Inferno. Part 8

Something familiar about that story... but Benito was looking out at the swamp, and I didn't ask him. He looked awfully big and heavy to be a glider pilot, and I had to remember that we didn't weigh what we should. I strained against the fuselage and shoved outward.

It wouldn't have worked if we hadn't been ma.s.sless-- or nearly so. Even then I kept wondering about that. It chewed at my soul the way a ragged tooth attracts the tongue. How could we have weight and no ma.s.s? The wrong weight, and...

Infernoland. Disneyland of the d.a.m.nable. How long had they kept me in that bottle? Clarke's Law kept running through my head, an old axiom of science fiction: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

In my time it would take magic, the supernatural, to make that many people, not weightless, but ma.s.sless. It wasn't even possible in theory to extract the inertia and leave the weight. But they could do it, the Builders, the G.o.d Corporation. Why? It must have cost a lot. Just how big a paying audience did they have?

Who was watching us now?

I heaved against the plane, and then there was no room for thought. The plane dropped like a rock, with me hanging onto the tail, crawling forward to get into the rear seat. Benito knew how to fly, all right. He let us dive, just missing the cliff, until we had built up speed; then he leveled out, taking us above the swamp and toward the red-hot city.

Dis. Dante had described it, glowing with red-hot mosques, with demons on the walls to guard it. I didn't see any demons. I'd take them on faith. If the Builders could build Minos, they could make demons.

We were about a hundred feet above the swamp, and keeping steady alt.i.tude. There must have been warm air rising from the h.e.l.lish brew below us. Then we were over the wall, and Benito banked sharply left to catch the updraft. The plane rose steadily, gliding along the gentle curve of the wall.

Benito shouted, "This won't do any good, you know."

"We're getting higher, aren't we?" I pointed down. The swamp had shrunk until I could see the gentle curve of the cliff beyond it. Cliff and red-hot wall were concentric arcs of circles.

The view to the right went down forever. Beyond what seemed the biggest maze ever built, steam rose in a thick curtain. Through wind-torn rents in the steam I could glimpse factories belching out ugly black dirt, a line of electric pylon towers, a yellow glow of desert... on and on, down and down."

What had it all cost? Thousands of times as much as Disneyland. What kind of people would build Infernoland and people it with unwilling d.a.m.ned souls?

If this worked out, I would never know.

We were higher than the cliffs to our left. It seemed that we had climbed fast, faster than we had any right to. But we were nearly weightless and completely ma.s.sless. The plane had only its own structural weight to lift. We continued to rise until we were in the hideous gray fog that served Infernoland for a sky.

It stank: excrement, oil, smog, sickness, slaughterhouses, everything hideous. There wasn't even the honest smell of sweat and locker rooms.

"Well have to turn now," Benito said. "We can't stay in the updraft if we can't find it."

"That's right. Go!"

We banked left, then straightened out. The fog began to thin. We were doing it! Pa.s.sing over the rings we'd struggled through. A wind fall of weightless people bounced us about, then let us go. We pa.s.sed over Minos' palace. It was even bigger than I'd thought. There was the wall ahead. We were going to make it.

Have at you, Builders! You can't keep a science-fiction writer in h.e.l.l!

Even so, no hero worth writing about would have left Infernoland with so many questions unanswered. He would have led a revolution against the Builders, and never mind the odds. The plane would have been for reconnaissance, not escape.

Heinlein, van Vogt, "Doc" Smith, Robert Howard, all the men who wrote of mighty heroes: what would they think of me now? Who cares? Go, Carpentier! Go, go!

The villas of the First Circle slid below us.

And suddenly we were losing alt.i.tude again. The plane dipped sharply just over the cold river. I should have known it would.

"Were not high enough!" I shouted.

"Obviously. What now?"

"Take us back to the thermals! Get up higher, we can try it again."

"As you wish." He didn't say it wouldn't work. He just banked left again and headed us back down into the bowl. Toward the winds.

Even below the gray fog, Infernoland's lighting was not good. Gloom and night, all the way down. Infernoland was a vast funnel, leading down, down... down where Benito said we had to go. And we were flying there.

Suddenly we were in the winds. People flew about us like flurries of autumn leaves, some together, some alone. Aerial whirlpool ahead, which Benito avoided. And off to the left a straight updraft, flailing human shapes rising helplessly toward Infernoland's invisible roof. Just before they vanished into the gray stinking fog, the air column topped out and they streamed away to both sides.

"There," I said. I pointed.

Benito shrugged expressively.

"I'm getting pretty d.a.m.ned tired of your defeatist att.i.tude!"

