that threatened to lift the top of my head off.
'Who was the dead man in your room?'
He rolled his eyes thoughtfully. 'Bill Benson, born in nineteen-twenty. Joined Navy in forty-two, five-inch gun loader in Pacific War, winning Bronze Star and Purple Heart, discharged in forty-eight, hired by us as security guard. That poor bastard had a stroke in the elevator, he was so worried about me!'
'How'd he get in that room?'
'I dragged him there! Otherwise, they don't close the lid of the little pine box and your second cousins come in plastic clothes and put dead flowers on you, a bad way to go!'
'I see. Uh, well, you're quite an organist.'
'Yes. But a terrible administrator!' Pertinax now clapped his foot down on the lowest pedal, sounding a rumble too low to hear. 'But hark!' he screamed, 'there sounds an ominous undertone of warning!' He released the pedal and looked around at Ephraim and me. 'I shall now play the famous 'Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.' This is clearly the work of a young and vigorous Bach, almost ostentatious in his readiness to show virtuosity, reveling in the instrument's ability to bounce mighty themes from the walls of the Kirche
but enough of this, my stops are selected.' He looked suspiciously at the ceiling. 'This one brings out the bats. Prepare your tennis rackets therefore! Ah. The nuptial song arose from all the thousand thousand spirits over the joyful Earth & Sea, and ascended into the Heavens; for Elemental Gods there thunderous Organs blew; creating delicious Viands. Demons of Waves their watry Eccho's woke! Demons of Waves!' And throwing his head back, he hurled himself into the Toccata. We stood mesmerized by his playing and his probing tongue, until the fugue began; then we retreated to the broadcast booth.
'He's playing stop combinations I've never heard before,' said Ephraim. 'Anyway, I'm broadcasting all this. He's great.'
Down in the tunnels we always kept the radio on low, and so heard plenty of Pertinax in the next few days.
Eventually we brought down the big power supplies from Heimlich Freedom Industries, wrapped in plastic and packed with chemical dessicants to keep them dry, surrounded with electric blankets to keep the electronics warm. Casimir produced several microchips he had stolen from the supplies so that Fred Fine could not use them, and plugged them into their proper spots. We ran thousands of feet of heavy black power cables down into the tunnels to power them. We tested each electromagnet; two were found wanting and had to be sent back and remade. We energized the rail and slid the bucket up and down it hundreds of times, using a small red laser to check for straightness, laboriously adjusting for every defect. It took two days to carry down the machine's parts, four days to adjust it and a day of testing before Casimir was satisfied it would work on its first and only trial.
Virgil worked on the payload, a ten-kilogram high-explosive shell. He used a computer program to design the shaped charge, an enormous program that normally would have run for days, but now required only seconds. The weakened Worm could only taunt him. AH, GOING TO BLOW SOMETHING UP? 'I'm going to blow you up.'
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM. This was its usual response to what sounded like threats. YOU'RE VERY CLEVER, BUT I SHALL TRIUMPH IN THE END.
'Wrong. I found where you are.'
HUH? 'I found the secret mini-disc drives that Paul Bennett hid above the ceiling of his office. The drives where you've been hiding. It's all over now.'
I AM EVERYWHERE.
'You are most places, but not everywhere. I'm going to shut off your secret disc drives as soon as I'm sure they aren't booby trapped.'
I'M GOING TO BLOW YOU UP.
'I'm going to be careful.'
THAT'S A LOT OF EXPLOSIVE FOR YOU TO FOOL AROUND WITH, LITTLE BOY.
'It'll do.'
I WILL BLOCK YOUR CALCULATIONS.
'You're living in the past, Worm,' typed Virgil, and executed his program. 'I have just executed my program. And next, I'm going to execute you.'
THREATS OF PHYSICAL VIOLENCE ARE USELESS AGAINST THE WORM.
Lute turned the shell on a Science Shop lathe and packed the explosive with a hydraulic press. Virgil carried it down an evacuated stairwell, placing each foot very, very carefully.
