But neither the gun nor the vial of gas would ever be used unless at least two of the three sets of forged identity papers he carried passed inspection by the Guards.
Johnson had been living in Greater New York under the name of “Michael Olinsky,” a television technician, a low-status identity that would not attract undue attention—a standard League practice.
But “Olinsky” could have no reason for traveling to Mercury that the Guards or the Guardian would accept. Therefore, Mason’s forgery factory had produced a new set of papers for “Daniel Lovarin,” representative of United Techtronics, with a travel pass to Mercury, ostensibly for the purpose of sizing up the prospects for building a factory on Mercury to produce office calculators. A good front, it was, since the Hegemony was most anxious to attract industry to the still somewhat questionable Mercurian environment dome.
Once on Mercury, “Lovarin” would disappear, and Johnson would become “Yuri Smith,” Maintenance worker in the Ministry of Guardianship. If the assassination succeeded, and if he were able to escape, he would return to Earth on papers made out for “Harrison Ortega,” a Mercurian adman on his way to Earth to organize a campaign to bring more Wards to Mercury—another reason for travel that would be highly approved by the Hegemony.
Johnson grinned as he patted the “Lovarin” papers in his breast pocket. It was hard, sometimes, to keep identities straight, to remember who you were supposed to be at any given paper check. But constant changes of false identities were essential. “Lovarin” had a right to travel to Mercury, “Smith” had a right to be in the Ministry, “Ortega” would have a right to go to Earth. But if any one “man” had papers that entitled him to all three, it would certainly seem highly suspicious. Ordinarily, the Guards simply scanned papers themselves, to see if the description and the photo on them matched that of the bearer. Sometimes they spot-checked retina patterns against the patterns on the papers. The papers would easily pass any such inspection. But if anything seemed out of the ordinary, the Guards would cross-check the papers with the memory banks of the Guardian, and then they would learn that the papers were forgeries—that the “man” they were made out fr did not in fact exist. So, many sets of ordinary papers were far safer than one set with too many passes attached.
Ahead on the horizon, the glare of the greenhouses faded away, and Johnson saw that he was rapidly approaching the large, open, concrete field and low terminal building of the spaceport. Soon he would either be on his way to Mercury, or … or he would be dead.
But there really didn’t seem to be too much chance of that. Everything had gone much smoother than he had really expected. The Democratic League had never tried to move more than a few dozen agents between planets before; now they had to get two hundred men to Mercury within two months. The forgery section had worked day and night to produce the necessary papers in time. Johnson had coldly calculated that a dozen or so agents would be caught in transit—by the law of averages, the Guards would’ve figured to check at least some of the false papers with the Guardian. As long as only a few agents were caught, suspicion would not be aroused. Johnson had expected to lose a few men in transit and had planned accordingly.
But so far, surprisingly, better than a hundred and fifty League agents had left Earth for Mercury, and not one had been caught. They were the cream of the crop, too—everyone wanted in on this one, and Johnson had felt that he owed it to the leadership of the League to give the assignment to those who had earned it by service. It was a fantastic run of luck that none of these men, many of whom were very high on the Hegemonic Enemy list, had been caught. Well, he thought, the League has had such bad luck ever since it was founded, that it was about time fate evened things out!
Now the terminal building loomed just ahead, and Johnson stepped outward onto a decelerating strip, then outward again to a slower one, and again and again, and he was standing on the concrete apron in front of the building.
He could see the blueish alloy hull of a big passenger ship standing tall and sleek just the other side of the white plasteel terminal building. Not many ships lifted from this civilian spaceport on any given day, and in fact, the ship just beyond the building seemed to be the only one in port at the moment—so it had to be the Mercury liner.
Johnson trotted up the broad, short flight of synthstone steps that led to the wide, doorless portal of the terminal building, and stepped inside under the watchful eyes of four big, brutal-looking Guards who stood, two-by-two, flanking the entranceway.
