“It’s him!” Radio cried. “Just like I told you.”
“It… sounds like him. But he can’t be the one who gave the orders you overheard. Can you be absolutely sure?” Amelia asked her unlikely sidekick for the umpteenth time. “Are you really and truly certain?”
Radio rolled her eyes. “Lady, I heard him with my own two ears. You don’t think I know the voice of the single greatest pilot…” Her voice trailed off under Amelia’s glare. “Well, don’t hit the messenger! I read Obey the Brain! every week. His stats are just plain better’n yours.”
“They have been,” Amelia said grimly. “But that’s about to change.” She unsnapped the holster of her pistol.
Then the bell pinged. They’d reached the top floor.
The elevator doors opened.
Rudy was conferring with progressive elements in the city police force about the possibility of a counter-coup (they argued persuasively that, since it was impossible to determine their fellow officers’ loyalties without embroiling the force in internecine conflict, any strike would have to be small and fast) when his liaison with the Working Committee for Human Resources popped up in his consciousness and said, “We’ve located the bodies, boss. As you predicted, they were all carefully preserved and are being maintained in the best of health.”
“That is good news, Comrade Mariozzi. Congratulations. But none of that ‘boss’ business, do you understand? It could easily go from careless language to a common assumption.”
Meanwhile, they’d hooked into televideon cameras throughout the city, and though the views were grim, it heartened everybody to no longer be blind. It was a visible — there was no way around the word — sign that they were making progress.
Red Rudy had just wrapped up the meeting with the loyalist police officers when Comrade Mariozzi popped into his consciousness again. “Hey, boss!” he said excitedly. “You gotta see this!”
The guards were waiting at the top of the elevator with guns drawn. To Radio Jones’s shock and amazement, Amelia Spindizzy handed over her pistol without a murmur of protest. Which was more than could be said for Radio herself when one of the goons wrested the Universal Receiver out of her hands. Amelia had to seize her by the shoulders and haul her back before she could attack the nearest of their captors.
They were taken onto the Imperator and through the Hall of the Naked Brains. The great glass jars were empty and the giant floating Brains were gone who-knows-where. Radio hoped they’d been flung in an alley somewhere to be eaten by dogs. But hundreds of new, smaller jars containing brains of merely human proportions had been brought in and jury-rigged to oxygen feeds and electrical input-output units. Radio noticed that they all had cut-out switches. If one of the New Brains acted up it could be instantly put into solitary confinement. But there was nobody monitoring them, which seemed to defeat the purpose.
“‘Keep close to the earth!’” a voice boomed. Radio jumped. Amelia, she noticed, did not. Then she saw that there were radios set in brackets to either end of the room. “Such was the advice of the preeminent international airman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and they were good enough words for their time.” The familiar voice chuckled and half-snorted, and the radio crackled loudly as his breath struck the sensitive electroacoustic transducer that had captured his voice. “But his time is not my time.” He paused briefly; one could almost hear him shrug his shoulders. “One is never truly tested close to the earth. It is in the huge arching parabola of an aeroplane finding its height and seeking a swift descent from it that a man’s courage is found. It is there, in acts outside of the quotidian, that his mettle is tested.”
A televideon camera ratcheted about, tracking their progress. Were the New Brains watching them, Radio wondered? The thought gave her the creeps.
Then they were put in an elevator (only two guards could fit in with them, and Radio thought that for sure Amelia would make her play now; but the aviatrix stared expressionlessly forward and did nothing) and taken down to the flight deck. There the exterior walls had been removed, as would be done under wartime conditions when the ’planes and wargyros had to be gotten into the air as soon as possible. Cold winds buffeted and blustered about the vast and empty space.
“A young man dreams of war and glory,” the voice said from a dozen radios. “He toughens his spirit and hardens his body with physical activity and discomfort. In time, he’s ready to join the civil militia, where he is trained in the arts of killing and destruction. At last, his ground training done, he is given an aeroplane and catapulted into the sky, where he discovers…” The voice caught and then, when it resumed, was filled with wonder, “… not hatred, not destruction, not war, but peace.”
To the far side of the flight deck, unconcerned by his precarious location, a tall figure in a flyer’s uniform bent over a body in greasy coveralls, which he had dragged right to the edge. Then he flipped it over. It was Grimy Huey, and he was dead.
The tall man stood and turned. “Leave,” he told the guards.
They clicked their heels and obeyed.
“He almost got me, you know,” the man remarked conversationally. “He came at me from behind with a wrench. Who would have thought that a mere mechanic had that much gumption in him?”
For a long moment, Amelia Spindizzy stood ramrod-straight and unmoving. Radio Jones sank to the deck, crouching by her side. She couldn’t help herself. The cold and windy openness of the flight deck scared her spitless. She couldn’t even stand. But, terrified though she was, she didn’t look away. Someday all this would be in the history books; whatever happened, she knew, was going to determine her view of the world and its powers for the rest of her natural life, however short a time that might be.
Then Amelia strolled forward toward Eszterhazy and said, “Let me help you with that.” She stooped and took the mechanic’s legs. Eszterhazy took the arms. They straightened, swung the body — one! two! three! — and flung it over the side.
Slapping her hands together, Amelia said, “Why’d you do it?”
Eszterhazy shrugged in a self-deprecating way. “It had to be done. So I stepped up to the plate and took a swing at the ball. That’s all.” Then he grinned boyishly. “It’s good to know that you’re on my team.”
“That’s you on the radios,” Amelia said. They were still booming away, even though the buffeting winds drowned out half the words that came from them.
“Wire recording.” Eszterhazy strode to a support strut and slapped a switch. The radios all died. “A little talk I prepared, being broadcast to the masses. Radio has been scandalously underutilized as a tool of governance.”