Casimir put it on a clean table downstairs and weighed it; ten kilograms precisely. He dusted it off with a lint-free rag and slid it into the bucket. We checked the power sources, and they looked fine. Everyone was evacuated except for me, Casimir and Fred Fine; Virgil led the remaining GASF forces upstairs and commanded them to leave. It was 10:30 P.M.
We sat in the APPASMU for an hour and a half, until Sarah's program came on.
'Everyone look at Big Wheel!' she said. There was long silence and we sat there on the APPASMU, protected by strobes, the rats chattering and grumbling in the darkness around us, the HFI power sources looking oddly clean and shiny as they flashed in and out of darkness in their own little strobe-pool.
'That's good,' said Sarah. 'As you can see, Big Wheel is shining tonight. But he won't shine for long, because he is unhappy.' Another wait. We knew that, upstairs, Hyacinth had phoned the Big Wheel's controller and ordered him to shut off the sign. 'Big Wheel is not shining tonight,' Sarah continued, 'because he wants you all out of the Plex. You are all to stop watching him from a distance. The Big Wheel wants you to see him up close tonight. Everyone get out of the building now and walk toward Big Wheel and stand under him. Leave your radios on in case I have more instructions! You have an hour to leave the Plex. When Big Wheel is happy, he will turn on again.'
Organ music came on, obviously another live performance by a particularly inspired Pertinax. We played cards atop the tank. 'Should we evacuate too?' asked Fred Fine. 'Could Big Wheel be another face of Shekondar?'
'Sarah wants you here,' said Casimir. This satisfied him. The music started just after midnight and continued for three hours. Above, we supposed, the evacuees were being loaded into ambulances or paddy-wagons, while Army fallout emergency workers prepared the city for the worst. The Board of Trustees were departing by helicopter from the top of C Tower, withdrawing to the HFI Tower a mile away.
'This is really it,' said Fred Fine, ready to black out. 'This is the moment of the heroes. The Apocalypse of Plexor. All will be unMixed in an instant.'
'Yep,' said Casimir, drawing another card. 'I'll see that, and raise you four chocolate chips.'
The only problem so far was minor: the station's signal seemed to be dying away. We had to keep turning up the volume to hear the music, and by 1:30 we had it up all the way. Our batteries were fine, so we assumed it was a problem at the station. As long as everyone else was turning up their volume too, it should be fine.
Finally the organ music was phased out for a second and we heard Sarah. 'Go for it,' she said, tense and breathless. 'We're gone. See you outside.' I started sweating and trembling and had to get up and pace around to work off energy, finally taking an emergency dump. We were in a sewer, who cared? We gave Sarah, Hyacinth, Ephraim and Bert Nix half an hour to evacuate, but the music kept on going. After twenty minutes, Ephraim's voice came in. 'Go ahead,' he said, 'we're staying.'
So we went ahead. We had no choice.
The tunnel was four hundred feet long.
The first fifty feet were taken up by the railgun, set up on its supports about five feet above the floor. There was a three-hundred-foot desert of tinfoil shards, then the barrier of light, then, fifty feet beyond that, the door to the Nuke Dump. We rolled the APPASMU to within twenty feet of the light barrier and parked it against one of the tunnel sides. Through long wires strung down the tunnel we controlled the firing of the railgun. When we were ready, we entered the tank, shut off the strobe and turned on the ultrasound. Within a minute we were surrounded by a thousand giant rats, standing on one another's shoulders in their lust for that sweet tone, milling about the APPASMU as though it were a dumpster.
Fred Fine and I aimed shotguns out the forward gun ports. Casimir hit the button.
We could not see the shell as it shot past the vehicle. We heard the explosion, though, and saw its flash. The rats milled back from the explosion. Fred Fine and I opened fire and annihilated the light-wall in a few shots, and with a chorus of joy the rat-army surged forward into its long-looked-at Promised Land, followed by us. Our fear
