INFERNO

  by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

  (c) 1976 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

CHAPTER 1

  I thought about being dead.

  I could remember every silly detail of that silly last performance. I was dead at the end of it. But how could I think about being dead if I had died?

  I thought about that, too, after I stopped having hysterics. There was plenty of time to think.

  Call me Allen Carpentier. It's the name I wrote under, and someone will remember it. I was one of the best-known science-fiction writers in the world, and I had a lot of fans. My stories weren't the kind that win awards, but they entertained, and I had written a lot of them. The fans all knew me. Someone ought to remember me.

  It was the fans who killed me. At least, they let me do it. It's an old game. At science-fiction conventions the fans try to get their favorite author washed-out stinking drunk. Then they can go home and tell stories about how Allen Carpentier really tied one on and they were right there to see it. They add to the stories until legends are built around what writers do at conventions. It's all in fun. They really like me, and I like them.

  I think I do. But the fans vote the Hugo awards, and you have to be popular to win. I'd been nominated five times for awards and never won one, and I was out to make friends that year. Instead of hiding in a back booth with other writers I was at a fan party, drinking with a roomful of short ugly kids with pimples, tall serious Harvard types, girls with long stringy hair, half-pretty girls half-dressed to show it, and damn few people with good manners.

  Remember the drinking party in War and Peace? Where one of the characters bets he can sit on a window ledge and drink a whole bottle of rum without touching the sides? I made the same bet...

  The convention hotel was a big one, and the room was eight stories up. I climbed out and sat with my feet dangling against the smooth stone building. The smog had blown away, and Los Angeles was beautiful. Even with the energy shortage there were lights everywhere, moving rivers of lights on the freeways, blue glows from swimming pools near the hotel, a grid of light stretching out as far as I could see. Somewhere out there were fireworks, but I don't know what they were celebrating.

  They handed me the rum. "You're a real sport, Allen," said a middle-aged adolescent. He had acne and halitosis, but he published one of the biggest science-fiction newsletters around. He wouldn't have known a literary reference if it bit him on the nose. "Hey, that's a long way down."

  "Right. Beautiful night, isn't it? Arcturus up there, see it? Star with the largest proper motion. Moved a couple of degrees in the last three thousand years. Almost races along."

  Carpentier's trivial last words: a meaningless lecture to people who not only knew it already, but had read it in my own work. I took the rum and tilted my head back to drink.

  It was like drinking flaming battery acid. There was no pleasure in it-- I'd regret this tomorrow. But the fans began to shout behind me, and that made me feel good until I saw why. Asimov had come in. Asimov wrote science articles and histories and straight novels and commentaries on the Bible and Byron and Shakespeare, and he turned out more material in a year than anyone else writes in a lifetime. I used to steal data and ideas from his columns. The fans were shouting for him, while I risked my neck to give them the biggest performance of all the drunken conventions of Allen Carpentier.

  With nobody watching.

  The bottle was half empty when my gag reflex cut in and spilled used rum into my nose and sinuses. I jackknifed forward to cough it out of my lungs and pitched right on over.

  I don't think anyone saw me fall.

  It was an accident, a stupid accident caused by stupid drunkenness, and it was all the fans' fault anyway. They had no business letting me do it! And it was an accident, I know it was. I wasn't feeling that sorry for myself.

  The city was still alive with lights. A big Roman candle burst with brilliant pinpoints of yellows and greens against the starry skies. The view was pleasant as I floated down the side of the hotel.

  It seemed to take a long time to get to the bottom.

CHAPTER 2

  The big surprise was that I could be surprised.

  That I could be anything. That I could be.

  I was, but I wasn't. I thought I could see, but there was only a bright uniform metallic color of bronze. Sometimes there were faint sounds, but they didn't mean anything. And when I looked down, I couldn't see myself.

  When I tried to move, nothing happened. It felt as if I had moved. My muscles sent the right position signals. But nothing happened, nothing at all.

  I couldn't touch anything, not even myself. I couldn't feel anything, or see anything, or sense anything except my own posture. I knew when I was sitting, or standing, or walking, or running, or doubled up like a contortionist, but I felt nothing at all.

  I screamed. I could hear the scream, and I shouted for help. Nothing answered.

  Dead. I had to be dead. But dead men don't think about death. What do dead men think about? Dead men don't think. I was thinking, but I was dead. That struck me as funny and set off hysterics, and then I'd get myself under control and go round and round with it again.

  Dead. This was like nothing any religion had ever taught. Not that I'd ever caught any of the religions going around, but none had warned of this. I certainly wasn't in Heaven, and it was too lonely to be Hell.

  It's like this, Carpentier: this is Heaven, but you're the only one who ever made it. Hah!

  I couldn't be dead. What, then? Frozen? Frozen! That's it, they've made me a corpsicle! The convention was in Los Angeles, where the frozen-dead movement started and where it has the most supporters. They must have frozen me, put me in a double-walled coffin with liquid nitrogen all around me, and when they tried to revive me the revival didn't work. What am I now? A brain in a bottle, fed by color-coded tubes? Why don't they try to talk to me?

  Why don't they kill me?

  Maybe they still have hopes of waking me. Hope. Maybe there's hope after all.

  It was flattering, at first, to think of teams of specialists working to make me human again. The fans! They'd realized it was their fault, and they'd paid for this! How far in the future would I wake up? What would it be like? Even the definition of human might have changed.

  Would they have immortality? Stimulation of psychic power centers in the brain? Empires of thousands of worlds? I'd written about all of these, and my books would still be around! I'd be famous. I'd written about--

  I'd written stories about future cultures raiding corpsicles for spare parts, transplants. Had that happened to me? My body broken up for spares? Then why was I still alive?

  Because they couldn't use my brain.

  Then let them throw it out!

  Maybe they just couldn't use it yet.

  I couldn't tell how long I was there. There was no sense of time passing. I screamed a lot. I ran nowhere forever, to no purpose: I couldn't ran out of breath, I never reached a wall. I wrote novels, dozens of them, in my head, with no way to write them down. I relived that last convention party a thousand times. I played games with myself. I remembered every detail of my life, with a brutal honesty I'd never had before; what else could I do? All through it, I was terrified of going mad, and then I'd fight the terror, because that could drive me mad--

  I think I did not go mad. But it went on, and on, and on, until I was screaming again.

  Get me out of here! Please, anyone, someone, get me out of here!

  Nothing happened, of course.

  Pull the plug and let me die! Make it stop! Get me out of here!

  Nothing.

  Hey, Carpentier. Remember "The Chill"? Your hero was a corpsicle, and they'd let his temperature drop too low. His nervous system had become a superconductor. Nobody knew he way alive in there, frozen solid but thinking, screaming in his head, feeling the awful cold--

  No! For the love of God, get me out of here!

  ***

  I was lying on my left side in a field, with dirt under me and warm light all around me. I was staring at my navel, and I could see it! It was the most beautiful sight I'd ever imagined. I was afraid to move; my navel and I might pop like a soap bubble. It took a long time to get the nerve to lift my head.

  I could see my hands and feet and the rest of me. When I moved my fingers I could see them wriggle.

  There wasn't a thing wrong with me. It was as if I had never fallen eight stories to be smashed into jelly.

  I was clothed in a loose white gown partly open down the front. Not very surprising, but where was the hospital? Surely they didn't waken Sleepers in the middle of a field?

  They? I couldn't see anyone else. There was a field of dirt, trampled here and there, sloping downhill to become a shiny mud flat. I raised my head, and he was standing behind me. A fat man, tall but dumpy and chunky enough that at first I didn't notice his height. His jaw was massively square and jutted out, the first thing I noticed about his face. He had wide lips and a high forehead, and short, blunt, powerful fingers. He wore a hospital gown something like mine.

  He was beautiful. Everything was beautiful. But my navel? Magnifique!

  "You are well?" he asked.

  He spoke with an accent: Mediterranean; Spanish, perhaps, or Italian. He was looking closely at me, and he asked again, "You are well?"

  "Yes. I think so. Where am I?"

  He shrugged. "Always they ask that question first. Where do you think you are?"

  I shook my head and grinned for the pleasure of it. It was pleasure to move, to see myself move, to feel my buttocks press against the dirt and know something would oppose my movements. It was ecstasy to see myself in the bright light around me. I looked up at the sky.

  There wasn't any sky.

  Okay, there has to be a sky. I know that. But I saw nothing. Thick clouds? But there was no detail to the clouds, just a uniform gray above me. Even in my sensation-starved condition it was ugly.

  I was in the middle of a field of dirt that stretched a couple of miles to some low brown hills. There were people on the hills, a lot of them, running after something I couldn't make out. I sat up to scan the horizon.

  The hills ran up against a high wall that stretched in both directions as far as I could see. It seemed straight as a mathematician's line, but I sensed the slightest of inward curves just before it vanished into deep gloom. There, was something wrong with the perspective. but I can't describe precisely what, just that it didn't seem right.

  The hills and the mud flats formed a wide strip between the wall and a fast-moving river of water black as ink. The river was a mile away and didn't seem very wide at that distance. I could see it perfectly, another perceptual distortion because it was too far away for the details I could make out.

  Beyond the river were green fields and white Mediterranean villas, walled complexes with the squat classical look to them, some quite large. They weren't arranged in any order, and the effect was very pleasing. I turned back to the wall.

  Not very high, I thought. High enough to be trouble climbing, perhaps two or three times my six-foot height. I was hampered by the perspective problem. The nearest point of the wall might have been a mile away or ten, though ten seemed ridiculous.

  I took a deep breath and didn't like the smells. Fetid, with an acrid tinge, decay and sickly sweet perfume to cover the smells of death, orange blossoms mingled with hospital smells. All subtle enough that I hadn't noticed them before, but sickening all the same. I won't mention the smells often, but they were always there. Most stinks you get used to and soon don't notice, but this had too much in the blend and the blend changed too often. You'd just get used to one and there'd be another.

  Beside me on the ground was a small bronze bottle with a classical beaker shape. I figured it would hold maybe a quart. Except for the man standing above me there wasn't another blessed thing.

  "Never mind where I am," I said. "Where have I been? I don't remember passing out. I was screaming, and here I am. Where was I?"

  "First you ask where you are. Then where you were. Do you think of nothing else you should say?" He was frowning disapproval, as if he didn't like me at all. So what the hell was he doing here?

  Breaking me out of wherever I'd been, of course. "Yeah. Thanks."

  "You should thank the One who sent me to you."

  "Who was that?"

  "You asked Him for help--"

  "I don't remember asking anyone for help." But this time I'd heard him pronounce the capital letter. "Yeah. 'For the love of God,' I said. Well?"

  The fat meaty lips twitched, and his eyes filled with concern. When he looked at me it wasn't in distaste, but in sympathy. "Very well. You will have a great deal to learn. First, I answer your questions. Where are you? You are dead, and you lie on the ground of the Vestibule to Hell. Where were you?" He kicked the bronze bottle with a sandaled foot. "In there."

  Hot diggity damn, I'm in the nut hatch and the head loony's come to talk to me.

  Carpentier wakes up a thousand years after his last flight and sloppy landing, and already he's in trouble. Spoons and forks and chopsticks, traffic lights, the way a man puts his pants on, all may have to be relearned.

  Law and customs change in a thousand years. Society may not even recognize Carpentier as sane.

  But wake him in a thirtieth-century loony bin among thirtieth-century twitchies, and now what? How can he adjust to anything?

  There were other bottles sitting unattended on the dirt, some larger than mine, some smaller. I don't know why I hadn't noticed them before. I picked one up and dropped it quick. It burned my fingers, and there were faint sounds coming from inside it.

  It sounded like human speech in a foreign language, a voice screaming curses. That tone couldn't be anything else. Endless curses screamed--

  Why would they put radios in old bronze bottles and scatter them through the loony bin? My hypothesis needed more work.

  The people up on the hills were still running. They'd looped back to about where I'd first seen them, and whatever it was they chased, they hadn't caught it yet. Do they let the nuts run in circles in futuristic loony bins?

  Where had I been? Where? There wasn't any hospital around here, no facilities for keeping all at part of a corpsicle, nothing but this crazy man and a lot of bronze bottles and people running in circles, and-- and insects of some kind. Something whined and did a kamikaze into my ear. Something else stung me on the back of the neck. I slapped frantically, but there wasn't anything to see.

  It felt good even to hurt myself slapping.

  My "rescuer" was patiently waiting for me to make some response. It wouldn't hurt to humor him until I had more information.

  "Okay, I'm in the Vestibule of Hell and I was in a bottle. A djinn bottle. How long?" I told him the date on which I'd fallen from the window.

  He shrugged. "You will find that time has not the same meaning here as you are accustomed to. We have all the time we will ever need. Eternity lies before us. I am unable to tell you how long you were in that beaker, but I can assure you it is not important."

  Not important? I almost went mad in there! The realization made me start to shiver, and he dropped to his knees beside me, all concern, to put a hand on my shoulder.

  "It is over now. God will not allow you back into the bottle. I cannot assure you that there will be nothing worse before you leave Hell. There will be much worse. But with faith and hope you will endure it, and you will be able to leave."

  "That's a lot of comfort."

  "It is infinite comfort. Did you not understand? I know a way out at here!"

  "Yeah? So do I. Right over that wall."

  He laughed. I listened for a while, and it got irritating. Finally he choked it down to a chuckle. "I'm sorry, but they all say that, too. I suppose there is nothing for it but to let you try. After all-- we have plenty of time." He laughed again.

  Now what? Would he turn me in if I tried to climb the wall? I got up, surprised at how good I felt except for the gnats and the smell. My imaginary exercises in the bottle--

  Look-- wherever I really spent all that time, effectively I was in a bottle, right? It's a convenient figure of speech. Anyway, my exercises in the bottle had paid off. I started briskly toward the wall.

  Wherever the ground dipped low it became squishy mud, ankle-deep, with small live things in it. I tried to stick to the high ground. The fat man kept right alongside me. There was no chucking him. After a while I said, "If we're going to walk together I might as well know your name."

  "Benito. Call me Benny if you like."

  "Okay. Benito." Benny sounded much too friendly. "Look, Benito, don't you want out of here?"

