Johnson began walking briskly but not too hurriedly across the ramp to the secondlevel street. A few more yards, and …
“Hey you!” bellowed a voice from the groundlevel street below.
Johnson looked down. It was a Guard. “You, up there!” the Guard shouted. “Back in the building! No one leaves this area yet!”
Johnson took a few steps back towards the Ministry, positioning himself in the center of the ramp as he did so, where the ramp itself would give him some cover from lasebeams from below. Suddenly he whirled around and broke into a dead run towards the glideway.
It was only a matter of a few yards, a second or two. The Guards below got off two shots which weren’t even close, and then Johnson was at the lip of the glideway. He lept onto the two-mile-an-hour outermost strip of the glideway, bowling over a fat man who waved his fist foolishly as Johnson skipped inward, onto the seven-mile-an-hour strip.
Already, he was several blocks from the Ministry. The important thing now was not to raise too much of a stir; the glideway was filled with Wards, and a man rushing around bowling them over would stand out like a spider in an anthill. Forcing himself to be leisurely about it, Johnson made his way inward toward the thirty-mile-an-hour express strip, threading his way politely through the Wards on the twelve, eighteen and twenty-five-mile-an-hour strips.
Finally, he was standing on the express strip itself. He had bought some time, but not very much. Within an hour, maybe less, all Guards would be alerted to be on the watch for a man in Maintenance coveralls answering the description on “Vassily Thomas” papers.
He had to get out of the dome fast, and back to Phobos. He knew that he had at best a few hours of safety left on Mars—and maybe a good deal less than that.
But “Samuel Sklar” would be safe on Phobos.
If Johnson could get out of the dome before they caught up to him.
The iron control of the Hegemony was based on three independent control systems: the Eyes and Beams of the Guardians, the human Guards, and the pass system.
Every Ward was required to carry his personal identity papers with him at all times. In order to travel between the planets and moons, a Ward had to have a specific travel pass for a specific destination attached to his papers. Tder tol passes were issued only for what the Hegemony considered good reason, and they were valid for a limited time only. There was no such thing as a permanent travel pass, or one good for all planets and moons—except for very high Hegemony officials. Each pass was good for one round trip between two given bodies—unless it was an immigration pass.
Being caught in transit without the proper pass was, like all other Unpermitted Actions, punishable by death.
Johnson had traveled from Earth to Phobos, Mars’ great “natural space station,” on his “Samuel Sklar” papers, which included a travel pass from Earth to Phobos, with a side jaunt to Deimos permitted. “Vassily Thomas’ “ papers were for a Martian resident and included no travel passes.
In this way, Johnson was “Thomas” on Mars and “Sklar” while in transit, and there was no traceable connection between the two.
The catch was getting from Phobos to Mars and back illegally.
Johnson had doubled back and changed directions several times along the glideway system, to make doubly sure he had lost all pursuit and was now on a groundlevel express strip, speeding out toward the circumference of the environment dome and airlock eight.
As the buildings whipped by, and the base of the dome came ever closer, Boris Johnson felt that old, familiar confined sensation that haunted him everywhere but on Earth.
The trouble with the Extra-Terrestrial Bodies was that all the colonies were islands of Hegemonic control in deadly, hostile environments. Nowhere in the Solar System but Earth could a man survive for a minute without the protection of either a spacesuit or a permaglaze environment dome.
And the domes had all been built by the Hegemony. They were all planned and controlled down to the last molecule of air. It was an ironic paradox—space, the frontier worlds and moons, where all the thinkers of the prespace past had assumed that the traditional freedom of the frontier would reign, were actually the bastions of most total Hegemonic control. On Earth, with its thousands of years of history, its still-remaining areas of wilderness, its secret and forgotten places, millenial accumulations of ruins, there was still some chance to escape temporarily from the Eyes of the Hegemony.
But the colonies were created whole by the Hegemony. The great permaglaze domes that kept death out were like aquariums for tropical fish—or cages.
