Inferno. Part 4

"Freeze him?"

I didn't bother to explain. They'd cremated Petri, burned him to ash and ga.s.ses. How could he have been revived? How could the Builders of this Infernoland even have found specs for a robot a.n.a.logue? Or a cell for cloning? Or... anything? Cremated is as dead as you can get!

Do the Builders have a time camera? Physical principles unknown, but to re-create Petri they have to be able to photograph the past. So we give them that, and the s.p.a.ce-warping fields, and the genetic engineering that created Minos and freed Carpentier from the need to eat or drink or sleep, and the weather control, and the reduced ma.s.s of people in the winds, and the engineering technology that built Infernoland itself.

Carpentier, if they're that powerful, do you really want to fight them?

Of course not. I only want out.

"You're very thoughtful," said Benito. "Watch your step."

I stopped at the brink of a precipice. Then I followed Benito down a wandering, dangerous trail. It switchbacked along the face of the cliff, and in many places it would have been easy to go over the edge. That scared me a lot. After all, I'd done it before...

At least we were going down on our feet, and the sleet had stopped.

Things were definitely looking up. Still, there were funny noises from the gloomy area below, sounds my mind registered as construction work. Crash. A long pause, in which voices screamed orders too distant to make out.

Crash.

CHAPTER 7.

The trail led out onto a flat plain of hard baked clay. As we reached the bottom Benito stopped me silently, with an arm held straight out across my chest. I was willing. I had heard the rumble and the shouting coming toward us.

It rolled past us at a good clip: a boulder four or five yards across, nearly spherical, bounding across the cracked adobe, surrounded by a shouting mob. They were urging it along, running alongside and b.u.t.ting the ma.s.s with their heads and shoulders, a mob of men and women dressed in the finest rags I'd ever seen. There were the remains of evening gowns and slashed velvet Restoration clothing, academic robes and Gernreich original creations, all torn and filthy.

The leader wore striped trousers and swallowtail coat and a ring that would have choked a hippopotamus. "This time!" he screamed at the top of his voice. "This time we'll get them!"

"We can pa.s.s now," Benito said calmly.

"What was that all about?"

CRACK!.

I looked to my left. Two nearly identical ma.s.ses of pale-blue translucent stone stood rocking back and forth. Eighty or ninety humans in decaying opulence lay about the rocks as if they'd been flung in handfuls.

A few started to get up. The leader shook his fist and screamed, "h.o.a.rders! Misers! Next time-- Come on, men, we need a bigger lead time!" More got up, shaking their heads dazedly, and two groups attacked the two huge stones and began painfully rolling them in opposite directions. The other outfit, the one furthest away, was dressed differently: also in rags, but these had never been much to start with.

"h.o.a.rders and Wasters," said Benito. "Natural enemies. They will try to crash each other with those rocks for all eternity."

"Benito, I'd swear those rocks--"

"Yes?"

"Skip it. I'm getting so I'll believe anything." We started across the plain. A couple of hundred yards ahead of us was a hedgerow of some kind, and sounds filtered through it. The misers were rolling their rock back that way, getting good distance for another run. We followed until they reached the hedges and stopped. Then they turned to, pus.h.i.+ng it the other way. A prim-looking bearded man in the remains of a dark suit from the 1890's shouted toward the other mob. "You threw away the good in your lives! Now pay!"

I couldn't stand it any longer. I grabbed a wildeyed matron by the shoulder. She struggled to get away. "Let me go! We have to crush those wasteful--"

"Ever manage to do it?"

"No."

"Think you will this time?"

"We might!"

"Yeah, sure," I said."What would happen if you stopped rolling the rock and took a break?"

Sha studied my face for signs of idiocy. "They'd cream us."

"Suppose you both stopped?"

She pulled away from me and ran to put her shoulder to the boulder. The mob heaved it over a b.u.mp. She shouted back to me. "We couldn't trust them. Even if we could... we can't stop. Minos might..."

"Might take it away," I guessed. "I thought I knew that color."

Several of them glanced at me suspiciously. A couple of the men left the rock to advance on me.

"Hey! Hold on! I couldn't steal it by myself. I don't want to."

They relaxed. One, a man wearing the remains of a peasant smock, said, "Many of us hae been here for unco time. Yon Queen Artemesia says when first she came, there were still facets upon't. It must hae been a bonny sight." He sighed wistfully.

It must hae been, yeah. Hey, Carpentier, how long would it take to wear all the corners off a twelve-foot diamond? I turned back toward Benito. He was talking to someone on the ground.

It was a man with both legs crushed. The rock must have rolled over him. He was still in shock, because he wasn't screaming in pain, but he would be. Blood seeped from the jellied mess that had been his legs.

"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 h.e.l.l," 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 pulps 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 onto 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 into 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... h.o.a.rder 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 a.n.a.log 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 own level there was a similar contest. One group was trying to build a bridge across the gorge and another worked to disa.s.semble it. Fifty yards in either direction were more bridge builders and destroyers. It seemed like a lot of wasted effort.

I looked to 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 it 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 wheatfield, she had a million reasons why you couldn't do it. I honestly think she'd have let all the Kansas wheatfields 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 steelworkbig tools would help anyway. But upstream was a wooden trestle bridge,with a group just finis.h.i.+ng it while another group tried to get at it with saws.

I looked at the saws and l.u.s.ted. 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-- and while they screamed insults at each other, they did nothing else. The rules in 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 at the trestle-piece he'd been tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 me.

"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.

CHAPTER 8

There was a ledge ten feet below the lip of the cliff, and we stopped for a moment to catch our breaths. 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 h.e.l.l. 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 some where 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 were 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 could 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 first we 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.