The interior of the building was one huge lobby, with a series of ten portals along the wall facing the main entrance, numbered in order by illuminated signs. Only one of the signs—number seven—was lit, meaning, as he had surmised, that flight seven, the Mercury flight, was the only scheduled lift-off of the day. He nervously noted that the other three walls of the big room were studded at regular ten-foot intervals with Eyes and Beams.
Johnson took his “Lovarin” papers from his breast pocket, and stepped quickly through the portal marked “seven.” He found himself in the familiar lumipanel-lit Coupletube. The flexible Coupletubes were permanently connected to the terminal portals at one end, while the other end was connected directly to the airlock of a loadhip. The Coupletubes were yet another security device, for where a short line of Wards had queued up at the far end of the tube immediately in front of the airlock, four Guards stood athwart the Coupletube going over papers and occasionally checking retina patterns against the papers with the small Eyebox one of them held. And this was the only possible entrance to the ship.
Johnson joined the line, recognized Igor Mallionov, one of the League agents assigned to the Mercury mission two slots ahead of him. They both carefully avoided even glances of recognition.
A burly blond Guard scanned Mallionov’s papers then waved him into the airlock. The Ward in front of Johnson showed his papers, was cleared, and then it was Johnson’s turn.
Although he had passed such checks with forged papers more times than he could remember, Johnson could not help tensing up as the big Guard held out a pawlike hand and grunted “Papers!” So much more than his own life depended on every move he made from here on in. …
Silently, Johnson handed the Guard the “Daniel Lovarin” papers with the attached travel pass.
The blond Guard glanced perfunctorily over the papers, looked up once at Johnson as he checked the photo on the papers with Johnson’s face.
He was about to wave Johnson on, when the Negro Guard holding the Eyebox said, “Let’s check this one’s peepers.”
The blond Guard shrugged, unclipped a small piece of film from Johnson’s papers, handed it to the other Guard. The Negro raised the Eyebox. It was a small metal box, with a red light and a green light on top, on either side of a slot that fitted the piece of film. There was a button on the rear of the Eyebox and two eyepieces in front.
The thing, Johnson knew, was a standard security device. The retina film was dropped in the slot, the subject’s eyes placed against the eyepieces. When the button was pressed, a microcamera in the box viewed the retinas and overlayed the live retina patterns on the ones on the film. If they matched, the green light went on—all clear. If they didn’t, the red light flashed—the man didn’t match his papers: an Unpermitted Act punishable by death.
The Guard dropped the retina-film into the slot, wordlessly held the Eyebox up to Johnson’s face—every Ward in the Hegemony was all too familiar with the procedure. Johnson stared into the darkness behind the eyepieces.
He was momentarily blinded by a brilliant flash of light as the Guard pressed the button and the Eyebox compared the retina film with the illumined backs of his eyeballs.
Then the Guard lowered the box and waved Johnson ahead into the ship, handing him his papers.
Johnson rubbed his eyes and heaved a sigh of relief as he stepped into the airlock—even though he had known that the patterns would match, the fear-reflex was deeply ingrained.
Another Guard ushered him
into a lifttube whose antigravs wafted him smoothly upward and deposited him in a large cabin where perhaps half of the hundred and eighty Gee-Cocoons were occupied.
Johnson picked a Cocoon—an open metal half egg—and sat down on the padded couch inside. The eliptical rim of the Cocoon reached up almost to his neckline.
After about ten minutes, and after perhaps another dozen Wards had entered the cabin, a klaxon sounded.
Hundreds of tiny pores in the metal of the Gee-Cocoon extruded fine plastic filaments. In a few moments, the stuff completely filled the Cocoon, enveloping Johnson’s body so that only his head, resting on the headrest of the couch, was free. He was swathed in the stress-absorbent packing like a fragile piece of glassware cushioned in excelsior.
Then the ship’s antigravs cut in, and he felt a moment of weightlessness as the ship and its contents were screened from the Earth’s gravity.
It lasted only a moment, for then the ship’s thrusters came on, and although he and the ship now had no weight, they did have inertia. He was pressed down into the Cocoon as the ship lifted, protected from the force of the thrust by the soft, stress-absorbing packing.
