Hurrying out of the passage from the Metro, Diane McClintock once more felt lost—though in fact she’d come here for a reason. She was here to find Atlas. Even so, she was overcome with a sensation of insubstantiality, of being a mere ghost wandering a palace.
And then, near the blockade at the entrance into Apollo Square, something caught her eye … a poster plastered to the metal wall.
It asked, Who is Atlas?
Just those three words, under a stylized, heroic image of a stoic, confident, clean-shaven man in rolled-up shirtsleeves and suspenders, fists on his hips, gazing with visionary intensity into the workingman’s future …
The one time she’d seen him, outside the café, he’d seemed like an ordinary man—good-looking, sturdy, but ordinary. And yet he was doing an extraordinary thing—risking Ryan’s constables by engaging in flagrant altruism.
At the very least, Atlas must be a charismatic man. Someone who could inspire her—end her feeling of aimlessness …
She turned to the bearded sentry cradling a shotgun at the blockade—a burly, unshaven man in a work shirt and oil-spotted blue jeans. “Listen—could you tell me … I saw him, once—in Pauper’s Drop. Atlas. He was passing out supplies. I’d … I’d like to talk to him. Maybe I could help. When I saw him in Pauper’s Drop, I just…” She shook her head. “I felt something.”
The sentry looked at her as if deciding whether or not she was sincere. Then he nodded. “I know what you mean. But I don’t know as I can trust you…”
Diane looked around to see if anyone was watching—then she took a wad of Rapture dollars out of her purse. “Please. This is all I could get hold of today. I’ll pay my way in. But I have to see him.”
He looked at the money, swallowed hard—then he reached out, grabbed it, and hid it in an inside coat pocket. “Hold up right here…”
The bearded sentry turned and called out to another, older sentry. They spoke in low tones; the bearded sentry turned and winked at her. The older guard hurried off. The sentry went back to his post, whistling to himself. With one hand he gestured to her: wait. Then he pretended not to see her.
Had she thrown away her bribe? Maybe she’d thrown away her life—spider splicers watched Apollo Square from high up on the walls. It was nippy, unevenly lit in Apollo Square tonight, and there were dead men rotting not so far away. The smell made her feel sick. She was still slightly drunk, the space around her whirling ever so slowly, and she thought she might throw up if she had to smell the dead bodies much longer.
But she wasn’t leaving. She was going to stick around till the splicers got her—or she got in to see Atlas.
If Ryan didn’t want her, she’d decided, maybe someone else would.
A woman hurried up to the barricade. “Atlas says okay, he’ll see you, McClintock,” said the woman. Diane tried not to stare at the woman’s scarred face—one of her eyesockets was covered over by scar tissue; her brown hair was matted. “Philo, you come on in with us.”
The shotgun-toting Philo nodded and gestured at Diane with the muzzle of the gun. “You go in ahead of me.”
Diane thought about backing out—but she stepped through the scrap-wood gate and followed them across Apollo Square to Artemis Suites. The one-eyed woman stepped over a low pile of trash in the doorway. Diane followed her into the reeking interior of the building.
Stomach lurching as she picked her way through moldy garbage, Diane entered a stairway that zigzagged up a graffiti-tagged concrete and steel shaft. They climbed four stories up, past drunks and groups of grubby children.
Her escorts took her through a doorway and down a carpeted, burn-scarred hall. The little bushy-haired woman never hesitated, and Philo clumped along behind Diane. The lights flickered again.
“Lights might go out,” Philo remarked, his voice a slow rumble. “Ryan’s turned the power off in the building. We got some jerry-rigged, but it ain’t reliable.”
“I got a flashlight,” the woman said. They came to another stairway, and, to Diane’s bafflement, this time they went down. This stairway was relatively clean, occupied only by the occasional bored sentry scratching himself and nodding as they passed.
Down and down they went, farther down than they’d gone up … down to a subbasement passageway.
