Virgil had been expecting TV cameras. If they had them down in the tunnels, they must have them upstairs in the HWA. So after a few minutes, when Virgil was sure that the B-men were down there for the long haul, he opened a small panel in the side of his crate and stuck out a long iron rod with a magnesium tip. The important thing about the magnesium rod was that Virgil had just set it on fire, and when magnesium burns, it makes an intolerably brilliant light. Virgil soon squirmed out through the panel, a welding mask strapped over his face. Even through the dark glass, everything in the room was blindingly lit— certainly bright enough to overload, or even burn out, the television cameras. Any camera turned his way would show nothing but purest white. To make sure, he lit two more magnesium rods and placed them on the floor around the room. Satisfied that all three cameras were now blinded, he withdrew a can of spray paint from his crate and used it to paint over their lenses. The mikes were easy to find and he destroyed these simply by shoving burning magnesium rods into them. Then he called me on the phone. "I was right," he said, "I'm safe, and you can go to sleep. But look out. Trouble is brewing." Alas, I was already asleep before he got to that last part.
While the magnesium rods burned themselves out, Virgil climbed into the cab of the truck, where the corpses of its late drivers had been stretched out on the floor. The Crotos' plan was daring and their aim excellent; they needed to penetrate the truck's armored cab and kill the occupants without wiping out the engine or the gas tank. The driver's window was splattered all over the seat, the door itself deeply buckled and perforated by the thumb-sized shells. Virgil hit the ignition and drove it far enough out to wedge the electrical gates open while leaving enough space for other vehicles to pass.
Back in the Plex, he made phone calls to several readymix concrete companies. Returning to the Burrows, he found a cutting torch and wheeled it back to the HWA. The red platform was nothing more than thick steel plate, and once he had gotten the torch fired up and the red paint burned away, it cut like butter. As he sliced a hole in the platform, he reviewed his reasoning:
1) Law is opinion of guy with biggest gun.
2) Biggest "gun" in U.S. held by police and armed forces.
3) Hypothesis: someone wants to break the law, or more generally, render U.S. law null and void in a certain zone.
4) This necessitates a bigger gun.
5) Threat of contamination of urban area with nuclear waste ought to fill the bill.
6) This provides a motive for taking over Nuke Dump. 7) Crotobaltislavonians have taken over Nuke Dump.
8) They either want to contaminate the city, or take over this area— the Plex— by threat of same.
9) Either we will all be poisoned, or else representatives of the People's Free Social Existence Node of Crotobaltislavonia will dictate their own law to people in this area.
10) This does not sound very nice either way.
11) Maybe we can destroy their gun by blocking the possible contamination routes. The elevator would be their preferred route, as it would provide direct access to the atmosphere.
A rough steel circle about two feet across pulled loose and dropped into the blackness. Virgil pulled back his mask and peered down. The circle's edge was still red hot, and as it fell through the blackness, he could see it spinning and diminishing until it smashed into the bottom. The clang reached his ears a moment later. Through the hole he could smell the odor of the sewers and hear occasional arguments among rats.
Hearing the whine of a down-shifting truck, he shut off the torch and ran out into the Access Lot. Virgil directed the cement truck through the jammed gate and up to the loading dock. He directed the driver to swing his chute around and dump the entire load into the freshly cut hole.
The driver was young, a philosophy Ph.D. only two years out of the Big U. He obviously knew Virgil was asking him to commit an illegal act. "Give me a rational reason to dump my cement down that hole," he demanded.
Virgil thought it over. "The reasons are very unusual, and if I were to explain them, you would only be justified in thinking I was crazy."
"Which doesn't give me my rational reason."
"True," admitted Virgil. "However, let's not forget the conventional view of craziness. Our media are filled with images of the crazy segment of society as being an exceptionally dangerous, unpredictable group. Look at Hinckley! Watch any episode of T. J. Hooker! So if you thought I was crazy, the reaction consistent with your social training would be to do as I say in order to preserve your own safety."
"That would be true with your run-of-the-mill truck driver," said the truck driver after agonized contemplation, "who tends to be an M.A. in sociology or something. But I can't make an excuse based on failure to think independently of the media."
"True. Follow me." Virgil walked across the HWA, leading the truck driver over to the heavy door that led into the Refuse Area. Here he paused, allowing the truck driver to notice the long red streaks on the floor. Virgil then opened the door and pointed at the nine bloody corpses, which he had dragged there to get them off the platform. "Having seen the remains of several savagely murdered people, you might conclude that my showing them to you so dramatically constituted a nonverbal threat. You might then decide— " but the truck driver had already decided, and was running for the controls at the back of the truck. The concrete was down the hole in no time. The truck driver did not even wait to be given an official American Megaversity voucher.
