A huge hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed Rudy’s right shoulder.
“Awright there, buddy,” said a firm but quiet voice. “And why don’t yez come along wit’ me, and we can continue this discussion down to the station house?”
Rudy twisted about in the flatfoot’s grasp. A sudden head-butt to the solar plexus, a kick to take the man’s feet out from under him, and Rudy was running fast, not once looking back to see if he was being pursued. Halfway to the exit, he spotted a narrow circular staircase that burrowed down into the bowels of the earth below the kinescope parlor. He plunged into the darkness, down into the steam tunnels that ran beneath all the buildings of the Old Town.
That was Phase Three of his plan: Run like hell.
Amelia had less than five minutes to the start of the Game. She sprinted to the flight deck and her autogyro. Grimy Huey was waiting, and he didn’t look happy. “Why didn’t you tell me you were having work done on the machine? You don’t trust me no more?”
“Huey, I’m up. We can talk about it later.” She swung into the cockpit. The engine was already running. Even when he was ticked off, Huey knew his stuff. “Just throw me out there. The whistle’s about to blow.”
Grimy Huey waved and Amelia grabbed the controls. Everything in place. She nodded, and the launch platform thrust the autogyro out of the Zep, into takeoff position.
The steam-whistle blew. The Game was in motion.
Amelia kicked, pushed, pedaled, and screamed her improbable craft into the air.
For a time, all was well. As was traditional, the flying aces appeared in goose-vee formation from opposite sides of the plaza, ignoring each other on the first pass, save for a slight wing-waggle of salute, and then curving up into the sky above. Then began the series of thrilling moves that would lead to the heart-stopping aerial ballet of sporting dogfight.
On the first fighting pass, the advantage was to the Reds. But then Blockhead O’Brien threw his autogyro into a mad sideways skid that had half their ’planes pulling up in disarray to avoid being shredded by his blades. Amelia and Hops Wynzowski hurled themselves into the opening and ran five stars, neat as a pin, before the opposition could recover.
Amelia pulled up laughing, only to discover that the Big E was directly behind her and coming up her tail fast. She crouched down over her stick, raising her hips up from the seat, taut as a wire being tested to destruction, neurons snapping and crackling like a Tesla generator. “You catch me,” she murmured happily, “and I swear to God I’ll never fly again for as long as I live.”
Because if there was one thing she knew it was that Eszterhazy wasn’t going to catch her. She was in her element now. In that timeless instant that lasted forever, that was all instinct and reflex, lust and glory. She was vengeance and righteous fury. She was death in all its cold and naked beauty.
Then a rocket flew up out of nowhere and exploded in her face.
Rudy pounded through the steam tunnels as if every finger in the Fist of the Brains was on his tail. Which they weren’t — yet. He’d given Fearless Fosdick the slip, he was sure.
It was only a matter of time, though. Back at Fat Edna’s, he knew, they had a pool going as to the date. But when the Fist came for him, he wasn’t going to go meekly, with his hands in the air. Not Rudy. That was why he was running now, even though he’d given the flatfoot the slip. He was practicing for the day when it all came down and his speed negotiating the twists and turns of the tunnels would spell the difference between escape and capture, survival and death.
The light from Rudy’s electric torch flashed from a rectangle of reflective tape he’d stuck to one wall at chest level. Straight ahead, that meant. Turn coming up soon. And, sure enough, up ahead were two bits of tape together, like an equal sign, on the right-hand wall. Which, counterintuitively, signaled a left turn.
He ran, twisting and turning as the flashing blips of tapes dictated. A left… two rights… a long downward decline that he didn’t remember but which had to be correct because up ahead glinted another tab of reflective tape and beyond it another two, indicating a left turn. Into the new tunnel he plunged, and then, almost falling, down a rattling set of metal steps that definitely wasn’t right. At the bottom the tunnel opened up into an enormous cavernous blackness. He stumbled to a halt.
A cold wind blew down on him from above.
Rudy shivered. This was wrong. He’d never been here before. And yet, straight ahead of him glowed yet another tab of the tape. He lifted his electric torch from the ground in front of his feet to examine it.
And, as he lifted it up, he cried out in horror. The light revealed a mocking gargoyle of a man: filthy, grey-skinned, dressed in rags, with running sores on his misshapen face and only three fingers on the hand that mockingly held up a flashing rectangle of reflective tape.
“It’s the bolshy,” the creature said to nobody in particular.
“I thought he was a menshevik,” said a second voice.
“Naw, he’s a tvardokhlebnik,” said a third. “A pathetic nibbler at the leavings of others.”
“My brothers!” Rudy cried in mingled terror and elation. His torch slid from monstrous face to monstrous face. A throng of grotesques confronted him. These were the broken hulks of men, horribly disfigured by industrial accidents, disease, and bathtub gin, creatures who had been driven into the darkness not by poverty alone but also by the reflexive stares of those who had previously been their fellows and compeers. Rudy’s revulsion turned to an enormous and terrible sense of pity. “You have lured me here for some purpose, I presume. Well… here I am. Tell me what is so important that you must play these games with me.”
“Kid gets right to the point.”
“He’s got a good mind.”
“No sense of humor, though. Heard him speak once.”
Swallowing back his fear, Rudy said, “Now you are laughing at me. Comrades! These are desperate times. We should not be at each other’s throats, but rather working together for the common good.”
“He’s got that right.”
“Toldya he had a good mind.”
One of the largest of the men seized Rudy’s jacket in his malformed hand, lifting him effortlessly off his feet. “Listen, pal. Somebody got something important to tell ya.” He shook Rudy for emphasis. “So you’re gonna go peacefully, all right? Don’t do nothing stupid. Remember who lives here and can see in the dark and who don’t and can’t. Got that?”
“Brother! Yes! Of course!”
“Good.” The titan let Rudy drop to the floor. “Open ’er up, boys.” Shadowy figures pushed an indistinct pile of boxes and empty barrels away from a steel-clad door. “In there.”
Rudy went through the door.
It closed behind him. He could hear the crates and barrels being pushed back into place.
He was in a laboratory. Even though it was only sparsely lit, Rudy could see tables crowded with huge jars that were linked by glass tubes and entwined in electrical cables. Things sizzled and bubbled. The air stank of ozone and burnt sulfur.
In the center of the room, illuminated by a single incandescent bulb dangling from the ceiling, was a glass tank a good twenty feet long. In its murky interior a huge form moved listlessly, filling it almost entirely — a single enormous sturgeon. Rudy was no sentimentalist, but it seemed to him that the great fish, unable to swim or even turn about in its cramped confines — indeed, unable to do much of anything save slowly move its fins in order to keep afloat and flutter its gills to breathe — must lead a grim and terrible existence.