Underground Movement

Illustrated by ENGLE
A mangled corpse held them captive in that dark tunnel beneath the Earth's surface—and taught them a lesson about what freedom really means!
The hatch to the front compartment swung open for the first time. One man came out. He turned at once to make sure that the air-tight door behind him had locked. Satisfied that it had, he turned again to look down the cabin at us. His face showed that insolence we'd learned to know as the uniform of the Bupo , the State Secret Police.
The man from Bupo walked down the aisle between the passengers toward the rear of the car. He swept his eyes right and left like a suspecting-machine, catching every detail of us on his memory. People leaned toward the walls as he approached, like children shrinking back from a big animal, and relaxed as he went by. He was out of sight in the galley at the rear for a moment, then was back, carrying a pitcher of water in one hand and the key to the front compartment in the other.
A battering-ram hammered into my belly. I slammed bent, hitting my head against the knees of the man sitting across from me. The capsule shuddered, smearing some obstruction against its outer wall. There was an instant when I weighed nothing. Then my head snapped back with hangman's violence as the capsule bounced forward a few meters. Then we were still. From the shock to the silence was a matter of ten seconds.
I pulled myself up from the floor. Surprisingly, my skeleton still hinged at the joints and nowhere else. The Bupo man was flat in the aisle, bleeding black splotches into the green carpet. He still had hold of a piece of the water-pitcher's handle. I ignored him, while my brain began to push out explanations for this impossible accident.
Something had gotten into the Tube, that slick intestine we'd ridden through under the Andes, below the Matto Grosso, out under the pampas. Something had got in the way of the hundred hurricanes that pushed us. The eyes and ears and un-man-like senses I'd helped build into this five thousand kilometers of metal gut had stopped the pumps. The vacuum inviting our capsule on had filled with air, no longer tugging us to the terminal nest by the Atlantic. We were abandoned, fifteen meters under God-knows-where.