And so, whatever precarious refuge there was for the Democratic League, it had to be on Earth.
Now Johnson made his way outward, across the decelerating strips of the glideway to the two-mile-an-hour strip adjacent to the lip. He hopped off the glideway and onto the immobile walkway of the street as the ‘way passed airlock eight.
Airlock eight was a little-used lock. It was designated as an excursion lock for Martian residents, and since curiosity was a trait that ustify"couraged, and since there was really very little of interest to anyone but specialists on the Martian surface anyway, the airlock was nearly nonfunctional and only perfunctorily guarded.
And the single Guard slouching by the rack of spacesuits in front of the outer airlock door looked very, very bored.
Johnson sauntered up to the Guard.
“I’d like to go outside,” he said.
“Why?” snapped the big Guard, apparently grateful to have someone to be nasty to.
“Just feel like looking around. Maybe I’ll find the Lost City of the Martians,” Johnson said, with a little laugh. The Lost City was a standard local joke on Mars, since the closest thing to “Martians” were the little belly-crawling sandtoads.
“Very funny,” said the Guard. “But it just so happens that no one’s being allowed out of the dome right now.”
“Oh…?” said Johnson. “Something wrong?”
“Something wrong? Where you been? The Brotherhood of Assassins just tried to kill the Coordinator!”
“The Brotherhood …?” Johnson blurted in amazement. “Why—”
He stopped himself just in time. That damned Khustov was clever, all right! No way to deny that there had been an assassination attempt—all of Mars had seen it—but they must have stopped the television coverage before the Brotherhood annunciator bomb had gone off. It sure looked better for Khustov to have escaped a Brotherhood plot than for the Wards to know that he had been saved from the League by the Brotherhood. Only the few thousand Wards who had been present in the flesh knew what had really happened, and it would be their unaided voices against the full weight of all the mass media. The League assassination attempt, for all that the average Ward of the Hegemony would ever know, had never happened. Damn! Damn! Damn!
“You look kinda funny …” said the Guard, fingering his lasegun and eyeing Johnson narrowly.
Johnson thought feverishly. If he didn’t get back to Phobos soon, he was a dead man. He had been spotted leaving the Ministry, and any moment now this Guard could get a call and be ordered to stop anyone in Maintenance coveralls answering the general description of “Thomas”—Johnson. If he did that, they would run a general identity check on Thomas’ papers. The forged papers were perfect, but if they were checked against the records of the Mars Master Guardian, it would be discovered that “Vassily Thomas” did not exist—there would be no birth record, no school record, no work record, nothing. Johnson knew he had to get to Phobos or die, and to get to Phobos, he had to get past this Guard. Now!
“There must be some connection …” Johnson muttered.
“What?”
“I said there must be some connection,” Johnson said. “Between the assassination attempt and the sabotaged spacesuits.”
“What’re you talking about?” grunted the Guard.
“Well, since you have your orders, I suppose I’ll have to tell you,” Johnson said grudgingly. “I’m with suit Maintenanc
e. A couple days ago, we discovered three sabotaged spacesuits at airlock two. Neat job—just some tiny holes in ’em, not large enough to be noticed until you’re too far from the dome to get back alive. That’s the real reason I wanted to go outside. We’re checking all the suits in the dome, but it’s a slow job, and we have orders to keep it quiet. It’d be a real mess if the Wards found out that someone had been able to sabotage the suits. Since I can’t go outside, I’ll have to check ’em right here. Of course, all this is to go no further.”
“I know how to maintain security!” snapped the Guard. “Go ahead, check the suits.”
Johnson ambled over to the rack of spacesuits and began poring over them. He removed the helmet from one of the suits and stuck his head inside.
“Of all the—!” he suddenly exclaimed, and began cursing long and loud.
“What is it?”
Johnson whistled, withdrew his head from the wide, open collar of the spacesuit. “Man, you just wouldn’t believe it!” he said dazedly. “You just wouldn’t believe it!”
“What did you find, man?” snapped the Guard.