  I hit a nerve. He stopped short, his wide face a gamut of emotions unlike anything I'd even seen. After a long time he said, "Yes."

  "Then come over the wall with me."

  "I can't. You can't. You'll see." He wouldn't say anything else, just kept pace with me as I walked on.

  And on.

  And on, and on, and on. The wall was a long way off. I was right about the perspective. We'd been walking for over an hour as far as I could tell, and the wall looked no closer.

  We walked until we were exhausted, and it was still a long way off. I sat down in the mud to slap gnats. "Didn't seem that far. How high is that thing, anyway? Must be colossal."

  "It is no more than three meters high."

  "Don't be silly."

  "Look behind you."

  That was the shock of my life. The river was now maybe three miles away instead of one. And we'd walked for hours. But--

  Benito nodded. "We could walk for eternity and never reach the wall. And we have eternity. No, you don't believe me. Very well, convince yourself. Continue toward the wall. Continue until even you, are certain it can never be reached, and then I will tell you how you can escape."

  It took me several hours, but I finally believed him.

  The wall was like light speed. We could get arbitrarily close, but we couldn't ever reach it. Like light speed, or the bottom of a black hole, but like nothing else in the universe I knew.

  We weren't going out this way.

  And-- and just where were we?

CHAPTER 3

  I sat in the dirt and slapped gnats while Benito explained it again.

  "We are dead and in Hell. This is the Vestibule to Hell, where those who would make no choices in life are condemned. Neither warm nor cold, believers nor blasphemers-- you see them in the hills. They chase a banner they will never catch."

  I remembered then. "Dante's Inferno?"

  Benito nodded, his big, square jaw heaving like a broaching whale. "You have read the Inferno, then. Good. That was the first clue I had to the way out of here. We must go down--"

  "Sure, all the way." Something about a lake of ice, and a hole in the center of it. It had been a long time since I had read Dante. I couldn't see that remembering a thirteenth-century book would do me any good to begin with. This couldn't possibly be the real Hell. Dante's cosmology had been ludicrous, for one thing.

  So where was I? "How come you're so sure this is the place Dante described?"

  "Where else could it be? All of the features are here. All of the details."

  And I'd been dead a long time. Centuries? What kind of civilization would build an exact copy of Dante's Inferno? An Infernoland. Was it part of a larger amusement park, like Frontierland in the Disneyland complex? Or was Infernoland all there was to it?

  Who was Benito? A stooge, or a revived corpsicle like me?

  The wall. How had they managed that trick? The wall hadn't moved, and I certainly had. Some kind of local field effect? A time slip? Bent space? Come on, Carpentier, you wrote the stuff. What's the explanation? Not the way they did it, just a plausible way!

  "First, we must cross the river," Benito was saying. "Do you believe me now when I tell you that you must not attempt to swim it, or even I get wet from it, or must you try that too?"

  "What happens if I just dive in?"

  "Then you will be as you were in the bottle. Aware and unable to move. But it will be very cold, and very uncomfortable, and you will be there for all eternity knowing you put yourself there."

  I shuddered and slapped a gnat. He might be lying. I wasn't going to try it.

  A looked very nice across the river, and that was where we had to get before we could find Dante Alighieri's escape hole in the center of Infernoland. The hell with getting to the center! Let me get to those villas over there and I'd be happy enough. "Who's on the other side of the river?"

  "Virtuous pagans," Benito answered. "Those who never knew the Word of God, but kept the Commandments. They are not persecuted. Their fate may be the most cruel of all those in this place."

  "Because they aren't tortured?"

  "Because they think they are happy. You'll find out, let us go and see them."

  "How?"

  "There is a ferryboat. Once it was a rowing boat, but--"

  "Got overcrowded in Hell. Too many arrivals. Sure." And in Disneyland I'd been on a Mississippi riverboat big enough for fifty or sixty people to walk around on. It chugged around on a little pond it shared with a miniature clipper ship. The Builders of Infernoland had a sense of humors putting a ferryaboat in place of Charon's old rowboat.

  Maybe we'd meet some of the paying customers on the ferry. I didn't think Benito was one. He behaved more like a fanatical Catholic.

  And what was I? Nobody had given me any role to play. Who inhabits Infernoland?

  Who inhabits the Inferno?

  Damned souls. Could that be my job now-- to play damned soul for the amusement of tourists? It wasn't a role I liked very much.

  It took as long to leave the wall as it had to go toward it. At least things were consistent. There were laws to this place, if only I could discover them.

  When we passed the bottle that had been beside me when I woke up, we turned left and angled toward the river. An old drinking song from science-fiction conventions kept running through my head. "If hosen and shoon thou never gavest men, every night and all, the fire will burn thee to the bare bone, and Christ receive thy soul." Was that really where I was, in a real Hell, where justice was meted out to the ungodly?

  Scary. It would mean that there was a real God, and maybe Jonah was swallowed by a whale in the Mediterranean Sea, and Joshua ben Nun really did stop the Earths rotation for trivial purposes...

  There was something leaning against a rock. At first I couldn't make it out: a pink mound with hair trailing down one side. We got closer and the mound became five-hundred-odd pounds of woman sitting cross-legged in stinking mud. A swarm of gnats hummed around her. She didn't bother to swat them.

  She looked up at us with lifeless eyes. Benito took my arm to hurry me on past her, but I shook him off. She couldn't be quite sane either, but she might be able to tell me something straight. It was more than he would do, and I needed help.

  I squatted down to look into her face. She was pathetic, hardly in shape to help anyone, including herself. Far back within tunnels of fat were tiny sparks of life, dull gray against black. Hopeless eyes, almost lifeless.

  Her voice was a husky whisper. "Well?"

  "I don't know where I am. I just got here, and I have to know. Can you help me?"

  "Help you! I died, and then this happened to me!"

  "Died?"

  "How else do you get into Hell?" Her voice rose to demand attention despite my shocked surprise. The full force of her breath washed over in waves. "What did I do? I don't deserve this! I don't belong here at all," she wailed. "I was beautiful. I could eat like a horse and burn it off in an hour. Then I woke up here, like this!" Her voice dropped to a low, confidential murmur. "We're in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism."

  I shied back. Another one.

  "Is there nothing you can do?" Benito asked her.

  "Sure. I can chase banners to keep slim. What's the point of that? They won't let you do anything meaningful."

  I shuddered. It could have been me. "Why would anyone do this to you?"

  "I... think it must have been because ten-million fat people were cursing me." Her voice turned venomous. "Fat, fat, fat people with no willpower and no self-respect."

  "Why?"

  "For doing my job! For trying to help people, trying to save them from themselves! For banning cyclamates, that's why! It was for their own good," she ranted. "You can't trust people to be moderate about anything. Some people get sick on cyclamates. They have to be helped. And this is what I get for helping them!"

  "Were trying to escape. Want to come with us? Benito thinks we can get out by going down to the center of this crazy place."

  A little spark of interest flared in her eyes, and I held my breath. My open mouth had sent me floating down the side of a building; when would I learn to keep it closed? If she came with us we'd never get away. What good was she?

  She struggled to get up, then collapsed against her rock. "No, thank you."

  "Right." I started to say something else in parting, but what? If anything went at all right, I'd never see her again. I just walked away, and she let her head slump back into the mounds of fat that bulged at her neck.

  As we walked away, Benito asked, "What are cyclamates?"

  I slapped at a gnat. The gnats were everywhere, stinging us both, but Benito didn't bother to slap at them. "Sugar substitute. For people who want to lose weight."

  He frowned. "If there is too much to eat, surely it would be better to eat less and share with those who have none."

  I looked at his big paunch and said nothing.

  "I too am in Hell," he reminded me.

  "Ah. And they can do what they did to her to you..." I shuddered. We were lucky.

  "I take it you did not agree with her policy?"

  "Idiots. If they'd fed as much sugar to the control rats as they gave cyclamates to the experimental group, they'd have killed the controls first. Instead, they doomed a lot of people to fat. There wasn't a good substitute for cyclamate. I know one guy who bought up cases and cases of a cyclamate diet drink just before the ban hit. He used to give cases of 'vintage Tab' as Christmas presents. They were appreciated, too."

  Benito said nothing.

  "I know a couple who used to drive up to Canada every so often just to buy cyclamates. It was a stupid policy." I looked back over my shoulder at the shapeless pink mound. "Still, it seems a little extreme, what they did to her."

  "It is not just?"

  "How can you call that just?" I didn't say anything else, but I remembered what she'd said. "'We're in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.'"

  And just who in Hell was Benito? A paying customer having sport? A damned soul like me? Or one of the paid crew of Infernoland? He talked like a religious fanatic; he seemed to take everything at face value.

  Did I dare follow him? But what else could I do? One thing was certain: if he could think that woman had been treated justly, he was not much better than a devil himself.

  Hey, Carpentier. Would an artificial Hell have artificial devils? I looked at Benito more closely. He was partly bald. There were no horns on his forehead.

  We seemed to be covering a lot of ground, as if the effect of too much distance to the wall had been played in reverse. Suddenly we were part of a crowd, all streaming toward the river. Nobody was pushing them along, but they didn't seem friendly and they didn't talk among themselves. Each one was huddled in toward himself, not looking where he was going. Or she; there were a lot of women.

  The ferryboat captain had a long white beard and eyes like burning coals. He screamed in rage when anyone was slow getting aboard. We were pressed together on deck, a mass of us so tightly packed that we couldn't move.

  "You again!" He'd turned his burning eyes on Benito. "You've come here before! Well, you won't escape again!" He swung a long billyclub at Benito. It hit with a crack that I thought would break my guide's skull, but it only staggered him.

  More people packed the decks until I couldn't even see. Finally I felt the boat begin to move. By then I'd have been glad to stay behind, but there was no way off the boat.

  Two voices whispered intensely near my ear:

  "Why didn't you stop when I screamed?"

  "Because you startled me into taking my foot off the brake. At least I'll never have to listen to your backseat driving again--"

  "But we're in Hell, darling. They'll probably put us in a car with no brakes. Maybe they'll give you a horn. You'll like that.

  "Shut up! Shut up!"

  She did, and quiet descended. No crowd is that quiet. It was as if nobody had anything to say to anyone.

  We bumped solid ground. "All off," Charon shouted. "Damned souls! Damned forever! You cursed God, and now you'll pay for it!"

  "Damn God and everyone else!" "Piss on you!" "Up the people!" "You're mucking bastards, all of you, get off my foot!" "But I don't belong here." "What'd I do? Just tell me--" "Damn the lot of you, I died a man!"

  We pushed and shoved, and danced to keep our feet in the swarm. At least we were on the other side. The crowd was hurrying downhill, along a road that ran between thick, high walls. I hung back, hoping Benito would go with the rest. No such luck. The road turned and twisted so we couldn't see what was ahead, but that was good because after a while we were alone.

  I tried to climb the wall. It was a tough scramble, and I kept falling back. After the fourth time I sat there below the wall and whimpered.

  "Would you like help?" Benito asked.

  "Sure. I thought you said the only way out was downhill."

  "It is, but we have time to explore. Try again, I will lift you."

  He practically threw me over the wall. He didn't look that strong. I sat on top for a second and looked down at him. He seemed to be waiting for me to help him up.

  And now what, Carpentier? Fair's fair, he helped you. Yeah, but why? Leave him behind, he's trouble.

  But he knows things I don't. And he got me out of the bottle.

  Did he? He says he poured you out of a bottle the size of a fifth of rum! Leave him.

  I didn't get the chance to decide. While I was thinking it over, Benito began climbing like an alpiner, using tiny cracks and bumps I could hardly see. Pretty soon he got one hand on top of the wall and pulled himself up. He wasn't breathing hard, and he didn't say anything about my sitting there and watching instead of helping.

  I turned to look at the countryside. After. all, this Infernoland seemed to be modeled on Dante's. A quarter of a century ago the Inferno had been a required book for a course in Comparative World Literature. I'd paid as little attention to the book as I could get away with. I remembered almost nothing, but certainly the place had not been pleasant. God's own torture chamber, very medieval.

  Vague images came back to me now: devils with pitchforks, trees that talked and bled, giants and centaurs, fire, snakes... but were those from the authentic Inferno, or were they hangovers from Oz books and Disney cartoons? Never mind, Carpender. You're not going any further.

CHAPTER 4

  It was lovely on the other side of the wall. I jumped down onto firm ground, grassy and pleasant. The air was clean, as at the top of a mountain, with that fresh smell you get only after a hard backpack into remote country. The gnats were gone. We walked toward the villas, lovely things, square-built, the colors of stone by twilight.

  There were crowds around us. Men and women and children-- a lot of children, far too many, all watching us with big round eyes (or almond eyes; Hell was thoroughly integrated). Adults and children alike were curious, but none of them said anything.

  They didn't want to be near us, either. They shrank away as we approached.

  It was embarrassing. I thought we must be carrying the smells of the Vestibule area, the fetid stench of roses and decay. We'd have to find a place to wash.

  "I think I'm going to like it here," I said.

  Benito looked at me curiously, but he only said, "Pleasant, isn't it? Here there is no punishment."

  The word grated. Punishment implies authority, someone with more power and a moral position superior to yours. I couldn't accept that. We were in the hands of the Builders of Infernoland, and I'd learned all about their moral position on the other side of the black river.

  But I didn't flare up at Benito. Lightly I asked, "These, then, are the privileged customers of Hell?"

  "Yes." Benito did not smile. "They never sinned. They would have reached Heaven if they had known the Church."

  "And the children?"

  "Unbaptized."

  I'd heard that about Catholic beliefs. Even, in Infernoland it seemed a little rough on the kids. "I thought they got Limbo."

  "Call it Limbo if you wish. This is the First Circle of Hell." He paused, uncertain. "There are legends that say the children will be born again."

  There were as many children here as there were adults! As if the Builders had gotten a discount for quantity. Hmmm. Could these creatures be androids?

  It could have come down to a matter of economics. Android infants would be cheaper than android adults: smaller, fewer reflexes. Would it be cheaper to build androids than to find and capture human beings? I couldn't know, not without knowing the source: who the Builders were or why I was here-- placed here without my consent or knowledge, by an unknown hand. If me, then why not a thousand others? A billion?

