Sewer, Gas and Electric

by Matt Ruff

  The Detonator

  “Holy Christ.”

  The room was large but not cavernous, though its exact dimensions could only be guessed at. Once it had contained machinery of some kind—there were ghost rectangles and ragged holes in the floor where equipment had been uprooted—but all furnishings and fittings had been torn out to make space for the dynamite. Four and a quarter tons of it, piled against the walls to an uncertain depth.

  It was arranged in neat bundles of seven sticks each, the bundles stacked to form a honeycomb pattern, a nitroglycerin hive. Joan did the math in her head: eighty-five hundred pounds of straight dynamite, at about half a pound per stick, and three and a half pounds per bundle, makes . . . makes a hell of a lot of bundles. She didn’t know enough chemistry to calculate the force of the blast, but it would certainly be, as Hoover had promised, a big bang.

  She was beginning to hyperventilate again, but this time she didn’t light a cigarette. She looked around for the bomb’s timer to see what kind of deadline she was facing but couldn’t find it. Moving very, very carefully, she approached the nearest section of honeycomb to examine it more closely.

  A blasting cap had been inserted in the center stick of each bundle and a six-inch fuse attached. The fuses stuck out into the air, like cilia; they were not connected to anything. Puzzled, Joan pinched one gingerly between thumb and forefinger, to see if it was some sort of antenna. But no, it was a fuse: cordite, fast-burning.

  “But where the hell is the master fuse?” Joan said. “Where’s the—” She stiffened, hearing a clank of metal behind her. All at once she understood. “Oh no.”

  “Oh yes,” Ayn Rand said.

  Joan turned around. The gates had shut, trapping her inside.

  Trapping the Lamp inside.

  “I’d rather go out doing something than nothing.” Joan felt the blood rising to her cheeks. “Is that what I said?”

  “That’s what you said.”

  “I’m an activist.” She spelled it out, like a trial lawyer’s summation. “That’s my philosophy: I see a problem, I act.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I act.”

  “Even though you know you don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” Ayn said. “Even though you’ve been warned.”

  Joan was nodding. “And it’s true, what you told me: you’re not the virus; you’re not the bomb . . .”

  “No.”

  “. . . you’re the detonator.”

  “An Electric Thermite Charge,” Ayn Rand said. “But a supremely rational one.”

  Joan closed her eyes. “Thermite. . . . Thermite lights the fuses?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fuses set off the blasting caps . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “. . . blasting caps blow the dynamite, dynamite shakes the building, shaking releases the virus, virus kills thousands of innocent people . . .”

  “Yes, yes, yes, and yes.”

  “All because of me.”

  “All because of you,” John Hoover agreed, his voice issuing from a speaker buried somewhere in the honeycomb. “And I just want to thank you, Miss Fine, for your truly heroic effort in coming here today. I couldn’t have blown up the building without you.”

  Two Minutes

  Tracer bullets stitched between the beams and girders of the Babel construction site. After the initial assault, the androids had fallen back to the north side of the tower, while the Marines occupied the south; the two groups were now engaged in a mostly random exchange of fire. The Marines’ goal was not to eliminate the opposition but to keep it busy and guessing, while a special strike team got the Eye of Africa into the kangaroo control center.

  In a relatively quiet corner of the 226th floor, a Portable Television marched along a covered walkway. Its monitor replayed broadcast footage from the ’09 Syrian War: a beefy American general addressing a roomful of reporters. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the general said, gesturing to a video monitor of his own, “you see here the headquarters of my opposite number.” A wave of appreciative laughter swept the room as a Kemo Sabe cruise missile gutted a three-story building, killing everyone inside. “Next we have a clip of the luckiest family in the Middle East today.” A couple pushing a baby carriage across a bridge reached the far side just seconds before a laser-guided bomb cut the span in half. A Newsweek reporter laughed so hard he fell out of his chair. “Next, a comparison of the long-range accuracy of Syrian and Israeli tank guns . . .”

  The image turned to snow as the Stone Monk garroted the Television with a loop of magnetic piano wire; Maxwell plunged a bayonet into the Television’s chest, finishing the job. Clayton Bryce gulped.

