The Fellowship of the Hand (10 page)

“Fellowship?” Frost was reminded of Tolkien’s century-old novel,
The Fellowship of the Ring,
and Edgar Wallace’s even older book,
The Fellowship of the Frog.
He’d read them both in his youth, when children still read books, and he remembered Wallace’s criminals taking orders from a mysterious voice that issued from the statue of a frog. “Doesn’t that sound a bit juvenile?”

Graham Axman sighed and stretched out his slim fingers. “Euler, do you remember how we met in Paris when you were only sixteen and still mourning the death of your father? Do you remember how I took you by sea-rail to Plenish, in the Indian Ocean? Do you remember those early days when our organization was nameless, leaderless, almost purposeless? And do you remember how you came back to me in Washington last year, and how we worked together to strike our first blow at the machines?”

“I remember,” Frost said softly.

“In those days it did not seem so juvenile, did it? In those days you were willing to follow where I led.”

“You forget one thing, Graham. I served ten years of my life in prison, much of it on Venus, for my part in the organization.”

“And I only served a few months?” The tone was mocking, scornful.

“I’ve earned the right, Graham. I’m not taking over your leadership of HAND, but I’ve earned the right to have my opinions respected.”

“And your opinions are …?”

“Call it what you will—HAND must face its real enemy. And that enemy is not in the New White House but in the underground computer complex of Nova Industries.”

Axman tugged at the bristles on his chin. Finally he said simply, “We will talk of this another time.”

H
E HAD LIVED HIS
life as a bitter man, one who watched humanity slip away to be replaced by the megamachine, the god of technology. His own boyhood had not been all that different from Euler Frost’s, though he had lived it in the exotic East. Much of his time had been spent on the man-made island of Plenish, constructed as a tourist resort in the early twenty-first century by a pair of Greek billionaires.

His father was the entertainment director on the island, staging theatrical events in the ultramodern theater where the wealthy could relax after a day of aqua-golf or an evening of gambling. Young Graham learned much during those days in the theater. He learned the rudiments of acting, and once disguised himself as a minister to travel by sea-rail with Carl Crader, luring him into a trap on Plenish.

But he’d learned other things as well among the scrims and flats of backstage life. Like most theater in the early days of the twenty-first century, his father’s productions were of a highly charged sexual nature. They were the type of shows the wealthy wanted to see in their leisure time, much as the nobles of ancient Rome must have found a sexual outlet at the amphitheater.

Young Graham’s sexual initiation had come at the hands of a tall Chinese woman in his father’s theatrical company. Twice each night she was realistically ravaged onstage to the bleeping of electronic music controlled by her brain waves. At the moment of orgasm the music reached its peak, and members of the audience had been known to join in at this point until the theater sometimes resembled an orgy scene from some hologram by Watts.

The Chinese woman, whose name he could not now recall, had died one night when a sudden surge of electronic feedback pulverized her brain cells. Graham Axman had been saddened by the tragedy, and for a time his father’s theater remained closed. Then, when he tried to reopen it, tragedy struck again. The exact nature of it had never been known to Graham. A machine had killed his father, they said. One of the machines onstage. The same one that killed the woman? He never knew, and nobody ever told him.

His mother had vanished somewhere into the resorts of Easter Island a decade earlier, and might be there still, relaxing beneath a solar mirror for all he knew. He did not venture to Easter Island to find out, nor did he remain on the island of Plenish. He went instead to Paris, where he took a job as a binary assistant and began to nurture his growing hatred of the machine.

It was in Paris some years later that he met young Euler Frost and returned with him to the island of Plenish. In the meantime Axman had lived through a succession of stormy love affairs, perhaps seeking the unattainable Chinese woman to replace that which he’d lost. He never found her, but her place was taken in turn by a wealthy English girl who taught him a catalog of standard perversions, a French prostitute who introduced him to the delights of the electric lance, and finally by an uninhibited Swedish boy.

Graham Axman was only beginning to come to grips with his bisexual nature at the time of his meeting with Euler Frost. That first summer together on Plenish, he’d been quickly rebuffed by Frost when he attempted intimacies. He had not tried it again, but his attitude toward the boy had been shaped and hardened by that moment in the sun.