After that, trucks arrived every fifteen minutes or so for the rest of the morning. Subsequent truckers, seeing wet cement slopped all over the place, impressed by Virgil's official vouchers, were much less skeptical. By lunchtime, twenty truckloads of cement were piled up behind the sliding doors at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
The first Refuse Area dock was still open. After blowing the crap out of the hazardous waste truck, the B-men had hauled the real radioactive waste cylinder out and left it there in the doorway. Virgil had the last driver bury the cylinder in cement where it sat. He smoothed out a flat place with his hand and inscribed: DANGER. HIGH LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE. TRESPASSERS WILL BE STERILIZED. His day's work was done.
Unbeknownst to anyone else, the two most important battles of the war had already been fought. The Crotobaltislavonians had won the first, and Virgil the second.
Once the actual war got started, things happened quickly. In fact, between the time that S. S. Krupp and two of his associates and I had got on an elevator and the time we escaped from it, the situation had changed completely.
S. S. Krupp felt compelled to visit E13S after its riot/party of the night before, somewhat in the spirit of Jimmy Carter visiting Mount Saint Helens. Naturally, as faculty-in-residence for E Tower, I was asked to serve as tour guide. It was preferable to washing dung off my boots, but only just.
Krupp arrived at the base of E Tower at 11:35 A.M., fresh from a tour of Bert Nix's cremation site. Considering the gruesome circumstances, not to mention the journalists and the SUBbie screaming directly into his ear, he looked relaxed. With him were Hyman Hotchkiss, Dean of Student Life, and Wilberforce (Tex) Bracewill, Administrator of Student Health Services. Hyman looked young, pale and ill. Tex had seen too much gonorrhea in too many strange places to be shocked by anything. They were so civilized that they viewed my Number 27 BILL'S BREWS softball jersey as though it were a jacket and vest, and shook my hand as though I had saved their families from death sometime in the distant past.
Here in the lobby the sixteen elevators and four fire stairs of E Tower emptied together into a desert of vandalized furniture, charred bulletin boards and overflowing wastebaskets. I didn't know about events on E13S yet, and my guests were doubtless still considering the charred remains of Bert Nix, so we were not suspicious when elevators 2, 4 and 1 remained frozen at the thirteenth floor for ten minutes. Only number 3 moved. When it got to us, it was packed with students. Two got off, but the rest explained in dull voices that they had missed their floor and were staying on for the return trip. Therefore the journalists and protesters found no room in the compartment; only the four of us could squeeze in.
This chummy group rode to the Terrorist-controlled ninth floor, where everyone else got off. As the doors slid shut, a burnout who had just disembarked turned around to say, "Sweet dreams, S. S. Krupp."
We started up again. "Shit!" said Krupp. "We've got a problem. Everyone get on the floor. Tex, you got your .44?"
Of course he did. Much to the concern of the SUB, Tex was massively armed at all times, on the theory that you never knew when degens might come and shoot up the clinic looking for purer highs. He was prepared to go out like a true AM administrator. Dropping stiffly to the floor, he paused on his knees to whip a humongous revolver out of his briefcase and hand it to Krupp.
"Hope we don't have to shoot it out on thirteen," he said. We agreed. Krupp tore from Tex's briefcase a medicine bottle, struggled with the childproof cap, yanked out the cotton wad, tore it in half and stuffed it into his ears. At this point I began to experience terror, more of Krupp than of whatever he was planning to dismember with that howitzer.
We passed the twelfth floor and the elevator crashed to a stop. Above us, from the elevators still halted on thirteen, we heard excited yelling.
"I get it." Krupp cocked the revolver and we all plugged our ears as he pointed it at the ceiling, The bullet vaporized the latch on the trap door and flipped the door open as well. We saw light above us. Krupp's second shot annihilated the light in our car. I felt as though my fingers had been driven three inches deep into my ears; my eyelids fluttered in shock and my nose complained of dense smoke. Krupp now stood up in the darkness and fired the remaining three rounds through the trapdoor. With a sigh and a thump, a corpse crashed into our roof.
At a great distance I heard Tex say, "Sep. Here's a speed loader." After some clicking and cursing, Krupp fired two more rounds— the natives were getting restless— and tugged at my shirt, "Leg up!" he shouted.
I stood and made a step of my hands, and he used it to propel himself through the trap door. Once he had scrambled through, I jumped and dragged myself to the roof after him. The only thing I was scared of was touching the corpse; other than that, one place was as dangerous as another. Krupp, who did not share my fear, retrieved a revolver from the body and handed it to me.
He began scaling the emergency ladder on the shaft wall. When he got to thirteen, he pounded the wall switch and the doors slid open. Seeing him jump through the aperture onto thirteen, I began to follow him up the ladder, not really thinking about what I'd do when I arrived. The two adjacent elevators began to head down, and as they passed, someone on a roof fired off a wild shot in my direction.
