The sound of a heavy concussion came from the TV speaker. Dick braced himself instinctively, tightening his hold on Elaine's waist, but nothing: they were too deep here to feel the shock.
"Do you know what went wrong with the plan?"
"No," said Dick. "Somebody must have gone to the Boss. It could have been anybody, any time. We knew that could happen all along."
"It's inconvenient," said the Old Man unemotionally. "We had our plan, too -- we were going to hit during the wedding." He glanced up at Elaine. "Your wedding, Miss Elaine."
Dick felt her body stiffen. He stood still and said nothing; there was nothing to say. Of course the Old Man knew who she was ... he was old enough; he must have been in his twenties when the last Elaine was alive.
Elaine was breathing quickly, her lips half-open. A few fine tendrils of her hair tickled his cheek. Dick was watching the Old Man's intent face and speculating furiously on the meaning of what he said; he was listening to the muffled sounds that came from the TV and trying to interpret them; and all the time he was half dizzy from having her so near.
A Frankie came over from the wall and showed the Old Man a paper, murmuring a few words. The Old Man answered shortly, and the Frankie went away.
Another concussion came from the TV. The Old Man's face contorted briefly in an expression Dick could not read.
"As it was," he said, "we had to hit early. Communications was our most serious problem; you can understand that. Melker could count on some outside support -- we could not." He was talking with a curious persuasiveness, looking from one to the other as if to make sure he was understood. "The change in timing hurt our plans very much. But at least we seem to have succeeded in Eagles ... " He nodded toward the TV. "That was the last pocket of resistance, the arsenal over the Rose Court, and it has just been taken."
They looked at him in a stunned silence.
"You've taken Eagles?" said Dick. It seemed monstrous, unbelievable.
The Old Man nodded slowly, "There's over three hundred slaves to every freeman in Eagles," he said. "We only had to put out our hand."
"You'll never hold it," said Dick.
The other inclined his big head. "I am afraid you may be right. That's what I wish to talk to you about." He turned, murmured a few words into the mike, then set it down and rose from his chair. With a courteous hand on Dick's elbow and the other on Elaine's, he urged them toward the door. Three young Frankies fell in alertly behind them. "We'll go up to the Concourse and talk," the Old Man said.
"Who's going to take over here?"
"One of my doubles. Being duped has its advantages, you see."
They moved out along bare corridors, along routes that looked recently cleared through the jungle of storerooms, and finally reached an elevator.
Up above, the corridors were almost deserted. Slobs stood in little groups here and there, most of them wearing white armbands: many were soldiers in uniform, with their insignia ripped off. The signs of battle were everywhere -- heaps of rubble and debris, torn garments, an occasional sprawled body. As they passed a cross corridor, Dick heard a single, distant shot.
The Old Man and the Frankies glanced that way, but said nothing.
In the main corridor they passed a servant with a broom and a loaded trash cart. He was a shriveled, wild-eyed fellow of fifty or more, not the type you expect to meet abovestairs at all. When he saw the Old Man, he dropped his broom and tried to hug the Old Man around the knees. One of the Frankies held him off. He was babbling something in a choked voice; Dick caught the words, "see this day come." Tears were running down his cheeks.
The Old Man said, "All right. That's all right," and passed by. As they moved on, he said to Dick, "Some of them have been waiting a long time for this. That particular fellow saw his wife rotated, and his two sons -- the Boss dropped them down the Tower."
They were on a short, narrow stair that led to a glassed-in balcony overlooking the Concourse. Dick had seen the place many times but had never been inside. The door had the Boss's personal seal painted on it; the door was dented, half off its hinges, and someone had drawn a ragged "X" in red chalk over the seal.
Inside, the Old Man motioned them to chairs. Through the glass wall they could look out across the wide Plaza, cool in the water-colored light that fell from overhead, with the bright worms of fluorescents marking the various levels. The great tessellated floor was empty, as it was when the Plaza was cleared for theatricals or a circus. This was the Boss's private box.
Across the Plaza, a few figures moved methodically on the stairways and balconies. They stopped at each doorway, entered, disappeared for a while and returned. It was a room-to-room search for weapons and fugitives, Dick supposed. Only when it was completed could the victors openly take power.
This was the thing that everybody had been silently afraid of for fifty years -- a slave revolt -- and now it had actually happened. Dick felt incredulous, staring out over the Plaza that had so recently been full of life and color. As for Buckhill -- there was no use thinking about that yet.
The Old Man was saying, "I wanted to talk to you two privately because you realize our gravest problem. There aren't many that do."
"How's that?" said Dick. He saw that the Frankies had gone away, leaving them alone. There was a TV at the Old Man's elbow, flickering silently with a succession of images, but the Old Man was not looking at it. He was staring heavily at Dick and Elaine.
"Why, how to live with the world after we've won," he said. "It isn't enough just to take Eagles, now we have to run it. We wanted to stop being slaves: but what does that mean? What are we going to do -- try to be men and ladies, while we make our misters slave for us?"
Dick felt himself flushing with anger.
"I know," said the Old Man. "And yet most of my people haven't thought any farther than that. We could make slaves out of freemen, but that wouldn't solve anything. That would be the old system all over again, only worse. Because we'd be poor freemen, and they'd be worse slaves."
That was sensible enough. "Well, what then?" said Dick curiously. Beside him, he was aware of Elaine sitting, bent forward, listening intently. She put out her hand, and he took it in his.
"First," said the Old Man, "we must end the injustice of slavery. That comes before anything else -- if we can't do that, we lose."
Dick shrugged.
"What choices does that leave us?" the Old Man asked, beginning to count on his fingers. "One, we could expel all the freemen and live here by ourselves. But that would not be a stable situation, especially if it only happened here. The freemen everywhere would want to recover Eagles. Furthermore, they could recover Eagles, or destroy it, very easily, if we were to expel our freemen -- whereas, if we keep them, they might hesitate. Now, second: this is a plan that we considered very seriously -- now that we have the Gismos in our hands, within a short time we could make up thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of little kits, about this size -- " He held his palms about a foot and a half apart.
"In each one there would be two Gismos, and a box of protes to make the basic things that everybody would need to survive by himself. There would be weapons, and ammunition. Water, of course, and basic foods. Medicines. Tools, and electrical equipment. Each Gismo would have an arrest or of course, and an Inhibitor, so that new protes could be made on it, of anything you might want to dupe. Now we could take those kits and load them into planes, and drop them just everywhere, with a little parachute on each one. Many of them would be destroyed or seized by the freemen, naturally, but any slave, you see, who did get one of the kits would have in his hands the potential of being a freeman."