Later, when Euler Frost was imprisoned for his part in their still nameless organization, Axman put him out of mind. He began building HAND, recruiting men like Sam Venray. Malcontents, mainly—men who would oppose the system because Graham Axman promised a better life somewhere in the foggy future.

He was startled when Frost made good his escape from a Venus Colony and returned to earth, but he was ready to harness the young man’s hatreds to his own use. They’d gone back to Plenish once more, and while Frost dallied with a Chinese girl, Graham Axman was busy gathering his strike force for HAND’s first mission.

Now, nearly a year later, Axman was gathering them again. Only two others had been arrested with him, and they were easily replaced. Venray was there to help him, though even the agile black man was developing a liking for Frost that Axman mistrusted.

“How many do we have?” he asked Venray one morning a week after his escape.

“Sixteen right now.”

“Have we contacted all the old ones?”

“Euler kept track of them.”

“I didn’t ask what Euler did! Have we contacted them?”

“Yes.” The black man seemed embarrassed.

“And we only have sixteen? We had twelve on the Chin-Chan team for the attack on the Federal Medical Center.”

“Some have scattered. We have the people back on Plenish, of course, but any movement of them would excite government suspicion.”

“All right,” Axman agreed finally. “We can do it with sixteen.”

Venray stared down at his feet. “You’re planning to attack the New White House?”

“I am.”

“Euler doesn’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Fuck Euler! You take orders from me!”

“Yes.”

“Understood?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Assemble them. We’ll have a planning session tomorrow morning.”

Euler Frost came to him in the morning, just before the meeting. “I have someone special I’d like you to meet, Graham. Someone who’s helped us a great deal.”

“Who would that be?”

“A young woman named Mildred Norris. She was once an intimate of Stanley Ambrose, and she helped me trap Earl Jazine.”

“Bring her in.”

The woman who entered the room was slim and pretty, with dark eyes and dyed blue hair. Axman let his gaze wander up the length of her legs, outlined by a black bodysuit. “Mildred Norris?”

“Everyone calls me Milly,” she said, extending her hand. “I’m pleased to meet you after everything Euler told me.”

“Just what has he told you?”

“About HAND, and what you’ve done to fight for the individual.” There was a sad softness about her mouth as she spoke. “You’ve made it my fight too.”

Euler Frost cleared his throat. “She’s supplied us with a great deal of information about Nova. And best of all, she tipped me off when Earl Jazine came snooping around. We were able to follow her with Jazine and capture him in her bed.”

Axman gazed down at the woman before him. “Oh?”

“Anything for the cause,” she said with a shrug.

“Tell me about Stanley Ambrose.”

“I knew him before he became head of the Venus Colony. I was his mistress.”

“You must be very good in bed.”

She blushed a bit. “He is a much older man, not hard to please.”

“And he told you about Nova?”

“That’s the odd part. He didn’t tell me a thing. I haven’t seen him since his return, or even heard from him in about two years.”

Axman glanced at Frost. He didn’t understand. “Then how were you able to convey this information about Nova?”

“I learned it from another source.” She hesitated and then said, “From Jason Blunt.”

“Blunt? The other man in this secret election?”

“Yes.”

“What did Blunt tell you?”

“That Nova has an underground city in an old missile defense headquarters in Utah. That they have computerized the entire history of this country, with an aim toward preserving its past.”

Graham Axman smiled slightly. “So you too believe that Nova presents a greater menace than our government.”

“Yes. Their machines could make change impossible, and without change the nation would wither and die.”

He nodded and seemed to wave her away with his hand. “Let us go in now to meet with the others.”

The meeting of the HAND strike force, held within the bare, curving walls of an old grain warehouse on the deserted farm, did not go well for Graham Axman. He was well aware that the months of prison confinement had robbed him of his vigor, of his ability to concentrate on details and plan an operation. But now there was a new challenge to his authority in the person of Euler Frost. Most of the men who faced him and listened to his words had followed Frost in the months gone by. They had been with Frost when Jazine was kidnapped, and they had helped with the escape of Axman himself. They were ready to follow Euler Frost anywhere, but they knew Axman only as a former leader who’d gotten himself imprisoned.