Johnson pointed numbly into the suit. “Just look at that!” he shrilled. “Just look at it!”
The Guard muttered, loped over to the open spacesuit, stuck his head inside.
Johnson brought the edge of his right hand down hard on the base of the Guard’s skull.
The Guard grunted softly and collapsed.
Quickly, Johnson donned a suit. He grabbed up the Guard’s lasegun and shot the other suits full of holes.
He paused, stared for a long moment at the unconscious Guard. He knew that the smart thing to do would be to kill the Guard, but somehow he could not bring himself to kill a helpless man, even a pig like this who he would ordinarily shoot with no regret whatever. With a shrug at his own softness, he opened the airlock door and stepped inside.
He hoped that when they found the ruined spacesuits and the unconscious Guard, they would take it for a crude actof tterrorism, at least until the guard was able to talk. After all, this airlock led nowhere but to the empty Martian surface. All interplanetary ships were controlled by the Hegemony—they surely wouldn’t take this for what it was: an escape from Mars itself. At least not for a while.
And even later, there would be nothing to link it to “Samuel Sklar,” a man who had never been on Mars.
Anyone stumbling across the little ship hidden in the jumble of big, red iron oxide boulders would be hard put indeed to explain its presence on the Martian surface—for it was a simple, tiny Deimos scooter with only enough power to travel between Phobos and Deimos, Mars’ miniscule moons.
Boris Johnson scrambled clumsily between the rocks in his bulky spacesuit, and he was breathing hard by the time he had opened the hatch on the little cabin of the scooter. He had been traveling overland as far as he could, cursing himself all the while for his failure to buy more time by killing the Guard. If they put two and two together before he got the scooter off Mars. …
It pleased the Hegemony to maintain as many illusions of freedom as possible. Along with the spiraling prosperity, it helped to keep the Wards placid. Deimos was maintained as a kind of national park, where a man could be alone with the stars on the little airless rock and feel that he was free.
But like all other “freedoms” in the Hegemony, it was pure illusion. Visitors to Phobos were allowed to rent the little Deimos scooters from private agencies. The scooters had just enough power to get from Phobos to Deimos and back again. A man in a scooter might feel that the wide void was his to explore, but the hard reality was that he could go nowhere but to Deimos and back again.
Thus the Hegemony felt perfectly secure in letting Wards take coaster-jaunts by themselves—Deimos was a tiny, uninhabited, airless rock, and the scooters carried only a two-day air supply.
“Samuel Sklar” had rented such a scooter on Phobos, from “Phobos Phil,” one of the smaller rental agencies. Officially Sklar was now on Deimos—a perfect cover story. And “Phobos Phil” was a member of the League. …
Johnson squirmed through the hatch and into the little cabin. The scooter was crude, cheap, and simple: a tiny one-man cabin, which could be sealed airtight, but which had no airlock, since the air loss from opening it directly to the vaccuum of space would be minimal; and a cluster of rockets below the cabin, shielded by a sheet-metal shroud.
But Phobos Phil had made some changes in this particular scooter. Externally, it appeared to be an ordinary Deimos scooter, but the shroud concealed far more powerful engines than a scooter was authorized to have. Powerful enough, and with enough extra fuel, so that it could touch down on Mars and get back to Phobos again. …
Johnson settled himself in the crude pilot’s seat, and then remembered to disconnect the meter. The scooters were rented partly on a milage basis, and the total milage of a trip appeared on the scooter’s metere League. yet another way the Hegemony made sure that a scooter wasn’t being used for unauthorized trips.
Johnson punched a button marked “three” on the scooter’s little minicomputer. “Three” was the preprogrammed emergency course to Deimos—maximum acceleration all the way.
He braced himself for the blast, and for the hairy trip to come—the idea was to get to Deimos, where the scooter was supposed to be, in the shortest elapsed time possible, thus minimizing the chances of detection.
