The Glory That Was

Chapter Thirteen

As his feet struck the man's back, Knut Bulnes brought his right fist down on the fellow's head in a hammer blow. The bulge at the base of the hilt of his knife hit the man's close-cut hair, and the man collapsed.

Bulnes sprang away as the body fell forward and rolled on its side. He lit lightly on the concrete floor, having just time to observe that, whereas the small thief was dressed in an Ionic chiton (essentially a big flour-sack with holes for arms and head), the man he had just felled wore a blue-denim shirt to which was pinned a large identification badge with photograph, and a pair of work pants held up by a belt with loops through which were thrust screw drivers and similar tools.

The other man, however, more urgently claimed his attention, for he dropped a similar badge, which he had been in the act of pinning to his garment, and pulled out a knife that had been strapped to his thigh under the skirt of his chiton.

Bulnes's instincts warned him not to admit that he was anything other than one more pseudo-Periklean Hellene intent upon getting his stolen property back. Accordingly he said, in Classical Greek, "Give me that, you thief!"

At the same time he advanced, knife ready.

The little man moved, not toward Bulnes, but at an angle, toward the corner in which the blond man had been sitting. In this nook there was an office chair, a shelf on which lay a clipboard with sheets of paper attached, and a small litter of pencils, paper clips, etc. Above the shelf, on the wall, was a panel with a telephone mouthpiece and many buttons and switches.

The thief limped toward the corner, menacing Bulnes with the dagger. Bulnes guessed that he meant to push an alarm button, and with a feline leap he sprang in front of the panel.

The thief, however, came right at Bulnes, the dagger held stiffly in front of him like a fencer's foil. Bulnes knocked the man's forearm aside; his opponent, coming on headlong, impaled himself on Bulnes's own knife.

The impetus of the man's lunge drove Bulnes's arm back. Bulnes shoved hard and thrust the man backward. The thief fell supine, eyes staring upward.

Now, thought Bulnes, I'm in for it.

A quick check showed the small man dead and the large one likely to regain consciousness at any time. Bulnes scooped up the papyrus roll and started up the steps down which he had come ... to realize that the trap door was again closed.

He placed a hand against its underside and pushed. No result. Harder — still none. He remembered that it had taken all his strength, applied with much greater leverage to the top of the altar, to open it before. It probably had an automatic locking mechanism.

He came back down the steps and examined the panel over the shelf in the corner. There was one big red button labeled "Djen. El." (General Alarm), several smaller ones bearing such cryptic abbreviations as "Kor." and "Tra," and others identified by numbers or letters alone. There was no way to tell, without instruction, which buttons worked the trap door.

Bulnes looked up and down the tunnel. For the most part it was lined with bare concrete, sloping slightly up in one direction and down in the other. Across the tunnel from the seat stood a full-length mirror, and next to it a branch tunnel went off in the direction of the Peiraieus. In the down direction, a few meters away, an object stood in a niche in the wall. As he walked toward it Bulnes saw that it was a large rack for holding six light machine guns. The guns stood like a row of the Emperor's guards, butt plates in slots at the bottom and muzzles projecting up through holes in the top. The guns were secured by a steel bar that ran horizontally through their trigger guards. At one end, the bar projected through a hole in the side of the rack, and at the other it entered a lock. It was firmly fixed in place.

However, perhaps something could be done with the rack as a whole. When he heaved on it, it leaned slightly. Though heavy, it was not immovable. By repeated tugging he hauled it out from the wall, though not so far as to clear its ends from the niche. Then he went back to his bodies.

First he appropriated the dead man's identification badge. (People seldom compared the photograph on such a badge with the face of the wearer.) Then he removed the chiton from the body of the thief and cut it into strips. With these he gagged the other man and bound his wrists and ankles. Bulnes dragged the fellow (who showed signs of reviving until quieted by another tap with the knife pommel) down the tunnel, heaved him to shoulder height with straining muscles (the man was as heavy as he), and pushed him over the top of the gun rack. The man's body fell with a multiple thump to the floor behind the rack.

Then Bulnes went back, picked up the naked corpse of the thief, and shoved it after his first victim. There was not much room between the rack and the wall behind, and Bulnes had to reach over the top of the rack and wrestle with the corpse to make it lie down out of sight and not leave a pallid foot sticking up like a mute plea for help.

Panting, he looked again about him. So long as he was stuck underground he might as well explore a little and learn as much as he could in the course of looking for another outlet. For this was evidently where they had their lair.

He again picked up the manuscript of Euripides and started down the tunnel. Beyond the gun rack the tunnel bent slightly, and around the bend he came upon another alcove in which stood two shiny motor scooters. Bulnes was tempted to try to ride one, but their master-switches proved to be locked. Presently he came to an intersection or fork. The small metal directional signs set in the wall bore legends in code: "A-64" and the like.

As he walked he became aware of a faint distant hum. The tunnel did a dog-leg. Before Bulnes knew it, he was upon another trap-door exit like that through which he had entered. At the base of the steps was a brown-skinned fellow with straight black hair, perhaps a southern Asiatic. He sat at his panel reading a magazine. The man looked up; their eyes met.

Bulnes cursed himself for hesitating. He should have breezed on by. Now, however, his pause required explanation. He thought fast, then said in his most American English, "Say, Mac, I'm a little turned around. Which way is the sector super's office?"

The title he remembered from the conversation between the thief and the other guardian of the gate. The man addressed spoke with a Hindustani accent, "Farst right, second left. It is just bepore you come to the entrance to the condeetioner substation."

"Thanks, bud," said Bulnes. and strode off.

