Underground Movement by Allen Kim Lang - HTML preview

UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT

A mangled corpse held them captive
 in that dark tunnel beneath the Earth's
 surface—and taught them a lesson
 about what freedom really means!

The hatch to the front compartment swung open for the first time. One man came out. He turned at once to make sure that the air-tight door behind him had locked. Satisfied that it had, he turned again to look down the cabin at us. His face showed that insolence we'd learned to know as the uniform of the "Bupo", the State Secret Police.

The man from Bupo walked down the aisle between the passengers toward the rear of the car. He swept his eyes right and left like a suspecting-machine, catching every detail of us on his memory. People leaned toward the walls as he approached, like children shrinking back from a big animal, and relaxed as he went by. He was out of sight in the galley at the rear for a moment, then was back, carrying a pitcher of water in one hand and the key to the front compartment in the other.

A battering-ram hammered into my belly. I slammed bent, hitting my head against the knees of the man sitting across from me. The capsule shuddered, smearing some obstruction against its outer wall. There was an instant when I weighed nothing. Then my head snapped back with hangman's violence as the capsule bounced forward a few meters. Then we were still. From the shock to the silence was a matter of ten seconds.

I pulled myself up from the floor. Surprisingly, my skeleton still hinged at the joints and nowhere else. The Bupo man was flat in the aisle, bleeding black splotches into the green carpet. He still had hold of a piece of the water-pitcher's handle. I ignored him, while my brain began to push out explanations for this impossible accident.

Something had gotten into the Tube, that slick intestine we'd ridden through under the Andes, below the Matto Grosso, out under the pampas. Something had got in the way of the hundred hurricanes that pushed us. The eyes and ears and un-man-like senses I'd helped build into this five thousand kilometers of metal gut had stopped the pumps. The vacuum inviting our capsule on had filled with air, no longer tugging us to the terminal nest by the Atlantic. We were abandoned, fifteen meters under God-knows-where.

Mrs. Swaime, who knew that I'd helped in the Tube's engineering, turned to me for explanation. "What happened?" she asked. "What did we hit?"

The foreigner across the aisle, Mr. Rhinklav'n, smiled, a curious effect. "A cow on the track, I believe," he said, his voice brassy with the accent of Mars.

"How did a cow get in here?" Anna demanded. She was the girl whose girl-ness had snagged the eyes and riled the hormones of every male in the car.

"The gentleman is joking," I assured Anna. I glanced toward Surgeon-General Raimazan, the man whose knees had hammered my forehead. He was clutching his right forearm, his eyes squeezed shut by pain. "What happened, Doctor?" I demanded, laying my hand on his shoulder.

"Fractured my arm, my ulna. Get my case under the seat. I want to look at him." The doctor nodded toward the Bupo man, who was struggling to sit up. I got out the doctor's bag.

"Morphine?" I asked, finding it.

"Codeine, next tray, will be plenty." I dropped three of the pills into Dr. Raimazan's left hand. He swallowed them without water. I used my newspaper for a splint, rolling it tight and bandaging it to the doctor's forearm. Then I hammocked the arm in a sling made of a triangular bandage. "OK?" I asked.

"You could make a fortune in orthopedics," Dr. Raimazan said. "Let's get our friend out of the aisle." I stepped out and pulled the policeman toward a sitting position. He groaned and opened his eyes. Though he'd fallen into the fragments of the broken pitcher, he'd suffered damage only to his dignity and his lower lip. A line of red dashes below the lip showed where his teeth had bitten through. He shook his head at our offers of tape and antiseptic and struggled to his feet. Holding the key to the front compartment before him like a dagger, he shuffled up there. He unlocked the door. Shouting something violent, he ducked into the compartment and slammed the door behind him.

I lent my hands to the Surgeon-General's instructions, patching up the cuts and sprains the passengers had gotten. In a moment Miss Barrie, the stewardess, took the bandages out of my hands and finished the job with fewer knots and less adhesive. The passengers sat quiet in the dim light of the capsule, as though afraid that panic might constitute a security-violation. The lovely Anna pouted. Though she was unhurt herself, her precious radio was shattered. It lay under her seat, its antenna snapped like a slender idiot's-neck, its electronic guts spilling from its belly.