A tremendous roar rang up and down the shaft. It came in three bursts, and not until the third one did I realize it was machine-gun fire. I had been dimly aware of it— "Oh, that's a machine gun being fired"— but it was not for a few moments that I comprehended that machine guns were in use at my institution of higher learning. There were also three WHAMs, and then silence.
Taking this as a good sign, I dove through onto thirteen and lay there dazed, looking at an elevator lobby dotted with strings of machine-gun fire and blood pools, tracked and smeared by hasty tennis-shoe footprints that converged on the two elevators. I sat up timidly. Krupp went to the far side of a large pillar and retrieved an assault rifle from a dead soldier. "See," he said, pounding hollowly on the pillar with the butt of the rifle, "these pillars are just for show. Just a little girder in the middle and the rest is plaster and chicken wire. Don't want to hide behind them." Judging from the bullet holes in the pillar and the unmoving legs and feet on the other side, someone had recently been in dire need of Krupp's architectural knowledge. "Can't believe they're handing out loaded Kalashnikovs to cretins like that, whoever it is that's running this show," he grumbled. "These youths need ROTC training if they're going to pack ordnance like this,"
"Maybe this is someone's ROTC program," I suggested, trying to lighten the atmosphere. Krupp frowned. "Maybe this is someone's ROTC," I shouted, remembering the cotton. He nodded in deep thought. "Very good. What's your field again?"
"Remote sensing. Remote sensing. Involves geography, geology and electrical engineering."
"I'm listening," Krupp assured me in the middle of my sentence, as he walked to the two corners of the lobby to peer down the hallways. "But you'll have to speak up," he added, squeezing off a half-second blast at something. There was an answering blast, muffled by the fire doors between the combatants, but it apparently went into the ceiling. Impressed, Krupp nodded.
"Well, we've got two basic tactical options here," he continued, ejecting the old clip and inserting a fresh one taken from the dead SUBbie, "We can seize the wing, or retreat. Based on what we've seen of these sandbox insurrectionists, I don't doubt we can stage a takeover. The question is: is this wing a worthwhile strategic goal in and of itself, or is my strong inclination to seize it singlehandedly— almost, excuse me— just what we call a macho complex these days? Not that I'm trying to draw us into psychobabble." He glared at me, one eyebrow raised contemplatively.
"Depends on what kind of forces they have elsewhere."
"Well, you're saying it's easier to make tactical decisions when one has more perfect information, a sort of strategic context from which to plan. That's a predictable attitude for a remote-sensing man. The aereal point of view comes naturally to a generalistic, left-handed type like you." He nodded at my revolver, which I was holding, naturally, in my left hand. "But lacking that background, we'll have to use a different method of attack— using 'attack' in a figurative sense now— and use the more linear way of thinking that would suggest itself to, say, a right-handed low-level Catholic civil engineer. Follow?"
"I suppose," I shouted, looking down the elevator shaft at Tex's face, barely visible in the dim light.
"For example," continued Krupp, "our friends below, though we must be concerned for them, are irrelevant now. Presumably, the students on this wing will do the rational thing and not attack us, because to attack means coming into the halls and exposing themselves to our fire. So we control entry and exit. If we leave now, we'll just have to retake it later. Secondly, this lobby fire stair here ensures our safety; we can always escape. Third, our recent demonstration should delay a reinforcement action on their part. What I figure is that if we move along room by room disarming the occupants, they'll be too scared by what happened to that guy in the hall to try any funny stuff. Christ on fishhooks!" Krupp dove back into the safety of the lobby as a barrage of fire ripped down the hall, blowing with it the remains of the fire doors. We made for the stairway and began skittering down the steps as quickly as we could. By the time we had descended three flights, the angry shouts of Terrorists and SUBbies were pursuing us. The shouters themselves prudently remained on their own landing.
"We're okay unless they have something like a hand grenade or satchel charge they can drop down this central well," said Krupp. "Hold it right there, son! That's right! Keep those paws in the air! Say, I know you."
We had surprised Casimir Radon on a landing. He merely stared at S. S. Krupp's AK-47, dumbfounded.
"Let's all hold onto our pants for a second and ask Casimir what he's up to," Krupp suggested.
"Well," said Casimir, taking off his glacier glasses to see us better in the dim stairwell. "I was going to visit Sarah. Things are getting pretty wild now, you know. I guess you do know," he concluded, looking again at the assault rifle.
"Physics problem:" said Krupp, "how far does a hand grenade fall in the seven seconds between handle release and boom?" "Well, air resistance makes that a toughie. It's pretty asymmetrical, and it would probably tumble, which makes the differential equation a son-of-a-bitch to solve. You'd have to use a numerical method, like"
"Estimate, son! Estimate!"