The rockets cut in with a deafening roar and slammed Johnson down into the seat. It would be six gees all the way to Deimos, without antigravs, without a Gee-Cocoon, but the crudest part of the trip was that Johnson knew he would have no control over whether he lived or died until the scooter reached Deimos. If it was spotted on this unauthorized course by a Hegemonic ship or detection station, it would be blasted without warning and he would never know what hit him. …
As the gees fuzzed his vision, Johnson realized that this was his first moment of repose of any kind since the assassination attempt. He did not welcome it, for now the full weight of the failure pressed upon him, heavier than the six-gee acceleration. The whole plot had been a catastrophe, a total loss. Not only had Khustov escaped, but the Democratic League hadn’t even been implicated in the attempt on his life. Putting the blame on the Brotherhood neatly removed the event from the realm of Hegemonic failure, for the attitude of the average Ward toward the Brotherhood was akin to his attitude toward fate or mental illness. Its every action seemed to be the work of insane religious fanatics, following, so it was rumored, the dictates of some superstitious book of arcane mysticism, variously called “The Bible” or “The Koran” or “The Theory of Social Entropy.”
No one seemed to know what was in this book, but whatever it was, it was something straight out of the Millenium of Religion, and as such, the madmen who worshipped it could only be regarded as a natural nuisance—like some of the other mental illnesses which still persisted.
Which made it very convenient for the Council to pin League actions on the Brotherhood of Assassins, and thus dismiss them as simply the work of madmen. …
Johnson strained his eyes to read the chronometer. Only another minute or so to Deimos. …
Maybe I’ll make it after all … he thought. Whatever good that’ll do. … The cold truth was that the League was getting nowhere. Membership, small to begin with, was declining. And Hegemonic control grew ever tighter. More and more places were being equipped with Eyes and Beams. The Wards became ever more cowlike and contented as the living standard soared and the punishment for Unpermitted Actions became more and more certain.
And now the Brotherhood too seemed to be somehow aiding the Hegemony, however inadvertently. …
Or was the Brotherhood of Assassins a creature of the Hegemony in the first place?
Maybe there was no point in going on. … Maybe the most merciful thing would be for the scooter to be detected, and …
Just then, the rockets cut out. Johnson floated in the seat straps, suddenly weightless. And even as the end of the acceleration eased
the weight of his body, the sight of Deimos, that dead, jagged rock hanging outside the Viewport, eased his spirit.
Whatever else had happened, at least he was alive. He had made it to Deimos, and now he was home free. Now he was “Samuel Sklar,” returning to Phobos from a jaunt to Deimos. In minutes, he would be back on Phobos, and in a day he would be aboard a ship for Earth, the one place where the League at least had a fighting chance to survive. Two thousand of the League’s three thousand members were on Earth.
Earth was still too complex, too honeycombed with forgotten places, to be totally controlled. The League survived, and he survived. A battle had been lost, but the fight would go on, the fight to destroy the Hegemony and replace it with that thing called Democracy. The fight would go on, and next time. …
Boris Johnson promised himself that at least there would be a next time.
“Order is the enemy of Chaos. But the enemy of Order is also the enemy of Chaos.”
—Gregor Markowitz, The
Theory of Social Entropy
3
THE COUNCIL CHAMBER was ostentatious in its simplicity. The walls and ceiling were plain, cream-colored duroplast, and the floor was carpeted by a brown wool rug. The center of the room was occupied by a large, sleekly functional, solid walnut table.
There were four loungechairs on each of the long sides of the table, single loungechairs at the head and foot. In the center of the table sat two unadorned solid silver trays, one holding glasses of various sizes, and the other, as per tradition, three decanters: wine, bourbon and vodka.
From this modern room on Earth, the ten men seated around the table ruled twenty billion people. There was no legislature, no independent judiciary. Every last quantum of power in the Solar System was held by the Hegemonic Council. Five of its members were elected by the Wards (though elections were seldom contested). The other five were chosen scientifically by the System Guardian, the great supercomputer which had access to the data banks of all area Guardians.
Agent of Chaos M Page 3