  Benito wouldn't be much help. He didn't seem to question anything he saw.

  Robot or human, child or adult, they didn't seem unhappy. Except those near us. "Benito, what's the matter with them?"

  "They sense that we do not belong here. I come from deeper in Hell, and the smell of the depths is on my soul."

  "But I don't."

  His smile was grim. "They will not accept you either."

  I wasn't so sure of that. If I found a way to clean up, and different clothing... hmm. Knock someone on the head, steal his toga; why not? Well, partly because they'd tear me apart if they caught me. And partly because there was no privacy here. The villas, maybe. Or--

  I pointed upslope toward what might have been a domed planetarium, the nearest building in sight of us. "What's that?"

  He looked. "I have never seen it before."

  "Come on."

  He came, but reluctantly. "We might not be permitted entry. This is a public building, but we are not of the appropriate public."

  "We--" I stopped because a white-bearded patriarch swathed in purple-bordered white bedsheets had grasped me roughly by the arm. He asked a rude question in gibberish.

  "Go peddle your papers," I informed him.

  He frowned. "Recent English? I asked of you why you invade a place not meant for you."

  "I'm taking a survey. Are you happy here? Do the arrangements satisfy you?"

  He snorted. "No."

  "Then," asked Benito, "why not leave? There is a way out."

  The bearded man looked him over, while several passersby stopped to listen. He said, "In what direction does it lie?"

  "Downslope. One must travel all the way to the center. To know evil is one path to knowing good."

  It was lousy dialogue. The bearded man thought so too. "I do not question your knowledge of the depths of Hell," he said pointedly. "I think you lie."

  "Why would I? We plan to leave Hell--" Benito was interrupted by raucous laughter. A crowd was gathering, and it wasn't friendly.

  "You can all leave." Benito seemed deadly serious. "Come with me, deeper and deeper into Hell. Learn to hate evil--"

  "Hatred for salvation?" one of the oldsters asked. "A curious route to salvation."

  Benito seemed to know him. "Yet, Epictatus, that is what you must learn. Not to hate men, but to hate their sins. And that you cannot do moderately. You know the truth, now. You know that reason alone is not enough. You must ask for grace..."

  I slipped out during the sermon. They were standing there politely waiting for him to finish. What might have been a mob scene had become a formal debate.

  How long would that last? Benito was pushing them in a direction they wouldn't even consider, and they didn't like him at all. They'd looked at me the same way; candid contempt, and the high bitter flavor of mockery. They wanted out, and they didn't believe there was any way out, and they were damned well not going to listen long to a man they thought didn't belong with them.

  Benito was preaching hatred, and they hated him. He should have had more sense. Like me.

  The dome: it couldn't be a planetarium. There was no sky here. Conceivably it was a bathhouse where I could wash off the stench and possibly find an unguarded toga. I climbed toward it.

  There were no guards. I walked between Doric pillars, up black marble steps to an expanse of black marble floor. Half a dozen people were talking in a circle. They seemed lost in distance, but as far away as I was, when they caught sight of me they turned their backs firmly and continued talking.

  The language wasn't familiar at all.

  The place was as empty as anything I'd seen since I left the area of the bottles. Six rude sons of bitches, and a thing in the center of the black marble floor. It might have been a sculpture, it might have been a machine. A thick silver ring twelve feet tall, standing on edge, and a control board at its base.

  The console looked operational. There were labels, in English. A switch (marked ON, OFF), a joystick, and a notch with a knob in it. The notch ran the whole length of the console.

  I tried the joystick. It went in all six directions: left, right, forward, back, push down, pull up. When I used the switch the space within the ring clouded, then became starry space.

  It was a planetarium.

  When I pushed on the joystick nothing happened.

  I took a closer look at the markings along the notch. They were logarithmic, labeled in parsecs/second. The knob was all the way to the left.

  I moved it hard right and tried the joystick again.

  The universe came up and hit me in the face. Whoosh! Stars shot past and around me; a sun came at me and exploded into a fraction of a second of intolerable brightness and was gone. And I was flat on my back a couple of yards from the console.

  That was some planetarium!

  The half-a-dozen natives were watching me with some amusement. Screw 'em. I went back to the console, moved the knob down to one parsec/second, then to a tenth of that. Tried the joystick.

  This time the motion was just obvious. I steered toward a blue-white star; moved the knob to slow as I approached it. Moved into it.

  The brightness should have burned my eyes out. It wasn't even painful. Odd...

  I went through the center of the star (X-ray blue) and came out the other side (tremendous prominences leaping out ahead of me) and into space. What now? Find a planet? A different star? Stars were easier to find in this sparkling emptiness, but I'd love to dive into an Earthlike world. To search out the layers of it, to see the glowing nickel-iron heart. Let's see, that not-too-brilliant white fleck could be a yellow dwarf. I moved the knob--

  A large hand fell heavily on my shoulder.

  I twitched like a man electrocuted. I turned, and there was the mob scene I thought I'd left behind me: fifty-odd large, heavy men surrounding me and Benito and the Anywhere Machine.

  The white-bearded man who spoke, English said, "You are leaving."

  I said, "Dammit! Why? Nobody else is using the damn machine. I've waited all my life for something like this!"

  "We do not want you here," he said. "We waited because we hoped a messenger of the gods would come to remove you. We might have asked him questions... but we have tolerated you too long. As for the machine--" One side of his mouth twitched upward. "If you can carry it you may take it with you."

  I cursed him. I stopped when his wide-shouldered friends converged. Several of them wore armor! They moved away in a tight circle with Benito and me in the center.

  I whispered, "Benito, can't you stop them?"

  He looked at me. "How?"

  Yeah.

  But if I'd known what waited below, I'd have fought them.

CHAPTER 5

  Even while they marched us toward the wall, Benito never gave up.

  "You may leave this place!" he shouted. "Hector! Aeneas! You are not cowards, to stay where it is pleasant when there is everything to gain elsewhere! Come with us!"

  They ignored him.

  They were compact and tough inside their armor-, too tough to fight, even if they were men, which I doubted. Hector, Aeneas: I knew the names. I remembered the Abe Lincoln robot at Disneyland. Could the armor be part of them? With inspection plates--

  "Where is Vergil?" Benito raved. "He is no longer here, is he? And the Emperor Trajan?"

  "We had our chance," said the taller, broader one. "We didn't take it. There will be no other."

  "Have none come here since?" Benito demanded.

  The soldiers barked bitter laughter. "Many."

  "Is it reasonable to suppose that they will never have the opportunity to leave?"

  We had come to the wall. "We'll think about it," one said. "Now out with you. Go where you belong." The gate slammed shut behind us.

  I went for the wall on the other side. I examined it without joy. The footholds Benito had used would better have fitted a spider.

  Benito watched with a wry smile. "You never give up, do you?"

  "No."

  "Perseverance is commendable. You will need it, but you must develop other virtues, such as prudence. What will happen if you enter the First Circle again?"

  "Maybe they won't catch us this time. I won't go near anyone until I've changed clothes and taken a bath."

  "Do not tempt the angels," Benito said. He was quite serious. Yeah, and why not? I was expecting devils in Infernoland. Why not angels?

  "That messenger they hoped to see. They wanted him to come."

  "They did, yes. But we are fugitives, Allen."

  There were no handholds. This time Benito wouldn't help. I was still trying to climb the wall when a flash flood of people spilled into the far end of the alley. As they foamed toward us in dreadful silence I made one last attempt to go up the wall. Then they swept us up and floated us away.

  We were in a marble palace. It was enormous, without furniture. The walls were covered with frescoes of bulls and dolphins and pretty girls wearing flounced skirts and little jackets that opened in front to show bare breasts. The palace was lit with torches in bronze holders along the walls, and there wasn't any sign of modern technology at all.

  Except for the palace itself. It wound on and on, chamber after chamber, huge staircases with great pillars inscribed in languages I couldn't read. It was too big; it must have been prestressed concrete or something better. I would have liked to stay and look around, but we were embedded in the flow of the crowd. Nobody spoke or paid us any attention. I was glad for Benito's company. Crowds of strangers bug me, and this one was worse than New York commuters, everyone wrapped up in himself.

  We spilled into an enormous room open at the far end. I had a good view through the pillars. The ground sloped sharply away into the bleakest landscape I'd ever seen. The castle was perched on the side of an enormous bowl, a world-sized bowl. Far down into it were the glimmers of fires and the shadow of smoke. I couldn't see far into the smog that hung over everything.

  There was a throne at the far end of the audience chamber. An alien occupied it. He was vaguely bovine, but I'd have taken him for an oversized man if it hadn't been for his tail.

  Tail!

  "What is that?" I demanded.

  "Minos. Judge of the Dead," said Benito.

  The Builders had mixed some Egyptian or Cretan mythology with their Christianity. That, or they'd had to warp their landscape to fit a genuine alien. I could believe a cropping beast becoming an intelligent biped, given time and impetus and perhaps an assist from biological engineers. I'd written stories about that kind of thing.

  Could Minos be one of the Builders?

  People went up to present themselves to the monster. I couldn't hear what the girl in the yellow dress was telling it, but it grinned and nodded. Abruptly its tail looped out and wrapped around and around the girl. It lifted her.

  The tail stretched like the limbs of Plastic Man in the old comic book! The girl shot between two pillars and dwindled, dwindled, dwindled to a speck. Minos's tail must have been tens of miles long at that point-- it came snaking back through the air, while the speck that was the girl sank like a single snowflake.

  My willing suspension of disbelief went all to hell. I started to giggle hysterically.

  Nobody noticed. Nobody but Benito, who watched curiously as I gathered the shreds of my self-control, took him by the arm, pointed at "Minos," and said, "He can't do that!"

  He was doing it again! The tail stretched out between the pillars like an infinite length of snake, dropped a man in a postman's uniform into the murky air, and came coiling back.

  But there wasn't room! Even ignoring the moment arm-- that much weight at the end of that much length should have toppled him, and how could such a length of tail, flexible tail, be strong enough to stay almost straight? But ignore that, and tell me where there was room for tens of miles of tail coiled inside his body?

  His feet weren't anchored; I watched until I saw them both move. The tail wasn't stored in the floor, then.

  "Are you all right?" Benito asked.

  My vision was graying out; my whole body had a buzzing foot's-asleep feeling. I said, "I'm going to faint."

  "You can't faint here. Hold fast." His hand gripped my shoulder.

  A dark-haired woman, quite pretty, was encoiled in the tail until she nearly vanished, lifted, and sent spinning off down the bowl. A man in a cabbie's uniform was next. Three loops of tail and out he went into space. And another, and another--

  There were thousands here. We'd starve before we reached our turn.

  But I didn't feel hungry, and hadn't felt hungry since I left the bottle, and that was hours ago. Also, something was wrong with time. "Minos" was in no hurry. Quite the opposite. He took plenty of time to deal with each case, and there were plenty of cases; yet the crowd thinned out much faster than it should have.

  Where were they going? I never saw anyone leave the room, but there had to be other audience chambers, people slipping off into side passages. There must have been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of copies of "Minos."

  Ridiculous mummery. But the tail, Carpentier! Hidden in hyperspace, or snaking out of an alternate time track? If the Builders have that kind of technology, how long were you dead? Ten thousand years? A million?

  It was our turn. We approached together. Not many had come up in pairs.

  "Sodomites, huh?" Minos said. "Seventh Circle, Third Level. Or have you got something worse to confess?"

  I said, "I refuse to answer on grounds that my--"

  He looked a lot like an angry bull when he frowned, and nothing at all like a machine. He turned to Benito. "You've been here before. Why have you left your proper place?"

  "Is that your affair? You see I roam freely through Hell."

  "Yes. How?"

  "It has been willed that I may do so. You have no right to interfere."

  Minos waved at me. "And this one?"

  "He has come from the Vestibule," Benito said. "You will note that he comes of his own accord. You may not judge him."

  "Lawyers." Minos laughed. "I have problems with lawyers. There are so many places appropriate to that breed. Where are you two going, then?"

  "Down."

  "Back to the First Circle."

  We'd spoken simultaneously. Minos laughed. "Back you will not go. Are you sure you don't want me to judge you, Allen Carpenter? My judgment is just and fair. You could choose worse for yourself than justice."

  "Cease!" Benito commanded. I jumped. He was a changed man. Power seemed to gather around him as he struck a pose, massive chin jutting out in defiance, his face both calm and stern. Once upon a time he had been used to obedience.

  "I am permitted to judge..." Suddenly Minos sounded petulant.

  "You have already judged me. What other power have you? And this man is not under your jurisdiction. Leave us alone to go in peace."

  "Not back up."

  "No. Down."

  Minos laughed. He waved toward the steps leading down into the bowl from his throne. "Depart. Thou art sent!" He was still laughing as we started down those steps, the mocking laughter in our ears until we lost sight of the palace.

  CHAPTER 6

  We were all right as long as the steps continued. Unfortunately they soon trailed away into a broken slope that still dropped at forty-five degrees or so. At the same time a wind began to rise. Benito and I turned to face the slope and backed down on toes and knees and hands.

  In fact, the hurricane in my head (Where does the Minos-thing keep its tail? What is Benito, that he gives orders to an inhuman that judges all others who come before it? Is this Hell for a science-fiction writer, where physical laws are whimsical and puzzles have no answers?) was nothing compared to the hurricane we were backing into. We moved flat against the slope, clutching at the rock and digging into the dirt for footholds.

  Benito yelled, "Minos called you Carpenter. Not Carpentier."

  I'd been wondering how the monster knew. "I was born Carpenter," I shouted down at Benito. "I added the 'I' to make the name more interesting, easier to remember. I wrote under Carpentier." And when I talked to myself (I didn't add) it was Carpentier I talked to. I'd started that in an effort to memorize the new pronunciation.

  We'd backed onto a broad ledge. I stayed flat as I looked around.

  Someone was dancing to the music of the howling wind.

  He was bones and paunch and long flying hair just graying unevenly at the temples. He jumped and danced and flapped his arms like a bird, grim determination on his homely face.

  I hollered into the wind. "Hey, friend--"

  He didn't wait for the question. "If I could just get off the ground!" he wailed. "The guy in the helmet's got a dozen!"

