We waded through boiling blood, going up to our chins before the bottom sloped up again. After an eternity we reached the other shore and let ourselves fall, each wrapped silently and solipsistically in his own pain. We lay in full view on what seemed to be rough white concrete. Four targets. If the guardians wanted us they could have us.

  A long time later, Corbett found the strength to roll over. "They're all along the far shore," he reported. "Watching us. Nazis, Indians--"

  Benito said, "Never mind. They will not hurt us. They do not bother those who wish to go deeper into Hell."

  "That's a relief," said Corbett.

  I wasn't so sure, but I held my peace. I inspected my feet, legs, buttocks. The meat was loose on my bones. I should have been dead down there; it should have stopped hurting. Fat chance, Carpentier.

  And Billy, who must have hurt just as much as I did, was smiling to himself. I snarled, "What are you so damned happy about?"

  "First off, this is the first chance I've had to lie down in a hundred years. Second, I don't have to kill anyone, even if they yell at me. Third, I didn't much like the company on that island. Maybe I'll like you better."

  "Maybe. Who were you?"

  "William Bonney. Just a cowhand that got done unto and did some back."

  "Bonney?" Corbett sat up suddenly. He'd healed much faster than I had. "Billy the Kid?"

  "Friend, there are a dozen men on the island that all claim they was Billy the Kid."

  "And you?"

  "I'm the real one."

  I could see the wheels going round in Corbett's head. Were we supposed to spend eternity wondering if he were telling the truth? Corbett said, "Have it your way. I was a spaceship pilot."

  "What? You mean like you been on the Moon?"

  "Right."

  Benito grunted and surged to his feet, then sat down hard with another grunt of pain. From the waist down he showed bright red skin, very tender looking. Like Corbett, he'd healed fast, but he wasn't in condition to scout.

  I asked, "Benito, what are we headed into? It's for sure we can't go back."

  "The Wood of the Suicides lies ahead. A pleasant place, comparatively, if we can avoid the dogs."

  "Dogs?"

  "The Wood is punishment for the sin of suicide," Benito explained. "Each tree holds the soul of one who took his own life. They are not dangerous to us. But the Violent Wasters also suffer there, and the dogs are their punishment. There will not be many of the dog packs. It is almost an obsolete sin."

  Corbett looked up. "Since when is a sin obsolete?"

  "Customs change. In Dante's time there were men who would hold a party at which they would burn part of their wealth, to show how wealthy they were."

  "Potlach!" I cried.

  "Gesundheit," said Corbett.

  "No, dammit, listen. There was a West Coast Indian tribe that used to do just what Benito's talking about. Hold a party, burn a lot of valuables. They used to compete at it. I never knew the Italians did the same thing."

  "They did," said Benito. "Their punishment is to run through these woods pursued by wild dogs. If the dogs catch them they tear them apart."

  Billy was sitting up. "They heal after that?"

  I was healing! My legs and buttocks still hurt, but the flesh was firm, and I could move the muscles. I watched, fascinated, as new skin grew before my eyes.

  "The dogs and the souls they pursue should be rare," Benito said, "and the trees can do us no harm. We should find this stretch easy." He stood up. "Are we ready?"

  My feet were still tender, and Billy was complaining about his. But it didn't sound like we'd have to run anywhere. Corbett and Benito were healed.

  We set off, deeper into Hell. It had become an obsession with me. Anything was better than waiting-- and if I spent too much time remembering the agony in the lake, we'd never get started.

  We left concrete for dirt. When we topped a gentle rise, the ground was suddenly all erosion gullies, hard red and yellow clay studded with gravel and gashed by flash floods. We had to scramble in and out of them. Some had water at the bottom, water filthy with broken bottles and bottle caps, used condoms, floating grease, occasional bursts of brightly colored dyes, chemicals that burned our sandaled feet. Nothing grew here; there were dead stumps of trees and dried brown vines reaching upward like dead old women's fingers. Strange smells moved on the air: incongruous whiffs of automobile exhaust, acids, burning oil and rubber.

  Billy grunted. "I don't see no trees, Benito. Where'd you put the damn trees?"

  "We should have reached the Wood long since. I do not understand. But we must go on."

  We scrambled out of the gully and looked downward. We had a vista of Hell.

  It looked like Hell on Earth. Nothing grew. We had to shout above a continual racket. In the distance rectangular shadows showed through the gloomy half-light and thick smog. Buildings? Factories?

  I said, "Progress has caught up with your woods, Benito."

  A clattering sounded nearby, within a cloud of roiling smoke. A woman ran out of the smoke, terror on her face, hair streaming behind her. She wore a torn evening gown with diamond brooch and earrings, high-heeled shoes with jeweled ornaments. She ran holding the skirt high.

  Billy shouted and tried to stop her. She dodged him and ran on. The clattering grew louder, and a bulldozer roared out of the smoke. A man ran just ahead of the blade. The dozer trailed smoke, and it was gaining on the fugitive. There was no driver.

  Billy was in the bottom of the gully, curled up, his head wrapped in his arms. When the monster was past I went down to Billy. He was muttering to himself, and when I touched him he twitched galvanically. He leapt to his feet in fighting stance.

  "I was never afraid of no man that ever lived," he said. "But I was scared of that. What was it?"

  "Bulldozer. For moving dirt."

  Billy stared into the smog, his face wondering. "You could tear down whole mountainswith things like that."

  "We did," Corbett said. "There's more than one way to be a violent waster."

  Billy frowned. "How's that?"

  "Pollution. This must be the place for people who ruin the environment." Corbett's face showed his disgust. "They did this to the Earth."

  "But who gets chased by them things?"

  "Real-estate developers, I guess. Housing-tract speculators. We shouldn't have too much trouble here."

  Corbett looked at us. "Or do we?"

  I'd always been a conservationist myself. If Big Juju's poetic justice ran true to form, I'd be safe enough.

  Or would I? Had I fallen by accident? I'd certainly put myself on that window ledge. If a bulldozer buried me here, would I become a tree?

  "Let's go," said Billy. "This place gives me the willies."

  We moved off by tacit consent.

  "Where we going, anyway?" Billy asked.

  "Past this round there is desert," Benito said. "A fiery desert, too hot for life, with flame falling from the sky. I know of only one way to cross it, and that is the way Dante used. A stream runs through the desert, the overflow from the lake of blood. It cools the desert as it moves through it."

  "Miraculously," I said. I'd intended it to be contemptuous, but it hadn't come out that way. I'd seen too many miracles, all unpleasant.

