“I had needed to cultivate no other person to obtain access to the longevity drug, since I had been one of the pioneers in the research and by then had advanced to assistant director of the chemistry complex. The original formula had required injection, and initial treatments still did, but boosters had been so refined that they might be administered orally, a dosage being required at least every five years. I secretly prepared enough to fill six hundred capsules and placed it in capsules color-coded as headache remedy. I stored the big bottle in my private office and took a handful at a time back to my quarters.
“Emmett and I finally decided that our defection should occur during the five-day celebration of the Dictator’s birthday, when most of the staff would be either drunk or absent and security most lax. The projector complex was situated on the north side of the river and connected to the main complex and the living quarters by a tunnel running beneath the bed of the river from bank to bank. There were always guards stationed at both ends of the tunnel and usually one or more at the entrance to the projection chamber, as well. Normally, no one would be allowed even to traverse the tunnel without written authorization, much less enter a subcom-plex to which he or she was not assigned, but we thought we might be able to get to the projector during the Birthday Days.”
Harold again plunged a glowing loggerhead into his drink, sending up a hissing cloud of pungent steam.
“You must understand, Bass, people had changed from your time and so had the customs, even the calendar. It had been juggled into months of an even thirty days; the five or six leftover days were designated Birthday Days, and during those days everyone went a little mad. The government distributed free alcohol, hallucinogens, and food to all the people in almost unlimited quantities. Very few persons worked during the Days and then only in skeleton crews; there was dancing and fornication in the very streets by day and by night. Staff members who were confined to the complex all year long were allowed to leave and visit family or friends during the Days, and those who remained behaved no more sanely than the general populace.
“Emmett and I chose the third night of the Days. We stuffed our pockets with booster capsules, gold discs, little bags of gems, and food concentrates and put even more into the big cargo pockets of the thigh-length parkas we were issued for outside work in bad weather, then we belted our daggers and slipped into our baldrics, thoroughly rinsed our mouths with raw alcohol, and splashed the rest of the bottle over each other’s clothing.
“We drew little notice as we staggered through the complex, since many persons dressed oddly during the Days and most of those we encountered were drunk or drugged, in any case. The guard cubicle at our end of the tunnel was empty, so we activated a car and rode to the other side. One of the guards there was lying on his back snoring and the other just stared at us glassy-eyed, obviously all but insensible from drink or drugs or both. We left the car and took the lift up to the level of the projector room. And that was when we ran into our first spot of trouble.”
Silently, one of the Archbishop’s servants entered, poked at the fire, then heaped two more logs upon it. That done, he took away the near-empty ewer, replacing it with a brimming one, then departing whence he had come.
The old man sipped at his mug, then asked, “Where was I in my tale, Bass?”
“You were approaching this projector-room, and said that there was trouble.” Bass sounded and was impatient, Harold of York nodded. ‘The guard before the door of the projector-chamber was neither drunk, nor drugged, nor absent, but wide-awake and alert though, fortunately for us, not immediately suspicious of our motives. He was fully armed with a heat-stun weapon hung from his shoulder, a smaller, shorter-range one at bis belt, and a truncheon.”
“Heat-stun weapons?” queried Bass. “I’ve never heard of anything like that Sounds like Buck Rogers stuff to me.”