  Hey, yeah, I'd been right the first time! It was a futuristic loony bin geared for psychodrama on the grand scale@ Let them work out their delusions here, and maybe they'd be fit for whatever unimaginable society they'd flunked out of... And I had answers to all the questions, in that wonderful moment before I followed his eyes upward.

  The air was full of flying people.

  They weren't exactly guiding their flight. The wind had them. Here it churned them in a momentary funnel, then flung them outward. There they came in a straight blast; it hit a shoulder of the mountain and churned the trapped beings into eddy currents. The people flew like Kleenex in a hurricane, but they looked like people, and they howled like PAOOKAKansans caught outside in a flash tornado.

  Most of them were flying in man-and-woman pairs.

  But, yeah, there was one guy surrounded by a good dozen girls, all in a whirling clump at the top of a rising air column.

  The bony guy on the ledge ran off flapping his arms. There were others along the base, men and women, all trying to fly. I had different ideas. I gripped the rock hard and stayed flat.

  "The Carnal," Benito screamed into the wind. "Those who warped all that mattered in their lives for lust. I imagine those at the base of the cliff were unsuccessful lovers. We will be in less danger on the next ledge." He started crawling.

  "Benito! That's it!" I cried. "Well fly out of herel"

  He turned in astonishment. It was a mistake. The wind slipped under his raised shoulders and lifted him and flung him at me.

  I got him by the ankle. He nearly tore me loose, but I had a handhold in a split rock and I hung on. He doubled on his own length and pulled himself down my forearm until he was flat to the ground again.

  "Thank you," he bellowed.

  "S'okay. I wish you could have seen your expression." I was rather pleased with myself, as if I'd managed to catch a glass somebody's elbow had knocked off a table. Good reflexes, Carpentier!

  "We'll fly out of here," I screamed happily into his ear. "We'll fly over the wall. We'll build a glider!"

  "I was stubborn too, once. Perhaps I still am. Is this really your wish, Allen?"

  "Damn right. We'll build a glider. Listen, if we're light enough to be blown away by the first wind, we probably won't need much more than a big kite! Hey, let's get out of this wind and talk it over."

  We crawled.

  The weather changed as we lost altitude. It didn't get any better. The wind died down; we didn't need to clutch at the rocks, and we could hear ourselves speak. But a freezing drizzle started.

  Now that I was thinking glider, the loss in altitude bothered me. "We need a place to build it," I said. "Out of the wind. We need fabric, a lot of fabric, and we need wood. We probably need tools."

  Benito nodded. "There is a place, a great swamp, the Styx. Trees grow there. As for the fabric and the tools, we can cross the Styx and get them from the wall."

  "How many walls have you got here?"

  Benito smiled grimly. "None like this one ahead. Red-hot iron."

  I believed him. Nothing subtle about Infernoland. "How far down is it? We're losing altitude with every step."

  "A good distance yet." Benito laughed. "A glider. You may be the first ever to think of that. If we can launch from the hill above Styx, we can use the thermal updraft above the red-hot walls. Ecch," he said, about the time I stepped backward into freezing slush.

  We'd reached another level region. I stood up and looked around. Freezing muck in all directions. Human beings lay full length in it, like half-immersed logs. The rain was turning to sleet. Cold garbage washed against my ankles.

  "Behold the low-rent district," I said.

  I got a chuckle from Benito. "Not yet," he said, and if I hadn't had the shivers before I got them then. He swept his arm about him and said, "The Gluttonous."

  "I don't want to know. Come on, let's get through this."

  We waded out into it.

  In the darkness and half-blinded by sleet, I managed not to step on any half-buried victims. Some raised their heads to watch us pass, showing us uniform looks of weary despair, then sank back after we were gone.

  Men and women in about equal numbers, they ranged from pleasantly plump to chubby to gross. Three or four were as bad as the woman in the Vestibule. I wondered if they'd be pleased to know about her.

  And once I wiped frozen slush from my eyes, cursing imaginatively under my breath, and when I dropped my hand he was staring at me: a long-haired blond man built like an Olympic athlete.

  "Allen Carpentier," he said sadly. "So they got you too."

  I looked close and recognized him. "Petri? Jan Petri! What are you doing here? You're no glutton!"

  "I'm the least gluttonous man who ever lived," he said bitterly. "While all of these creeps were swilling down anything that came near their mouths, from pig meat to garden snails-- and you too, for that matter, Allen-- I was taking care of myself. Natural foods. Organic vegetables. No meat. No chemicals. I didn't drink. I didn't smoke. I didn't--" He caught himself up. "I didn't hire you as my lawyer. Why am I bending your ear? You're here too. You were one of the PIGS, weren't you?"

  "Yeah." He meant the Prestigious International Gourmand Society, whose purpose in life was to go out and eat together. I'd joined because I like the company. "But I'm not staying. This isn't my spot."

  He wiped slush from his face to see me better, "So where are you going?"

  "Out of this place. Come along?" He'd be unpleasant company till we got him a bath, but I knew he wouldn't slow us down. There never was a health nut to match Petri. He used to run ten miles a day. I figured hed be a lot of help building the glider.

  "How do you get out of Hell?"

  So they'd convinced him too. "We go downhill for a while. Then... well..."

  He was shaking his head. "Don't go down. I've heard about some of the places downhill. Red-hot coffins and devils and you name it."

  "We're not going very far. We're going to build a glider and go over the walls."

  "Yeah? And then where?" He seemed to think it was funny. "You'll just get yourself in more trouble, and for what? You're better off if you just take what they give you, no matter how unfair it is."

  "Unfair?" Benito asked.

  Petri's head snapped around. "Hell yes, unfair! I'm no glutton!"

  Benito shook his head, very sadly. "Gluttony is too much attention to things of the earth, especially in the matter of diet. It is the obsession that matters, not the quantity."

  Petri stared a moment. Wearily he said, "Bug off," and sank back into the freezing muck. As we left him I could hear him muttering to himself. "At least I'm not fat like those animals. I take care of myself."

  I was annoyed with Benito. "You didn't have to insult him. We could use his muscles. Hey--"

  Benito heard the panic in my voice. "Yes?"

  "I was at Petri's funeral! All that attention to his health, and then be got caught in the Watts riots. But they damn sure didn't freeze him! They cremated hini!"

  "Freeze him?"

  I didn't bother to explain. They'd cremated Petri, burned him to ash and gasses. How could he have been revived? How could the Builders of this Infernoland even have found specs for a robot analogue? 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 space-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 mass 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 butting the mass 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 pass now," Benito said calmly.

  "What was that all about?"

  CRACK!

  I looked to my left. Two nearly identical masses 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, "Hoarders! 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.

  "Hoarders 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, pushing 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 bump. 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 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 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... 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 own 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 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 finishing it while another group 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-- 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 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 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 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 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.

  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 other things 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 mad 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 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, its good enough for you."

  He was a big min 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!"

  Benito grasped him by the shoulders and lifted him as easily as I would a child. I gaped as Benito flung him out into the marsh. He wasn't even breathing hard. "Come, Allen."

  Yeah. Sure. I followed numbly, wondering who Benito really was. A professional wrestler? Circus strong man? What he'd done wasn't impossible. I'd seen it done before, but not often, and Benito didn't look that strong.

  CHAPTER 9

  Eventually we got through the trees and brush to open water. There was a big black tower at the edge. I couldn't see anyone in the tower, but suddenly there was a light in the top window. It flashed, ruby-red, out across the marsh.

  Red? Ruby? A laser! Not magic, just a laser signal from an old stone tower. Far out in the murk over the water there was a flash of light, blinking, the same color as the signal.

  "Phlegyas will come for us now," Benito said. "You must be careful. Say nothing you don't have to say, and as little of that as possible. Let me handle him."

  "Sure. Why?"

  "Because we are fugitives and we are approaching the, ah, administrative centers of Hell. There are demons here. Guards. They can do terrible things to us."

  "Can't they just." I'd seen enough atrocities already. Were the Builders the crazy ones? They seemed to like pain.

  From somewhere behind us there were screams of rage and agony, and splashing noises. I thought I saw ripples in the open water ahead of us too.

  Then something took shape in the gloom ahead, something moving toward us.

  It was a boat. A big man, bearded, with a low gold crown on his head, stood in the stern with an oar in a sternlock. He sculled slowly, but that boat moved. I almost laughed. He certainly wasn't putting out enough effort to get that kind of speed. The boat must have a hidden water jet or something.

  "I have you again!" the man crackled. "Ah, Benito, caught again. Good work!" He looked at me closely, and his grin faded. "Who are you?"

  I didn't answer.

  "Were you sentenced to lower Hell?"

  "Phlegyas, mind your own business." Benito said. "Bring the boat to the shore. I do not care to wade in your filthy swamp."

  "Don't like cold, eh?" Phlegyas seemed to find that funny. "Well, you won't have cold feet long, where you're going! Get in, Benito, get in. The other one has to stay here, of course. I have orders concerning you, but not him." He looked at me again. "You don't have a pass from Minos? No papers? You can't come."

  "He will come," Benito said. "This has been willed where what is willed must be. Now bring the boat to shore."

  Phlegyas shrugged. "All right, all right, you have the formula." His voice was a nasty whine of complaint. "It's sure been hell here since Dante published that book. You'd be surprised how many try that on me. Nothing I can do about it, either."

  We scrambled onto the boat and sat gingerly. I noticed that the boat didn't sink deeper by an inch. Didn't we weigh anything? In that case we could walk on the swamp! But that was silly, because the swamp rippled and bubbled with people-- and we'd sunk to the ankles in the muck. I could smell the stink on my feet.

  Every now and then a nose would appear above the water as someone caught a breath, then vanished again. How many were there in that swamp? I could hear screams of rage and agony and pain, and cursing in all languages, but I couldn't see any details in the halflight and the fog.

  Phlegyas sculled rapidly, and the boat shot away from the bank. The fog enclosed us in a circle of dark water rippled with shouting faces and with the chicken guts and other filth that poured down from the land of the Hoarders and the Wasters.

  Sometimes a filthy claw would reach from the water to clutch at the gunwales, and then Phlegyas would smash it with a six-foot pole he kept in a socket ready to hand. He sculled easily with one hand.

  "You know, that formula doesn't work with the real supervisors," he said. He reached to straighten his crown and gave us a sour look. "They took the power of decision away from me. I made a couple of mistakes, just a couple of lousy mistakes, and now they think they can do better than me. Over two thousand years of service here, and upstarts have more power than me. It isn't fair, you know. Bastards. Stupid bastards. But they won't let you in without a pass, you watch and see."

  "Old man, be silent," Benito said.

  "Humph." Phlegyas sculled more rapidly. The boat shot through the water. Now I could make out dim glowing red. The fog began to lift, and we could feel the heat.

  There were walls ahead of us. They had towers, and some of them were cherry red. The radiated heat was already uncomfortable. A low, wide mudbank stretched out from the walls to the swamp, and I could see a landing dead ahead, at the end of a narrow bay.

  We headed toward it. A man came out through a doorway in the wall. He was old and bent, and he hobbled. He carried a box about a yard square and an inch deep.

  He shuffied to the water's edge and used a shovel to fill his box with mud. Then he turned and ran, his robe flying out behind him as he darted back into the door hed come so slowly out of. It didn't make sense.

  I turned to Benito, but he only shrugged. He didn't know either.

  We passed the entrance to the bay. "You may let us out at this landing," Benito said.

  "Nope." Phlegyas continued to scull.

  "It would be more convenient."

  "Yep."

  "Then why don't you do it?" I demanded.

  "Because I don't have to," Phlegyas answered. He continued to scull until we reached another landing. "Regulations say ferry terminal to ferry terminal, and that's where I go. Nothing about stops in Himuralibima's Bay."

  Benito frowned, but we didn't say anything. The boat reached the dock area. There was no one to meet us, and I wasn't sorry.

  "Off, off," Phlegyas shouted. "There's more coming. No rest for an old man, none at all. Off, off." He reached for his cudgel, and we scrambled ashore before he could smash us with it. As soon as we were off he was sculling away, headed for the other shore like a motorboat.

  The city was maybe a quarter-mile away across hard stinking mud. The walls were hot, although not as hot here as further away. A mile to our left was a tower that glowed cherry red.

  Thermals! There'd be thermals here, if a glider could get across the swamp. It would take luck, and we'd have to drag it pretty high up that cliff to make it, but it could be done.

  "Be very careful," Benito said. "I will have to deceive the officials. Do not undeceive them."

  "You mean you're gonna lie? Oh, Benito, that's sinful. You could go to Hell for telling lies."

  He took it seriously. "I know. It is one reason I am here."

  "Um, but this is in a good cause..."

  "I thought my deceits were in a good cause." He shrugged. "The Commandment is against false witness, and by extension against malicious deceit, and fraud, and perversions of honesty and honor. We shall not do that, and as you say, it is in a good cause. Or so I hope. We tread dangerous ground, Allen."

  "Come on," I said. I started off toward the door I could see ahead of us. Fat chance I'd ever make that joke with him again.

  It was getting warmer all the time. Off to our left, near the blazing-hot tower, were the remains of a big gate, torn off its hinges. Things walked guard duty in front of it. They were just far enough away, and there was just enough fog and steam, that I couldn't see them clearly. But the shapes seemed odd, twisted out of true. I didn't want to ask about them.

  We came to a Dutch-type door open at the top and with a counter on the lower half. Heat poured out through the opening. A bored-looking man in a high stiff collar, something out of a Dickens novel, was inside in a little office. His face was narrow and pinched, and the heat couldn't have improved his disposition. He had a desk like a woodcut from the Scrooge story, a tall thing he stood at. There wasn't a chair or a stool in the room. We waited at the counter.

  And waited, and waited, getting warmer and warmer, while the clerk fussed with papers on his desk. He seemed to be reading every line on an enormous form a dozen pages thick. Every now and then he used a red pencil to mark something. When he continued to turn the pages and scrawl notes without even looking at us, I pounded on the counter.

  "Are we invisible?" I demanded.

  "A moment, sir. Just a moment, please. We're very shorthanded here, sir. You'll have to wait, sir." He made each "sir" a curse.