"Whatever else happens, we're rid of that puling nuisance," Don Raffe growled, looking at the ex-radio. His mouth settled into creases, a satisfied line between parentheses. He picked up his magazine and leafed through it, to prove himself superior to these chance joltings-about. The lights maliciously dropped till only the bulbs at either end of the aisle were glowing. These died till they were yellow coils, magnifying the dark that fogged us.

In the top tray of my test kit was a flashlight. I broke it out to sweep the light in a quick survey of the car. Anna's eyes squinted at my beam, her mouth loose with fear for a moment, like a drawstring bag. Then she squared off, sat straight, stared defiantly into my light. Without looking down she snapped her purse open and took a tiny automatic pistol from it. She laid this on the seat beside her, out of sight. "I've got a right to defend myself," Anna said, grim as a suffragette. I laughed out loud at this tableau of maidenhood-at-bay. She smoothed her hair back with both hands, making a double cantilever of her arms to lift her breasts, demonstrating the noble architecture of woman, mocking me. I stopped laughing. I jumped the beam over her to help Miss Barrie break out the emergency lights.

Those lamps were lit, and glowed in the cabin with their chilly blue light. Mrs. Swaime asked of the woman beside her, as though it were an afterthought, "Why did we stop?"

"I don't know," Mrs. Grimm admitted. I knew her. She was the wife of the Minister of Agriculture, a man who'd acquired a reputation for integrity in a government that didn't use the word. "For me the Tube has always been just a link between home and Albert's office at Bahia. I didn't think that link could break."

Miss Barrie was knocking at the door up front. It opened a reluctant inch to show the eye of the Bupo cop. He growled some answer to the stewardess' question, then slammed and relocked his door. Miss Barrie hurried back to me. "A man was pulled out of that compartment," she said. "He unlocked the entry hatch and was blown out into the Tube by cabin pressure."

"Like a beetle blasted off a bush by a garden hose," Don Raffe murmured.

"I expect my baggage is strung out from here to Havana," Anna pouted. "Doesn't the State have regulations to keep prisoners from killing themselves on public property?"

"Suicide?" Mrs. Swaime asked, soft as a prayer.

"Must have been," Don Raffe snapped. He twisted his magazine into a club, underlining his words with thumps against his open palm. "Some weakling not worthy to stand with us in war, he was. A conscientious objector, probably." Don Raffe said "conscientious objector" exactly as he'd have said the name of a sexual perversion. "We're all going to the Capital on the Leader's business. Some of us have been called to the Leader's actual presence." He glowed pride, giving his secret away. "There is no place in the Leader's new society for weaklings. They are better where this one is, underground, dead."

"Many of us are pained by the thought of war," the Martian said. "Not in the pain of weakness, but that of pity for men lost in battle who might have grown strong in peace."

"A peace-monger!" Don Raffe's was the tone of a Puritan finding a red zuchetto under his pastor's hat. "Surely you don't expect our Leader to bear forever the insults of the Yellow Confederacy? Of course," Don Raffe's eyes widened in anticipation of delicious violence, "you men from Mars are yellow, too." The foreigner, whose skin was in fact the color of lemon-peel, smiled and made no comment.

"I wish you men wouldn't talk so much about war," Mrs. Swaime broke in. "Talking about ugly things just helps them to happen. Rafiel, my boy, is in the Continental Guard. He says we'll have no war. He says that the Confederacy is too afraid of our airpower to risk a war. Rafiel is a flier."

"Of course," Don Raffe smiled, his smile not reaching up to his eyes. "The Yellow Confederacy is so afraid of our flying defenders that we're forced to travel like moles, so as not to confuse our own radar guns. Our skies are closed to us. Everything that flies across two continents, from Tierra del Fuego to Medicine Hat, is shot from the air as an enemy. We must take to these caves for a ten-hour trip. Ten hours for a capsule to be blown from Bogota to the coast, a trip a rocket could clip off in minutes! That's why our leader will take us to war, to get back the freedom of our own blue skies." Don Raffe finished, a little breathless.

