Now there were shouts of alarm and surprise—from our box people captors. They didn’t know what was going on any more than I did.
As taut as a fully drawn bow, I sat in the darkness, wondering what to do now.
Some of the floating boxie guards switched on their built-in lighting units and began to flicker about the rain-filled dome like dimly seen fireflies.
A hand gripped my shoulder.
I probably jumped no more than two and a half meters.
“Quick!” hissed Jin Tshei’s voice in my ear. “Get your chair onto my pallet! I’ve got all the entrances jammed open. We ll—”
“Van Bastolaer,” I gasped. “He’s dying. We’ve got to…” I trailed off, too busy trying to use my GEM chair and my one good arm to drag the Loonie s limp body onto the dimly outlined platform Jin Tshei had maneuvered next to us.
“Hey! What’s going—” A boxie appeared out of the darkness and loomed beside me, a tightly focused beam of white light stabbing down on Van Bastolaer’s chest.
I caught a brief flash of a silvery gleam and heard a meaty thud. The boxie went cartwheeling away, his light turning end over end until it vanished in the rain.
“Let’s go!” screamed Jin Tshei, brandishing the steel bar with which she had just bashed the guard. “Your friend’s on the sled! We’ve got to get out of here!”
The pallet lurched beneath me and we plunged into what seemed to be a torrent of water as dense as Niagara Falls. Moments before, I had been worried about boiling to death; now my only concern was to keep from drowning.
“How can you see where we’re going?” I shouted around mouthfuls of water.
“Infrared goggles,” came the barely audible reply. “I’m going strictly by heat source.”
Whatever Jin Tshei was doing, it was working. Almost before she had finished speaking, we were abruptly out of the rain, although the wail of the sirens was even more deafening and the darkness seemed even more absolute.
Suddenly my stomach seemed to be floating up around my ears. “Elevator!” shouted Jin Tshei above the siren. “We re going down!”
By the time we emerged into a dimly lighted passage of roughly dressed rock walls, the sirens were only barely audible. Two sharp turns and a steep ramp brought the four-meter-long pallet and its improbable cargo to an imposing metal door hung with KEEP OUT and DANGER signs and stylized death s heads.
“In here,” breathed Jin Tshei into the eerie silence that now seemed to be filled with the noisy beating of my heart. “Quick!” The door slid open.
In here was a rectangular cubicle whose walls were brightly colored scenes of bucolic spots on Earth. The ceiling was a creamy blue and white and its thick carpet a cheerful yellow and orange. Comfortable-looking chairs and couches jammed all the available floor space. Dozens of unfamiliar glass and ceramic objects were scattered throughout.
“Ashtrays,” explained Jin Tshei as she caught my look of puzzlement. “This is an old smoking club that’s been replaced by a bigger one down the hall. I found the program that changes the locks. Now no one can get in except me—and you.” Floating in the middle of the room, she used the metal pipe that she had used to whack the boxie to indicate a jumble of items piled high on one of the leather couches. “You’ve got all sorts of emergency breathing equipment and lights, tanks of compressed air, everything I could get my hands on. And just in case the crazies really turn the air off, there’s a monitoring device that’ll warn you if they do. Plus food and water and entertainment stuff. And nutros for newbies—I didn’t know whether Van Bastolaer would be with you or not.”
As she spoke, she had drifted lower to slip an oxygen mask over the Loonie’s face and to pull his drenched shirt away from his torso. A plate in his formidably muscled male chest opened and Jin Tshei began pulling empty nutrient packets from the cavity and replacing them from a carton on the couch. “There,” she said eventually. “I’m not much of an expert in newbie maintenance but it’s amazing how much information you can access from one of these boxes.” She snapped Van Bastolaer’s chest shut and together we tugged his body off the hovering pallet and onto a couch. “Either he’ll live or he won’t.” She rose decisively into the air. “I’ll let you know when it’s safe to come out. In the meantime, don’t open the door for anyone—they ’d have to use industrial lasers to bum their way in.”
“Who’d want to bum their way into a cancer factory?” I asked groggily, still half-dazed by the suddenness of recent events.
“No one—I hope.”
“But what are we doing here?”
Jin Tshei smiled wanly. “Haven’t you guessed? Waiting out the revolution.”
“But what about you? Aren’t you staying with—”
She grinned broadly. “I can’t—I’m a revolutionary myself, only a simple foot soldier, but still a soldier. That’s how I learned all the programming tricks to cause all that confusion upstairs.”
“You, a revolutionary? You’ve only been here a couple of weeks!”
“How else was I going to save you?” She drifted closer and her lips brushed mine. “Don’t go out, no matter how boring it gets.” She floated toward the door. “One thing I didn’t leave for you—cigarettes. I want to find you alive when I come back.”
For the rest of the Glorious Revolution of 2283 Tom Van Bastolaer and I played chess and monopoly and cornered the Solar System’s entire wealth on various computer games that Jin Tshei had left us. But as revolutions go, it wasn’t a very long one, hardly more than an extended coup d’etat. Three times the lights went off, six times the water, and once—for a heart-pounding twenty seconds—the entire air system. It wasn’t long after that that the door slid open and Jin Tshei’s ^earning box darted into the room. Six and a half standard days had passed since it had closed behind her. “It’s over!” she exclaimed.
I looked up distractedly from where I was about to capture Van Bastolaer’s queen. “Who won?”
“The boxies, of course.” She floated down beside us, settling her box body on the couch. “How could they lose, when you think about it?”
“I concede,” said Van Bastolaer grumpily, then turned his gaze to Jin Tshei. “So the inmates have taken over the asylum?”
“Not entirely. We could have held out for more, I think, but we were in a hurry. We now get automatic citizenship eighteen months after we’re boxed, and long-term, low-interest government loans for the automatic purchase of a newbie body at the end of the work period.”
“Well, there goes whatever industrial productivity we ever had on the Moon.” Tom Van Bastolaer sighed heavily. “The stock market’ll be ruined! And how many people died to achieve this… this descent into madness?”
“Too many,” said Jin Tshei with a pained grimace. “Hundreds probably, but at least it’s not thousands.”
“And the hospitals are working again?” I asked breathlessly.
“They will be by the time you get there.”
“I must be healed by now! I’m going crazy tied to this chair!”
Jin Tshei grinned. “I’ll swap you the chair for this box.”
I bit my lip. “Sorry, I shouldn’t be complaining, I suppose. What about Isabel—she must be absolutely frantic by now.”