He banked toward the updraft. Suddenly we were rising as in an elevator. I caught startled faces, and some of the whirling victims tried to swim toward us through the air, but they were rising faster than we were. They couldn't catch us. I was glad. Ma.s.sless they might be, but if I could feel wind roaring past my ears and tugging at my hair, then people clinging to the wings would foul the airstream. We'd all crash.

We left the updraft and were carried along with the others. Sure enough we were just at the edge of the fog, so that we could hardly see below. This was it!

We were as high as we'd been above Dis, and much closer to the wall. "Now!" I shouted.

Benito even grinned at me as he turned toward the wall. This time we'd make it!

As he banked, something bulky hit him in the face and knocked him back into the seat, then slipped past and wrapped itself around me. I struggled to rip it off, and it fought back. We'd picked up a pa.s.senger.

"Let me at the controls! I used to be a glider pilot!"

The hitchhiker pulled himself off me and scrambled into the other seat.

Benito didn't resist. "Let him fly," he said.

The plane turned sickeningly. We had lost alt.i.tude.

I could see over the stranger's shoulder: cliffside, swampland, a glowing red line. A tailspin, and we were beyond the place of the winds, headed back into the inner circles of Infernoland.

He pulled us out of the spin. Nothing subtle about it. He just stopped the spin with the ailerons, then pulled back on the tailflaps and hung on. Presently we were flying level again, headed toward the swamp. The stranger looked back at us, showing a lean, cheerful face beneath short, wind-tossed hair. "Where to?"

"Up and out. Over the wall."

"Good thinking, but there's a problem." He waved toward the cliff. We were well below the level of the winds.

I said, "There are red-hot walls down there. Good thermals. We'll spiral around them until we're high enough, then get back into the winds--"

"Not me."

"We have to! There are updrafts in the, winds. Before you interfered we were high enough to get out of this place."

"Down is correct," Benito said.

"Not the way you mean!"

He shrugged. "It is the only way we can go now."

"No question about that." We headed out over the swamp again, feeling the rising air that was just strong enough to keep us level. If we didn't find an updraft we'd crash in the swamp.

The trouble was, we were looking for something invisible. You can't see a wind, you can only see what it does. I was looking for heat turbulence, or formations that might break a horizontal airstream and send it upwards; anything. There'd been no problem spotting updrafts when the wind was full of actors or draftees or whatever they were.

Ahead through the murk we could see the cherry-red glow of the walls of Dis. It looked a bit like the first sight of a town in the middle of the Nevada desert, and for a moment I thought of food and coffee and one-armed bandits, and girls...

We were over a hot-spot in the swamp. A shape rose from the murk and shook a fist at us. He had a big bushy Afro hairdo. He lost interest when another man in a voluminous white gown and high pointed cap rose up to scream at him. They were locked in battle when we left them.

"Take it easy," I told our pilot. "I think I saw the left wing bend way up when you pulled us out of the spin."

"Yeah, I saw it too. What did you build this thing out of?"

I told him. He looked uneasy. I asked, "What kind of gliders are you used to?"

"Hypersonic."

"Eh?" said Benito.

"Huh?" I said.

The stranger chortled. "Jerome Leigh Corbett, at your service. I was a s.p.a.ce-shuttle pilot. I had a dozen flights on my record, and then... you ever have one of those days?"

"d.a.m.ned right," I said. Benito laughed and nodded.

We seemed to have enough alt.i.tude to reach the hot walls. They were close enough that we could,make out details through the murk and the red glow. Corbett seemed to know what he was doing.

There were ripples in the dark mud below. A hand thrust itself upward, middle finger extended. There was no movement in the cobwebs and slimy moss hanging from the bushes, no wind, nothing; only the ripples in the mud.

"One of those days," Corbett said. "First, a twenty six-hour hold while we replaced one of the solid boosters. That was only irritating. We lost one of the three main motors going up. Then after we made orbit one of the fuel tank clamps jammed. Either of you know what a s.p.a.ce shuttle looks like?"

I said I did. Benito said he didn't.

"Well, the tank is big and bulky and cheap. We carry the main motors down aboard the dart, the winged section, but we leave the tank to burn up in the atmosphere. If we couldn't get the tank loose there wouldn't have been any point in going down."

"Did you?"

"Sure. We fired the orbital motors in bursts until the clamp sprang open and let us loose. Then we had to use more fuel to get back to our orbit. We were supposed to dump cargo and change orbit, but there wasn't enough fuel. We had to go down."

Benito was looking totally confused. It must have been gibberish to him. I asked, "What happened?"