"I wonder who the poor man was," Mrs. Swaime said, ignoring him.

Miss Barrie shook her head, wondering the same thing. Without saying anything, she went back to the galley to call a surface station on the capsule's radio-telephone. While she was back there, Miss Barrie took a lamp and peered through the glass window in the rear hatch. She saw what becomes of a man caught between a pistoning capsule and its tube. After being sick, she came to tell us that the surface station had determined that we were just east of the village of Rabanan. My mental map of the route the Tube followed showed Rabanan as a dot fifteen kilometers from the nearest exit hatch. Miss Barrie smiled on courage. "A rescue party will be here before long," she assured the others. "Would anyone care for sandwiches or coffee while we wait?" Her stomach must have cringed at the thought.

"Tea would be nice," Mr. Rhinklav'n volunteered. Then he realized his blunder: tea came from Confederacy countries. "I mean coffee, of course!" he said.

"I'll help you get it ready," Mrs. Grimm said to Miss Barrie.

"Oh, no," the hostess protested, without much conviction in her voice. Mrs. Grimm smiled and led the way back to the galley. In a moment she had the water for our coffee steaming on the chemical burner. The stewardess meanwhile was smearing the current butter-substitute on slivers of bread and arranging the buttered triangles into Maltese crosses on our plates. Thus Miss Barrie brought us tiffin.

The Martian took his coffee black. He sat looking into it as he sipped, as though apologizing for his alien presence. Mrs. Swaime, more practiced than the rest of us in this act of informal refection, took a slice of bread and a cup of sugar-thick coffee and talked. She steered clear of the grim topics around us, turning her attention instead to Mr. Rhinklav'n, who sparkled back at her like a grateful mirror. "Is this your first visit to Earth?" she asked him.

"No, indeed. I spent several years at your excellent University at Sao Paulo," the yellow man said. "That was some time ago, of course." He refrained from saying just how long ago. The Martian lifespan makes humanity's scant three-score and ten look feeble.

The Surgeon-General asked me quietly, "Why, exactly, are we held here?"

"As long as the body is back there the pumps can't run. Safety devices prevent the capsule from moving so long as there's a foreign body in the Tube." I stopped, suddenly aware of my clumsy, accidental pun.

"All right," Dr. Raimazan said. "We'll have to move the corpse into the capsule, and take it to Bahia with us."

"It will be the worst sort of job," I said.

"If the repair crew takes more than a day, we're in for trouble anyway." He was right. This was February, our hottest month. "You have a strong stomach?" he asked.

"No." I hurried forward to tell Miss Barrie of our decision. She gave us a lamp and a blanket, and phoned the surface to tell them what we were doing. The doctor and I locked the air-tight door of the galley behind us.

At this end of the capsule there was a second air-tight hatch, exactly like that in front, the one the body had hurtled through. At its middle, like a glass navel, was a dial showing the pressure outside. It read 975 millibars. I spun the wheel to unlock the door from its frame, stubbornly resisting the temptation to anticipate through the window, to see what waited us out there. The hatch swung out.

I turned the lamplight on the walls outside. It was bad. The tube was bulged at the top a little way back, like a vein about to rupture. Its surface was smeared with red. It smelled like a place where they slaughter chickens. The body lay about twenty meters back. I took the blanket from Dr. Raimazan and walked back along the slippery shaft, trying to dull my eyes and nose to what I was about to do. The doctor, one arm trussed to his chest by my crude sling, could lend me only moral support. I looked down at the corpse. One arm had been torn off at the shoulder, and was held to the body by the handcuffs between the wrists. The man had been cut and burned and broken before he'd thrown himself out of the capsule.

I rolled the thing into the blanket and dragged it behind me to the capsule. It took ten minutes for me to force it through the hatch. Inside, we rolled the body under the galley sink, then washed our shoes and ourselves. We dogged the hatch shut and phoned topside, telling them to let the winds take hold again.

As we made ready to go back into the cabin, the light of my lamp glinted off a bit of metal lying on the floor. It had fallen from our horrible package under the sink. Dr. Raimazan picked it up. He held it near the lamp, examining it. He was going to say something to me when the door to the cabin, which we'd unlocked, burst open. "What in hell's name are you doing?" the Bupo man demanded.