  Benito nodded. "Of course. We must find this stream, or we cannot cross. It runs through the Wood. Comrades, we must find the Wood." He turned left and walked on.

  "Why this way?" Billy laughed. "You ain't got any idea where that Wood is."

  "No, but we must reach it if we walk far enough. It is only a matter of time."

  Yeah, we had plenty of that. And Hell was a series of concentric circles, God only knew how big around. It might take years, and so what?

  "Why not go the other way?" Billy insisted.

  Benito shrugged. "Dante always turned left on his way down. But we will turn right if you like."

  "Naw. It ain't important."

  CHAPTER 17

  The noise, the smells, the desolation continued. The damned were here, placed by a macabre humor. Phantom heads rose from oil pools. Some were pecked incessantly by oil-smeared birds. A river ran past like an open sewer, and men and women lined the banks, mourning. The wails were constant in our ears, wails and roaring motors and clanking machines.

  We looked into some of the huge buildings and pulled back out fast. Inside the noise was overwhelming. Here a sizzling hum of electricity, there a scream of metal grinding on metal, elsewhere a roar of flame. There were more of the damned in those buildings, and they were hard at work.

  Our way led through one of the immense factories. Not a head lifted to see us pass. Incomprehensible widgets passed on an endless belt, and men and women screwed on nuts and tightened them and fitted the bottoms and the handles, endlessly. We followed the endless belt for miles until it went through a wall. On the other side more of the damned were taking the widgets apart. Machinery hummed, and conveyors took the parts back to the other side of the wall.

  We left the building to find oil derricks raising and lowering their heads like giant prehistoric birds. We crossed a strip mine, and Benito pointed out that it was laid out very like Hell itself: a vast series of descending circular terraces. But there was nothing at the bottom except stagnant water.

  A towering oil-fueled power plant of spidery framework and miles of pipes and valves poured power into a cable thick as my waist. Transmission towers took the cable downhill.

  I peered along its length, but the murk defeated me. How did they use electricity in Hell? But outside the power plant was an athletic man chained to a wheelless bicycle set in concrete in front of the exhaust pipe of the generator. Black smoke poured around him, almost hiding him from view.

  As we watched he began pedaling furiously. The hum of the gears rose to a high pitch-- and the generator inside died. There was a moment of quiet. The man pedaled with sure strokes, faster and faster, his feet nearly invisible, his head tucked down as if against a wind. We gathered around, each wondering how long he could keep it up.

  He began to tire. The blur of his feet slowed. The motors inside coughed, and black smoke poured out. He choked and turned his head away, and saw us.

  "Don't answer if you'd rather not," I said, "but what whim of fate put you here?"'

  "I don't know!" he howled. "I was president of the largest and most effective environmental protection organization in the country! I fought this!" He braced himself and pedaled again. The hum rose, and the generator died.

  Billy was completely lost. He looked to Benito, but our guide only shrugged. Benito accepted everything. I knew better. This couldn't be justice, not even Big Juju's exaggerated justice. This was monstrous.

  Corbett had to be guessing when he suddenly asked, "You opposed thermonuclear power plants?"

  Tbe guy stopped dead, staring as if Corbett were a ghost. The dynamo lurched into action and surrounded him with thick blue smoke.

  "That's it, isn't it?" Corbett said gently. "You stopped the nuclear generators. I was just a kid during the power blackouts. We had to go to school in the dark because the whole country went on daylight saving time to save power."

  "But they weren't safe!" He coughed. "They weren't safe!"

  "How did you know that?" Benito asked.

  "We had scientists in our organization. They proved it."

  We turned away. Now I knew. I could quit looking for justice in Hell. There was only macabre humor. Why should that man be in the inner circles of Hell? At worst he belonged far above, with the bridge destroyers of the second ledge. Or in Heaven. He hadn't created this bleak landscape.

  I couldn't stand it. I went back. Benito shrugged and motioned to the others.

  Within the cloud of blue smoke his face was slack with exhaustion. "It wasn't just the problem of where to bury the waste products," he told me. "There was radioactive gas going into the air." He spoke as if continuing a conversation. I must have been his only audience in years, or decades.

  "You got a rotten deal," I said. "I wish I could do something."

  He smiled bravely. "What else is new?" And he started to pedal.

  I glared at the nothing sky, hating Big Juju. Carpentier declares war. When I looked down, Benito was fumbling through saddlebags attached to the stationary bicycle.

  The man cried, "What are you doing?"

  Benito took out papers. The man snatched at them, but Benito backed away. He read, "Dear Jon, I could understand your opposition to us last year. There was some doubt about the process, and you expressed fears all of us felt. But now you know better. I have no witnesses, but you told me you understood Dr. Pittman's demonstration. In God's name, Jon, why do you continue? I ask you as your sister, as a fellow scientist, as a human being: why?"

  He began pedaling again, ignoring us.

  "You knew?" I demanded. He pedaled faster, his head bent.

  I leaned down and put my face close to his.

  "You knew?" I screamed.

  "Fuck off."

  Big Juju wins again. Too much, but appropriate. As we walked away, Jon screamed after us, "I'd have been nothing if I gave up the movement! Nothing! Don't you understand? I had to stay as president!"

  ***

  We plunged on. Once we caught lungfuls of something unidentifiable. We were getting used to that by now. This time we wound up at the bottom of an erosion gully, kicking and twitching, unable to control our muscles.

  "N-n-nerve g-g-gas," said Corbett.

  We lay there for hours. Days perhaps. Eventually the wind shifted, and our legs could work again. Benito and Corbett scrambled up the side of the gully, came back for Billy and me.  As usual we were the last to heal.  Big Juju's biological engineers hadn't done as good a job on us.  We scrambled to the top.

  Beyond the gully we saw trees. That was all we could see through the sniffles and the tears and the dark, smoky air: a sharply bordered forest, some distance away.

  We began to run. Trees. Real living things! Or close to it; nothing was really alive in this terrible place. But trees! We ran, wearing fierce grins, noses lifted as if the air were already sweet...

  Closer, they were not so inviting. Gnarled trunks, black leaves... Not Mother Nature herself could have called them pretty. Clumsy birds flapped above them. The forest ended abruptly at a border of flat ground. No, not ground. I stopped at the edge, confused.

  The others ran heedlessly out onto the flat black borderland.

  It was a road. Blacktop, and a white double line down the center. I called, "Hey, wait a..."

  Things roared past and drowned my voice. Too fast to tell what they were, but I knew the sound: the whip of air, followed by a shriek of brakes. I screamed, "Run!"

