“Tell it to the Marines, lady. I didn’t fall off no turnip truck. The onliest electronics you got here is two wires coming off a detonator cap and leading to one of your radios. If I didn’t know better, I’d tag this sucker as a remote-controlled self-destruct device.” The imp stuck its head out of the workings again, and said, “Oh yeah. The name’s Radio Jones.”
With an abrupt rush of conceptual vertigo, Amelia realized that this gamin was a girl. “How do you do,” she said dazedly. “I’m…”
“I know who you are,” Radio said. “I got your picture on the wall.” Then, seeing that they were coming up on the bend in Archer Road, “Hey! Nix! Not that way! There’s a guy with a coupla rockets up there just waiting for you to show your face. Pull a double curl and loop back down Vanzetti. There’s a vacant lot this side of the Shamrock Tavern that’s just wide enough for the ’gyro. Martin Dooley’s the barkeep there, and he’s got a shed large enough to hide this thing. Let’s vamoose!”
A rocket exploded behind her.
Good advice was good advice. No matter how unlikely its source.
Amelia Spindizzy vamoosed.
But as she did, she could not help casting a wistful glance back over her shoulder, hoping against hope for a glimpse of a bright red aeroplane. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about Eszterhazy surviving this?” she heard herself asking her odd young passenger. Whatever was happening, with his superb skills, surely he must have survived.
“Uh, about that…” Radio Jones said. “I kinda got some bad news for you.”
Rudy awoke to find himself in Hell.
Hell was touchless, tasteless, scentless, and black as pitch. It consisted entirely of a bedlam of voices: “Lemme outta here — wasn’t doing nothing — Mabel! Where are you, Mabel? — I’m serious, I got bad claustrophobia — goddamn flicks! — there’s gotta be — minding my own business — Mabel! — gonna puke — all the things I coulda been — I don’t like it here — can’t even hear myself think — Oh, Freddy, if only I’da toldja I loved you when I coulda — got to be a way out — why won’t anybody tell me what’s happening? — if the resta youse don’t shut — ”
He knew where he was now. He understood their situation. Gathering himself together, Rudy funneled all the energy he had into a mental shout:
“Silence!”
His thought was so forceful and purposive that it shocked all the other voices into silence.
“Comrades!” he began. “It is clear enough what has happened here. We have all been harvested by the police lackeys of the Naked Brains. By the total lack of somatic sensations, I deduce that we have ourselves been made into Naked Brains.” Somebody sent out a stab of raw emotion. Before his or her (not that gender mattered anymore, under the circumstances) hysteria could spread, Rudy rushed onward in a torrent of words. “But there is no need for despair. We are not without hope. So long as we have our thoughts, our inner strength, and our powers of reason, we hold within ourselves the tools of liberation.”
“Liberation?” somebody scoffed. “It’s my body’s been liberated, and from me. It’s them is doing the liberatin’, not us.”
“I understand your anger, brother,” Rudy said. “But the opportunity is to him who keeps his head.” Belatedly, Rudy realized that this was probably not the smartest thing to say. The anonymous voices responded with jeers. “Peace, brothers and sisters. We may well be lost, and we must face up to that.” More jeers. “And yet, we all have family and friends who we left behind.” Everyone, that is, save for himself — a thought that Rudy quickly suppressed. “Think of the world that is coming for them — one of midnight terror, an absolutist government, the constant fear of denouncement and punishment without trial. Of imprisonment without hope of commutation, of citizens randomly plucked from the streets for harvesting…” He paused to let that sink in. “I firmly believe that we can yet free ourselves. But even if we could not, would it not be worth our uttermost efforts to fight the tyranny of the Brains? For the sake of those we left behind?”
There was a general muttering of agreement. Rudy had created a community among his listeners. Now, quickly, to take advantage of it! “Who here knows anything about telecommunications technology?”
“I’m an electrical engineer,” somebody said.
“That Dutch?” said another voice. “You’re a damn good engineer. Or you were.”
“Excellent. Dutch, you are now the head of our Ad Hoc Committee for Communications and Intelligence. Your task is first to work out the ways that we are connected to each other and to the machinery of the outer world, and second, to determine how we may take over the communications system, control it for our own ends, and when we are ready, deprive the government of its use. Are you up to the challenge, Comrade —?”
“Schwartz. Dutch Schwartz, at your service. Yes, I am.”
“Then choose people to work with you. Report back when you have solid findings. Now. Who here is a doctor?”
“I am,” a mental voice said dryly. “Professor and Doctor Anna Pavlova at your service.”
“Forgive me, Comrade Professor. Of course you are here. And we are honored — honored! — to have you with us. One of the greatest — ”
“Stop the nattering and put me to work.”
“Yes, of course. Your committee will look into the technical possibilities of restoring our brains to the bodies we left behind.”
“Well,” said the professor, “this is not something we ever considered when we created the Brains. But our knowledge of microsurgery has grown enormously with the decades of Brain maintenance. I would not rule it out.”
“You believe our bodies have not been destroyed?” somebody asked in astonishment.
“A resource like that? Of course not,” Rudy said. “Think! Any despotic government must have the reliable support of toadies and traitors. With a supply of bodies, many of them young, to offer, the government can effectively give their lackeys immortality — not the immortality of the Brains, but the immortality of body after body, in plentiful supply.” He paused to let that sink in. “However. If we act fast to organize the proletariat, perhaps that can be prevented. To do this, we will need the help of those in the Underground who have not been captured and disembodied. Who here is —?”
“And you,” somebody else said. “What is your role in this? Are you to be our leader?”
“Me?” Rudy asked in astonishment. “Nothing of the sort! I am a community organizer.”
He got back to work organizing.
The last dirigible was moored to the tip of the Gaudi Building. The Imperator was a visible symbol of tyranny which cast its metaphoric shadow over the entire city. So far as anybody knew, there wasn’t an aeroplane, autogyro, or Zeppelin left in the city to challenge its domination of the air. So it was there that the new Tyrant would be. It was there that the destinies of everyone in the city would play out.
It was there that Amelia Spindizzy and Radio Jones went, after concealing the autogyro in a shed behind Dooley’s tavern.
Even from a distance, it was clear that there were gun ports to every side of the Imperator, and doubtless there were other defenses on the upper floors of the skyscraper. So they took the most direct route — through the lobby of the Gaudi building and up the elevator. Amelia and Radio stepped inside, the doors closed behind them, and up they rose, toward the Zeppelin.
“In my youth, of course, I was an avid balloonsman,” somebody said from above.
Radio yelped and Amelia stared sharply upward.
Wedged into an upper corner of the elevator was a radio. From it came a marvelous voice, at once both deep and reedy, and immediately recognizable as well. “… and covered the city by air. Once, when I was a mere child, ballooning alone as was my wont, I caught a line on a gargoyle that stuck out into my airspace from the tower of the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption — what is now the Sepulchre of the Bodies of the Brains — and, thus entangled, I was in some danger of the gondola — which was little more than a basket, really — tipping me out into a long and fatal fall to earth. Fortunately, one of the brown-robed monks, engaged in his Matins, was cloistered in the tower and noticed my predicament. He was able to reach out and free the line.” The voice dropped, a hint of humor creeping in. “In my childish piety, of course, I considered this evidence of the beneficent intercession of some remote deity, whom I thanked nightly in my prayers.” One could almost hear him shaking his head at his youthful credulousness. “But considering how fortunate we are now — are we not? — to be at last freed from the inhuman tyranny of the Naked Brains, one has to wonder whether it wasn’t in some sense the hand of Destiny that reached out from that tower, to save the instrument by which our liberation would one day be achieved.”