Johnson felt a great spasm of exhilaration as he was pressed down against the couch. Home free! Nothing could keep him from reaching Mercury now. Stage one of the plan was successfully completed!
Robert Ching studied the bland, calm faces of the seven Prime Agents of the Brotherhood of Assassins seated around the great rock table and thought of how different their calmness was from that of Arkady Duntov who stood before him.
What to make of men like this Duntov? Ching thought. Ignorant, but blissful in his ignorance. A man of action and nothing else, yet at the same time submissive to the orders of anyone to whom he could feel inferior, wanting someone to feel inferior to. Why does such a man submit to Chaos rather than to the Hegemony?
“The ship is ready to depart, Brother Duntov?” Ching asked.
“Yes, First Agent.”
“You understand your orders?”
“Yes, First Agent.”
“You have no further questions?”
“No, First Agent.”
Robert Ching sighed. What indeed to make of an Arkady Duntov? A man who rebelled against Order, yet always sought something else to obey, something greater than his own soul. A type that persisted, the dogmatic religionist, in an age where there were no longer any religions. Yet to a Duntov, who sought but to worship and not to comprehend, was not the Brotherhood a religious organization, would not s appear as a god? Certainly the Brotherhood attracted enough of these simplistic religious types at the lower levels. Yes, no doubt to the Duntovs, Chaos was a god, and the service of Chaos a religious calling. Or perhaps more precisely, the need for religion persisted in such men and they were attracted to the Brotherhood because Chaos was the closest thing to a god that there was. …
What was it that Markowitz had written about god and Chaos? “God is the mask men erect facing them to hide from the unacceptable fact of the Reign of Chaos. … God is that which fearful men must postulate, the omnipotent ruler of a superhuman Order, in order to protect themselves from the awful truth that the seeming randomness of the universe is not an illusion caused by the inability of mortal Man to completely comprehend the all-encompassing Order of God, but that Chaos itself is the ultimate reality, that the universe, in the last analysis, is based on nothing more structured or less indifferent to Man than Random Chance. …”
What irony, Ching thought, that men who search for a god to believe in should be drawn to the service of Chaos, the blind random truth behind the desperately Ordered illusion of a tidy, god-ruled universe! What irony—and yet, what a perfectly Chaotic situation!
“Very well, then,” Ching said. “You will now join your men on the ship and leave for Mercury immediately.”
“At once, First Agent!” Duntov said. He turned smartly on his heels and left.
Watching Duntov go, Ching wondered whether perhaps the Duntovs did not possess a kernel of the truth. Perhaps, in a way, the Brotherhood was a religious order. Did a religion need an anthropomorphic god? Or merely the certain knowledge that there was something bigger than Man and his works, something that would always, in the end, frustrate the absolute, certain Order that Man was forever trying to imprison himself in? Did it matter that that omnipotent something was not a god, was not any being, but the ultimate tendency inherent in everything in the universe, from atom to Galaxy, toward ever-increasing entropy, Chaos itself ? Perhaps, in its own way, Chaos was a god-immortal, infinite, omnipotent. …
“It goes well, eh First Agent,” Brother Felipe said, breaking into Ching’s reverie. “This Duntov is not very complex, but he is good at following orders, and—”
“It’s back! It’s back!”
Dr. Richard Schneeweiss suddenly burst into the chamber, his little arms waving wildly, his tiny, almost elfin face flushed with excitement. “It’s back! It’s back!” he shouted.
“What’s back?” several of the Prime Agents said in unison as Schneeweiss stood, arms akimbo, by the table.
“The probe! The probe!” Schneeweiss exclaimed. “The Prometheus Probe. The interstellar instrument package! It’s returned from the 61 Cygnus system. The faster-than-light drive is a success. The film is being processed in the photo lab right now.”