  Corbett was already running for his life. Benito and Billy stared at me; then Benito just took my word for it and ran toward me. Billy looked where I was looking-- and for him it was already too late.

  They looked like black Corvettes, 1970's models, but they were lower-slung and more rakish-looking.

  They'd stopped and turned and were coming back, accelerating hugely, leaving opaque black clouds of smoke. Billy made up his mind to run; he turned, and they were on him. Billy flew high, hit hard, and rolled like a beanbag: no bones.

  I started swearing. The cars roared away-- two of them did. The third turned hard, right off the road.

***

  It rolled over once and landed upright and came for us, bouncing and rattling, but accelerating. Its headlights came on blindingly.

  I stopped swearing and looked for cover.

  "What are they?" Benito screamed.

  "Cars. No drivers," Corbett told him. "I saw. Empty race cars. They must guard the forest."

  I looked for cover: something to hide behind, or even a jumble of broken rock too rough for a car.

  Nothing. The black demon bore down on us.

  "There!" I pointed, and ran.

  It was an oil slick, depth unknown, and it would bloody well have to do.

  I ran straight into the pool. My foot landed on something that jerked away and sent me sprawling. When I pulled my face out of the oil another black, dripping face looked back at me. "Sorry," I said.

  "That's okay. We all got our own problems here," said the stranger, and he sank beneath the oil.

  Benito was waist deep and wading deeper. Corbett hesitated at the edge, looked disgusted, looked behind him... squealed and dived sideways. I ducked under.

  The glare of headlights was branded on my closed eyes.

  A wave of oil splashed over me. I lifted my head, and there it was: a rakish black sports car, hubcap-deep in the oil pool. Its motor was a demon-snarl; its wheels spun frantically. It found some traction from somewhere: it edged backward, found more traction and surged out of the pool just as Corbett went over the door in a flying dive.

  The horn screamed in rage. The car backed, then turned in a tight circle. I think it was trying to roll over. It never made it. The motor died, the killer car rolled to a gentle stop.

  Corbett stood up in the driver's seat, grinning all over his face. The keys dangled from his hand.

  ***

  Benito and I waded out, streaming oil.

  Corbett had the hood of the murder car up and was inspecting the motor. "I used to race a little," he said. "I can probably drive this. What do you say, shall we cross the desert in comfort?"

  "You look it over," I told him. Benito and I went to see about Billy.

  He lay twisted as no living man could be. We straightened him out. His body was mushy and limp. So was one side of his head. The good eye opened and looked at us.

  Benito bent over Billy and took one of his hands between his own. "I don't know if you can hear me," he said. "I want you to know that you will heal. It will hurt, but you will heal."

  I beckoned Benito out of Billy's hearing. I asked, "Should we take him with us?"

  "I think so. He will be of no help until he heals, but what of that? He should be safe enough in an automobile. He can ride in the passenger seat."

  We rejoined Corbett at the car.

  "I don't know the make," he told us. "It's got a big mill, but the tuning is lousy. You saw how much smoke it was pouring out. I've been checking the brakes, and they look good--"

"The question," said Benito, "is whether it will obey the steering wheel and other controls. We saw it driving itself."

  "Yeah." Corbett frowned, studying the car as one would search the face of a prisoner of war. Would he give information? Would it be the truth?

  "The top's down. We can always jump clear," he said. "No point in taking chances, though. Why don't you two get under cover, and I'll take her for a spin."

  There wasn't any cover. We stood at the far edge of the oil pool, ready to jump, as Corbett turned the ignition key. He drove the car around for a while, trying it on rough and smooth terrain. He brought it back and prudently took the key before he got out.

  "Seems okay. I'll stay in low gear the whole trip. That way nothing can happen fast. If the gearshift starts moving by itself I'll give a yell."

  "There's one more problem," I said. "Four of us. Two seats. Benito, shall we ride on the fenders?"

  "I have no better suggestion."

  ***

  The change was gradual. The air got hotter. Then there were no more oil pools. The dead ground gave way to hot dead sand, and Corbett worried aloud about the tires. A minute later he'd forgotten the tires; he was too busy slapping away fat flakes of burning matter.

  CHAPTER 18

  It snowed fire. Great burning flakes fell slowly from the dead gray sky and settled on us. We slapped frantically. Billy was slumped like a corpse while fireflakes dropped to his skin and clung. I could reach his head by stretching backward along the fender, and I pulled a saucer-sized chunk from his face. His one good eye thanked me.

  We rolled across a burning sandy waste. The fireflakes vanished when they touched ground, but not when they touched flesh. Another evil miracle. The car weaved drunkenly, then shifted into second and picked up speed.

  I called back to Corbett. "Did you do that?"

  "Yeah! You want to be out here forever?"

  "Not really." The sand was flat enough for higher speed-- provided we could control the car.

  Billy grunted in soft protest. I could imagine his fear. He'd never seen a car before or gone faster than a horse could run.

  Fire bored into my back where I'd exposed it stretching to help Billy again. I slapped it off and wished for a Cadillac.

  Cadillacs belong in Hell. There's something about the car that rots the driver's brain. Every time some damn fool has almost gotten me wrecked by running a red light or jumping lanes or parking where no car ought to be, said idiot has been driving a Cadillac. There had to be Cadillacs in Hell-- and if we'd captured one of those, we'd be riding in air-conditioned comfort! Instead of riding a fender and slapping fireflakes!

  Clusters of souls danced frenetically on the blazing sand. Some stopped, amazed, to watch us pass. A couple of times Corbett tooted the horn at them. He was cursed for his trouble, but he wasn't mocking them. There was nothing he could do.

  I called across the low hood to Benito. "Who are they?"

  Benito was busy tearing burning gunk out of his hair. "They sinned against Nature," he yelled back.

  "What does that mean?"

  "Unnatural, love. Man for man, woman for woman--"

  Man for sheep, woman for vibrator... poor bastards. I wondered about the gay couple who'd owned the house next door to mine. Quiet neighbors, friendly middle-aged people like any married couple without children. Were they here?

  I turned my head and hunched up so that the fireflakes hit the side of my face instead of the front. I couldn't slap fast enough. The windshield gave Billy some protection now that we were moving.

  The fire burned holes in my skin. You'll heal, Carpentier. You'll heal, if we ever get out of here.

  But what about them? They danced, they slapped at themselves; they ran in circles; they screamed at us to stop and cursed us when we didn't, with an insane jealousy that I understood perfectly. They'd be here forever.

