was almost as dense and warm as that in the apartment.
The headlights and searchlights of two organic patrol cars illuminated the street. These were parked a few apartments away. The faces of tenants looking out from the doorways were pale in the beams. Four ganks were burning through the locks.
A half-hour passed. The lights of the patrol cars and the violet beams of the proton guns were by now far down the street. People came out of their apartments. Their talking was quiet at first but became a babble in a short time, the chatter of adults mixed with the crying of infants and screeching of children.
Sarah-John Tan said, “It’s scary. How are we going to find out what’s happening if there’s no TV?”
From birth, she had been surrounded with light and with the moving pictures on the walls. Their absence was making her shaky. Duncan and Snick had been conditioned to an iconless environment during their flight through New Jersey. They had been so busy trying to survive that they had not had withdrawal symptoms.
Fifteen minutes later, maintenance and repair department workers brought portable torches. These were being placed every two hundred feet. They gave a feeble light in the area of the apartment since it was almost exactly halfway between two torches. But that was better than none, and it seemed to cheer up the people in the street.
Duncan and Snick withdrew into the living room. Tan and Shurber stayed in the doorway.
Duncan said, “Unless they get the power back on soon, the city will have to be evacuated. The air isn’t going to last.”
“I’d imagine that the entrances to the roof and the base of the tower have been opened,” Snick said. “That should help.”
“Probably. But it won’t be enough. I think that the citizens will have to be moved out of the tower. Or, at least, to the perimeters, where the air might be fresh enough.”
“You mean we can’t stay here?”
“We can try to. Maybe, if all those people leave, there might be air enough.”
“It’s certainly not fresh enough now.”
“We can go with the crowd, but that’s taking a big chance. If the ganks are on their toes, they’ll know that now’s a good time to get us. However…”
The authorities had enough to do, perhaps more than they could handle. Would they even think about ordering the ganks in the field to keep an eye out for the fugitives? Probably not. On the other hand, it just might happen that a gank would recognize them.
A few minutes afterwards, an M & R worker on an electric tricycle rode slowly by. Duncan heard the bellowing of her bullhorn long before she got to the apartment.
“Attention, citizens! Attention, citizens! All tenants! All tenants! Go immediately to the eastern end of the street! There is no cause for panic! Move to the eastern end of the street!
“Attention, all citizens! Move to the eastern end of the street! This is an order of the governor! Do not panic! Go to the east end of the street! The east end! This is an order of the governor! You will be evacuated via the emergency stairway! Attention, all citizens…!”
Her voice receded westward. The people in the street, after some hesitation, began walking toward the ordered destination. They were joined by others coming from the west. Presently, several buses jammed with passengers rolled by. Duncan could not see to the end of the street, but he imagined that the crowds would soon be one huge mass. The ganks were not going to find it easy to handle all these, direct them up or down the stairway, move them swiftly enough but not too swiftly, and quell the citizens’ panic. Just how the sick in the hospitals would be gotten out, he did not know. But that was not his problem.
Sarah-John said, “What should we do? Stay here or go with them?”
“We’re staying,” Duncan said. “It’s up to you, but I think you should go.”
“We’ll see you later,” she said. She and Shurber stepped out into the street and merged with the molasses-slow and increasingly more numerous crowd. After a few minutes, however, the street was empty. Then the same woman rode by, repeating her evacuation orders.
After she had gone, Duncan said, “There should be enough air for just us two. It doesn’t seem to be getting any hotter.”
A half-hour went by while they sat down in the doorway, breathing the slightly fresher air, ready to scramble inside if workers or ganks came by. Both were very sleepy, but they could not go to bed. It was too hot and too hard to breathe in there. Besides, something ominous was happening. They felt it in their unconscious, in their nerves. This blackout was unexplained, and they would not relax until they knew what had caused it. Perhaps not then.
They rose as they saw lights illuminating the area beyond the curve of the street. A moment later, the headlights of two patrol cars shone brightly. Duncan crouched down and stuck his head out beyond the doorway far enough to see with one eye. When he withdrew it, he said, “Two gank vehicles, parked on each side of the street to our right. Their spotlights are on the doorways just by them. One man in each car operating the spotlight. Two men from each car have entered an apartment. Each one of the two was carrying some device. It was hard to see what the device was, but I think they’re using sniffers.”
“I have to see,” Snick said. She crouched down but looked both ways before moving back into the apartment. “There’s activity at the other side, too. The curve blocks my view, but I think there are cars there. Probably doing the same thing as those ganks.”
It seemed highly probable that they were looking for him and Snick. Who else could it be? How did they know that he and Snick were in this area? If some citizen had seen him, or more likely thought he had seen him
but was not sure, he would have notified the organics. But why were they searching for the outlaws now? Why not sooner? Answer (if there were any): The snitch must have seen him hours ago. However, he had only recently reported the sighting because he had not been sure about it. As recently, say, as just before the blackout. He could not have done it after the power was off.
Yes, he could if he went to a precinct station or a gank to deliver his information personally. But he would have had to live close to a station or have seen a gank passing by. He would not have ventured outside in the dark.
But…the informer must have been outside his apartment when he remembered seeing Duncan. Or perhaps in a store which had no doors with locks.
Did it matter how it had happened? It was happening, and that was the important aspect.
It did matter that the ganks did not know exactly where he was. Otherwise, they would have been in full force in the street outside the apartment, ready to storm it. In fact, if they thought that he was in this neighborhood, they would be crowding the streets in their search. Perhaps they only knew that he was on this level or in this tower.
He looked around the doorway edge again. A gank was standing by each car and directing its searchlight on the doors of the residences into which their colleagues had gone.
Duncan stepped back and spoke softly. “If they can catch us while there’re no citizens around, they can do what they want to. Kill us or arrest us and get us unobserved to the nearest precinct station.”
“Which do you think?” Snick said.
“I think they’d like to find out all about our activities and whom we’ve associated with. But, if we’re alive, we might become very embarrassing to the government, plus a rally-around-the-flag for the discontented and the radical. If I were the World Council, I’d want us dead.”
“Most assuredly,” Snick said. “Let’s take as many down with us as we can.”
Duncan grinned. The ancient Vikings who despised dying in any situation but battle had nothing on her. If there were a Valhalla, the Valkyries would have to carry her off to it even if she was a woman.
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