"Eight hundred feet."
"No problem. But what if they counted to three? How far in four seconds?"
"Sixteen times four two hundred fifty-six feet."
"If they count to five?"
"Two seconds sixty-four feet."
"That's terrible. That's six stories. That would be about the sixth floor, which is where we make the run into the lobby. Do you think they'd be dumb enough to pull the pin and count to five?"
"Not with a Soviet grenade."
"Good point."
"If I'm not mistaken, sir," said Casimir, "they all have impact fuses on them anyway. So it'd go off on six in any case."
"Oh. Well what the hell?" said Krupp, and started to run down the stairs again.
"Wait!" I said. Krupp stopped on the next landing. "You don't want to go up there," I told Casimir.
"Yeah. If you think it's wild down there, you should see thirteen. It's wilder than a cat on fire, thirteen. Those people are irrational," said Krupp.
"Are you going to stop me by force?" asked Casimir.
"Well, anyone traveling with S. S. Krupp today is a prime target, so I couldn't justify that," said Krupp.
"Then I'm going," said Casimir, and resumed his climb. "Let's get a move on. Let's build up a good head of steam here so we can charge right through the danger zone at the bottom. I think the twenty-third psalm is in order."
Reluctantly, I left Casimir to his own dreams and we began to charge down the steps side by side, crossing paths at each turn, listening upward. I saw a 7 painted on the wall. We were practically diving down the last flight when I heard someone yell "Five!" We were on the level now, sprinting for a door with a small rectangular window and a sign reading E TOWER MAIN LOBBY.
"Did he say five, or fire?" Krupp wondered as we neared the door. We punched it open together and were in the lobby. And there, waiting for us, were three Crotobaltislavonians with UZIs. "Professionals, I see," said Krupp. He had gone through on the hinged side of the door and now pushed it all the way around so that it was flat against the lobby wall, where he leaned against it. Back in the stairwell there was a series of metallic clanks, like something heavy bouncing off an iron pipe. Having seen many TV shows involving foreigners with submachine guns, I had already raised my hands; I now took the opportunity to clap them over my ears.
Krump. Bits of fire shot out the door at incredible speed. The three janitors just seemed to melt and soften, sagging to the floor quietly.
"It worked," said Krupp, sounding drunken and amazed. Trying to walk around, I found that the concussion had scrambled my inner ear; stars shot around like tracer bullets. I went to a wall phone, dialed Lucy and Hyacinth's number, and listened to it ring. At each ring my head cleared a bit. They were not answering. Had the Terrorists taken twelve? I redialed; no answer. After eight rings I lost my mind, gripped the handset that had withstood untold vandalism attempts and jerked it out by its roots. I grabbed its shattered wires and swung it into the wall like a mace, ludicrously enraged, and began to stumble back toward the stairway.
"Hate to bust in, but we've got to stop porch-setting here," shouted Krupp from the lobby entryway. He lay on the floor with the AK-47 pointed down the hall.
"What about these B-men?"
"They'll keep."
"I'm not leaving. My friends are up on twelve. Hey, look. These men are in pain okay? I'm going to tell their friends upstairs they've got wounded down here."
"Could do that," said Krupp, "but Casimir's in the stair well, If they come down this way, he'll be like a hoppity toad in a snake stampede."
For the first time, we heard shouting and shooting from the main hallway which led to the Cafeteria. "Don't look forward to fighting my way through whatever that sounds like," said Krupp.
"Shit. Shit in a brown bag. Great fucking ghost of Rommel," I said. "That thing is a tank." — Indeed, a small tank was approaching our location. We retreated.
For Fred Fine too it was a hell of a day. He was physically burned out to begin with. The Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome had stood at yellow alert for two days, and he had worked like an android the whole time, directing the stockpiling of supplies and material in the most secure regions of Plexor. Klystron may have been a haughty swordsman who reveled in single combat, but Chris the Systems Programmer was a master strategist who understood that, in a long war, food was power. The recent Mixture of Klystron and Chris was regrettable, but it did enable him to plan for the coming weeks with magical intuition and technological knowledge, a combination that proved extremely potent.
Finally Consuela and Chip Dixon had insisted that he sleep, and Klystron/Chris had okayed the rec. He slept from the close of our expedition until 1200 hours on April First, then rolled smartly out of the sack, called an aide for a quick briefing and proceeded to the mess hall for some grub and a few cups of joe. It was there, in the Cafeteria, just as he had predicted, that the war began.
Many things contributed to its success. The MegaUnion finally found the secret elevator used to smuggle scab workers into the Caf, resulting in fights between the Haitian and Vietnamese cooks and the professors and clerical workers who stood in their way. The outcome was predictable, and when the battered progressives returned to the main picket outside the Caf entrance, Yllas Freedperson exhorted them to hang tough, to further peace and freedom in the Plex by finding the violent people who had hurt them and bashing their brains out.