"I don't know. I s.p.a.cewalked out and looked at the fuel tank clamp. I swear there was nothing wrong. But maybe the metal fatigued, or maybe the hatch over the clamp lock got twisted-- anyway, we were halfway down and going like a meteor when we got a burnthrough under the nose. I heard the maintenance techs-- they were the cargo I couldn't jettison-- screaming in the instrument room, then the whole nose peeled back in front of me. I woke up by that ferryboat. The crowd pushed me along to Minos, and he threw me into the whirlwind."

"And why were you there?" Benito asked.

Corbett grinned. "Being a shuttle pilot carries a lot of prestige. The girls liked me."

We were over the walls of Dis now, and banked to catch the rising air. My seat surged comfortingly against me... and the left wing bent in the middle. The Fudgesickle turned on its side and dropped.

Corbett dropped the nose. The wing, relieved of pressure, straightened out. But when he tried to pull up it bent again. We'd have been better off if the loose section hdd ripped away, but it hung on, dragging us back.

Corbett did his best. He tried to fly with the broken wing, the flap raised high on the right wing to compensate. We got some lift that way, but there wasn't any doubt: we were going to crash.

Inside the walls of Dis there were tombs. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of tombs, some glowing red hot, others dark. The whole landscape was littered with them.

On the walls themselves were-- beings. They didn't look much like the cute little devils in Disney cartoons. They raged at us, and Corbett, seeing them, dove for speed to get out of their sight.

The wing folded entirely. Corbett played the controls like a virtuoso at an organ, heading out over the tombs and toward a steamy clear area beyond and below them, but we were too low and falling lower, into the tombs-- We dropped into their midst. The plane kissed the top of one tomb, bounced, and smashed nose on against a wall of red-hot iron.

CHAPTER 13

Flame roared up around me, as if a fuel tank had caught. I pulled myself loose and rolled out, clawing frantically with my hands as the flames washed over me. When I tried to get to my hands and knees my right leg wouldn't work. I pulled myself along the ground, dragging the useless leg behind me, whimpering with fear while the fire raged behind and the air I breathed grew unbearably hot.

I didn't stop until I was forty feet away. My fingernails were torn, and my hands cut on the flinty ground. I rolled over onto my back to look behind me, afraid to look at my leg, knowing I'd have to. What had I done to myself?

Someone was screaming.

I ignored the deep throbbing incoherent pain in my leg to look back at the crashed glider. Benito had been thrown clear in the crash. Now he was running back toward the glider.

Corbett was trapped in the wreckage, rammed up against the red-hot iron tomb, screaming like a d.a.m.ned soul. I didn't even consider trying to get him out. He'd be dead in seconds. His skin would already have charred away, and he was breathing superheated air and smoke. How could he scream like that with seared lungs? He was a dead man.

Benito hadn't thought of that. He ran straight back into the flames. I watched in disbelief as he pulled at Corbett's arm, getting nowhere, while fire roared about him. Benito took flaming wreckage in his hands and heaved it away, clawing to get Corbett out.

Idiot! He'd leave me stranded here, my leg ruined, with no guide and no one to help me! I sat up and tried to go to his aid, but agony flashed in my leg. I had to look down.

I stared at two splintered ends of red-and-white bone protruding through my thigh. Bright blood spurted through the torn skin. Arterial bright, impossibly red. I couldn't take my eyes away.

Once before I'd broken a bone. I'd caught a football wrong in high school, and a knuckle cracked. It had made me sick, not just the pain, but the thought of that broken thing inside me. I could hardly walk to the clinic. Now I stared at two ends of a broken thighbone while my life's blood jetted out with each pulse. I expected to faint. But nothing happened, and presently I thought of making a tourniquet before all my blood was gone.

There was only my robe. I gripped the hem in my teeth and pulled with both bands. It wouldn't tear, and wouldn't tear, and bright blood jetted in the air.

Benito! I was lying with a broken bone and a terrible wound, but I could be saved! Why was Benito wasting his time on a hopeless case, a man he'd barely met, a hitchhiker? It wasn't fair.

Corbett was still screaming as Benito tore at the wreckage. Where did the pilot find the strength? He should be finished, lungs burned out, heart stopped, but he went on screaming mechanically as if the sounds of pain were being ripped out of him.

The pilot came lose suddenly, and they both went sprawling backward. Benito got up and dragged the pilot over to me. Benito was parboiled and hairless, his hands blistered and burned. Corbett was a charred corpse, black from end to end, with blood-rare steak showing through cracks in the char. There were no eyes left in the sockets. And still sounds came through the swollen blackened lips. I wanted to stop my ears.

"Stupid!" I said. "Stupid, stupid, stupid! In a minute he'll be dead anyway!"

"He will heal," said Benito. "He is dead already."

"Heal?"