Thief and guard burst back outside. The light-sensitive fabric of the stolen garments blazed like a sodium flare. There was no patrolman in sight. Heedless of the slow traffic, the pair darted to a pedestrian island in the middle of the six lanes. A metal plate there hinged downward. In the instant before it closed again over the fugitives, Lacey caught a glimpse of stone steps and a dozen other faces.
“Old subway entrance,” Nootbaar said with dismal satisfaction. “That’s all the show. We may as well look at each other for a while.”
Lacey swung up his counterweighted helmet. “You’ve got a Coventry for thieves up here?” he said incredulously. “You just ignore them if they make it to ground before you catch them?”
The bigger man sighed. “Maybe there was a choice once,” he said, “but the size of it scared people. The subways’d been closed because they were inefficient and the surface streets were enough without private cars. There were water and sewer mains; some of them forgotten, some operating but big enough to hide in anyhow, to splash through . . . almost all the time at least. Cable vaults and steam ducts and sealed-off sub-basements; parking garages and a thousand other things, a maze twenty levels below you.
“You close one off and somebody breaks into it again before the crew’s out of sight. Set up a scanning camera and in ten minutes it shows you a man reaching toward it with a crowbar. Send down a Red Team and nobody comes back.” Nootbaar looked up. “And it’s all so easy to say, ‘They want to live like rats, what’s that to you or me or the State?'”
“So it’s a separate society?” Lacey offered.
“It’s a worm in the guts of the City!” Nootbaar snapped back. “It’s fences who sell goods at a tenth their surface price; cribs where they hose the girls off because they’re too wasted to clean themselves. It’s a family living in a section of 36-inch pipe, with no water and no light within a hundred meters. It’s slash shops that generally poison their customers even when they don’t mean to. And Lacey—” the captain leaned across his narrow desk, his eyes black and burning with furious despair—”it’s ten thousand people, or a hundred thousand, or just maybe—and they don’t believe me, Lacey, but I’ve been down there—just maybe a million rotting devils and more every day.”
Nootbaar shook himself and leaned back in his chair. “It’s called Underground,” he repeated.
Lacey traced his neck sear with one stubby finger. “What do they expect me to do?” he asked.
The heavy captain spread his palms. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think anything can be done. We can’t cut them off from water or electricity—they tap the distribution lines. We’d have to shut the whole City down. We can’t close off the exits from their warrens, because there’s at least one opening in every block in the City. If we arrested everybody who came out of Underground, we’d have half the population in the slammer by Sunday morning. It’s a cut that’s bleeding us day by day, and some day it’ll bleed us out; but there’s nothing we can do.”
“So take the gloves off,” Lacey said. The captain’s ironic smile grew broader. Lacey ignored it. “Get the State to send help. Hell, get the military in, it’ll be a change from the Cordillera Central. Go in with stun gas, back it with powerguns; and when you’ve cleared a stretch, seal it for good with a long-term toxin like K2 so nobody’ll try moving back in fifty years or so. It’ll cost something, cost a lot; but it’s still cheap at the price.”
“You’d have enjoyed talking to Director Wheil,” Nootbaar said reminiscently. “He planned it just that way, ten years ago.”
Lacey frowned. “Don’t tell me you couldn’t shoot your way through a bunch of untrained thugs, even if they were tough,” he said.
Nootbaar shook his head. “We were making good headway—not cheap, but like you say cheap at the price—when about a thousand of ’em came outa the ground and took over Stuyvesant Armory.” Nootbaar paused and sucked his lips in, his eyes focusing on the close-chewed nails of his left hand. “It wasn’t the powerguns they took, though the fighting down below’d been hot enough already,” he continued. “And it wasn’t just that they got enough explosive to crater the City Complex like an asteroid hit it. The real thing was, they got all the K2 we’d stockpiled to close Underground after we’d cleared it. Used right, there was enough gas in Stuyvesant to wipe out the whole City; and nobody thought the people who’d planned the raid couldn’t figure out how to use the goodies they’d taken.”