  This, just for being queer? But it was no surprise to me that God's justice and mine didn't agree. I thought about my neighbors and shuddered. Credo in un Dia crudel...

  The industrial section of Hell was only a yellow tinge to the sky behind us. Ahead was nothing but more desert. We must be about halfway across, I thought.

  Suddenly the car surged forward with the bit in its teeth.

  Corbett froze in panic. The motor screamed in inhuman fury as the car accelerated. In a second we'd be moving too fast to stop. I tucked my head in my arms and rolled off the fender.

  Look, I wasn't running out on my buddies. The car was going to crash, and they'd have a better chance if one of us could move, right? It was what I was thinking, anyway.

  The motor choked off while I was still in the air.

  I hit rolling. I came up screaming and dancing. The other souls hadn't been dancing for joy either. The pain was as bad as the boiling blood.

  The car rolled to a stop, and I ran for it, yelling and swearing at the fireflakes.

  Suddenly a girl was running alongside me. She'd have been pretty once. Now her hair was raggedly scorched, and her body was covered with burns. "Can you take me out of here?" she screamed.

  "We'll be lucky to get out ourselves. There's no room!" I kept running until I reached the car.

  The girl stayed right with me. "Please, I'll do anything if you'll take me out of here. Anything."

  "That's nice," Corbett told her. To me he said, "We're in big trouble. The gas pedal just damned well floored itself. I had to turn off the ignition."

  "Couldn't you--"

  "Couldn't I what? Pull the pedal up with my toes? Allen, this car is haunted. It hates us."

  "What's wrong?" the girl asked. She got no answer.

  It was hard to think with the fire settling on me. I danced around the car, shouting, "We'd better think of something. In a minute or two we'll be under a pyramid of people." The damned were running toward us from all directions.

  "Raise the bonnet," Benito commanded. "Corbett, see to Billy."

  I got the hood up. We looked inside, and Benito said, "Now, Corbett, move the accelerator."

  Something wiggled behind the engine.

  "Allen, you saw? That moves the petrol feed. You must control it with your fingers."

  It was a hell of an awkward position, sprawled across the fender with my head and hands under the hood. The motor was as hot as the sand. I couldn't avoid touching it. But I pulled at the widget and cried, "Okay! I got it! Corbett, go! Go like a bat--!" The crowd was very near, and they couldn't all hang on. Benito motioned to the girl, and she took the fender in front of me.

  The car roared and surged into a converging circle.

  Most of them dodged for their lives. One went under the wheels. Another, a big athletic type with long black hair halfway down his back and a scraggly beard, got the edge of the right door and swung up on the trunk lid. A small-boned blond man had come with him.

  "Frank!" the companion called. "Frank! Don't leave me!"

  "Sorry, Gene. Nothing I can do. No room for both of us."

  "Frank!" The car gunned ahead as Corbett got it under control again. A thin voice followed us. "Frank! I went to Hell for you..."

  Frank had managed to crawl up to get an arm around Corbett's neck. He squeezed. "All right, buddy, turn this thing around! We're going to Havana!"

  "Fine. Whatever you say," said Corbett. Frank grinned and slacked off his grip on Corbett, but he didn't let go.

  Now we had Frank on the trunk; Billy in the passenger seat, groaning a little, still unable to move; Benito on the left front fender; me in the motor compartment trying to stay clear of the hot engine, my legs dangling out to the right; and the girl forward on the right front fender, her feet on the bumper. Corbett had his problems driving. He had to lean way out to the left to see around the open hood.

  Billy was able to scream now.

  "For God's sake, brush the fire off him, Frank!" Corbett yelled.

  "Screw that. Screw God too. Get moving."

  We moved. Corbett yelled, and I slacked off on tha gas to let him shift to second. That was fast enough. The car fought, the hot metal tugged against my fingers like something alive, but I could control the speed! At least we weren't hitting any bumps.

  "Heeehaaah!" Frank screamed in joy. "Better'n the last chicken run! I'll make you guys honorary Hell's Angels! We're tough, you know? Toughest bunch in the world, you know? Hick sheriff was so seared of us he called the state fuzz. We run for it. I had the lead. Come around a curve and the whole road was fall of fuzzmobiles. I got two fuzz smearing myself."

  "Your friend back there--" I shouted.

  "Gene? We did. some swinging times, man. Had a whole stable of 'em. Boys, girls, but the only one they let me keep here was Gene. Maybe I'll miss him."

  He didn't look back.

  "Could you get that fire off my leg?" I asked the girl.

  "Naw! Enough trouble holding on here."

  "You said you'd do anything!" I clenched my teeth in agony. There was fire on both legs now, and I couldn't slap. I couldn't let go of the spring, and I had to hold on with the other hand. The car was still fighting me. "Get that fire off or we'll throw you off!"

  "Awright, awright, you don't have to get nasty." She slapped a couple of times and got the worst away.

  "Who are you?" Benito asked.

  "Doreen Lancer," she yelled above the roaring motor. "Go-go dancer. One night some bastard raped me and strangled me. At least, he tried to rape me!" She laughed bitterly. "He didn't seem to know how to go about it!"

  "So what the hell are you doing here?" Frank demanded.

  "Don't know! I liked it every which way. Most of the types I meet here are fags--"

  "I'm no goddamn fag!" Frank yelled.

  "Do not blaspheme," Benito told him, predictably, I guess.

  "Fuck off! Talk to me that way and I'll twist this bastard's neck off!" The car lurched as he choked Corbett.

  "No!" Doreen screamed. "We'll crash! This is our only way out! Leave him alone-- look, don't hurt him, and when we get out we can really swing, right?"

  I laughed. I couldn't help it.

  "What's so funny?" she demanded.

  "It's not a romantic situation!" I bellowed. I wasn't even sure there could be sex in Hell, and I hadn't found any opportunity to try. Or inclination, either.

  I bellowed again when she slapped my testicles. It hurt as much as it had when I was alive. I pulled the accelerator widget out, tugging with all my strength, letting the car slow.

  "I'm sorry!" she yelled. "I was getting the fire off, I swear, that's all I was doing! I'm sorry... hey, you wanna be a threesome with Frank and me?"

  I let the car speed up again. We had to get out of here. But I'd never had an offer I liked less.

  "I can see something ahead!" Corbett shouted. "We're getting to the edge!"

  "About time," Frank said. We rolled on. "Just remember, pretty boy, I'm in charge here," he added, and Corbett grunted in pain. Frank must have emphasized his words.