  "You would be well advised to attend us." Benito's voice had that edge to it, a note of warning. The clerk looked around uneasily. He obviously didn't recognize either of us. Hardly surprising.

  "Your papers, please."

  "We have none," Benito answered.

  "Oh my, oh my, one of those days," the clerk muttered. "Well, if you haven't any papers, you can't come in. The rules are very strict. You'll have to go back for papers." He turned back to his desk and started looking over the files on it.

  "We have an errand inside," Benito said. "You do not help your record by delaying us."

  The clerk looked back nervously. He examined us closely again, noting the slime on our gowns and the stench of our sandals. That seemed to cheer him. "What is your station inside?" he asked.

  "No fixed post," Benito answered.

  "I can't help you, sir. I'm only record-keeper for the Sixth Circle. Next window, please." He turned back to his desk. We waited. Benito whistled something monotonous. Finally the clerk turned back. "You still here, sir? I told you, next window, please."

  "It is to the Sixth Circle that we must go now."

  "Why didn't you tell me," the clerk complained.

  "Very well." He reached into a cabinet and produced what looked like manuscript books and short stubs of pencil. "If you don't have the proper papers, you'll have to fill out these forms."

  They were twenty pages long, covered with small blanks, and there were nine copies. Not only wasn't there any carbon paper, but the blanks were arranged differently on each copy, although they all asked for the same information.

  "I think we will not bother," Benito said.

  I flared up. "What the hell do you want all this for? Great-grandmother's blood type! Why should I fill this out?"

  "You have to." The clerk was getting more and more irritated. "You can see they're all blank. You can see they have to be filled out. Right at the top, see, it says, 'Replacement for lost papers, application for, D-345t-839y-4583, to be submitted in nine copies.' I can't do anything for you without that information."

  "Aren't there exceptions?"

  "Of course there are exceptions, sir. One was made over two thousand years ago. Before my time, but they still talk about it." He shuddered. "But you are obviously not Him. Is either of you a living man? Can either of you summon angels? Those are in the book too." He glanced at a shelf of loose-leaf folios above his desk. "Volume sixty-one, page eight ninety-four, paragraph seventy-seven point eighty-two-- I'm glad we changed to the decimal system, but most of us didn't like it-- it says very plainly, anyone who can summon angels may pass. But if you're applying under that ruling you'll have to go to the main gate. Don't prove you can do it. Just go to the main gate, and they'll take care of you."

  "But you will not let us pass," Benito said. "Not even if I tell you that if you do not you will be in grave trouble?"

  "I know my duty. You will not come through."

  "Very good. You have done well," Benito said. "If you had let us in, we would have reported it. Now you have a favorable report coming. Who is your supervisor?"

  The clerk stared at Benito. "Mrs. Playfair. Formerly a postmistress. But--"

  "Oh, my," said Benito. "I won't be able to help you after all. It would do no good to give the report to her."

  The clerk was unsettled. "Why not, sir?" The "sir" wasn't a curse any longer.

  "I am not permitted to say."

  "Ah. You mean--" He gulped. Whatever he imagined was going to happen to Mrs. Playfair worried him excessively. "But what will happen to her people? What will become of me?"

  Benito looked crestfallen. "You know the rules--"

  "But I've done everything properly! My files are in perfect order-- oh dear, oh dear, I told her she shouldn't have let that man in the records room, I told her he wasn't properly credentialed, I told her! It was all her fault, I told her... my files are in perfect order. And they won't even look at them, they'll just--" He was actually wringing his hands as he looked around his office at his desk and files.

  Benito frowned. "It would be a waste to have you in the boiling pitch."

  "IN THE PITCH!" the clerk screamed.

  "Are you certain your files are in perfect order?" Benito demanded.

  "Of course they are! Here, you can see for yourself." He did something that opened the gate.

  Benito and I crowded in. Benito took down a volume of the rule book and leafed through it. "Keep this up to date, do you? All revisions in place as they come in? Where are your unfiled revision sheets?"

  "There are none," the clerk said primly.

  "Hmm." Benito lifted the forms on the clerk's desk. "This is not in order!" He leafed through quickly.

  "But I hadn't checked the seventh copy yet!" the clerk moaned. "I was doing that when you interrupted me! You can't report me for that, I was trying to give you service, and--"

  Benito handed the forms back. The clerk looked through and extracted a bulky set. There was pencil all over the first six pages, then the writing medium changed to something darker. Benito looked at it curiously. "This is hardly legible."

  "He used up his pencil," the clerk said. "Volume four, page ninety-eight, paragraph six, states that no applicant can have more than one pencil. So I made him fill it out with something else. He used blood."

  "His own?" I asked.

  "Where else would he get blood?" The clerk turned to Benito. "Who is this man?"

  "In my custody. Witness. Not your case, don't worry about it." He handed back the forms. "This seems to be in order."

  "Thank you." There was relief all over the clerk's face.

  "One item was very difficult to read. You should be more careful next time."

  "Yes, Sir. Certainly, sir. Are you finished with it?"

  Benito nodded. The clerk took the form-- copy seven of nine copies-- and tossed it into a wastebasket in the corner. It burst into flames. I stared. A man had used his own blood to fill that out? I glanced at the forms the clerk had handed us.

  Sure enough, at the top of copy seven, it said "DESTROY." Copy eight went to "APPLICANT" and copy nine was "TO BE ROUTED TO THE STATISTICAL SECTION."

  "What will be the charges against Mrs. Playfair?" the clerk asked, his voice low and confidential.

  Benito frowned. "I understand there are shortages in uniforms and supply--"

  "But we don't have anything to do with that."

  "Precisely," Benito said knowingly. Comprehension dawned on the clerk's face. He nodded.

  "We're going to check that now," Benito said. "Keep up the good work, uh--"

  "MacMurdo. Vincent MacMurdo. You'll remember?"

  "Certainly." Benito opened the inner door and held it for me. I went through, trying not to hurry.

  CHAPTER 10

  Benito followed and closed the door behind him. I slumped against the wall, convulsed by silent laughter.

  I jumped away fast. The wall was burning hot. I smelled scorched cloth. Another second and I'd have had a bad burn.

  We were in a corridor that stretched to infinity in both directions. It was about ten feet high and wide, and there were doors at intervals along it. People hurried in both directions, paying us no attention.

  And there were all kinds of people! Men and women in flowing robes, in US Post Office uniforms, in colonial costumes, in the high collars the Dickensian clerk had worn, military uniforms, Chinese mandarin robes, modem business suits, coveralls with insignia of planets and stars and sunbursts, a whirl of scurrying humanity shoving past us as if we weren't there.

  Nobody was going to notice us for our funny clothing.

  The old man we'd seen outside rushed past us, almost running. He carried a box of fresh mud and poked at it with a stick as he ran. We watched as he turned through a door and out of sight.

  Someone had stopped beside us and was laughing. He wore a Roman toga.

  "Do you speak English?" I asked.

  "Certainly." He was still laughing.

  "Who was that?" I asked.

  The laughter stopped, and the man glared. He was carrying some kind of wood plank with wax on it. There were letters cut in the wax. "You are new here?" he demanded.

  "From another division," Benito said quickly. He lowered his voice. "Special assignment."

  The Roman drew away from us. "Surely you have no interest in Himuralibima? He is our most honored civil servant."

  Benito gave a knowing look. I still had a blank stare.

  "Hammurabi's secretary, you know. Invented record-keeping."

  "Ah," I said. Hammurabi? Oh, all right, he's Hammurabi's secretary. And I am Napoleon Bonaparte. "You'd think after all these years they'd let him slow down a little."

  "But he can't," the Roman protested. "They've offered him retirement, but he has to fill out the proper forms, and in his case, of course they're in cuneiform. And you have noticed how hot it is in here?"

  I couldn't stand it. I tipped my head back and roared with laughter. It rolled out, gales of laughter, choking me, as I thought of that first bureaucrat trying to complete his retirement papers before the mud dried from the heat...

  ... Himuralibima's Bay?

  Benito merely nodded. "Fitting. I am certain you have work, Signor--?"

  "Uh, of course," the Roman said. "Your pardon." He pushed past us and walked briskly down the corridor. Our clerk came out of his office. The Roman stopped, and they talked in whispers.

  "Allen, must you ask unnecessary questions?" Benito demanded.

  "I'm a writer. Of course I ask questions."'

  "Please do not. Not in here. For the moment we are safe. They think--" He motioned with his eyes.

  I turned my eyes only. The Roman had stopped someone else and was whispering to him. The man he'd stopped, a young man in 1930's US Army uniform, nodded. Pretty soon he stopped someone and both looked clandestinely at us. They stopped others...

  "They're telling stories about us," I said.

  "Yes. Let us hope they are telling the proper ones. Now we must find the supply center."

  Wherever we went we were preceded and followed by whispers. People got out of our way, too. If we wanted to go through a door, if we even looked like we wanted to go through a door, there was a scramble to hold it open for us.

  "They sure are scared of you," I said. "They know who you are." Which was more than I did.

  "I think few of them have seen or heard of me," Benito answered.

  Oh, really? "You know your way around here."

  "No. I know my way around bureaucracies. This one is no different from any other."

  "You were a bureaucrat once?"

  He hesitated. "I suppose you might say so."

  "Exactly what--"

  An anguished voice drowned me out. We were passing an open door, and a woman's voice screamed in rage and pain: "But that form is twenty-seven pages long! All that for one tool?"

  I looked in, caught a familiar hawklike proffle, turned back and kept walking. "Don't look now," I said out of the corner of my mouth.

  The other voice followed us. "You should keep better track of your handsaw. The rules are very clear..."

  At the next door there was a long line of naked people, fat men, pretty girls, ugly women, studs-- every form and variety of mankind: the reception desk at a streakers' convention. They were trying to get to a counter where some fat guy handed them clothing while two beanpole women took information down on more forms.

  What was this? The supply center for Infernoland? Were these employees, or spectators, or--

  --Or what?

  We got in line, the only ones with clothing who did. A thin guy in a medieval bachelor gown came in, went behind the counter, and whispered to the supply clerk. The clerk summoned his two old biddies, and they whispered together.

  Finally one of the women came out from behind the counter. She wore a coverall of a kind I didn't recognize, dark blue with strange insignia. "What may we do for you?" she asked. She was trying to be pleasant, and it was obvious that she'd never learned how.

  "This man was given the wrong clothing," Benito said. "He is wearing the same thing I am. In our section we do not give a junior courier the uniform of a supervisor."

  She frowned. Benito didn't look like he was dressed as a supervisor. He looked like an escapee from the violent ward. So did I. But he only stared back, and after a while her eyes dropped. "What should he wear?" she said.

  "Loincloth. And there are nine senior men in my section who have loincloths and no gowns. It is intolerable!"

  "Oh." She didn't know what to make of that. She went back and whispered to the other biddy.

  Meanwhile the line moved up. The clerk looked at papers and then at the fat man at the head of the line. He went into the shelving stacks behind the counter and came baok with bright gaudy clothes, slashed velvet sleeves and tight trousers. They were obviously too small.

  "Ungood. Double plus ungood. Too small. Wrong period," the fat man protested.

  "Tough shit, buddy. We all got our troubles. Next!"

  The biddies came over to him and whispered. He looked at us. "Uh, you sirs-- can I help you?"

  ***

  Three helped carry the gowns, and a fourth brought up the rear with stacks of papers flowing with seals and ribbons. Benito paid no attention to me; he just walked ahead as if he assumed we'd all follow, which we did.

  We turned a corner, and he stopped. "This will do," he said. "Give those things to Allen. You have your work to do, and this is his task."

  "Certainly, sir. Is there nothing else we can do for you?" This one wore a policewoman's uniform, vaguely American, though the shield was shaped strangely. She talked without using articles. When she spoke to her subordinates she used a language I didn't know. I was afraid to ask her death date.

  "I said this will do," Benito said. "We will be met by others. You may go."

  "Thank you, sir." The sow turned and stalked away, followed by the others.

  When she was out of sight Benito seemed to wilt. His straight posture was gone, the high angle of the chin vanished, and he slumped.

  Then he laughed. "So. Nothing changes. Now we must get out of here before someone tells this story to an internal security agent."

  "They think-- what do they think? That were important officials?"

  "No. Of course not. They know we are only pretending that."

  "Then what--?"

  "But they cannot be sure. We might be important officials. But most of them think we are secret police."

  "But how do you know there are secret police?"

  Benito looked very sad. "Allen, there have to be. You cannot run a bureaucratic state without them. Come."

  We found a door to the outside, and Benito surrendered one of the documents he'd collected. We passed through and were out on the mud flats again. A stinking breeze wrapped itself around me, deliciously cool, and I said, "Ahh..."

  Far to our right the old man had just filled his box of mud again. He ran for the gate, writing frantically.

  CHAPTER 11

  I was smiling as I turned. The robes I held stacked on my head, an ungainly load. "Now what?"

  Benito was staring across the swamp. "I don't know."

  "Ah?"

  "We cannot possibly persuade Phlegyas to take us back. I fear we must swim." He set his own stack of robes down, shook out the top robe and used it to tie the rest together.

  Swim? Through that? It wasn't the garbage that turned me off. It was the bubbling of angry people in and under the water. If we met anyone like the guy Benito had thrown back into the water... if we met half a dozen of them while loaded down with heavy wet stacks of robes! "Wait a minute, Benito. Let's try something else."

  "Lead on, then, Allen."

  I stopped to tie my bundle as Benito had tied his.

  Then I turned right along Himuralibima's Bay. The choice was deliberate: here there were windows and doors along the wall.

  I was wading thigh-deep and not liking it, but it was the only way to learn what I wanted to know. At worst I was postponing our swim. At best-- "We've got plenty of time. You keep saying so."

  "So we do. I wonder what you expect to find."

  My foot brushed something soft.

  She was clearly visible beneath two feet of water: a long-boned black woman with her hair floating like seaweed around a slack face, I asked a stupid question. "Is she dead?"

  "Of course," said Benito.

  She was curled in fetal position. She stayed rigid as I rolled her to bring her head above water. There was no sign of decay, and no sign of life. But I felt for a pulse in her neck and found it.