A bubbling wave of excitement swept through the room. Even Robert Ching had bolted to his feet, grinning like a boy. At last! he thought. The first stage of Project Prometheus is a success! The drive works! And now the probe has returned with pictures of the first extra-Solar planet human eyes have ever seen. … Ching knew that this was a great moment in scientific history, but to him it was more, so much more. It was no less than the beginning of the end of the Hegemony, the prelude to the ultimate triumph of Chaos. And what, he thought, will the film show? A habitable planet beyond the Solar System, beyond the control of the Hegemony? Perhaps even. …
“Come on!” Schneeweiss shouted. “Let’s get to the projection room. They should have the edited film ready to roll by the time we get there.”
“Indeed,” said Ching, “let us see this with our own eyes.”
He led the Prime Agents and Schneeweiss out of the chamber and into a corridor hewn from the rock of the asteroid, down the corridor to a droptube, which lowered them gently further down into the labyrinthine catacombs which permeated the asteroid.
As the antigravs lowered him down the droptube, thousands of questions flitted through Ching’s mind. Did 61 Cygnus have a habitable planet … ? How many? Might not there be … another intelligent race working out its destiny around that distant sun … ?
They reached the bottom of the droptube, hurried down another rock-walled corridor, reached a small auditorium where a screen was set up before several rows of seats. At the rear of the auditorium, a technician had set up a projector.
As Ching and the other Prime Agents took seats near the screen, Schneeweiss held a quick, hushed conversation with the projector technician, which Ching could not make out. The physicist’s face became wild, ecstatic, and Ching had to suppress an impulse to demand an immediate report—but no, this was something to experience through one’s own senses!
“What you will see is of course an edited summary of what the probe cameras saw, greatly speeded up,” Schneeweiss said. “But nevertheless, you will see. … Ah, but I should not tell you, you must see with your own eyes! Let us have the film.”
The screen came alive, and Ching saw a great spangle of stars against a black background. As he watched, the film seemed to jerk many times in succession, and one of the stars began to grow in fits and jerks, dominated the others, became a visible disc, which grew and grew. …
“The approach to the 61 Cygnus system,” Schneeweiss’ voice said from the back of the room. “A system of five planets. …”
The image on the screen abruptly changed, showed a jagged barren rock careening through velvet black space. …
“The outermost pla
net, dead, airless, about the size of Luna,” Schneeweiss said.
p height="0em" width="13" align="justify">Images of two great banded planets flickered on and off the screen in rapid, staccato succession—the first red, orange and yellow, the second banded with blues and blue-greens.
“Two gas giants, roughly the sizes of Uranus and Saturn respectively,” Schneeweiss said. “One tiny inner planet, two-thirds the diameter of Titan.”
The screen showed a small black disc, cruelly outlined in the blazing light of the nearby star.
“And …” Schneeweiss said, pausing dramatically, “the second planet! 1.09 Earth diameter, oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, .94 standard gravities! In the liquid water zone! Look!”
A blue-green disc appeared on the screen, grew in rapid jerks of perspective to the size of an orange, a melon, a great sphere that all but filled the screen. Ching gasped as he saw great oceans, four brown and green continents, ice caps at both poles, winding rivers, islands, cloud masses. …
The camera perspective jumped again, and now the screen showed an aerial view of a large section of one continent—green, obviously wooded areas, rivers, blue lakes: life! The camera-angle narrowed, the area shown was smaller, the details clearer: woods, grassy rolling plains, and … and cultivated fields! There was no mistaking the bands of vegetation—orderly rows and checkerboards on the plains, sinuous bands following the contours of the hills—for anything else!
“Yes!” said Schneeweiss. “Sentient beings, undoubtedly! But there’s more! Look!”
Now the camera seemed to be diving towards the surface, in great jumps of increased magnification and narrowing field of vision. The camera seemed to hang for a moment over a stretch of coast where a large river emptied into the sea. … And then the view jumped again, and the screen showed. …
A city! Scores of square miles of tall, silver buildings, along both banks of the river, lining the seacoast. Long docks reached fingers out into the river. Roads led out into the surrounding countryside. Tiny flashes of light seemed to be flitting about above the city like mites. …
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