Mobs of hungry students broke through the picket lines empty-handed, obviously bent on eating scab food. The unionists were still so pissed off from the earlier fight that more scuffling and debris-throwing ensued. Twenty TUGgies carrying anti-communist signs took advantage of the confusion to set up a barrier around the SUB information table and erect their OM generator, a black box with big speakers used to augment their own personal OMs, which they now OMed through megaphones. A picket-sign duel broke out; it became clear that the SUB had reinforced their picket signs to make them into dangerous weapons. At a sign from their leader, Messiah #645, the TUGgies produced sawed-off pool cues and displayed highly developed kendo abilities.
All the Terrorists then seemed to arrive together. Twenty Droogs, thirty-two Blue Light Specials, nineteen Roy G Bivs, eight Ninja with Big Wheels on their foreheads, four of the Flame Squad Brotherhood and forty-three of the Plex Branch of the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republican Army (Unofficial) marched in with their politically correct bag lunches and, shouting and waving sticks in the air, demanded that a large area be cleared of scab sympathizers and other scum so they could sit down. This section contained a table of twenty-five athletic team standouts, heavily drunk, as well as a number of people on ghetto scholarships who really knew how to handle unpleasant situations. Much hand-to-hand violence took place and the Terrorists were humiliated. There were more of them, though. A huge arena ring formed around the brawl and tables were herded to the walls to make room. The SUB showed up, decided that the brawl was ideologically impure, and began chanting and throwing food. This triggered the Cafeteria's mass food fight emergency plan; but as the enforcers began to emerge from the serving bays, they were met by MegaUnion partisans who wanted to get them out in the open. Short on brawling power because of the inexplicable absence of the Crotobaltislavonians, the MegaUnion was bested here.
The Haitians and Vietnamese, who had built up fierce hatred for the Terrorists, took this opportunity to rush into the central brawl. The SUB tried to block them, without success. The TUGgies charged after the SUB to make sure they didn't do anything illegal. The fight was frenzied now; a flying wedge of cooks speared back toward the kitchen to obtain big knives.
Upstairs in the towers, SUB/Terrorist extremists who were apparently waiting for something like this began to bombard the roof of the vast kitchen complex with heavy projectiles. On cue, the administration's anti-terrorism guards, stationed on Tar City and in some wings and on top of towers, responded by blasting tear gas grenades into the SUB/Terrorist strongholds. Already there were gaping holes in the roof; above the tumult, everyone in the Caf now heard the booms of the grenade launchers— every gun in the place was drawn for the first time.
Shooting began, at first to scare and then to injure. People scrambled to the walls, throwing furniture through the wide plate-glass wall sections to escape. But some were unable to get out, and others were happy to stay and fight. After a minute of incomprehensible noise and violence, battle lines formed and things became organized.
Obviously SUB and TUG were prepared. Both groups hoped to capture the kitchen by entering through the serving bays and vaulting the steam tables, Local fights hence developed along the approaches to all twelve serving bays. Squads from both groups made for the main serving bay, ducking sporadic fire. The SUB got there first, shot the lock out and kicked the door; but there was a senior TUGgie barricaded behind a steam table, with a heavy machine gun aimed at them and a smiling protиgи holding the ammo belt. The gunner watched cheerfully as the SUBbies jumped back and rolled away from the door, but held his fire until the TUGgies behind them had jumped through the breach and scurried out of the line of fire. He immediately opened fire on a strategic SUB salad bar across the Cafeteria. This entailed shooting through several tables, but he had plenty of ammo, and as soon as the furniture was conveniently dissolved, a river of red tracer fire could swing around and demolish whatever it touched, such as a milk machine, a number of people, and, of course, the flimsy salad bar. The SUBbies retreated and joined their Terrorist allies in safer places.
Klystron/Chris knew as well as anyone that the kitchens were the strategic linchpin of the Plex. He was the first person in the Cafeteria to decide that war was breaking out, and so during the early stages of the great fistfight he mobilized and girded his loins for the Apocalypse. Retreating to a corner, he dumped the now-useless textbooks out of his briefcase and withdrew the bayonet, which he stuck in his belt, and the flash gun, which he carried. As the booms and thuds from the ceiling indicated that aerial bombardment had begun, he flexed his fingers, then shoved his right hand into his left armpit and snapped out a standard-issue .45 automatic pistol— just to test the shoulder holster one last time. After cocking the weapon he gingerly slid it back under his houndstooth polyester blazer and turned toward the nearest serving bay.
