Inferno (6 page)

“For pity’s sake,” he said, “pull me out of the way. Maybe they won’t get me a few times, and then I’ll be able to keep away from them—”

He’d had it. Mind gone with his body. It was just as well. We ought to be taking him to a hospital, but why bother? He’d had it.

“We are leaving Hell,” Benito said. “First we go down—”

“Oh, no! I know what they do to you down there! Just move me, just a little, please?”

I wondered where to put him. The ledge was hard and flat, baked adobe, with no cover between the cliff and the hedgerow. But we couldn’t leave him out here. I took him under the arms and dragged him over against the cliff to die in peace.

“I thank you,” he whispered. “What’s your name?”

“Allen Carpentier.”

He seemed to brighten. “I had all your books.”

“Hey! Did you?” Suddenly I liked this man.

“Too bad I don’t have my collection. I could get your autograph on them. I had . . . all of everyone’s books. Did you ever hear of my collection? Allister Toomey?”

“Sure.” I’d known many book collectors, and they’d all heard of Allister Toomey, to their rage and sorrow. Toomey had spent a considerable inheritance on books, all kinds of books, from double four-edges to first editions to pulp and comic books that were just getting to be worth owning. Much of what he had owned had been unique, irreplaceable. He’d kept them all in a huge barn he’d managed to hang on to somehow.

He’d spent everything else on books: there was no money left to take care of them. They moldered in that barn. Rats and insects got to them, rain dripped through the roof. If he’d sold a few of them he’d have been able to take care of the rest. I’d known a lot of collectors, and they all had a tendency to brood over Allister Toomey.

“I guess I don’t have to ask why you’re here.”

“No. I was both a . . . hoarder and a waster. I lay between both groups . . . I suppose it’s fair enough. I wish I’d taken . . . one or another of those offers. But what could I sell?”

I nodded and turned away. He continued talking, to himself now. “Not the complete
Analog
collection. Not the
Alice in Wonderland
. It was autographed. Autographed!”

Good-bye, Allister Toomey, who’d died twice now. I waited with Benito until the mob swarmed past with their bouncing boulder, then we ran across.

CRACK!

We found a hole in the hedgerow and scrambled through.

There was only a narrow ledge beyond the hedgerow, then a cliff. Thick mists hid the bottom, but it was a long way down. There didn’t look to be any way over it.

We walked along for miles. There were other groups behind the hedgerow (CRACK!) all shouting and screaming (CRACK!) in various languages.

Then the sounds changed. Machinery, rivet guns, hammers ringing, the sounds of workmen and their tools.

Tools! We’d need tools for the glider. I began to run ahead.

A

tremendous chunk of the ledge had collapsed, and the chasm ran right across, from the cliff on the downhill side to the base of the cliff towering above. A stream ran through it, and it had cut the gorge even deeper. Far below we could see people working frantically on a dam.

Another group was just as frantically tearing it down.

At our level there was a similar contest. One group was trying to build a bridge across the gorge, and another worked to disassemble it. Fifty yards in either direction were more bridge builders and destroyers. It seemed like a lot of wasted effort.

I looked at Benito, but he only shrugged. “I have never been to this part before. I do not think Dante came here either.”

The group just in front of us were steelworkers, slapping together I beams, girders, plates, anything they could manage, fastening them with hot rivets and hammers. A small forge blazed away to heat rivets. I looked at all the work without comprehension—until I saw Barbara Hannover.

Suddenly it came to me. I’d known Barbara a long time. She wasn’t cruel, and she didn’t hate people, but she loved wildlife more. Whatever anyone proposed, a new bridge, a new freeway, housing development, mine, power plant, oil well, or wheat-field, she had a million reasons why you couldn’t do it. I honestly think she’d have let all the Kansas wheat fields go back to prairie and buffalo if she could have thought of a way to manage it.

Add to her fanatic streak a Harvard Law School degree and one of the sharpest brains in the country, and it was easy to see why lovers of progress shuddered when she took an interest in what they were doing.

