Agent of Chaos by Norman Spinrad

Author:Norman Spinrad [Spinrad, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 0552117277
Published: 1967-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

“The servant of Order, by the very fact that he strives to maintain an eddy of decreased Social Entropy in a hostilely Chaotic universal context must imagine dangers lurking around every corner. The servant of Chaos does not imagine such dangers; he knows that they are there.

—Gregor Markowitz, The Theory of Social Entropy

8

Boris Johnson, dressed in anonymous Maintenance coveralls, stood in the square of greenery immediately across the small static street from the entrance to the Mercurian Ministry of Guardianship building. The Ministry itself was the tallest structure on Mercury, except for the environment dome itself, and its white plasteel facade soared nearly to the heavily polarized permaglaze of the dome above it, outside of which the thin but caustic Mercurian atmosphere raged—instant death lurking outside the dome, making it a cage far more perfect than anything the Hegemony alone could construct. With this area of the planet now on the dayside, where it would remain for the next sixty days as Mercury completed its leisurely revolution about its own axis, not much shorter in duration than its orbit around the sun, the blazing solar furnace, so nearby, could dimly be seen even through the all-but-opaqued permaglaze, reminding all within the dome how frail and isolated they were, how totally confined and artificial their bubble of safety was.

The square in which Johnson stood was itself an attempt by the Hegemony to counter that feeling of impending destruction, of artificiality; a caged feeling that verged on claustrophobia. Only sixty yards by seventy, the square was an expanse of real glass, rimmed by two score genuine oak trees, both brought from Earth, planted and maintained at tremendous expense. It was no esthetic frill, but a psychological necessity on Mercury, this bucolic illusion in the permaglaze cage.

The park was jammed with Wards. It seemed to Johnson that every Ward not otherwise occupied in the dome was huddled there amidst the greenery, trying for the moment to forget that they were trapped in this cage on the most hostile planetary surface in the Solar System, with the exception of the gas giants.

And all to the good, Johnson thought as he felt the bulge of his lasegun in one coverall pocket, the smaller shape of the vial of nerve gas concentrate in another. There were perhaps three hundred Wards milling aimlessly about the park. Nearly a hundred and fifty of them were League agents, committed to risking their lives against terrible odds in the diversionary frontal attack on the Ministry building, designed to force the Hegemonic Council to seal off the Council Chamber and thus render themselves vulnerable to the real attack from within the Ministry itself.

Half an hour ago, there had been still more League agents among the Wards in the square, a good fifty more—men who were going willingly to certain death.

The wide plastomarble steps leading up to the Ministry had a constant trickle of Wards coming and going up and down them, for the Ministry was the busiest building on Mercury, with

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