  “All right,” said Maxwell. He unstrapped the Ark from his back and offered it to Clayton.

  “Me?”

  “Can you fight?” asked Maxwell.

  “Of course not. I’m an accountant.”

  “Then you carry. Take it.”

  Squatting behind a pallet of cement bags for concealment, Maxwell pointed out the control center to Clayton; an Automatic Construction Worker with an assault rifle was crouched beneath the non-slip staircase, waiting to shoot anyone who approached.

  “That’s where you’ve gotta get to,” said Maxwell. “In two minutes, first squad is going to assault the opposition on their left flank, using everything they’ve got. Second squad will hit them from the right. That should draw their attention away from the middle ground, out there. The Monk’ll take out the sentry; once he does that, you rush in, up those stairs, and jack the Eye of Africa into the Babel supercomputer.”

  “Me?”

  “If you get shot, don’t stop,” Maxwell counseled. “Even if you’re hit bad, don’t stop until after you jack the Eye. But try not to get shot at all. Move fast.”

  “But why me?”

  “You’re an accountant.”

  “But—”

  “I’d do it myself,” said Maxwell, “but I’ve got other business.”

  “What other business?”

  “Something I saw while I was riding the crane.” He looked up. “I’ve got to check it out.” Maxwell patted the Stone Monk on the arm. “Two minutes.” He turned to go.

  “Wait!” Clayton said. “What happens if I do plug the . . . the whatever it is, into that supercomputer? Will it deactivate those Servants that are trying to kill us?”

  “No,” said Maxwell. “But if everything works out the way it should, the Eye of Africa will gain control of them.”

  Clayton took a moment to ponder this. “Will that be an improvement?” he asked.

  But Maxwell, hurrying away, didn’t hear the question.

  What If

  “This is a cheap shot,” Joan said.

  “But,” said Hoover, “you knew it would be.”

  “It’s. . . .” Joan raised her arms, thinking of a thousand protests, all of them futile.

  “It’s what? Not fair?” Hoover laughed. “It’s not supposed to be fair. It’s supposed to be ironic.”

  “Hoover—”

  “You can still deactivate the thermite charge if you want to.”

  “How?”

  “Just use the arming key to switch the safety back on.”

  “Arming key? What arming key?”

  “It’s a little thing, shaped like a button. Fits in the compartment in the bottom of the Lamp—you know the one I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Joan said, cheeks coloring again. “I know the one you mean.”

  “Uh-oh. You didn’t leave it in New Jersey, did you?”

  “Silly of me,” Joan confessed, “but Ayn told me it was a tracking device.”

  “Oh, it was—one of two. The other one is located in the Lamp’s handle. I’ve been following your progress very closely.”

  Joan counted ten, slowly. Then she asked: “What if I hadn’t come?”

  “How could you not have come? I told you, Miss Fine, you’re easy. You’re a compulsive Samaritan, the sort of kne
e-jerk do-gooder who’ll even save the life of a man she hates—so I knew you couldn’t pass this up. All I had to do was give you a few hard nudges to keep you on course.”

  “Yeah,” Joan said, “but what if I hadn’t come? What if I’d lost Ayn in the sewers? What if I’d refused to take that last step?”

  “What if Dewey had beaten Truman in ’48? Who cares? What matters is what did happen.”

  “Would you have killed them anyway?” It was half question, half plea.

  Hoover chuckled. “That’s something you’ll never know, isn’t it? . . . Ayn?”

  “Yes?” Ayn Rand said.

  “Explode.”

  Maxwell Kept Going

  The seismic sensor rested on a platform at the highest level of the unfinished tower. Every time a grenade went off on the battlefield below it, lights flashed on the front of the unit, as it measured the vibrations and gauged whether this was the explosion it had been programmed to wait for; but every time the vibrations were too weak, and the lights, after a moment, went out again.

  A black helicopter flew overhead, blades beating the air. Its loudspeakers came on with a scream of feedback: “Attention. This is Special Agent Ernest G. Vogelsang of the F. B. I. If you are within the sound of my voice, you are breaking the law. Cease fire, put down your weapons, and come out where I can see you.”