A burst from the flash gun got him through the door and over the steam tables into the kitchen area. Here was chaos: scab workers running to and fro, some with knives; Cafeteria administrators telling him to get the hell out of here, an opinion his flash gun then modified; particularly bold SUBbies and TUGgies making their first inroads; a man in a flannel shirt carrying a .50-caliber machine gun— that could be a problem— all of this in an almost primeval landscape littered with sections of roof, piano fragments, scattered food and utensils, broken pipes spewing steam and water, sparks and flames breaking out here and there.
The elevator he sought was at the dead-end of a hallway, hidden in the nethermost parts of the kitchens, back by the strategic food warehouses. Arriving safely, Klystron/Chris protected his rear by slitting open and overturning several hundred-pound barrels of freeze-dried potatoes and dehydrated eggs near the doorway, where hot water spewed from a broken ceiling pipe. Without waiting to watch the results he jogged down and boarded the elevator, held for him by a captain of the Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome.
Below, in the Burrows, he emerged to find all in readiness: several officers awaiting orders; his body armor and weapons; and in a nearby storage closet, the APPASMU, or All-Purpose Plex Armed Strife Mobile Unit.
The APPASMU was a project begun three years ago by several MARS members. Starting out as a joke— a tank for use in the Plex, ha ha— it became a hobby, a thing to tinker with, and finally, this semester, an integral part of the GASF defense posture. The tank was built on the chassis of an electric golf cart, geared down so that its motor could haul additional weight. The tires had been filled with dense foam to make them bulletproof, and a sturdy frame of welded steel tubing built around the cart to support the rest of the innovations, Hardened steel plates were welded to the frame to make a sloping, pyramidal body in which as many as four people could sit or lie. Gun slits, shielded peepholes and thick glass prisms enabled the occupants to see and shoot anything in their vicinity, while a full complement of lights, radios, sirens, loudspeakers and so forth gave the APPASMU eyes and ears and vocal cords. The APPASMU had been designed to fit into any elevator in the Plex. It could recharge its batteries at any wall outlet, and replacement battery packs had already been stashed at several secret locations around the building.
From status reports provided by underlings as he pulled on his gear, Klystron/Chris learned that S. S. Krupp was trapped in a hostile area of E Tower. Such a mission was perfect to battle-test the APPASMU and toughen up its crew, and so after barking some orders to his major officers he squeezed into the tank along with three others and steered it backward into the elevator.
The situation upstairs had begun to take on some texture. The dead-end outside the elevator was blocked by a mountain of light-yellow potato-egg mixture. The APPASMU plowed through with ease, and Klystron/Chris could now hear the rumble of the heavy TUG machine gun. The APPASMU could not withstand such firepower, so Klystron/Chris decided to outflank it by exiting the kitchens through a back route. He aimed the APPASMU down an aisle lined with great pressure vats and headed for the door.
Unfortunately a stray weapons burst had struck a pressure vat by the exit. The top of the vat exploded off, blasting a neat hole through the ceiling, and the vat, torn loose by the recoil, tumbled over and spilled thousands of gallons of Cheezy Surprise Tetrazzini onto the floor. This mixture had long, long overcooked in the fighting, causing the noodles to congeal into a glutinous orange mass with an internal temperature over three hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which had rolled out on impact and squatted sullenly in the doorway, swathed in its nebula of live orange steam. Klystron/Chris fired a few desultory rounds into it and concluded that this doorway was now impassable. They would have to choose a serving bay, pass through the Caf and hope to avoid the TUG machine gun— exactly what the APPASMU was built for, though to fire it now would be to use up their first and only surprise.
"Well have to make the most of it, men. We'll head for the lines of the SUB/Terrorist Axis and pick up all the weaponry we can find. If you see anything that looks like it's armor-piercing, sing out!" Without further chitchat, and accompanied by a soft plopping of potato-egg, the minitank was out of the kitchen and into a serving bay which was being disputed in hand-to-hand combat. The astonished fighters could only stand in confusion, and only two rounds glanced off the APPASMU's armor before they entered the Caf. The tank's entrance occasioned a surprised lull in the fighting. Klystron/Chris and Chip Dixon used the flat-trajectory indoor mortars to lob a few stun grenades behind the line of overturned tables and main salad bar that served as the SUB bunker. At this, the Axis forces turned and ran through the shattered plate-glass walls behind them and scurried for F Tower. The poorly armed wretches who had been pinned down by their presence emerged and sprinted for the exits.
They got a fine haul from the stunned and demoralized soldiers in the Axis bunker: a Kalashnikov, a twelve-gauge slug gun, ammo, knives, clubs and gas masks, all plastered with smoldering lettuce and sprouts but functional. After collecting the booty and using his intercom to dispatch a negotiator to cut a deal with the TUGgies— who were clearly winning in this theater— Klystron/Chris sent the APPASMU crashing magnificently through a plate-glass panel that had miraculously remained unbroken, and pointed it toward E Tower and the endangered Septimius Severus Krupp.
