Title: Underground Movement
Author: Lang, Allen Kim
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Underground Movement" ***


                         UNDERGROUND MOVEMENT

                           By ALLEN K. LANG

                         Illustrated by ENGLE

                  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!

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                       Infinity, December 1956.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


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 of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Underground Movement" ***

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