  Someone sniped at the helicopter, probably a Marine with bad memories of the Libyan Air Cavalry. The bullet glanced off a steel girder and hit the seismic sensor. The flashing lights came on and stayed on; beneath the platform, with a sound like a second gunshot, a gate flew up, releasing a fragile canister onto a track. The canister began to roll downhill, picking up speed.

  The hologram display of the track that Hoover had shown to Joan was a vast oversimplification; far from a straight incline, the real track was laid out like a theme park rollercoaster, looping and meandering all over the construction site. As the canister rattled back and forth across the width of the tower, it engaged the attention of more snipers. Twice it was nearly struck by rifle fire; twice the bullets missed. As it rounded a final bend, a rifle-propelled grenade bounced off the track in front of it but failed to explode. The canister rolled for the drop-off at the tower’s edge.

  A soldier’s head appeared at the very end of the track. An Electric Leg kicked in space; Maxwell hauled himself up into a precarious catcher’s stance. The virus canister was heavy, and it had built up a lot of momentum in the course of its run, but Maxwell braced himself with a leatherneck’s stubbornness and would not be moved. “Gotcha!” he said, as the canister came to rest in his arms.

  A cry went up as the Marines began their diversionary assault. First squad used a rocket launcher to break up suspected enemy positions. Second squad, showing equal enthusiasm but poorer judgment, used a mortar for the task, a bad weapon in a place with crossbeams. The ranging round went off right underneath Maxwell, blasting the canister track’s support; the track’s end-section collapsed and fell sideways, stopping when it hit a crane arm. Maxwell kept going.

  “The building is surrounded!” Agent Vogelsang warned. “The building is surrounded! You are all under arrest!”

  In the Game

  On a nonexistent island of little pink houses, meanwhile, a helicopter belonging to the EPR (Environmental Protection Racket) settled on the front lawn of a white ice-cream factory. Four uniformed enforcers jumped out, wagging their billy clubs at the filth belching from the factory’s smokestacks (why an ice-cream factory would have smokestacks is anyone’s guess, but since this was all imaginary, it didn’t have to make sense). The enforcers dragged the plant manager from his office and beat him with their clubs; he crawled back into the factory on hands and knees, and the smokestack output was temporarily cut in half.

  Harry Gant’s parents breathed easier. Harry didn’t; the EPR enforcers’ next act was to fly back across the island to his ice-cream factory, demanding payment for their services. They were expensive; he had to mortgage one of his delivery trucks to meet their price. Then the Electric Gant hired a corrupt banker to call the mortgage and repossess the truck, depriving Harry of a tenth of his revenue.

  He was losing. This did not seem to bother him much, considering what was at stake—but then it had been obvious, from the moment Roy explained the new rules of the game to him, the cheats and advantages to be given his opponent, that he had no chance of winning. The odds were so stacked against him, in fact, that even sacrificing his parents would have gained him nothing but a few extra minutes in which to feel like a bad son.

  The knowledge of certain defeat can be liberating: as Edward Abbey once observed, when the situation is hopeless, there’s nothing to worry about; and Harry had never been one to worry, anyway. Instead, drawing on his native talent for ignoring the larger picture, he blocked out grim reality—except for an occasional glance to make sure his mother wasn’t turning blue—and immersed himself in the game. When the Electric Gant slashed ice-cream prices, Harry slashed them lower; when the Electric Gant sent Wobbly agitators to invade Harry’s factory, he mortgaged another truck and hired Pinkerton strike-breakers to turn them back. In the real world Shorty the Barber polished his Tommy gun, but Harry, now totally engrossed in the contest, paid no attention to that. And as the Electric Gant whittled him down and the competition became ever more desperate, a strange thing happened: Harry smiled. He was beginning to enjoy himself.

  Roy Cohn was not enjoying himself. Ignoring the game, he stood at the window gazing north towards Babel, and brooded.

  “Toby,” he said.

