Arthur Clarke - Richter 10

“I’m wondering if you could help—”

“I’ve got to go. I’ve lost my dog,” he said.

A gull flew down to perch on Newcombe’s shoulder. “Sorry,” the gull said. “I was tied up in back. Someone didn’t want to vacate when their time was up. Waiting long?”

“I’m supposed to meet someone here,” Newcombe said carefully.

The gull took to the skies, flying circles around Newcombe. “If you don’t have a reservation,” it said, “you won’t be doing anything. We’re always booked solid on Masada nights.”

“My name is Enos Mann.”

The bird squawked, then landed on his head. “Ah, Arabian adventure,” it said. “We’ve been expecting you. Follow me.”

The gull flew out over the ocean, Newcombe followed, stepping into the water without getting wet. He felt a curtain in his face, and parted it to find a hallway filled with doorways. A man was staring at him. “This way please,” he said in the gull’s voice.

Moans and cries issued from behind the closed doors. Newcombe had seen chippies on the teev, but Liang always had them portrayed as emaciated shells, living only for the brain fix. He had no idea of what it was really like to interface directly with a computer, though the thought of joining with the Foundation’s machines struck him as a marvelous notion.

The man opened the next to last door, ushering him into a bare utilitarian room containing bed and a recliner, with a small table set between them. An inch-square chip sat in the center of a tiny red pillow. Alongside on the formica of the table was a box with flashing numbers, its meter.

“You heard the horns?” the man asked as he slid the bed aside to reveal a manhole cover in the floor.

“Yeah.”

“You’re here for the night.” The man stomped twice on the manhole, then left, the steel door clicking locked behind him.

His heart beating fast, Newcombe stared around the room. He picked up the chip, studied it, wondered about the moans and laughter he’d heard. If he were to change his mind, this would be the last possible instant in which he could get out. He looked at the door, then at the manhole in the floor.

It moved. Newcombe jumped back as it lifted, a smiling face peering out of the darkness. “Brother Daniel!” Mohammad Ishmael said and chuckled, “how pale you’ve turned.”

“You make a grand entrance.” Ishmael climbed out of the hole and hugged Newcombe. Two young men eased over the rim and into the room. They had scanners and came close to examine Newcombe.

“I see there was a big meeting today at the Foundation,” Ishmael said, straightening his dashiki.

“How did you know that?” Newcombe asked, raising his hands up so they could scan under his arms.

“I keep tabs on my brother,” Ishmael said. “He moves in elite circles. How is President Gideon? What’s he like?”

Newcombe shrugged. “He’s a politician.”

“Who isn’t? Is Liang still insisting on a quick prediction?”

“Very quick.”

Ishmael fixed him with bright eyes. “It’s a rollover, Brother. Remember I told you that. Watch out.”

The scanners were buzzing. “Two transmitters,” one of the young men reported. “One on the right hand, the other on the left sleeve.”

“The one on the hand is mine,” Ishmael said, moving to look at Newcombe’s sleeve.

“I don’t know anything about this,” Newcombe said, suddenly frightened at the position he’d put himself into. “I would never—”

“Of course you wouldn’t,” Ishmael said, pulling the bug, scarcely bigger than a mite, off his sleeve and stomping on it. “This could have come from anyplace. They float on the breezes outside.”

“We must go,” one of the bodyguards said.

Ishmael nodded and moved to the manhole. “Follow me, Brother.” He started climbing down.

Newcombe was really scared now. The bug queered everything. Not only was he consorting with the enemy, but also there was someone who knew about it. Gently pushed from behind by one of the bodyguards, he realized as he walked to the opening in the floor that he was no longer in control of his life, and wondered if Ishmael had planned it this way.

A metal ladder led down into darkness. He looked over his shoulder at the bodyguards, one climbing down on his heels, the other locking the manhole over them. He reached ground about thirty feet later, Ishmael right beside him, his face glowing faintly in the haze of a red dry cell light in the brick sewer.

He started to speak but was interrupted by a menacing buzzer. “Uh-oh,” Ishmael said loudly over the noise. “The G is at the door. Come on, you’ll get to see what it’s like to be a revolutionary.”

They strode through a long tunnel, lit with the same bloody haze. It seemed to stretch on forever. They were moving fast, the bodyguards always right behind.

“This doesn’t look like the sewer system,” Newcombe said as they hurried along.

“It’s not. We built it.”

“How?”

“Prisoners dig. That’s what they do.” He took a sharp right turn and walked into, then through, a wall. Newcombe followed, the wall a projection. He found himself in another hallway, this one tiled and well lit. It branched off to either side at ten-foot intervals. “We will fight in these tunnels and escape through them, should it come to that,” Ishmael said.

He turned into another wall, and Newcombe, confused, followed closely. They were at the top of an ornate winding staircase. They descended. Or was it an illusion?

“I didn’t mean how did you dig them,” Newcombe said. “I meant how did you afford to dig them?”

“Money is not a problem for us. Space is. We have many benefactors, people like you who have found their way to us and are sympathetic to an Islamic State on this continent. There is much you don’t understand.”

“Apparently. And, by the way, I really didn’t lead the G here intentionally. I have no idea how that—”

“Nature of the white man’s world,” Ishmael said, waving it off as he reached the bottom of the stairs.

They were in a vast echoing cave honeycombed with tunnels. It was lit by torches, hundreds of them. Ishmael moved quickly across the chamber.

“Are we going to be caught?” Newcombe called from behind as he hurried without prompting now.

“Hope not!”

They ran for nearly a minute before reaching rock walls. Ishmael pulled on a ground-level boulder, the cave face creaking open to reveal an elevator within.

Once they were all inside, Ishmael pushed a button to close the rock doors. They moved through the virtual back of the machine and into another hallway whose walls, ceiling, floor were tiled in ceramic squares of the palest blues and yellows. There were no doors. Ishmael slowed his pace, Newcombe realizing they were close to their destination. The beauty of the elevator was that its function motor could disguise the virtual projection equipment.

“Does the elevator go down?” he asked.

“And up,” Ishmael said. “It leads into a myriad other passages, even into the real sewer system. You’re the one who’s in trouble, you know.”

Newcombe knew. “Whoever owns that bug owns my ass,” he said bitterly. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

Ishmael looked Newcombe dead in the eye and shook his head. “We’re on the same side, Brother.”

“I hope so,” Newcombe said. The hallway was well lit now and twisted sharply to the right.

The hallway was cracked all the way around, the walls out of line. “How far down are we?” Newcombe asked.

“Fifty… seventy-five feet. The earth shifts a bit, eh?”

“This is part of the Elysian system of faults,” he said, excited to look at a transform fault. He ran his hand over the jagged, angry crack. “How long has it been like this?”