  "Catatonic." And I started to get mad. "Another catatonic. Of all the dirty things. We don't persecute crazy people for crimes. What right do the Builders have to put crazy people in Hell?"

  "The Builders?"

  "Never mind. Of all the dirty things. Benito, can you handle two bundles for a minute?"

  He took my robes on his other shoulder. He waited while I reached into the water to adjust the woman's position.

  Catatonia. It's a rare enough disorder, but almost incurable. You can find one or two catatonics in almost any mental hospital. They afford opportunity for endless jokes, all identical, for a catatonic will take any position you put him into and hold the pose indefinitely.

  Every intern thinks he is the first to see the possibilities. He will lead the resident catatonic to the hospital cafeteria, place him just outside the door, and leave him there with his thumb to his nose or his middle finger rigidly extended. Hilarious!

  Sometimes he gets a surprise...

  I had to stand on her knees to straighten her legs, but finally I got them stretched out in front of her. She was still leaning too far back, her eyes staring at infinity through a half-inch of scummy water. Still standing on her knees for leverage, I reached beneath the water, took her shoulders and pulled her up to sitting position.

  Now she'd be able to breathe.

  ...sometimes he gets a surprise, your antic intern. He will have just finished adjusting the patient's hand with thumb properly to nose, when the hand becomes a fist and the fist becomes a missile warhead. Catatonics are hideously strong. They have to be, to hold one position forever.

  And she was sitting down. She lashed straight out and tried to punch a hole through my groin. She damned near made it. I whooped and doubled over, sucking air. Sucking, as it turned out, filthy water as I rolled helplessly over into the swamp.

  I tried to uncurl. My lungs still wanted to suck water. Inch by inch, I fought my mouth to the surface, drew a lungful of sweet stinking air, and screamed.

  Benito was sloshing toward me. I gestured him back. If he dropped the robes to help me, they'd quadruple in weight!

  He stopped. I waited for the pain to ease a little, then tried to stand up. When I put weight on my legs it felt like she'd hit me again. I moved toward shore, doubled over.

  The woman's lower lip was just at the surface of the water. She held her arm straight out, fist clenched. "Don't make waves," I told her sourly as I passed. She didn't respond, and she still looked dead. Water streamed from her nose.

  I didn't stop for any more catatonics. Gradually I was able to straighten up. Benito followed patiently, carrying both bundles, both of us wading thigh-deep in water. I ignored the floating garbage. It wasn't getting me any dirtier than I already was.

  The texture of the bottom had changed. Beneath a film of frictionless mud there were tilted slabs that had sharp corners and tended to slide... I stopped. Benito stopped behind me.

  I said, "Feel that?"

  Benito didn't get it. "What should I feel?"

  "Himuralibima's Ford, that's what! No telling how far it goes, but it should get us a good distance across the swamp. Here, give me that." I took one of the bundles and started into the swamp. The footing was chancy, the slabs tended to slide, but it was better than swimming.

  And I, feeling that I had earned the right to brag, bragged. "All along I wondered where the dried mud was going. It'd shrink a little when the water evaporated, but even so, that bay is huge. Where do they dump the slabs after Himuralibima gives up? Maybe I'd find a mountain of them. Or maybe they don't want a pile of ruined clay slabs in their working area. Maybe they're afraid of getting ticked off for sloppiness.

  "So, I was right. Someone's been dumping the slabs in the bay. Every hundred years he has to walk a little further. Otherwise they'd show above the surface."

  "Very clever, Allen."

  "Thank kew." No telling how far it would go, but we were a good distance into the swamp, and the water was only up to our calves. Hold your breath and make a wish, Carpentier. Or just hold your breath; the water could be over your head any second.

  We were nearly across before it ended. The slabs dipped, and I followed the dip, walking on eggs, with the stack of robes balanced on my head. I was chin deep where the mud turned squishy soft.

  So far, so good. I found an underwater ridge and followed that, going waist deep, then higher. I was wading ashore, with Benito behind me, when our luck ran out.

  The broad-shouldered man who blocked our path was the same who had blocked our path before. He shied back when he recognized us, and then he saw our situation and grinned.

  I turned back to Benito. "Mind if I try this?"

  "If you think it will help."

  "I wrote science fiction, remember? I ought to be able to explain a complicated idea to a moron."

  I hadn't lowered my voice. The broad-shouldered man advanced on us, saying, "Who's a moron?"

  "Don't worry about it," I told him. "You've got worse problems than that. Remember the flying lesson?"

  His grin was back. "I'd like to see old Benito try that with his arms full of bedsheets!"

  "He won't be able to," I said, keeping my speech slow and distinct. "He'll have to put them down. In the swamp." Pause. "They'll get all dirty." Pause. "Imagine what that will do to his temper."

  I watched his eyes. It was getting through to him.

  I said, "Why don't you step aside while you think it over?"

  "Some guys would rather talk than fight," he said contemptuously. He turned and stalked back to his point of high ground.

  PART II

  CHAPTER 12

  "Things are definitely looking up for Allen Carpentier."

  "I beg your pardon?" Benito was looking out at the marsh, at decaying trees embedded in fog.

  "We've got a quiet place to work, I've made some flint tools, and there's everything we need for the glider. What more could we want?"

  Benito sighed, and I got, back to work. The first job was to find a place to loft the glider. We were on a little area of high ground, no more than thirty yards square and nestled up against the base of the cliff. The bad-tempered character was between us and everyone else. He wouldn't let anyone else past, and he wasn't about to bother us. I could just see his back through the mist.

  First things first. I used a log to flatten out an area larger than the glider would be, then cut a long springy sapling for a ruler. After a while I had a whole collection of saplings of various lengths and thicknesses.

  You draw the rough outlines, then spring the batten-- in this case one of the saplings-- across the important points. That makes a smooth fair curve. It was the way the Wright Brothers designed airplanes, and it was the way the Douglas Gooney Bird was designed. It wasn't until World War H, long after the age of flight was underway, that airplanes were designed on drafting tables. Before that they were done on the loft floors, the same way that boats were designed for centuries.

  I don't know how long it took me to get it right. I wasn't in any hurry, and Benito never tried to rush me. After a while he even developed some enthusiasm.

  Did you ever try to set up ribs and make them keep their shape by tying them with vines? When the ribs are whatever you can cut off swamp willows? As a lesson in patience the job has few equals...

  Eventually it looked liked a glider. The wings weren't precisely symmetrical, and the control surfaces pivoted on wooden bearings with dowels shaped by flint knives and thrust into holes enlarged by flint drill bits; the fabric was sewn with vine tendrils shoved through holes poked with a thorn; but it looked like a glider.

  I remembered the Cargo Cults of the South Seas.

  The islanders had been sorry to see the airplanes go after World War II ended. Native magicians had made mockups of airplanes and landing fields. It was sympathetic magic intended to bring back the real airplanes and the great days of cargo and trade. I told Benito about the Cargo Cults, amusing him greatly, and only later realized what had brought them to mind.

  What I was building would never look like more than a crude imitation of an airplane. But it would fly!

  I spent as much time making tools as I did working on the sailplane. A bow drill: take one bow, as for shooting arrows; get a good curve in it, and instead of an arrow, take a piece of sapling. Wrap the bowstring around the piece of sapling. Attach the drill bit to one end. You need a hard block in which the top of the sapling chunk will rotate freely because you've worn a depression in it. Hold that block in one hand, put the drill point where you want it, and draw the bow back and forth with the other hand. The sapling turns. The point turns. In about a week you can drill a hole.

  I'd heard that boatbuilders in Asia preferred their bow drills to American electrics. They must have been crazy.

  I worked. There were no distractions. The Builders must have altered my body radically. I didn't get hungry, thirsty, horny, or sleepy, and I never had to go to the bathroom. I wondered what I had become. What was my power source now? A power source with no food intake and no waste outlet? If it was beamed power, Benito and I would be turning ourselves off when we dropped the glider beyond the wall.

  Beyond the wall... I hadn't thought much about that. What would we find outside? Dante had described a dark wood, a wilderness. Why not? A low-gravity world, native vegetation allowed to run wild...

  No guarantees, Carpentier. There might be nothing but Infernoland itself, a tremendous cone built in airless space, with a point mass, a quantum black hole for instance, mounted at the tip to provide gravity. In that case we were dead.

  I kept working.

  And eventually, there it was. The Fudgesickle, by Carpentier and Company. "This is a demo, madam. The finished model will have many other desirable features, such as landing gear and seats for the crew, and metal fastenings..."

  "Will that hold together?" Benito didn't seem particularly worried. His tone was more one of abstract curiosity.

  "I think so. We shouldn't put much strain on it, but I've noticed we don't weigh what we should. Infernoland seems to be built on a lower gravity planet than Earth."

  "Yours is the most curious delusion I have yet encountered here. Well, if it will fly, we may as well try it. The sooner you are done with this idiocy, the sooner we can reach the center and escape."

  I could have killed him. So the Fudgesickle wasn't a thing of beauty. It would fly! And it was a lot better way out than his.

  I didn't try to kill him for three reasons. First, he'd break my neck. Second, he had been useful as a guide; he'd gotten me the fabric. Third, I needed his help getting the Fudgesickle high enough on that cliff above us for a launching.

  We pulled the glider up the slope and carried it until the land fell away as a steep cliff. The swamp bubbled like sludge, with sickly lights glowing among the odd-shaped bushes and trees.

  "If we crash down there, we'll never get out," I said "Can you fly this thing?"

  "I have flown them." Benito laughed, with real humor.

  "What?"

  "I have done this before. We launched the glider from a much higher cliff. An Austrian soldier came to get me out of a sticky situation." He settled himself at the controls.

  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 massless-- 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 mass? The wrong weight, and...

  Infernoland. Disneyland of the Damnable. 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 massless. It wasn't even possible in theory to extract the inertia and leave the weight. But they could do it, the Builders, the God 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 altitude. There must have been warm air rising from the hellish 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 damned 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 massless. 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! Passing over the rings we'd struggled through. A wind fall of weightless people bounced us about, then let us go. We passed 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 Hell!

  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 altitude 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 damned tired of your defeatist attitude!"

  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. Massless 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 passenger.

  "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 altitude.

  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 space-shuttle pilot. I had a dozen flights on my record, and then... you ever have one of those days?"

  "Damned right," I said. Benito laughed and nodded.

  We seemed to have enough altitude 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 space 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 spacewalked 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 damned 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?"

  "Certainly."

  Agony surged in my leg. I looked down... and couldn't look away. I watched in helpless fascination.

  The blood had stopped pumping. The bone ends gradually vanished as skin crawled out to cover them. It crawled on, closing the wound, leaving my leg in an odd tented shape. Without my willing it the leg straightened slowly.

  An old scar I'd once got fishing slowly reappeared where before there had been bloody jagged bone end. The pain turned to a ferocious itch. That went away too.

  I was healed.

  Corbett had stopped screaming. Now he only moaned softly. I looked, afraid to look, afraid not to. The char was flaking off him in thick patches. The skin beneath was bright sunburn red, not at all like raw meat. His tattoo, like my scar, came up from underneath his skin like a self-developing photograph. He groaned again and opened his eyes.

  There were eyes in the sockets. Corbett looked at me and smiled weakly. "Can't die again, I guess. Wished I could for a time there."

  "It is a pointless and evil wish," said Benito. "The dead cannot die."

  "No." Corbett began an inspection of his body.

  I stood up uncertainly. Benito watched, saying nothing. I was able to stand. I could walk. I did. I went off a way, toward the glowing tomb, until the heat was nearly unbearable, and I stared at it.

  We'll have to change our theory, won't we, Carpentier? Corbett's no robot. The Builders would have had to put new, sunburned skin under the skin to be charred. They would have had to plan all this ahead of time. They would have to be omniscient.

  And what about your leg, Carpentier? What about your leg?

  Biological engineering. Rapid regeneration. That, to add to their other powers. They can warp space and possibly time. They can take the mass from a human body and leave the weight. They can put Minos' tail into-- where? Hyperspace? They've got fine-tuned weather control and infinitely adaptable robots.

  And they can engineer your body, Carpentier, your body, in such a way that it heals in minutes, and do it without your knowing they gave you that ability.

  Getting a little thin, isn't it, Carpentier? A neat set of rationalizations, but it won't work. How are these Builders different from God Himself? What can God do that they can't?

  And back at the edge of my mind I couldn't help remembering the last thing I'd screamed in the bottle.

  Corbett had got up and was peeling saucer-sized flakes of charred skin from his chest and shoulders. "Hot here," he said.

  I nodded and abandoned my reverie. It was hot. Even the tombs that weren't glowing were just below red heat. Here and there flames shot up from open pits. It must have been painful for Corbett with his new skin.

  I remembered where we were. Inside the walls of Dis. How were we to get out again? We were surrounded by hot glowing tombs, flames, fire, heat everywhere, except in one direction where darkness showed through the red glow.

  "We have to get out of here," I said to Benito. "We'll roast to-- we'll roast." To death? We couldn't die. Can't die twice, Carpentier.

  "Of course we must leave," Benito said. "Recall your promise. I helped you with the glider, and it did not work. Now you have no choice. We. go downward."

  "Which way?" For that moment I didn't care.

  "I am not sure. We may as well go where it is more comfortable." He led us off toward the dark. It drew us onward, promising relief from the heat and the choking air. We threaded our way between heated tombs and great vatlike pits with fire dancing from them. Huge lids that would just cover them lay beside each one.

  The edge of the hot region was the beginning of a white marble maze. The heat stopped as if we'd gone through an insulated doorway, but there was no door. I wasn't even surprised. It would take more than invisible heat barriers to surprise me now.

  Corbett staggered into a corridor and sank down with a happy sigh, his back against cool marble. He wriggled to get his head clear of the brass fixtures.

  We were in an endlessly sprawling building. The corridors were about fifteen feet wide and nearly that high. Every wall was covered with square-cut marble slabs and rows of brass plates and slender brass... what? Vases? I read some of the plates. Name, birth date, date of death. Sometimes an insipid poem. These were burial vaults, and those brass things were vases, and of course there were no flowers in them. The corridor stretched on endlessly, and there seemed to be branches at frequent intervals. Millions of tombs...