"We've cleared the Tube," I said very softly, shoving before his face the card that showed with my face and fingerprints that I was a Tube Engineer. The Surgeon-General stared at the policeman as though he were something wet and stinking from a swamp.

"Who was the man who jumped from your compartment?" the doctor asked.

"State business!" the Bupo snapped. "Keep your mouth shut!" Too late, he recognized the Surgeon-General's uniform, and became silent.

"Watch your long tongue," Dr. Raimazan growled. "I have an audience with the Leader: you may find yourself envying the poor devil under the sink his blanket." The Bupo, wavering between anger and apology, settled on an attitude of injured dignity. He turned and stalked down the aisle toward his private cabin up front. I followed him with my eyes, memorizing him. In case I should ever meet him again, I wanted to complete wrecking his face where the accident had left off.

The capsule jumped onto its plunger of wind. Only the brilliance of the ceiling lights showed that we were again flashing toward the coast and the Capital. I sat beside the Surgeon-General. "What was it that you picked up back there?" I asked him. He handed me the thing. It was a Medal of Honor. Its ribbon was a scrap of silk, and the medal itself was bent as though it had been clamped in a vise and hammered. Turning it over, I read the engraved legend through a smear of blood. "To Doctor Noah Raimazan, for devotion to his profession, his people, and his Leader." A curt congratulation, I thought. After a moment I asked, "A brother?"

"My oldest son. He saved hundreds in the ruins of Managua, in the plague that followed the Revolution there." Dr. Raimazan took the medal from me and sat rocking back and forth, staring at the laurel-garnished star in his hand. "Why did they kill him?" he asked.

"It wasn't suicide?"

"It was escape. You saw what they'd done to him, with their little knives, their pliers and electrodes. Noah was a hero, set by Imperial order on a pedestal. He looked directly at the Leader, man to man, his physician. He wasn't as strong as I am, this son of mine. Noah couldn't watch men killed for their ideas, defending his silence with the argument that he was a doctor, set somewhere above grubby politics." Dr. Raimazan's voice was loud enough that anyone in the car who wished could have heard him.

"Your son died for talking plain," I whispered to the doctor.

We sat in silence. The Capital of the Leader of our hemisphere was only an hour away. After a moment the Surgeon-General sat straight. He brushed his uniform with his left hand, and smoothed the sling under his right arm. Then he crossed the aisle to the seat where Anna sat. I stared at him. "Do you mind if I sit beside you?" he smiled down at the girl, as gallant as though they were at a military ball.

"As you wish, General," Anna answered. She was pleased, I saw, that a man with such a uniform and such position should notice her.

The doctor talked to Anna the way a pretty girl expects to be talked to, emphasizing what he was saying by an occasional avuncular pat. After a while, Anna grew a little bored with a playmate who was older than her father. As the car began to slow, caught by resistance coils in the walls of the Tube, I saw the Surgeon-General pat the girl playfully once more, and pick up something she'd laid beside her in the darkness. She didn't notice.

We halted on the shores of the Bay of All Saints, Bahia, the Capital. We saw no more of the Bupo man, since his compartment held the exit hatch. He was out first, scurrying somewhere with the news of Noah Raimazan's suicide, news which would either lift him a notch in his profession or push his head onto the chopping-block. The rest of us lined up, passed through the front compartment, out onto the platform. The station sparkled like a diamond tiara, glittering with slogans and brass and reminders that we'd reached the greatest city in our half of the world.

A gray sedan stood on the ramp, waiting for those the Leader had singled out for audience. Its door bore those interlocked commas, the yin-yang symbol that the Leader had taken from the enemy to make his cypher. Dr. Raimazan nodded good-bye to me. Accompanied by Don Raffe, he walked over to the Imperial limousine. The Surgeon-General replied to the salutes of the bodyguards with his left hand, turning aside their references to his injury with a grin. The doors slammed shut, and the sedan roared off, carrying Don Raffe and Surgeon-General Raimazan to meet the Leader.

And carrying, under the doctor's sling, the little pistol I'd seen him steal from Anna.

END