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?
Chapter Fourteen
Bulnes reminded himself that the more urgent problem for him right now was to escape to the upper world again before his imposture was penetrated.
He backtracked briskly. When he arrived at the place where he had entered the tunnel system, he found a group of three people. One sat at the control panel — not the blond man with the German accent, but a dish-faced Slavic type — while two others, one in work clothes and one with a peaked cap and pistol holster that suggested a security organization, talked to him.
All three looked around as Bulnes came toward them, and he of the pistol said, "Hey, you seen Muller?"
"No," said Bulnes. "What's become of him?"
"That's what we're trying to find out. Surkov here came to relieve him, and he wasn't there. If he's wandered off to get a brew, it'll be the last of his job."
The other standing man said, "I don't think Manfred would do that. He's pretty conscientious about regs."
Bulnes felt his scalp prickle with the knowledge that Manfred Muller lay bound only a few meters away. If these employees of the System didn't locate him soon, he would probably get his gag loose and yell.
Bulnes asked the seated man, "Didn't he at least leave a note for you?"
"Not one liddle think. Nothing but dis empty sit."
"Have you checked the lavatory?" said Bulnes. The guard said, "I got my partner doing that now."
At that instant another man appeared in the tunnel, a stout character wrapped in a himation. As he walked up, Surkov said, "Hallo, Pierre."
"Hallo yourself." Pierre unpinned his badge and laid it on the shelf below the control panel. "What is all this? A conditioned man get into the tunnels?"
"Muller has disappeared himself," said Surkov, handing Pierre the clipboard from the shelf.
Pierre signed the sheet, took a good look at himself in the full-length mirror on the opposite wall, rearranged his himation, and started to climb the stairs. Surkov reached for the control buttons.
"Hey, come back here!" said the guard. "Surkov, you never more than glanced at the picture on the badge. That man could be anybody at all."
"No, he could not. I know him. I play bezique with him." He waved the badge under the guard's nose and pushed one of the buttons. With a whirr of machinery the trap door began to open.
Bulnes had meant to deposit his badge and boldly walk out likewise, trusting to the human weakness that causes every security routine to become slipshod with familiarity. Now, however, that the guard was there, and since They knew something had befallen Surkov's predecessor, somebody would be sure to take a sharp look at the thief's badge adorning Bulnes's chiton, and realize that the face depicted there did not look at all like that of the man who wore it.
"Be seeing you," said Bulnes, and strolled up the slope of the main tunnel with ostentatious casualness.
Not until he had gone a good hundred meters did he dare look back. By then, the curvature of the tunnel hid the trio around the portal. The upward slope became more and more pronounced. The damned thing must surely have risen above ground level by now. Bulnes tried to orient himself but found he had completely lost track of above-ground directions. From the height, however, he guessed that the tunnel was ascending inside either the Akropolis or the Areopagos, or Mount Lykabettos.
At last the passage ended in a stair with a niche beside it where a man sat at a control board, very much like the portal through which Bulnes had entered the system. Bulnes walked boldly toward the man, unpinning his badge as he came. He laid the badge on the shelf and had his hand out for the pencil to sign the register even before the man had picked it up. He signed "Djon Hwait," laid down the pencil, and started up the stairs without a word, as if confident that the gate keeper would press the button that opened the trap.