  "More unbelievers," I said.

  "Yes," Benito answered.

  "But I was an unbeliever. An agnostic."

  "Of course."

  "Why of course?"

  "I found you in the Vestibule," said Benito. "But now you know the truth."

  A two-syllable response stuck in my throat. The truth was an elusive thing, here in Infernoland. I could talk about advanced technologies until Hell froze over, and Benito would still call them miracles.

  I'd watched a miracle. A compound fracture had healed before my eyes. And I was no robot!

  But this place had to be artificial. It was a construct, a design. I knew that.

  All right, Carpentier. An artifact implies an artificer. There has to be a designer. Pick a Chief Engineer for the Builders, and call him... what? Good fannish names, like Ghod, Ghu, Roscoe, the Ceiling? No. Call him Big Juju.

  Question, Carpentier. In what way do Big Juju's abilities differ from God Almighty's?

  Size? This place is the size of a small planet. Carpentier, you've no way of knowing Big Juju can't build even bigger. Worlds, stars, whole universes.

  Natural laws? He suspends them at will. A world-sized funnel, as stable as a sphere would be in normal space. And-- and he can raise the dead. Me! Corbett, who couldn't possibly have been frozen. Jan Petri the health-food addict, cremated, Carpentier, burned to a pile of greasy ashes and a few chunks of bone, and now risen so that he can be tortured.

  Big Juju can create. He can destroy. He can raise the dead and heal the sick. Was more ever claimed for Christ?

  I looked back at the red-hot tombs. They still glowed with heat, but none of that reached us in these cool marble halls. "There are people in those tombs?"

  Benito nodded. "Heretics."

  The word was frightening. Heretics. They believed in the wrong gods, or worshiped the right god in the wrong way. For that they were raised from the dead so they could be tortured in botboxes.

  Iago says it. "Credo in un Dio crudel." I believe in a cruel God. And that you must believe, Carpentier. The ability to make a universe does not presuppose moral superiority. We have seen no strong evidence that Big Juju's moral judgments are better than our own. Would God torture people?

  I half-remembered Sunday school lessons. No. But also, yes. It was one reason I was an agnostic. How could I worship a God who kept a private dungeon called Hell? That might be all right for Dante Alighieri, a Renaissance Italian! But Carpentier has higher standards than that!

  A voice floated from within my mind, a tired voice whispering out of a mound of fat. We're in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

  We were in the private museum park of Big Juju. "We've got to get out of here."

  "Too right," said Corbett. He paused. "Music?"

  I listened. There was music playing from somewhere within these marble corridors. Something chintzy-sweet, a minor work by a major composer, played for every melodramatic sweet note in it. Artificial good cheer in Hell. "It fits," I said. "Granted we're damned, how do we get out? Which way?"

  Benito looked around him. "I have never been in this part before."

  "Not back out there," Corbett insisted. "Not unless we have to."

  "Right. We've got time," I said. And I started laughing.

  It was an awful sound. It bounced around in the maze and came back at me from all directions, transmuted to racking sobs. I tried to stop. Corbett and Benito were staring. I tried to tell them:

  "I was right. Just once, I was right. All that time in the bottle, all that guessing, and I was right just once. Immortality! When they woke me up they had immortality." Dammit, I was crying.

  Corbett took my Arm. "Come on, then."

  We went inward.

  CHAPTER 14

  The corridors branched away, endless cross-corridors in an endless corridor, and every one of them the same, wall after wall of marble-sealed caskets, each with its empty bronze vases for flowers. Our footsteps echoed hollowly. Our sandals hadn't been touched by the flames. The sprightly music continued, never getting louder, and the light never changed, neither gloomy nor bright. On and on, corridor after corridor. Finally we halted.

  "We haven't turned," I said.

  Corbett nodded. "Do a one-eighty and we can get out of here. Let's."

  Half-facetiously I rapped on a bronze nameplate and read off the name and dates. A translucent human shape formed before me. I stared in horror, then shrugged. What was a ghost among ghosts?

  "Pardon me," I said. "Can you direct us toward the wall of Dis?"

  The ghost's voice was faint and reedy. "Wall? Dis?" Faint laughter. "They must have added more extensions to the Mausoleum. I don't remember anything like that in Forest Lawn."

  "Very funny. This isn't Forest Lawn."

  The ghost seemed vexed. "I was supposed to be buried in Forest Lawn. I paid for it before I died. It was in my will. Where am I?"

  "Would you believe Hell?"

  More faint laughter, as if from a great distance. "Certainly not. I don't even believe in ghosts." And then there was nothing but the wall.

  I jumped when Corbett spoke behind me. "It's a risk, but are you game to try a cross-corridor? I think if we turn left and keep going straight we'll be headed up again."

  The scenery changed. Now there were niches with urns in them, much closer together. We came to a T intersection and turned and returned to the right direction when we could. Then another T and a Y and a big round empty space with corridors off in all directions, and a big monument in the very center...

  ... and we were in the good section of town. The sarcophagi were no longer buried in the walls. At the ends of short alcoves were huge marble oblongs, ornately carved, guarded by traditional statuary. Knights and vague sexless winged beings that were supposed to be angels and might have been faggots; reproductions of famous religious statuary; original creations, all done with enormous competence, all in monstrous bad taste. Sculpted Bibles open to John 3:16. Replicas of European cathedrals, done in perfect scale, bronze toys.

  One alcove was blocked off by a brass gate and enormous lock. All the nameplates were of the same family, all ornately carved with relief pictures and bronze replicas of their life's signatures. We looked in, grinned at each other, and went on.

  Pride. Unbelievably ornate monuments purchased at unbelievable price: expensive tombs turned prisons. I wondered if they matched monuments left behind on Earth. Sure, I decided. Big Juju has a sense of fitness.

  Fitness?

  In this one case, yes, fitness.

  The corridors twisted again and again. The dead were high walls on all sides of us. Our footsteps were dull intrusions on music for the proud dead. The dead walked among the dead. Dead. Dead. Dead. Dead! Word and reality echoed with each step. Word and reality hammered at my soul. Dead. Dead. Dead. Presently I sat down against coot marble.

  "Allen? What is the trouble?" Benito's anxious voice was far away.

  "Come on, let's get moving. This place gives me the creeps." Corbett shoved at me with his toe. "C'mon."

  I tried to speak. It wasn't worth the effort, but finally I heard my own voice saying, "We're dead. Dead. It's all over. We tried to make lives for ourselves, and we didn't make it, and we're dead. Oh, Corbett, I wish I'd died like you."

  The gay sweet music mocked me. Dead. Dead. Dead.

  Green light blinked on and off in the corner of my eye. It was annoying, a disturbance, an irritant in the thick cotton closing about me. I could see the source without turning my head, but it was an effort to move my eyes. Why bother? But the light winked on and off, and eventually I looked at the source, a neon sign blinking far down at the dead end of a corridor of the dead. It echoed my thought:

  SO IT GOES SO IT GOES SO IT GOES

  --off and on, endlessly, in green neon.

  Unreachably far away, on another world, in another time, Allen Carpentier had been buried like a potato in a closed coffin ceremony. The fans had come to the funeral, some of them, and a few writers had come, and afterward they'd gone off to have a drink and talk about new writers. Carpentier was dead, and that was all there was to it. I could speculate forever about Big Juju's moral superiority, I could wander forever through Hell, and so what?

  SO IT GOES

  SO IT GOES

  Corbett's voice came dimly. "We may have to leave him. I saw this happen to a guy, once, in the war. He's going autistic."

  "I have seen it also. Many times. Would you leave him here?"

  I thought Benito was shaking my shoulder.

  SO IT GOES

  SO IT GOES

  SO IT GOES

  --what was the blinking neon sign doing in this place?

  A horrible suspicion filtered through the blankets around my brain. I pushed Benito away and surged to my feet. I walked, wobbling, toward the blinking light. So it goes?

  At the end of the corridor was a tremendous square-cut edifice in black marble. The epitaph beneath the neon sign was long and wordy, couched in words of one syllable and short, simple sentences. A man's life history, a list of books and awards--

  Corbett and Benito stared when I came back. Corbett said, "You look like you're ready to kill somebody."

  I jerked my thumb behind me. At first I couldn't speak, I was that angry. "Him. Why him? A science-fiction writer who lied about being a science-fiction writer because he got more money that way. He wrote whole novels in baby talk, with sixth-grade drawings in them, and third-grade science, and he knew better. How does he rate a monument that size?"

  Benito's smile was lopsided. "You envy him that tomb?"

  "If you must know, I was writing better than he ever did before I left high school!"

  "Being dead hasn't hurt your ego," said Corbett. "Good. We thought we'd lost you."

  "He's got vases bigger than the bottle they put me in!"

  "You were an agnostic. Selfish, but not viciously so," Benito said. "If I judge rightly from the size of his tomb, he must have founded his own religion. And possibly worshiped himself."

  "No, they were jokes, sort of. But he did found at least two, not that there ever were any followers, or that he even intended there to be. One of them had everyone telling comforting lies to everyone else. The other was the Church of God the Fairly Competent. Maybe I should have gone in for something like that."

  "Why didn't you?" Corbett asked.

  "Because what's the point of mocking people who've found something to believe in." I turned toward the big, gaudy edifice. "That's the point."

  Benito shook his head wonderingly. "I question your sanity. He is in there. You are out here, free to escape."

  I didn't answer, but he was right. We turned away. For a time I could see the green reflection blinking ahead of us.

  SO IT GOES

  We were lost in endless corridors of the dead. Benito walked in stolid patience, but Corbetes face had acquired a grim, set look, desperation barely held in check. I kept my own thoughts to myself.

  But I remembered Big Juju's ability to distort space and time.

  We'd come a long way. Perhaps there was no way out.

  And what if we did get out of the maze?

  Benito said we had all eternity. Eternity in Infernoland. Or in Hell. Big Juju or God, it didn't matter; the problem was to escape.

  I'd built a glider once, and it had flown. Get me through the wall, get me fabric for the wings, and I'd do it again.

  But I'd have to do it without Benito.

  You promised you'd go with him, Carpentler. Down to the center, out his way. You can keep your word or you can break it; but if you break it, it'll be without his help.

  Suppose he's crazy? Or an agent for Big Juju?

  Then you're on your own.

  Nuts. Benito might be able to trick the damned bureaucrats into giving us whatever we wanted. I couldn't kid myself I'd be able to. Fabric I could get, at worst by peeling it off catatonics-- but how to get through the wall? I'd seen demons on the rim. More demons guarded the gate.

  I glanced sideways at Benito. Stolid patience, and iron faith in God and the maps of Dante Alighieri. And Carpentier's given word. If we ever got out of this maze, he'd go down. We could follow or not.

  I felt heat ahead. We turned a corner and found a wall of red-hot urns. The floor seemed to slant uphill.

  Corbett whooped. "This way! To the wall!" His voice sounded out of place in the mausoleum. I waited for Benito to protest, but he said nothing, and I wondered if he knew something we didn't.

  "We could make quite a safari," Corbett shouted. He was over-joyful at finding a way out. "Just open these urns and pour out the ashes."

  "I went further than that, once," Benito told us. "I attempted to establish a local government."

  "Didn't work?"

  "No."

  "Why?"

  There was no answer. It became apparent that there wouldn't be one. Something else to think about.

  We hit a T corridor and were back in cool marble. We followed it a short way, anxious lest we find ourselves back in the endless tombs. It turned left again. I rounded the turn ahead of the others and found myself facing red heat. I shaded my eyes-

  "Your papers, please?"

  I squinted through my fingers.

  I faced a towering wall of red-hot iron, with a divided door in it. There was a counter on the lower closed half of the door, and someone behind it, half-hidden in the dark interior framed by bright red light. He held a stack of papers. The bored face showed no sign of recognition. It might have been the same clerk or a different one.

"Papers? Come on, I haven't got all eternity." He pushed the stack of papers toward me. "You'll have to make these out before you can go uphill. It's in the rules."

  I backed around the corner. To the questioning looks of the others I said, "Don't ask. Just turn around."

  We went back the way we'd come, looking; for a right turn. Presently we found it, and--

  "Your papers, please?"

  I walked toward the booth, but I was studying the gate behind the clerk. Iron glowing red, butit was only waist high. We could jump it.

  The counter turned white hot as I approached.

  "Papers? You'll have to fill out the forms. No exceptions."

  I looked to, Benito. He shrugged and turned away. After a moment I followed, hating him. He wasn't going to help.

  And he'd known it all along. We had to go downhill.

  CHAPTER 15

  The music went with us wherever we went: nature themes, melodramatic sweetness, singing violins, but never funeral dirges or somber tones. The cheerful music was more depressing than any funeral march.

  Gradually I realized we could hear something else as well. I don't know if it had been with us the whole time, waiting for us to become aware of it, or if it began as we threaded our way deeper into Hell.

  The sounds came from the tombs. Groaning. Whimpers. Croaks of rage. Mumbled curses. Once even gay whistling, a tune that jarred against the canned music.

  Gradually the clammy air warmed. It was our first sign that we were moving out of the maze.

  We followed currents of warming air. Where the air turned steamy hot we found a doorway.

  Unnerving sounds reached us through the doorway: screams of agony torn from throats that could contain them no longer, blended with animal war cries and the most vicious curses I'd ever imagined.

  Corbett plunged ahead, but Benito caught him. "Carefully," he warned us.

  We looked out and down. The ground fell straight away from the doorsill, first vertically, then angling down to a forty-five-degree slope. The dirt was baked adobe with jagged edges of protruding flint.

  The bottom of the cliff was obscured by steam, much like the marsh outside Dis, but this was hot. The steam roiled about, leaving occasional clear patches. Gradually the picture formed.

  We were looking at an enormous discolored lake. The shore curved away to either side until steam hid the endpoints. Men and women stood waist deep in steamy red water, and they howled. They were packed like a public pool on a Kansas summer Saturday, and they wanted out.

  Some tried it, but they didn't make it. Armed men patrolled the shore between us and the scarlet water. The guards were dressed for a costume ball, in the military garb of all places and all times, but they walked like sentries whose officers are watching. Their eyes were uniformly on the lake, and they held weapons ready.