Here, they passed under steam-shrouded pipes, their feet splashing through puddles, till they came to a small antechamber with a high, water-dripping ceiling. A Securis door was guarded by a grinning, shivering splicer in a ratty sweater and torn trousers, toes sticking out of his decaying shoes. He had the hard-core splicer’s red scrofula on his face, and he juggled three scythelike fish-gutting blades from hand to hand. The curved blades hissed close to the naked lightbulb on the ceiling, missing it by no more than a quarter inch. “Who’s the extra bitch, tittle-tattle tits?” the splicer asked in a scratchy voice, never pausing in juggling the blades.
“McClintock. Atlas says she can go in.”
“Says you, tittle-tattle tits—we’ll fry your bits if that ain’t it! Ha! Go ahead on in!”
The splicer stepped aside, still juggling, and “tittle-tattle tits” opened the Securis door for them. Diane hurried through, eager to get past the splicer.
They were in a lamplit utility area. Pipes and heating ducts came up through the floor near the walls. The room was warm and smelled of cigarette smoke and mildew and brine.
The cigarette was being smoked by a muscular man seated casually behind a battered gray-metal desk. On the desk was a tumbler and a gold cigarette box.
It was he. The man she’d seen outside the café. He wore white, rolled-up shirtsleeves, just like in the poster. A good face, she thought, that seemed to emanate trustworthiness.
Two shaggy bodyguards stood behind him, near a ganglion of valves. Both bodyguards wore coveralls and carried tommy guns. One of them had an unlit pipe dangling from the corner of his mouth.
“I’d be Atlas,” said the man at the desk, with an Irish lilt, looking her over with an unsettling frankness. “And you’re one of Ryan’s birds?”
“I’m Diane McClintock. I work … I worked … for Mr. Ryan. I saw you helping people in Pauper’s Drop—and it touched me. I don’t feel good about the way things are going and … I just wanted to see if … to see if…” What was it she wanted, exactly?
He smiled impishly. “You don’t seem certain of what you’re wanting to see, Miss McClintock.”
She sighed and unconsciously brushed her hair into place with her hand. “I’m tired. Had a few drinks. But … I want to know more about you—I mean, you know, in a friendly way. I don’t work with the constables. I’ve seen things. Heard stories … I don’t know what to believe anymore … I just know—once I was passing by Apollo Square and I saw a woman come over the barricades and … one of the splicers working for Andrew…” She didn’t like to remember it. The woman hurrying along, full of life, one moment. The next, a splicer had sent a ball of fire into her—and she’d sizzled away into a blackened corpse, within steps of where Diane stood. “Well the splicer burned her. And the look on her face … like she was trying to tell me something. So tonight…” She sighed. “I don’t know. I’m just so tired right now…”
“Get the lady a chair, you great ejit,” Atlas growled at Philo.
Without a word, Philo brought a metal chair from a corner, and Diane sat down. Atlas pushed the gold box across the desk toward her.
“Cigarette?”
“I’d adore one.” She opened the box and took a cigarette, her hands trembling. Philo lit it for her, and she inhaled gratefully, then blew the silken smoke into the air. “This—this is a real cigarette! Virginia tobacco! And in a gold box! You do yourself well for a revolutionary…”
Atlas chuckled. “Oh, aye. But we took that from one of Ryan’s little storerooms under Rapture. Sure, he brought it in to sell in a little shop—a shop I used to sweep out, once upon a time. I was maintenance, a janitor in Rapture—come here when they sang me a pretty lie—a promise of working in me trade. Ended up a janitor. And later—couldn’t find work doing even that.”
“What was your trade, before?”
“Why, I was a metal worker.” He stubbed out his cigarette—his fingers looked pale and soft for a workingman. “As for what we took from that storeroom—we distributed most of it to the people. How do you think people eat round ’ere, with Ryan, the great son of Satan himself, cutting off supplies to Artemis, eh?”