And naturally she was tearing the bridge down. I had an idea and looked closer at the construction workers. If Barbara was in this part of Infernoland, Pete couldn’t be far away.

And there he was, bucking rivets. Pete and Barbara had been married for a while. A short while. Just as she couldn’t see a housing tract without wanting eviction writs and bulldozers, he couldn’t see a nice place on the trail without wanting to improve it with a log cabin. I’d gone hiking with him once. The whole fifty miles was one long development plan, with ideas for improving the trail, building hostels, constructing artificial beaver dams, putting in handrails where the climb was steep . . . I almost killed him before we got back to the car.

“It makes sense,” I told Benito. “Artistically. The way anything else down here makes sense. Pete and Barbara were both fanatics.”

Neither of them had noticed me. I couldn’t see how steel-working tools would help anyway. But upstream was a wooden trestle bridge, with a group just finishing it while another tried to get at it with saws.

I looked at the saws and lusted. With a saw and nothing else we could build a glider. Other things would be useful, but they were easier to make than a saw would be. I had to have one.

The funny thing was that they used each other’s tools. One guy would be hammering away to put a beam in place, and another would be sawing it in half—while they screamed insults at each other, they did nothing else. The rules of Infernoland were more complicated than I’d have thought.

Or the robots were programmed funny.

But that sure looked like Pete and Barbara.

I waited until a progressive type laid down his saw, then started for it. Too late. A thin-faced woman grabbed it and had it at the trestle-piece he’d been trimming to fit.

The next time I was quicker. When she set the saw aside for an ax, I grabbed it. There was a drill bit on the ground next to it, just a twisted chunk of steel more valuable than its equivalent in diamonds, and I got that too.

You’d have thought they
were
diamonds. Madam Hawkface started for me with the ax, and her builder companion was right behind. He didn’t need an ax. He could have made three of us.

“Run!” I shouted.

Benito heard. We dashed for the trail leading down into the gorge. It was narrow and twisted, but it looked safer than what we were leaving.

I’d done one thing. I’d got those two crews to cooperate for the first time since Infernoland was opened to the public.

Unfortunately, what they wanted to cooperate on was tearing me to pieces. The trail turned a corner, then swooped down the cliff. We followed it.

8

T

here
was a ledge ten feet below the lip of the cliff, and we stopped for a moment to catch our breath. I thought I felt the cliff tremble and asked Benito about it.

“It is not any place to stay,” he warned. “Allen, you will find that there is no safe place in Hell. Wherever you stop—well, you won’t like it.”

“I can believe that.” The thing to do was get out of here, and the more I thought about it, the better the glider looked. Now I had a saw that I could use to cut frames and ribs and stringers, if I could find anything to cut.

I still wondered what we’d use for fabric, but somewhere there had to be a storehouse for the costumes. The gowns Benito and I wore would do. It was a close-woven fabric, very tough, and it shed most of the dirt and muck we’d crawled through. I lifted the hem and tested the weave by blowing through it. It didn’t let much through. It would do fine.

The ledge heaved again. I wondered if this was something for our benefit, then laughed at myself. Earthquakes on call? The Builders were powerful, but
that
powerful?

We scrambled along the ledge until we were stopped by a waterfall pouring out in front of us. The water was black and dirty, and it stank like a sewer outfall, but the water rushed downward, and it had carved a bed in the cliffside. There were handholds in the sides of the notch the stream had carved.

How long would it take a stream to carve that? It would depend on what the rock was made of. And of course the Builders would have carved the notch themselves, though it looked natural enough.

After a while we reached the bottom of the cliff. The ground fell away at a steep angle. We found a path down it, along the stinking stream, twisting and turning along lower and lower, with steep cliff edges in places.

It would be an ideal place to launch a glider if we could get one up the slope. Drag it up here and over to one of the drop-offs, and push. Yeah. It looked better all the time, but we first had to build the glider, and what was I going to build it out of? I wanted to see those trees. I clutched the saw closer to me.

Benito was staring at me. I stared back.

“Forgive me,” he said. “You hold that tool in a way I have seen before.”

“Yeah?”