  Weapons: there was every hand weapon known to history. Pistols, bows, scythes, crossbows, throwing-sticks, slings, pikes and lances, AR-15 rifles, all held at the ready. When someone attempted to leave the lake, the sentries fired.

  I saw a woman in black military uniform cut nearly in half by a burst from an automatic rifle. She shrieked in agony and waded deeper into the lake, where she stood, healing.

  Healing. The implications of our inability to die began to get through to me then.

  One man in a long beard wore a golden crown on his head and clustered crossbow bolts through his chest. He was stubborn. He'd move toward the shore. The crossbowmen would fire, and he'd stagger back, the scream hissing through clenched teeth. He'd pluck the bolts from his chest and throw them contemptuously into the water-- and wade toward shore again.

  And again. And again. He was a fool, but a brave one.

  "I take it the guards won't be on our side," I whispered.

  Benito shuddered. "No. On the contrary, if they catch us, we--" He didn't finish, but he didn't have to.

  The guards looked silly in those costumes. I knew some of them. Nazi swastikas and American GI's. Coldstream Guards and Cameron Highlanders. Blue and gray of the Civil War. World War I helmets. Redcoats and the blue-and-buff of Washington's Continentals. Fuzzy-wuzzies and Chinese Gordon's Tommies, and more: Roman legion, Greek hoplite, vaguely Asiatic uniforms, long gowns and wicker shields, spears with golden apples on the hilts; and more still, yellow men in animal fur, red and black men in little besides war paint, blue men stark naked. Blue? Britons in their woad, marching beside legionnaires, followed by men and women in coveralls carrying tiny machine guns of a variety I'd never seen.

  And they watched the lake, constantly, vigilantly. "They won't see us up here," I said. "Now what?"

  "We must cross the lake," said Benito. "There is a place, far around, where it is only ankle deep. Elsewhere it rises to above our heads in the deepest parts. The damned stand at a depth appropriate to the violence they did on Earth."

  "That water looks hot. It steams."

  "It is boiling blood." Benito laughed without humor. "What would you expect for the violent?"

  A frozen moment stretched endlessly. Then Corbett shouted, "We can't walk into that! No!"

  "Jerry--"

  "I've been burned before, remember? We'll never make it! When our ankles are cooked we'll go to our knees. When the legs are cooked we'll be lying in it!"

  "Yet you see that every man and woman in the lake is standing."

  The calm voice halted Corbett's panicky monologue. He looked. I'd already seen that Benito was right. If they could stand, their cooked legs must still be operating. They also wouldn't stop hurting...

  "The guards will not allow us to wander freely in Hell," Benito cautioned us. "Without instructions regarding our sentence, they may well force us to the deepest spot and keep us there. You have noted that their weapons do not kill, but they can disable."

  Let's stay here, Carpentier. I'm starting to like the music.

  "They must not notice us. We must do as little screaming as possible." Benito spoke seriously, without a trace of humor. Benito had been in Hell so long that suffering was not remarkable to him, or even unusual.

  "There may be a better way," Corbett said slowly. He pointed. "Allen, what do you see?"

  "An island." Half-obscured by steam, it stood very low in the lake a good mile to our right. It was more crowded than the water around it, the water that Benito said was boiling blood.

  Poetic justice. Infinitely exaggerated, as everything was here. No doubt the people boiling down there were murderers in life, or torturers, or kidnappers, arsonists perhaps. The violent. Well, at least we knew how to get across. "Benito, can we cross on the island?"

  He stared pop-eyed, his big square jaw thrust forward. "I had no idea there was an island in Acheron. Dante did not describe it."

  "I suppose he mentioned boiling blood?"

  "Of course. He also described the ford I used before. The ford is heavily guarded, and perhaps the island would be better." He considered. "Dante did not mention the ship in Acheron either."

  "Ship?"

  "Yes, Allen, a wooden sailing ship sunken on the other side of Acheron. The decks are just awash with blood. I have been aboard it. There are grills in the deck and souls beneath the grills."

  "Slave traders," Corbett speculated.

  "Probably," said Benito.

  But how had Benito been aboard? Was that where he had escaped from? Or from deeper down? I didn't dare ask, yet how could we trust him until we knew his crime?

  How could we not?

  "Slave traders aren't our problem," Corbett said. "I suppose the best plan would be to circle up here until we're just opposite the island, then make a run for it."

  We looked at each other and nodded agreement.

  We turned back inside to parallel the shore, passing walls of shelves packed with crematory urns. I savored the cool, damp air. I was going to miss it. The cliff edge was just beyond that wall.

  Why bother, Carpentier? Why not stay here?

  No. We've got to get out of here. Minos would track us down eventually, and then what? We have to escape.

  Hey, Carpentier, what makes you think there's a way out?

  I don't want to think about that. There has to be a way out. Benito says there is. Dante described it--

  A way out for him, yes! A living man whose guide called on angels!

  There is a way out of Hell and were going to find it, because we can't die trying, because there's nothing else to do but sit for eternity. Eternity.

  I'm scared, Carpentier.

  Me too. Let's talk to the others. They're scared like you. Talking helps.

  "The guards," I said. "They bother me two ways."

  Corbett said, "It's boiling that bothers me."

  "I don't think I'll like being shot full of arrows and bullets," I said. "But worse than that, what the blazes are they doing here?"

  Corbett just laughed. They were guarding, his look said.

  "They did violence they believed justified," said Benito. "They fought for what they thought was a higher cause."

  "And there aren't any soldiers in Heaven?"

  "I'm sure there are. But these enjoyed their work." His voice took on a note of sadness. "They enjoy it still. They do not seek to escape."

  "It's weird. They're serving the Builders, or Big Juju, or God, whatever we call the master of this place. If they're serving God they ought to be in Heaven!"

  Benito shrugged. "Or Purgatory. Perhaps. Theology is not my specialty. The next doorway is just ahead, be careful."

  He wouldn't say more, but I remembered the uniformed servitors in Disneyland. I'd wondered if the guards worked in shifts. Did they have homes to go to when they got off work? Did they go home and tell their wives about their day?

  We waited, peeking around the doorjamb to watch the share. The island was just opposite, no more than fifty yards offshore, obscured by clouds of steam and no easier to see than it had been from a mile away.

  A band marched past, robed and unarmed. "Inquisition priests," Benito murmured. "They would call the temporal authorities. The soldiers."

  They receded. A handful of barbarian women passed, arms and shoulders the color of their bronze armor. They carried bows and shortswords. Behind them was another group, also women, wearing olive-drab fatigues and carrying submachine guns. They passed out of sight, and the shore was clear.

  "Run," Benito ordered.

  We ran. There was a ten-foot drop to the steep slope. I landed on my feet and kept running in a half-controlled fall. Jagged flint edges tore at my feet. When I hit the beach I kept running, because I knew I'd never be able to walk into the boiling lake. The wandering clouds of steam wrapped me round, hid me from the guardians, and I ran toward the chorus of screams. The smell was overpowering, fresh blood and clotted blood, copper bright and polluted foul.

  Corbett was ahead of me. He splashed into bubbling red fluid and screamed. He stood, covered to his knees, screaming in pain. Benito plunged in, waded through the stuff like a damned robot and gripped Corbett's arm to keep him from turning back. Then I was in it myself. I fell into a trench and was instantly waist deep.

  The pain hit me weirdly, as if I'd stuck my finger in a light socket. Stunning. Unreal. All my senses were scrambled. I knew the smell of pain, its sight and sound, and there was nothing to see or hear but pain. I couldn't control my limbs. They thrashed and twitched, almost spilling me full length into the stuff.

  Still jerking like a marionette, I turned toward shore. Nothing could be worth this much pain.

  Half a squad of Green Berets stood there studying us. They had friends: small men in black pajamas.

  I turned back. We were committed now. Through a gap in the steamy mist I had seen their eyes; dull, expressionless, intent on their task: and their task was to let no one leave the blood.

  "The island," I screamed. "To the island!" But I didn't move and neither did the others. We stood where we were and screamed.

  "The island!" Corbett laughed hysterically, laughter and pain and horror. "We can't use the island--"

  I screamed, "What?"

  "Stupid! Look!"

  He was right. I cursed the rolling clouds that had hidden it from view. They were shoulder to shoulder over every square inch of the island. I never saw a more vicious mob. They were armed haphazardly, with clubs and crude daggers of what seemed to be splintered bone. Even as I watched, someone trying to climb out of the blood was repelled by half-a-dozen stab wounds. He staggered away, howling, leaving a foaming red wake.

  Benito came up to me, still pulling Corbett by the arm. "We must wade around the island."

  I couldn't move. Suddenly he took my shoulder in his powerful grip and began to plunge through the boiling red, towing both of us like children. I remembered his strength. There was no point in struggling with him. I didn't want to. I wanted out, but my limbs would not obey. The pain was paralyzing.

  You could read the agony on Benito's face. He hurt as we did. But he plunged on. He shouted, "Deeper down, there is a place where souls are not even allowed to cry! Here there is no law against screaming!"

  "Yeah! Cheer me up!" I screamed.

  We halted. There were guards on the shore. A man in a high peaked hat stared through binoculars. We didn't dare move.

  There are two ways to treat constant excruciating agony. Both involve screaming. You may try to suppress the screams, and they will force their way through your teeth; or you can just let it out. Similarly, you can concentrate on the source of pain and try to minimize it: a current of not-quite-boiling blood here on the left, get into it! Stand on tiptoe, you gain an inch...

  Or you can tell yourself it will heal and concentrate on something else.

  There was turmoil on the island. People were shouting at one of their number. He stood with his feet planted wide and his hands raised high over his head. The hands held the haft of a spear: a length of wood that might have been a broken oar or a tree sapling, and a leaf-shaped blade poised a few inches above his feet. Poised to strike, but at what? Hands reached to shake his shoulders, and he snarled in an agony different somehow from all the moans around him.

  I tried to hear. By now the wordless moaning of the thousands of waders, even my own, had become a background noise, had faded like the sickening smell of boiling blood. I caught disjointed phrases.

  "Kill 'em! Kill 'em before--"

  "Billy, if you won't do it, let us through!"

  "Idiot, you hafta, they'll be all around us in a minute--"

  The man with the spear bell-owed, "No!"

  And the ground seemed to erupt beneath his feet.

  He kicked at whatever was gripping his ankles. He kicked himself free and ran for the island's shore. Others got out of his way, then surged to close the gap. Behind him, that portion of the island was heaving as in an earthquake, and clubs and knives were rising and falling with horrible rhythm.

  "Billy" splashed knee deep into boiling blood and stopped at once. As he sucked air for his first shocked scream, three separate hands thrust forward against his back. He splashed face down. Two surging waves washed against the bathers around him.

  He was up in a flash, his spear ready for war. I was sure he'd try to fight his way back onto the island. But he didn't. He turned and waded away, in our direction.

  A foot short of my nose he said, "Friend, it's not polite to stare."

  "Sorry. What happened back there? Will they let you back?"

  He glared back at his erstwhile neighbors. "Those bastards couldn't stop me." He sounded like he was holding his breath... as we all did, because each of us was trying to talk around a scream. It was almost funny, that sound. "I... never thought it would hurt so much," he said.

  "Why didn't you stay?"

  "Couldn't take the killing."

  "What?"

  Benito and Corbett had crowded close to listen. "Billy" studied me, his face contorted in agony. "Don't know about the island, do you?"

  I shook my head. The Afrika Korps had gone, but cuirassiers with muskets had replaced them. We still dared not move.

  "We on the island, we killed people, just like you in the swimming hole. But we all had some excuse, some reason we had to kill. Like me. There was a range war going on. We wasn't even the ones that started it."

  I said, "Yeah?"

  He took it wrong. "You think maybe we could have stopped it? Gone along with the amnesty?"

  I didn't know what he was talking about and didn't much care. His blue eyes had turned killer in that moment. I said, "Don't mind me. I'm in Hell too."

  That calmed him, and changed him. He was younger than me and shorter than me, and the short amateurish haircut gave him a pleasant boyish look. Though the hair was plastered down with blood... "Then there's Harry Vogel," he continued, "he was robbing a liquor store and the owner pulled his mask off. He'd seen his face, so he had to die, see? And Rich and Bonny Anderson, they kidnapped a kid, and it would have been okay, but he got away. Got as far as a great big street called a freeway, then some kind of machine hit him." He looked down, then continued talking, hurriedly, as if that would block the pain. "Bonny's here, Rich isn't. Rich got religion. Hey, we got Aaron Burr on the island! And that guy who ran the Andersonville prison, camp--"

  "I get the idea. If they thought they had to do it, they don't get hurt as bad."

  "Yeah." Billy looked down a his waist. "It hurts. I think this hurts as much as anything I ever did except die. But I wouldn't go back. No." But he looked back and wasn't sure. He said it again. "No! I won't ever kill anyone again!"

  "That's twice you've--"

  "Well, that island ain't any common dirt, you know. It's mostly judges and congressmen and lawyers and a few jury members and crooked sheriffs--"

  "Wait! Wait!" I remembered the island surging up around him. "The island's people? Live people?"

  I swear he was enjoying my reaction. "Yeah. We have to keep 'em crippled. It's what Minos does to them for letting known killers loose on the public that was paying them to protect them. Some was jury members that took bribes, and lawyers that fiddled with the evidence, and congressmen that passed laws against putting a man in jail if the evidence wasn't got in a special kind of way... I don't know. That kind of law is all new to me. The island was a lot smaller when I came here."

  "And they keep coming back to life!" I was this shocked: I had forgotten to hurt.

  "Friend, they sure do. And we have to keep persuading them not to move, one way or another. Otherwise they'd just swim away, and where'd we be?"

  "Waist deep in boiling blood?"

  He tried to laugh. "Well, I guess I'd rather boil. If they could die it'd be okay, but they can't. Let 'em alone long enough and they try to get up. I can't take it anymore."

  I felt Benito's hand on my shoulder. "Allen, the shore is clear of guards. I think we can move."

  Corbett was already raising a wake. I started after him, tottering on stiffened legs. On impulse I turned back. "Why not come with us? It can't be any worse lower down."

  His eyes sparked with hope. "Maybe you're right."

  CHAPTER 16