There we met them, below E Tower. From a distance we could make out the insignia: a stylized plan of the Plex (eight Swiss crosses within a square) with a sword and phaser rifle crossed underneath and the word MARS above. "I guess that would be Fred Fine," I said.
The top hatch flipped open and a helmeted, goggled head arose, speaking through the PA system. "This is the Grand Army of Shekondar the Fearsome Expeditionary Plex Purification Warfare Corps. Resistance is useless." The tank pulled up next to us, and Fred Fine pulled back the mask to reveal (alas) his face. He spoke with his usual grating humility.
"Mr. President. Professor Redfield. Sorry if we upset you. This is a little something we've been developing as a career suitability demonstration project during the recent years of decaying civilization. In fact, once we're on secure ground, I'd like to discuss the possibility of receiving some academic credit for it, Mr. President. The basic design principles are the same as for any armored vehicle."
"I see that," said Krupp, nodding. "Heimlich would go nuts over this. But what you need, I think, are more liberal arts courses." "Dr. Redfield will find the infrared personnel sensing equipment very interesting. But sirs, we have heavy fighting in the Cafeteria. My men have secured the other end of this hallway while I came to get you."
Chip Dixon had clambered out to reconnoiter and inspect the APPASMU. Seeing the three mangled B-men, he scurried over to them and slid his hand under one's ear to check his pulse. A queer look came on his face and he stared directly up at Fred Fine. "Jim, he's dead," he whispered.
"Sir to you," said Fred Fine, nonplussed, "and my name is not Jim, it's . . . something else. Anyway, sirs, my men are now securing D Tower, with direct elevator connections to the Burrows. We've arranged with your anti-terrorist forces to courier you to C Tower, which they are securing. Chip will steer the APPASMU, you'll sit in my place and I'll serve as point man. Dr. Redfield is welcome to follow. But first we must retrieve those weapons!" He clomped over to the remains of the Crotobaltislavonians.
Sarah slept until about noon, when a corpse burst through her window. Her eyes were half open, so that it exploded out of a dream: a leathery female cadaver from the Med College, wearing the wig Sarah had left behind in Tiny's room, white clown makeup smeared on the face. This effigy had been placed in a hangman's noose and thrown out the window above hers; it swung down and crashed through her window, then swung out and in and out as Sarah struggled between sleep and awakeness, disbelief and terror. At last she chose awakeness and terror, and stared at the corpse, which grinned.
She tried to scream and gag at the same time, but did neither. Outside she heard the excited whispers of the lurking Terrorists. She took three slow breaths and pulled her .38 from under her pillow. As she was sliding her feet into her running shoes, she found a big shard of window glass on one of them and nearly panicked. She picked up her phone and punched out Hyacinth's number (after the rape attempt she had bought a pushbutton phone so she could dial silently). Hyacinth answered alertly. Sarah pushed the 1 button three times and hung up, stood, slipped on the pack containing her emergency things and padded to the door. Sleeping in her long johns was neither cool nor glamorous, but proved useful nonetheless.
There was a long wait. The Terrorists were quietly getting impatient. wondering whether she was in there, talking about shooting the door open-they knew a police lock would be difficult to blow off. Sarah stood shivering, feet on marked places on the floor, gun in right hand, doorlock in left. If only there had been a way to practice this!
Hyacinth's gun sounded. Horribly slow, she snapped the lock, moved her hand to the doorknob, grasped it, turned it, swung the door open and examined the five men standing there. They were looking sideways toward Hyacinth. As they began to turn their faces toward her, she finally picked out the one with the gun— thanking God there was only one gun. For just a second now they were trapped and helpless, caught in a double take, trying to process the new information. For the first time Sarah understood how generals and terrorists made their plans of attack.
The one with the shotgun had turned it toward Hyacinth and now seemed indecisive. The other men were stepping back and dropping to the floor. Sarah's finger twitched and she fired a round into the ceiling.
The rest happened in an instant. She pointed her gun at the head of the armed man. One of the other four suddenly whipped a handgun from his belt. Sarah wheeled and shot him in the stomach. The one with the shotgun tried to swing around but scraped the end of his barrel on the wall; Sarah and Hyacinth fired two shots apiece; three missed, and one of Sarah's hit the man in the arm and dropped him. The other three had simply disappeared; looking down the ball, Sarah saw them piling into the fire stairway.
There was less blood than she had expected. Before she could examine the two wounded, Hyacinth floated past and Sarah followed. They ran to the elevator lobby, where Lucy was waiting with an elevator and another gun. That was what had taken so long— an elevator! But many Terrorists were pouring into the lobby as the doors began to creep shut. A Terrorist glided toward the wall buttons, hoping to punch the doors open; Sarah made eye contact with him; he kept going; she fired a shot whose effects she never saw. The doors were closed, joining in front of them to form a Big Wheel mural. The car was motionless for a sickeningly long time, and then shifted and began to sink.
