The spires of the tallest buildings in Greater New York soared a mile into the sky, and there were scores of such man-made mountains.  There were thousands of buildings - older skyscrapers, newer residences - over seventy stories high, and all these buildings were linked together at numerous levels by glideways and elevated streets and liftubes and droptubes, forming one vast multi-leveled aerial warren that stretched from Albany in the north to Trenton in the south, from Montauk in the east to Paterson in the west, from the clouds above to the original groundlevel below, a level all-but indistinguishable from the scores of levels tiered above it.

But having pierced the clouds, having piled level upon level above the ground until the entire city was all but one unthinkable huge building, greater New York, unlike its ancient ancestor, stopped at groundlevel.

And below groundlevel was a vast underground labywrinth, a forgotten, hidden city of abandoned subway tunnels, sewer mains, trans-Hudson tunnels and tubes, ancient grottos that had existed as far back as the forgotten American Civil War.  This abandoned honeycomb beneath the city crossed the Hudson by the moldering Tube Tunnels, by The Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the Metroway subway tunnel.  All but forgotten by the Hegemony, totally forgotten by the Wards, erased from the history and guide books, unpatrolled by the Guards, berift of Eyes and Beams, unmapped and perhaps unmappable, this subterranean labywrinth was the motive citadel of the Democratic League.

Making his way along the abandoned subway tracks between the old 135th Street and 125th Street stations, the thin brilliant beam of his flash the only light in the all-enveloping velvet darkness, Boris Johnson savored a rare moment of utter security.

The subways were League territory.  In fact, this under ground city, and similar abandoned man-made grottos beneath Chicago and Bay City and Great London and Paris and Moscow and Leningrad and scores of other multi-leveled cities all over Earth, were all that stood between the Democratic League and extinction.  Above was control, Guards, Beams and Eyes, paper checks.  But a man could disappear into the underground ruins until the necessary papers were forged when things got too hot up above.  Here arms could be cached, meetings held, papers forged, in security.  No doubt the Hegemonic Council was aware of the uses to which the abandoned warrens were put, but to seal the myriad forgotten entrances, to install Beams and Eyes in every tunnel under every city, to patrol the tunnels, was clearly im-possible.  And to blast the tunnels shut would crumble the cities above at their roots, so honeycombed with the abandoned tunnels of centuries was Greater New York and the other huge cities.

The tunnels, like the League, were nuisances too picayune to justify the enormous expense of total elimination, and in that economic calculation lay the League's precarious safety.

Now Johnson reached the 125th Street station.  Ahead, he saw a circle of flash beams lighting up the blackness of the station platform - the others had already reached the meeting place.  Johnson scrambled up out of the right-of-way cut by a corroded metal ladder and stood on the station platform, amidst rotten remains of wooden benches, decayed vending machines, the cracked and pitted asphalt of the platform itself.