  The horizon was sharp ahead. I could barely see over the motor. Corbett saw it too. "Kill the power!" he yelled. Brakes screeched, and he twisted the wheel hard.

  I climbed out of the motor. The fireflakes were thicker here than in the middle of the desert. We ran, hopping--

  Frank still had Corbett by the neck. "This the way out of here? What are you trying to pull?"

  There was a sheer drop ahead of us. It was gloomy down there. I couldn't see the bottom. Several hundred feet, anyway. "Now what?" I asked Benito.

  "The quick way would be to jump." He was dead serious. "Jump and wait to heal, then go on."

  The girl backed away, staring at him. "You're crazy! Crazy! I should have known better than to trust guys like you! All the promises you make--" She didn't finish, but ran back into the desert, crying.

  "That's done it!" Frank yelled. "You're sure as Hell going over that cliff, all right, because I'm going to throw you!" He had Corbett by the neck, and he dragged him toward the cliff edge. "First you, then your loudmouth friend, then the fat one, and then--"

  He'd forgotten Billy. We all had. It was a mistake for Frank. Billy launched himself from the car without warning. He landed on Frank's back and seized the long hair with one hand, pulled the head back, and wrapped his arm around Frank's neck. His knee gouged into the Hell's Angel's back, bowing him into an arc.

  "Friend, I don't think I like you."

  I yelled, "Billy! Are you all right?"

  "Yeah."

  "You weren't moving--"

  "Been able to move awhile now. Didn't seem like a good idea to let this creep know it. Jerry coulda crashed this thing if we were fightin' while it was movin'."

  I thought about the self-control it would take to sit still under a rain of sticky fire.

  "What'll I do with the Gila monster, Benito?"

  "Leggo! I was only kidding!" Frank yelled. "You guys got no business giving me false hopes! It was all your fault--" He stopped talking because Billy's arm had closed his throat.

  "Do not harm him," Benito said quietly.

  "Yeah?" Billy let him go. "Friend, you're not tough. You don't know what tough is. Now get away from us." The pale-blue eyes seemed infinitely deep, and cold even in this place of fire.

  "You may come with us if you like," Benito told Frank, "although I do not think you are ready. With your attitude you might well find a worse place than you have now. Still, you are welcome to join us."

  "Go to Hell!" Frank screamed. He thought that was funny. "Go to Hell! Go to Hell!" He ran away into the desert, laughing, screaming, trying to keep both feet off the hot sand at once.

  Benito looked at us, waiting.

  "I'll jump if you say so," Billy said. "Looks bad, though. I can tell you, being crushed flat ain't no fun."

  I gulped. "I will too." I wondered if I meant it.

  "There may be a better way," Benito said. "We must find the stream. Corbett, can you drive?"

  We turned left. I had the whole fender to sprawl on now. The car seemed more docile, too, but I wasn't going to trust it. I didn't really have to-- I was getting good at manipulating the gas widget.

  We came to a horde of people dressed in the finery of all ages: velvet robes, flare pants, alligator shoes. Corbett shouted at me. "Stopping!" He turned off the key before I could do anything, and the car rolled to a halt.

  Fireflakes fell on us. "Now what?"

  Corbett was out of the car and looking at a beefy man in gaudy tunic, crimson sash, and black gloveleather boots. There was a big leather wallet hung on a golden chain around his neck, and he stared into it, not looking up. The fireflakes had burned holes in his tunic and scorched his hair.

  Corbett stood in front of him. When the burly man didn't look up, Corbett stooped over so that his face was in line with the wallet. "Give me my money!" Corbett shouted.

  "You son of a bitch, you owe me!"

  "But, I've had this problem, see, my girl is--" Corbett began.

  "I don't want to hear any stories, I just want my money! Arrgh!" A big fireflake settled on the crown of his head. He tried to brush it off.

  "Hang tough," Corbett said. He came back to the car chuckling. "Long Harry there loaned me some cash, once. Six for five-- every week."

  I nodded. There were lots of others there, crying into their purses. The rain of fire seemed heavier here. "Let's get going." I didn't like Corbett gloating over them-- but if anybody deserved to be here, it was them. Loan shark is as low a form of life as there is.

  We didn't drive so fast that we couldn't talk. "Funny thing about Harry," Corbett said. "He had to give up the loan shark business. Had a customer with a hit man for a friend. Took his buddy Lem to see Harry, but Harry wouldn't listen. Just kept saying 'Give me my money.' So Lem had a talk with Harry."

  "Lem?" Billy asked. He sounded puzzled.

  "Yeah. I don't know what he told Harry, but just after that all of Harry's customers were off the hook. Just had to pay what they'd got in the first place."

  "Lem," Billy said. "Little guy? About my size? Big scar over his left eye?"

  "Yeah," Corbett said. "You know him?"

  "Kind of. They used to let him onto the island for a day. One day a year. The rest of the time he was out in the blood. I always did wonder why."

  "We are coming to the stream," Benito said. "The fire does not fall there."

  CHAPTER 19

  The river was narrow but fast. Its roar was different somehow from that of water, and it was still bright scarlet. The air was thick with the smell of blood.

  Nonetheless we walked down and bathed our half-broiled feet in it. Afterward we walked the cool mud of the bank with our sandals off until we reached the waterfall. There we watched endless tons of blood falling into the darkness.

  I said, "Now what?"

  Benito scowled in indecision. "It is a risk. The monster Geryon carried Dante and Vergil into lower Hell. But they were,on a holy errand. We are not. I have known Geryon. He is not worthy of trust."

  "The password," I remembered.

  "'This has been willed where what is willed must be.' Yes. Shall we try it?"

  "Better'n jumping." Billy looked at Benito. "It is, ain't it? What can he do to us? Eat us?"

  "Summon Minos."

  "Let's try it," said Corbett. "We've gotten this far without anyone doing that."

  "Are we agreed, then? Good. Now we must summon Geryon. We need a signal, something to get his attention. Dante flung a rope into the abyss."

  "A signd," said Corbett. "Does it have to be subtle?"

  "I should not think that subtlety would be necessary."

  "We wouldn't want Geryon to think were crude, would we? Some delicate change in the environment, just noticeable enough to attract his attention. Let me see." Corbett walked back to the car and switched on the ignition. He went around to the back and unscrewed the gas cap.

  A fireflake fell past his nose. He blew on it, guiding it into the gas tank. The tank lit with a whoosh. Hurriedly Corbett reached into the car and shifted it into first gear. We stood well back and watched it roll over the edge.

  "Subtlety is all," said Corbett.

  The car fell like a battlefield flare. It passed and illuminated a compact body already rising through the murk.