She nodded. “He’s talked about an amnesty for people who give up the … what does he call it, the Bolshevik organizing.”
“Bolshevik organizing! So we’re Soviets now! Asking for a fair break is hardly that!”
She tapped the cigarette over an ashtray on the desk. “Any sort of ‘break’ is pinko stuff to Andrew.” She sniffed. “I’m fed up with him. But I’ve got no reason to love you people either. You can see what you did to me.” She touched the scars on her cheek.
He shook his head sadly. “You were hurt in the fight, were you? A bomb? You’re still a fine-looking woman, so you are. You were too strong to die there. Why, you’ve gotten character from it, that’s all that’s come about, Diane.”
He looked at her with that disarming frankness. And she wanted to believe in him.
“Why do you call yourself Atlas? It’s not your real name.”
“Figure that out on your own, did you?” He grinned. “Welllll … Atlas takes the world on his shoulders. He’s the broad back, ain’t he? And who’s the workingman? The workingman takes the world on his broad back too. Holds it up for the privileged—for the likes of you!”
He opened a drawer and, to her astonishment, took out a bottle of what looked like actual Irish whiskey. Jameson. “Care for hair of the dog, mebbe? Philo—find us some glasses…”
They drank and talked, of politics and fairness and organizing and reappropriation of goods for the working class. “And you think you’re the liberator of the working class, Atlas?”
“I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. That’s the only thing Ryan was right about. These people will liberate themselves! But they do need someone to tell them that it can be done.” He toyed with his glass. Then he said, “You know about the Little Sisters, do you? What they do to them poor little orphan waifs?”
“I’ve heard … Yes, it bothers me, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
He poured her a third drink. “Sure, and it should bother you,” he said solemnly, lighting another cigarette. “It should cut you up inside! I’ve got a little girl meself, you know. The thought of them bastards mebbe getting hold of that child! Oh, the thought! But will it stop anyone from buying ADAM? No. Rapture can’t go on like this, Diane, me dear. This cannot go on…”
It didn’t take long for her to make up her mind. It wasn’t the whiskey, or the cigarettes, or that strong chin, or those frank brown eyes, or the pungent opinions. It was thinking about going back to her place alone—and waiting to hear from Andrew Ryan.
No. Never again.
“Atlas,” she said, “I’d like to help.”
“And why would I believe Ryan hasn’t sent you here, on the sly, like, will you tell me that now?”
“I’ll show you—I’m no spy. I’ll do things he would never approve of. And then … you’ll know you can trust me.”
Ryan Plasmids
1959
The odd little chamber, partly cold steel-walled lab and partly nursery, was chilly today. Drips of cold water slipped from a rusty bolt in the ceiling in a far corner. Brigid had told maintenance about the leak, but so far no one had come to fix it.
Subject 15 didn’t mind—the little girl played contentedly with the drip as Brigid watched, the girl seeming to delight in this tiny little invasion of the gigantic sea into her cell. Squatting in the corner, the child tried to catch each drop as it came down. She giggled when she caught one …
Brigid sighed. The experiments had been going well; the attachment conditioning was working. But she felt heavier every day—as if she were carrying some hidden burden. She was beginning to feel like a Big Daddy herself, as if she too were sheathed in metal. That thought reminded Brigid—it was time.
She went to the door, opened it, took the remote control from her lab-coat pocket, and pointed the device at the hulking gray-metal figure waiting, dormant, in the corridor. Somewhere inside that metal armor was what remained of a man, who was now in a sort of comatose state, waiting for the stimuli to awaken … but never completely awaken. He would always be little more than a machine.
She pressed the button on the remote, and the Big Daddy responded instantly, turning with a creak, coming with clanging steps into the conditioning lab.
“Ooh!” Subject 15 chirped, clasping her wet hands together with delight when she saw the Big Daddy. “Mr. Bubbles is here!”
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