Surprisingly, it was Venray who led the opposition to the White House plan, and Axman cursed the black man as he heard him ask, “Just what are the goals of HAND, and is this attack in keeping with those goals?”

“The goals of HAND, the goals of our Fellowship? I would have thought that Euler Frost might have instructed you in those during my enforced absence. HAND aims at nothing less than the reestablishment of the individual, the overthrow of the machine society which robs us of our individuality.”

“But how is President McCurdy to blame for this?”

“He represents authority.”

“And in his place, what would you put?”

Axman glanced around at the cornerless room, feeling himself imprisoned once more. The white plastoid walls seemed to shriek their control over him, and the faces of his followers could just as easily have been the faces of his jailers. “We want freedom for the individual,” he stated, and then, echoing words he’d once heard Frost speak, he hurried on. “Let man take over from the machine. Let hands do honest work again.”

“And let us face our real enemy,” Frost interrupted. “That enemy is not in Washington but beneath the sands of the Utah desert. I propose that this strike force be aimed at Blunt and Ambrose and their underground city.”

“How do we know such a city even exists?” Axman challenged. They were face to face now, like two debaters on a rostrum.

“You know the answer to that! Milly Norris told you she learned it from Blunt!”

“Milly Norris? She lured a Computer Cop into a trap. Why couldn’t she be luring us into one too? Why couldn’t she get us all into this underground city and then flood it, or blow it up? Then President McCurdy would have no more worries from HAND!”

It was a moment of decision, and for an instant Axman thought he had them. But then a few eyes turned toward Milly, who stood in the back against the curving plastoid wall of the granary. She did not say a word, but she didn’t have to. Frost was doing the talking for her.

“Believe that if you will, but I will be leading the attack on Nova. If it is a trap, I’ll be the first to die. Now you decide. Do you follow Axman to the New White House, or me to the desert of Utah?”

The meeting broke up soon after, without any firm decision. But Axman could feel his power slipping away. His leadership of HAND had been challenged, and things would never be the same again.

Unless he acted quickly.

Their rooms were in a dormitory adjoining the abandoned grain warehouse, and Milly Norris had been given a place there too. It was to her room that Axman made his way later that night, when he was certain Frost and the others slept.

“Who is it?” she asked through the door in response to his soft knocking.

“Graham Axman. I must talk to you.”

“Just for a moment.”

She slid open the door and peered out, her face shadowed by the polarized light. “What do you want?”

“Let me in,” he said, pushing past her. In that moment his motives were mixed even in his own mind. The possibility of sexual assault was certainly among them. “Now then, I want to know everything about this man Blunt.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Are we suddenly modest?”

She merely stared at him. “No, just sleepy.”

“Then I won’t keep you long. But it was never explained to me how you came in contact with Jason Blunt.”

“He contacted me, if you must know.” She seated herself on the edge of the cycled bed, crossing her legs so that the pale pink nightsuit fell open. His eyes took in the full thighs, slender calves, thin ankles.

“For what purpose?” he asked.

She glanced around nervously, and for an instant he was reminded of a laudanum addict seeking a dose. But then she seemed to settle down, facing him with a bland, bleak smile. “I was Stanley Ambrose’s mistress, remember? It seems to be a fact that was well known around the country. I sometimes wonder that it wasn’t on the telenews, or in the hologram theaters.”

“Blunt came to you because of that?”

“Yes, he came to me because of that. The first time.” She turned to gaze at the wall. “He wanted to know about Stanley, just as Euler Frost and Earl Jazine did later.”

“You became Blunt’s lover?”

She shrugged. “He bought a sixteen-year-old girl as a bride on the Turkish market. As you know, those things have a way of paling after a few years. He’s a wealthy man, most generous with his gifts. I would have been foolish to refuse him. Stanley had stopped writing to me, after all.”