  "He knew we were here." Corbett was flat on his belly with his face over the cliff's edge. "We didn't need a signal."

  "He will not come without a signal," said Benito.

  The car was a towering flame at the base of the cliff. Lighted from below, Geryon was a compact shadow with a slender, twisting tail. He floated up to us, his features growing clear. He hovered at our height, smiled reassuringly at us with a startlingly human face, then slid forward onto the rock ledge, leaving his tail hanging free in space.

  Geryon was as big as a rowboat, and wingless. His hind feet were webbed, built for swimming. His almost human head was hairless, the mouth wide, the chin broad and strong, the nose very wide and flat, with large nostrils. The head sloped back to round shoulders, without benefit of neck.

  His arms were human enough, the size of my own. On Geryon they were disproportionately small. Something was funny about the hand: the fingers were short and thick, designed for ripping.

  I could see him as an air-breathing aquatic beast that had developed human intelligence. I wondered about his nose. It was big enough to feed him air fast, hooded to keep water out. Reasonable, but different from the cetacean design.

  His pelt had the look of medieval tapestry: golden knots and figures on a blue-gray background. Lovely; a trifle flashy. And adequate camouflage if he was used to hovering just beneath sunlit water.

  Altogether he was a believable alien, excluding his ability to fly. I didn't like that. Bad enough if Infernoland had been built by humans. What if it had been built by interstellar conquerors for their own amusement?

  Geryon's voice was deep, with a queer buzzing quality. "Hello, Benito. Three of them? Isn't that a bit much?"

  Benito was brusque. He didn't like Geryon. "This has been willed where what is willed must be. In any case, you must have noticed how the damned flow in like a river in flood--"

  "Haven't I just. Swamping you, are they? I think the end of the world must be near. Hell is getting full," said the alien. "Well, we who serve God's will in Hell have precious little of free will, eh, Benito? Climb aboard, you. I hope you all can hang on."

  He had spoken jovially, with no bitterness and only the merest trace of mockery.

  My foot kicked something rigid as I tried to board Geryon's reasonably flat back. I looked down. It wasn't easy to see, but there was metal belted about Geryon's belly, machinery covered with material the same color as his gaudy pelt.

  Antigravity?

  I settled behind the monster's head. Billy's arms closed about my waist. Corbett was behind him, and Benito last, braving the twin stings in the forked tail. Geryon grinned at me over his shoulder and pushed back from the edge.

  Billy's arms tightened convulsively. I saw that his eyes were closed tight, his teeth clenched.

  My view of Hell was darkness and firelit smokes, the fires tracing concentric arcs. Geryon tilted to one side and dropped in a slow spiral. The scarlet waterfall dashed itself to foam and spray on the rocks. Billy was squeezing the breath from me, but I didn't complain. I heard whimpering noises being squeezed from him.

  We touched down.

  I said, "Your first flight, Billy?"

  "Yeah."

  "We're down. You can let go."

  "Yeah." He unlocked his arms in stages and climbed down on shaky legs. I followed.

  Geryon floated up a few feet and hovered. "Hey, Benito," he called. His voice was full of artificial camaraderie, more menacing than threats. "Why is it, Benito, that the people you travel with don't ever come back?" The monster lifted toward the sky, chortling.

  Carefully casual, Corbett asked, Benito, "You've been here before?"

  "I have rescued others," Benito answered.

  "How many?"

  "Six. One at a time. No matter how many come with me at first, no more than one at a time ever seems to reach the exit point. Perhaps this time we will be more fortunate."

  "What happens to the others?" I asked.

  "Why did you come back?" Corbett demanded.

  We'd both spoken at once, and Benito chose to answer neither of us.

  "Have you seen the exit?" Corbett asked.

  Benito's voice was colorlessly grim. "Yes."

  "And gone beyond it?"

  "No. But it follows Dante's route, which leads to Purgatory. I came back to find others in need of guidance. Do you object, Allen Carpentier? Should I have left you in the bottle?"

  "Hey, hey, hey!" Billy was dancing with impatience. "If we're going, let's go! What's all the jawing about?"

  Benito nodded and led us off downslope. We felt exposed on level ground, and Geryon couldn't be the only flying thing. He hadn't reported us (had he?), but that was no guarantee that something else wouldn't. We moved swiftly across what seemed to be solid rock, always downhill, further into murk and gloom, until we came to a cliff edge.

  There was a ditch in front of us, seventy or eighty feet deep and perhaps twice that wide. It was divided in the middle by a low wall of rock. Just off to our left was a passageway in the dividing rock wall. The divider was low enough that we could see over it, lower than the height of a normal man--

  --and the ditch was full. Masses of humanity moved in a standard traffic pattern, all hurrying along, not quite running, leftbound on the far side, rightward on the near side. They moved fast.

  They moved fast because there were beings with whips urging them along. It took a moment for that to register.

  Okay, Carpentier, you're in Hell-- and there are demons in Hell. There were things on the red-hot wall that might have been demons if you could have seen them clearly through the fog. There's Geryon, certainly a monster. Of course Big Juju can make demons.

  But I hadn't wanted to believe it.

  Now I was looking at them. They were blackskinned rather than the red I'd expected, and they were at least ten feet tall. They had horns and tails and were uglier than I could have imagined. They used whips twice as long as themselves. They screamed at the laggards:

  "Along with you, Big Morris, there's no ass to sell here!"

  "Git along, little dogie, git along, git along--"

  Wails and groans rose from the pit, and screams of pain and rage. Snapl Crack! Chunks of flesh flew from the backs of those who slowed down.

  "Who..." whispered Corbett. He ran out of voice and had to try again. "Who are they?" He was frightened, and why not? I was scared out of my mind. The demons were looking up at us-- but they went back to their tasks, gleefully lashing the crowd. I recognized one of the runners. He was a famous movie director-producer, idolized by millions when I was younger. He was on the near side, but as he reached the passageway in the dividing wall the demon stationed there lashed him until he went through and joined those scurrying in the other direction.

  I'd never met him, but I knew who he was. And I knew who these people must be.

  Benito confirmed my suspicions. "Panderers on this side, seducers on the other. Come, we must find a bridge." He turned left, and we followed uncertainly.

  "I was a seducer," Corbett said uncertainly.

  I remembered the convention atmosphere and what happened the night before I died. "Me too."

  Benito snorted. "Did you ever have a woman against her will?"

  "No."

  "Or make her drunk, or drug her?"

  "Well--" Did pot count? "Nobody who didn't know what to expect."