Soon he came to another intersection. As he stepped out into it he had to jump back to avoid being run down by another man on a motor scooter. The man wore the sandals, felt hat, and chlamys or riding cloak of an Athenian ephebos. The cloak streamed out behind him leaving his body otherwise naked, as he purred past.

Remembering his instructions, Bulnes took the right-hand tunnel. The mechanical hum grew louder. More men passed him, some in the dress of Periklean Greece, others in modern working clothes. Bulnes turned left at the next intersection. More men, more scooters, more noise, more cryptic signs. Doors began to appear in the walls of the tunnel. Bulnes noted the legends on them: "9-E-401," "Fai. Dip.," and at last: SEKTER SIUP.

Bulnes toyed with the idea of walking in and handing his papyrus to the receptionist or secretary or the superintendent himself, whoever seemed prepared to receive it. He immediately vetoed the notion; first, because he might yet want to return the document to Euripides; secondly, because there was too much chance that somebody in the office might know the late thief by sight.

Hence, after a slight pause, Knut Bulnes hurried on. More noise, more people, and then an open door with a chain across it, through which most of the noise seemed to come.

The sound was a mechanical clicking and buzzing such as one heard in a large telephone exchange, and the sight glimpsed through the opening was, in fact, much like such a place. There were endless banks of gadgets, each bank reaching to the high ceiling. Relays clicked; lights flashed; and in the electro-mechanical jungle a few technicians moved casually, pressing a button or throwing a switch or simply staring at little flashing lights.

Bulnes, not wishing to attract attention by interest in a sight that must be old hat to those who worked here, walked on past the open door. He went past another like it and then turned and retraced his steps, taking a good long look through each opening.

A picture began to form in his mind. The scientists of Emperor Vasil's staff must have developed a machine that conditioned people (hence the name "conditioner") to believe any predetermined story about who they were, and when and where they had lived all their lives. Then the Emp had restored Greece to its Periklean condition (having first dismantled and stored all the genuine relics of antiquity in that country) and likewise converted some millions of Greeks into believing they were truly Sokrates, Perikles, et cetera. He had chosen his types with care, so that the pseudo-Sokrates was to all intents and purposes a replica of the real one — the right age, mentality, personality, appearance, and so on.

Vasil would have indoctrinated these unwitting actors (by some sort of super-post-hypnotic suggestion?) to correspond with all the known historical characters of the time in question: the 530's before Christ. He would moreover have indoctrinated enough others to give a lifelike human environment — the right proportions of slaves and free men, workers and aristocrats, and so forth — for the re-enactment of the drama of the Greek Golden Age. And no doubt the machine which he had glimpsed at one substation kept control of these people so that they should continue to act as they would have in the real Hellas.

The tunnel system, which might well extend all over Greece, served to maintain contact between the actors on the surface above and the unseen puppet-masters below, who could emerge by one of the secret entrances when expedient, pass among the pseudo-Athenians as one of them, gather data, and return.

That was no doubt the reason for the theft of the manuscript of Euripides. It was a datum. Why? Oh, they might want to compare the Medeia composed by pseudo-Euripides with the real one.

But was the machine supposed to force re-enactment of the entire history of the period? Or was Vasil simply winding the play up, as it were, and letting it go from there as the human puppets chose to play it?

In the former case, those in charge would face an impossible task. The original Periklean Greece could not be literally reproduced, because historical records existed for only a tiny fraction of its population. In most cases, even these were far too scanty to make possible an accurate re-creation of the individual. You could not hope for a lifelike synthesis of some character who was merely mentioned by Plutarch in one sentence, to say nothing of his parents, wife, children, slaves, and so on. Not to mention all the anonymous millions who had lived and died without leaving any tangible trace. Therefore, you would have to fake: imagine what so-and-so might have been like, invent a background and character for him, and hope for the best.

However, one of these historians' figments might prove a talented man who would rise in the world on his own account, or a crank who would assassinate one of the actors in the leading roles, and then what would become of Periklean history? Not to mention the ubiquitous threat of accident, how could Perikles start the Peloponnesian War if he had already died of a snake bite or been killed in a chariot wreck?

Well, was Periklean history going according to schedule? Bulnes decided he did not know enough Greek history to judge.

There were of course other possibilities. Perhaps Vasil IX had at his command some gadget by which he could actually snatch Periklean Hellas out of its proper space-time frame and bring it forward to this modern era, as Flin had suggested ... No, that wouldn't work. Bulnes was sure Euripides's wife Melite was really Flin's wife Thalia.

Or could it be that the Emp had a gadget that, while it would not disturb the real space-time fabric, would enable Vasil or his men to view what actually happened at some past time — a sort of temporal television? In this way it would be possible, by a vast enough amount of detail work, to follow the career of every real Greek of the Periklean Age from birth to death. With this mass of data one could, at least in theory, set up a pseudo-Hellas wherein every individual of the real one was approximated by some bemused modern Greek acting out his part.

But most obscure of all, why should Vasil undertake such an extraordinary enterprise?

It must be fabulously expensive. Furthermore, the Emp would be treasuring up trouble for himself by trampling on the rights of so many people — using them as guinea pigs without their consent — in case the near-dictatorship of the Lenz ministry should someday fall. Could it be that Vasil was merely employing the re-enactment as an aesthetic experience? Bulnes remembered the stories that Vasil, a devotee of small and esoteric cults, believed himself a reincarnation of several great historical leaders: Perikles of Athens, Henri Quatre of France, Franklin Roosevelt of the United States, Kenji Nogami of Japan ...

If this worked, would he next undertake the re-enactment of the history of France in the sixteenth century, or of the United States in the twentieth?