“By monks riddled with self-doubt, and clutching a crucifix to reassure themselves their religion is true.”

“We’ll
need
this. We’ll need others too. Wood, and rope for the glider—”

“Will that do?” He pointed downward.

We were almost at the bottom now. We faced a stinking swamp. Thick fog hid most of it, with only temporary glimpses through. Things thrashed around in the filthy water, but there were also bushes and trees hung with vines. Wood! Vines! Certainly I could build a glider out of those! “Now all we need is fabric. There must be a supply dump in this place. Or a laundry. Something.”

Benito sighed. “There is.”

“Great! Can we get a lot of those gowns?”

“It will not be easy.”

“Easy?” I laughed. “Who cares, as long as we get
out
of here.”

Benito’s determined look was very like a bulldog’s. “Very well. I will help you get what you need. I will help you build your glider. I will help you fly it, in whatever direction you choose. In return, you will promise me that if this scheme fails, you will come with me to the real exit.”

“Yeah, sure, sure.” I wasn’t really listening. I was too interested in the swamp below us.

The things bubbling around in there were people. Some of them just lay there half submerged, bubbling out filth and talking nonsense. Others fought each other, for what I couldn’t make out. They roiled the stinking waters, washing up slimy things. Thick fog hung all around, and I had only glimpses of anything more than a few feet away.

“This way.” Benito waded out into the slop. He seemed to know what he was doing, because it wasn’t very deep, just to our ankles. The goop squished inside my sandals, slimy and thoroughly unpleasant. Every now and again there was solid ground a few inches above the muck.

We picked our way through low-hanging trees and bushes. I fingered the wood and tried my saw on one of the trees to cut off a branch. It seemed strong enough and quite springy. I hacked off a chunk of vine, and it was too tough to break.

We could! We really could build a glider!

As we got deeper into the swamp there were fewer people, but I could hear curses in every language I’d ever imagined, people screaming at each other, and the sounds of blows. Sometimes a filthy shape would try to climb up onto the ground where we walked, but others would grab it and pull it back into the mire. I shuddered. Why did they do that?

“The Wrathful,” Benito said. “And the Sullen. The worst offenders in upper Hell.” He was about to say something else, but he ran into something lying on the trail and almost fell.

It was a man, filthy with the muck, lying in a fetal position. His eyes were open and staring at us. He glared, not at us, but at the universe in general.

“Hello,” I said.

“Come with us,” Benito added. “There is a way.” He didn’t sound hopeful, and of course there wasn’t any response. “Remember there is a way. Downward, accepting everything—”

“Come on, he’s catatonic.” It bothered me, Benito preaching to a rubber-doll catatonic. Was my loony-bin theory right after all? Psychodrama on the grand scale?

Then why was I here? And Jan Petri, and Pete and Barbara? It was as if the Builders had revived everyone who had ever lived! Then set out to cure the crazy ones. Did they think I was one of those?

There was another one on the trail, and he wasn’t catatonic at all. He stood there glaring at us, while others thrashed in the muck at either side of him. To get past we’d have to wade out into that, and from the ripples we would not only be over our heads but among the fighters. They’d never let us out.

“Excuse us,” Benito said pleasantly. “The trail is wide enough for us to pass if you will step forward two paces.”

“Bugger off.”

“Surely you will not stand in our way?” Benito was still very pleasant, but there was an edge to his voice.

“Took me a hundred years to get up here,” the figure said. “
You
never
have
been in the muck. If it’s good enough for me, it’s good enough for you.”

He was a big man with powerful arms, and he seemed to mean it.

“Stand aside,” Benito said. He was giving orders now. “You may come with us if you will—and if you can, which I doubt. But you will not prevent us from going.” Benito’s voice still had the ring of authority that had cowed Minos, and it shook the guy momentarily.

“Don’t I know you?” he said. He stared at Benito. “I’m sure I know you. Well, whoever the hell you are, get past me the same way I got up here.”

“Friend, you leave us no choice,” Benito said.

“Aha! I
do
know you! You’re Ben—Hey! Let go! Hey!”