  "Never had to," Corbett said matter-of-factly.

  "Or use threats of force?"

  "Don't be silly." Corbett resented the implication. "I told you, it wasn't necessary."

  "The Italian does not properly translate as your English seducer, which is hardly more than casual fornication," Benito said seriously. "I think perhaps the better word is 'rape.'"

  Now we could see the bridge ahead of us: a stone arch. it looked very old.

  "Jerry!" A voice called from the pit. "Jerry! Come on down, Jerry. You belong here!"

  It stopped Corbett cold. He looked down into the pit. "Julia?"

  "Come on down, Jerry. Share everything with me. You taught me how, Jerry--"

  "How can a girl be a rapist?" I demanded. She was, or had been, quite pretty, but now her face was distorted by pain and exhaustion. The demons were watching her stand there as she panted and shouted up to Corbett, and they didn't interfere.

  "Deceit. Fraud," said Benito. "Those who induce others to what they know is wrong, as well as those who force their will on others."

  I turned to Corbett and-- Shut up, Carpentier! None of your business-- closed my mouth.

  "'You taught me everything, Jerry," she was calling. "I could still love you. Come down with me. Where else can you go now?"

  "Out! Down to the center and out!" Corbett screamed to her.

  The demons howled maniac laughter. The girl laughed with them. "Oh, Jerry, do you believe that? Don't you know that the deeper you go, the worse it is, and you can't ever go back, and you can't get out? It's worse down there, Jerry. Wait till you see who's below us! Here you have me, Jerry. Stay where you belong. There's no escape down there. Don't you know what's carved on the gates of Hell, Jerry? All hope abandon!"

  "I'm not afraid of what's below!" Corbett was getting hysterical. "I never did any of the things they punish you down there for--"

  She laughed again. "The only perfect man who ever lived! Are you sure, Jerry? Then why do they let you go there? And what makes you think you'll get justice anyway? Come down with me before its too late to-- HYEEEE!"

  The demons had called time on her. Crack! Snap! The whips sounded like popcorn popping. Julia sprinted, screaming with the rest. The flesh of my back rippled. I wanted to shut my ears.

  "Come." Benito took Corbett's arm. "Come. Do not let her seduce you again."

  "Uh?" Corbett looked at Benito as if he'd only just met him. "It did happen that way, now you mention it. Or did it? Maybe I do belong in that pit."

  "If you do, you will be there. For the moment you are not. Ergo-- come along."

  We walked in silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts. What if the girl was right? Were we plunging deeper and deeper, never to return? What was below us? Had I committed any of the appropriate cnmes? "Benito, what's ahead?"

  His dry lecture voice couldn't mask the screaming as we walked the rim. "No more!" "Not again!" "Wait, I'm in the wrong place!" "It was just one book, just one. I needed the money!" "You big ugly sonofabitch, you--" Crack!

  "Of the ten bolgias-- canyons-- of this circle of Hell, this is the only divided one. Each canyon is crossed by a bridge, except that all the bridges are down across the sixth canyon. We must descend into it. It will be no problem."

  "Benito, how in God's name can you ignore those screams?" Corbett demanded.

  "They have no more than they deserve," Benito said simply. Either he hadn't the empathy of a turtle, or... or what? "Now, we will have trouble at the fifth bolgia. It is the pit of grafters, and the demons are on the rim, not down in the canyon."

  "Ugh." I'd forgotten most of the Inferno, but I could never have forgotten that image: a troop, an army of devils, ill-mannered and sadistic, a military organization of ugly hate. They'd almost got Dante despite his safe-conduct. "What's after this circle?"

  We had reached an arching bridge of rough stone. It had no handrails and was about ten feet wide, a slender arch above that pit of screaming runners. It sloped up so steeply that I dropped to all fours to climb.

  "Jerry! Come down, Jerry!" It was the girl again. Corbett stiffened.

  "What's next?" I prompted Benito. "After the ten canyons what will we find?"

  "Very little," Benito answered. "The great ice plain, where traitors are punished. Those who betrayed their blood kin or their benefactors."

  "Not me," Corbett said. He seemed to feel better. "And then?"

  "We cross to the very center. There is a hole. We crawl through it, past the center of the world, and find ourselves climbing up again."

  "And I can believe as much of that as I like?"

  "Certainly. Why should you not believe it?" Benito was genuinely puzzled.

  "It's nonsense," said Corbett. "We'd be in free-fall by the time we got there."

  "Jerry!"

  Corbett shuddered. The voice floated upward again. "Don't be a fool, Jerry. It's bad down there at the center. And they never let you out."

  "Did I really put her there?" Corbett wondered. "Maybe I have betrayed a benefactor. She was kind to me and--"

  "Come on, no woman's worth what they're gettin'," Billy said. "We stick together. I never let a buddy down in my life, and I'm goin' down to the center. Now come on."

  Corbett lost some of his tension. "If you're really Billy the Kid, that's right. At least, that's what the movies showed." He began moving again, over the arch of the bridge and downward. "Benito, your deseription is still nonsense. Not only would there be free-fall at the center of the Earth, but this isn't Earth to begin with. A cavity this size, under the Earth? Can you imagine the pressures? And we'd get seismograph readings on it with every earthquake. No, we have to be somewhere else."

  "Sure," I said. "Infernoland. Somebody built it, following Dante. But the geography's been the same as the Inferno all the way so far, so what do we care if it's an artifact?"

  "It is an artifact," Benito said, "in the sense that God designed and built it."

  "Okay," said Corbett. "I was never a good atheist. Not a churchman either. Still, Benito, I've seen designs for bigger structures than this. Bigger than Earth, for that matter. Our real problem is, did Dante really see this place himself? And can we trust his reports?"

  That was a good question, but I had a better one. How far could we trust Benito? He had never mentioned earlier trips.

  Just how did Benito get back uphill after those trips? How did he earn this privilege of running free through Hell? Geryon had said "we" when speaking of both himself and Benito. "We who serve God's will in Hell."

  Benito was an unlikely angel... and Geryon an untrustworthy witness, I reminded myself. But this was the Devil's realm, and Benito wandered at whim.

  All right, Carpentier: just what is the punishment for a soul who defies God's final command? God or Big Juju, I had plenty of evidence that He was vindictive. He put me in the Vestibule, and I violated my sentence. Minos warned me. Is this the final retribution against Carpentier? To go even deeper into Hell, with no way back, to find my own level and have it worse than He condemned me to?