Casimir Radon only came in at the end of it. He had gotten up earlier than any of us that morning. Opening his curtains to let in the gray light, he had seen the blind patches grow, and had put on his glacier glasses before allowing any more light past his eyelids. He lay in bed until the blind spots had shifted over to the right side of his vision, then read some physics and tinkered with the railgun's electronics. Finally he went to lunch; but seeing the outbreak of violence there, he headed back up the stairs to look for Sarah, meeting me and Krupp. After we parted, he continued resolutely. placing his feet as gently as possible on each tread and pressing carefully until he moved up to the next step. As a result he moved with a smoothness that was not even noticed by the little embryonic headache in his brain.
A few seconds after leaving us behind, something flashed by him down the center of the stairwell, and a second later— accompanied by a brief stabbing light— came a sharp awesome KABOOM that KABOOMed many times over as it bounded up and down the height of the stairwell. To Casimir it was like being bayoneted through the head, and when he dared to move again, the headache struck so badly that he could only laugh at it. He proceeded toward the Castle in the Air with a helpless moaning laugh, heels of hands buried in temples, and heard other, less tremendous explosions.
The door to E12S was open and three Terrorists were running through in a panic, headed for thirteen. Something white flashed by the door, heading for the lobby. Casimir ran into the hall and was promptly knocked aside by a migration of Terrorists, who emerged from several nearby rooms. Falling, he glimpsed Sarah and Hyacinth, clad in white long johns, running with guns and backpacks down the hall. He managed to trip a few of the Terrorists, more by flailing away randomly than by craftiness, and stood up and began to head for the elevators too. As he approached the lobby, there was another painful WHAM and he felt a sharp pain in his chest. He had no idea what had happened. In fact, Sarah's last bullet, after ricocheting off several walls and passing through a fire door, had in mangled form dispersed its last bit of energy by bouncing sharply off Casimir's T-shirt.
Something hard was against the back of his head— the floor? The Terrorists were standing above him. He stood up. Two wounded men were being carried toward him, leaving uneven trails of blood on the shiny tile floor. He followed these trails to their sources, and stepped through Sarah's open door.
A clown-cadaver was smiling at him through the window and he knew he was hallucinating. Nothing he did could dissolve the ghastly sight. Noticing a Terrorist looking at him from the doorway, he walked over, slammed the door in his face and locked it. Then he wandered around the room, picking up and examining random objects— numerous mementos of Sarah's friends and family, books he would never read, a little framed collection of snapshots. A family portrait, graduation photos of several smiling good-looking earnest types— which was her boyfriend?— and various shots of Sarah and friends being happy in different places, including some of Hyacinth. Tucked in one corner of the frame was a folded piece of paper. Casimir felt filthy reading it; it was obviously a love note. He had never gotten one himself, but he figured this was one of them. Getting to the bottom, he read the name of the mysterious man Sarah so obviously preferred to Casimir: Hyacinth.
He sat on her bed, elbows on knees, scarcely hearing the shouting outside. He smiled a little, knowing Sarah and Hyacinth had made it out safely.
He knew why he'd come up here. Not to assist Sarah, or go with her, but to save her. To create a debt of gratitude that could neither be erased nor forgotten. She would have to love him then, right? This impossible secret hope of his had made his thoughts so twisted and complicated that he no longer knew why he was doing anything; he was never one to analyze his pipe dreams. But now she was safe. His goal was accomplished. And if she had done it herself, and not seen him, then that was his fault. She was safe, and now he had to be happy whether he wanted to or not.
Most importantly, he had seen the proof he had needed for so long, the undeniable proof that she would never be in love with him. All his wild fantasies were impossible now. He could purge himself of his useless infatuation. He could relax. It was wonderful. The Terrorists shot out the lock, came in and grabbed his arms. In the hall he was thrown on his back and straddled by a Terrorist while others sat on his arms and legs. Then they all stared at him dully, lost and indecisive.
"Let's knock his teeth out," said a voice from behind Casimir. A hammer was given to the man on his chest. Someone held Casimir by the hair. Casimir's vision was sharp and bright without the glacier glasses; the hammerhead was cold and luminous in the white light, finely scratched on its polished striking face, red paint worn way from use. The Terrorist was examining Casimir's face as though he could not find the mouth, neither excited nor scared, just curiously resigned to what he was doing and, it seemed, at peace with himself.
This is what I get, being heroic for the wrong reason, thought Casimir. He could not take his eyes off the hammer. He began to struggle. His captors clamped down harder. The torturer made a swing; but Casimir jerked his head to one side and the blow slid down his cheek and crushed a fold of neck skin against the floor.