  Gant’s personal assistant came instantly to life. “Yes sir, Mr. Cohn.”

  “Amos and Andy have been shot. The person who did it shouldn’t be a problem anymore, but I want you to go make sure.”

  “Yes sir. I’ll take care of it.” Toby picked up the Swingspeed bat from Gant’s desk and left the room.

  “Do you w-want me to go w-w-with . . . Should I b-b-back h-him . . . D-d-don’t you th-think it w-w-would be safer i-i-if. . .”

  “Shut the fuck up, Shorty,” Roy said. Then he frowned, still gazing out the window, seeing one more thing that he did not like.

  Air-Sea Rescue

  The blimp had grounded briefly at a CNN refueling berth at Kennedy Airport. Here the captive crew of the Mitterrand Sierra were turned loose, and the Palestinian Kazensteins announced their intention to fly home to London on the next available flight. Most of the rest of the Yabba-Dabba-Doo’s former crew caught public transport back to the city; Lexa went into the terminal to make some phone calls and also to pick up some clothes for Seraphina and Twenty-Nine Words. The lemurs remained aboard Sweet Jane, monkeying with the equipment in the production studio.

  While Walter directed Dan and Morris in topping off the blimp’s fuel tanks—it was a self-service berth—Philo stood on the tarmac with Captain Baker. The two captains had got to talking on the ride back from the battle zone. Captain Baker had been curt but polite, Philo reserved yet courteous, and over the course of the flight the two of them had discovered that they liked each other—or would have, had they not already established themselves as enemies. Their conversation continued even after the other mercenaries had left, and they were still at it when Lexa returned, carrying two souvenir T-shirts and an Eskimo-sized pair of sweatpants.

  “Toshiro and Betsy are going to pick us up at Grant’s Tomb,” she announced. “I had Bets patch me through to my home computer for a news scan—turns out there’s some sort of terrorist incident going on at New Babel. Big stuff. I figure since it’s right on our way anyhow, we can swing by for a look-see.”

  “You know, Lex,” said Philo, “Captain Baker and I were just discussing how we’d had enough big stuff for today. And with these chicken pox, I really should be resting . . .”

  “Don’t be a wimp. This is news happening, Philo.” She grabbed his hand. “Come on.”

  Philo looked at Captain Baker. “Well,” he said. “Got to go . . .”

  “Ye
ah,” said Captain Baker. “Well. . .”

  And Lexa, hearing the reluctance in their voices, said, “Oh, please,” and grabbed Captain Baker’s hand, too.

  “Walter!” Dan called now, as Sweet Jane entered Harlem airspace. “Walter!”

  Gruffly: “What?”

  “There’s a guy hanging off the building!”

  “What guy? Where?”

  “There,” Captain Baker said. He leaned forward in the copilot’s seat and pointed. “Far left, just below the top.”

  Maxwell had fallen into the catch tarpaulins that ringed the Babel construction site. The upper circle of tarpaulins, meant to stop small objects only, had collapsed beneath his weight, but the lower, last-chance tarps were made of stronger material. Even so, his headfirst plunge had torn a seam in the tarpaulin fabric; he’d slipped through the seam as far as his waist, and now hung upside-down from his belt, still clutching the virus canister.

  Captain Baker asked Walter: “How close in can you take us?”

  Walter looked at the fireworks display of explosions and muzzle flashes spangling the ziggurat’s crown. “Why would I want to take us in closer?”

  “Before I got on command track in the navy,” the captain explained, “I did about two hundred hours of air-sea rescue—abseiling from helicopters to pull downed fliers out of the water. So what I’m thinking, if you can get above that guy . . .”

  Walter shook his head. “Gas bag’s too wide. Even if we snugged right up next to the building, you wouldn’t be able to reach him from the gondola.”

  “Get above him,” Captain Baker said. “Then lower me on a mooring line. I can swing if I have to.”

  “Hmmph,” said Walter. “If you’re serious, there’s a rope ladder you can hang out the side door of the production studio. Some of our cub reporters like to use it for those macho hand-held shots. . . . But with that head injury, are you sure you’re up to this?”