  Or. Suppose this really is Infernoland, a bigger and more powerful Builder's playground. Why would the Geryon-type engineers have built anything but the Inferno? They clearly enjoyed seeing humans suffer. Would they get a similar kick from human pleasure? All the professors told me the Inferno was by far the most interesting of the three books of The Divine Comedy.

  Benito was talking again. "I have always assumed that Dante made his trek in a vision. When he woke he had forgotten many of the details. He filled them in with research in theology and dogma and philosophy and natural history and with his own whims and prejudices and special hatreds. But the basic vision was sound and true. Be careful here."

  The bridge dropped steeply at the end. The inner rim of the trench was twenty feet lower than the outer. We went down backward. The lip of another pit was a hundred yards away. A cacaphony of sound rose from it. We stopped for a moment.

  "For instance," Benito said, "Dante's work gives the impression that he met large numbers of Italians--"

  "Sounds perfectly reasonable to me," said Corbett. We tried to laugh, but this wasn't a place for laughing.

  Benito merely continued as if he hadn't heard. "Improbable numbers of Italians. Large numbers of famous ancients. He met writers, poets, politicians, but no Hottentots, Eskimos, Askaris, or American Indians. This seems unlikely."

  "Then you don't trust Dante after all?"

  "Jerry, that was not my point."

  I said, "Benito, we've met an embarrassing sufficiency of Americans."

  Billy laughed. "Plenty on the island, too."

  Benito was startled. "It's true. And Hilda Kroft and I met Germans. And--"

  "Man tends to notice his own folks," said Billy. "Let's get moving."

  We angled toward a bridge spanning the next ditch. Benito still looked disturbed. Why? That disturbed me.

  The smell stopped us joltingly at the second pit. It was like being dropped into a sewer. We didn't even try to look over the edge.

  "Who's down there?" Billy asked.

  "Flatterers," Benito said shortly, and turned toward the bridge.

  We followed. "I don't get it," Corbett said.

  "In every place of power, throughout all time, the rulers have been surrounded by flatterers. In many places flattery has been the path to power and wealth. In others it is only a good living. Yet everywhere the flatterers tend to push aside the men of real wisdom. Flattery is so much safer than telling unpleasant truths."

  "Not in America," said Corbett.

  "This I doubt," said Benito. "But you should know best."

  "Never buttered up the boss? I sure have," said Billy.

  I felt uncomfortable. What was I doing at the moment I died but flattering the fans? I glanced over At Corbett, and he looked no better. Flattery? We'd all tried it. What did they do to flatterers?

  We clustered at the bridge approach and stood looking at it. The smell was thick as putty. I could feel it clinging to me, and I squirmed. Corbett said, "How are we going to cross that?"

  "Fast," I said. "Don't breathe." I didn't move. I hadn't worked up the nerve.

  "Come on, pals!" Billy hit the bridge at a dead run. As he went over the arch and disappeared from view, we heard him yell. The other side of the bridge would be steep. I hoped he'd rolled to the end and not over the edge. I wasn't ready to dive in after him, and I didn't hear anyone else volunteer.

  "Billy?" I shouted. There was no answer.

  "He's all right," Corbett said. His voice was hollowly reassuring. "Sure he is."

  We looked at each other. We took deep breaths.

  We scrambled up the arch, and when we could stand, we ran.

  Was Billy down there? I made the mistake of looking from the top of the arch.

  Down into a river of shit, chest-deep. A respectable crowd waded through it.

  Disgust can freeze you as solid as fear. At my side, Corbett stopped to look where I was looking. He made a retching sound, took my arm and tried to pull me on. I couldn't move. I'd recognized someone I knew.

  I called down. "George!"

  Heads turned up. They were disguised by what was smeared across their faces, but that was George, all right. I tried to remember his last name and couldn't.

  But he knew me. He shrank away with his sticky arms hiding his sticky head.

  Benito had come back up the bridge. "Billy is safe." He spoke with the pinched voice of a man holding his breath. "Who was that?"

  "An old friend. An advertising man, wrote fiction in his spare time. Not very good stories, but he wasn't a bad guy. How did he get here?"

  "Immoderate flattery. There is no other way to reach this pit. Allen, Jerome, there is no profit in standing here. You cannot enjoy the view."

  Immoderate flattery? It fit, in a way. Big Juju's way. Most advertising is immoderate praise of a product or its users. But like every other torture I'd seen in Hell, it was just too damned much! I wanted to tell George... what? That he'd been wronged? That I'd get justice for him no matter what it took? That I couldn't save him and I couldn't save myself and everything was useless because we were in the hands either of a cruel God or heartless aliens? I don't know. But I'd remembered one of his own ads, and I shouted it down to him. It was not to mock him! Only to get his attention!

  "You deserve to belong to the Xanadu Country Club!"

  The response was an explosion of voices. Smeared stinking heads rose, mocking voices called. "The wethead is dead!" "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?" "I'm Glenda! Fly me!" "Hazel, it turned blue!" "Always have... always will."

  And we three who peered into the moat, we saw where the shit came from.

  Another macabre joke. Every one of them had been fitted with a second anus. It became apparent only when they tried to speak.

  Corbett bent double, heaving, a ghost trying to expel emptiness from the ghost of his belly. I tried to help him, but he backed away fast. He didn't want to be touched. The convulsions went on and on.

  I tried to turn away from the edge, but it was too late. George screamed up at me, in agony. "Allen! Why?"

  "I'm sorry!" I should have left him alone.

  Benito spoke in an actor's voice, calm but carrying. "There is a way out of Hell."

  He got insults and laughter, but a few listened.

  "You must climb the pit. Cooperate if you must. It will be hard, but you can do it if you try long enough. Then you must move inward. The route to Heaven is at the center of Hell."

  Smeared faces turned away. George stayed to answer. His laugh had tears in it. "Me, in Heaven? With shit dribbling down my chin? I'd rather stay here."

  Another called. "Listen, when you get there, tell Him. Tell God we will praise Him day and night! I have written a new hymn to His name! Tell Him!"

  Benito turned sadly away.

  I looked for Corbett-- and found him at the outer end of the bridge. He was crying and hiccoughing and trying to run. I shouted, "Corbett! Wrong way!"

  He turned. "No chance! I don't belong here! I'm supposed to be in the winds!"

  "You'll never get up the cliff."

  "I will! Somehow, I will! I belong up there, not down here with--" He flapped his arms helplessly. Corbett had no word for these thoroughly damned souls with whom Corbett would not associate. He went away from us.

  Billy was waiting at the inner end of the bridge. He watched us come down, then, "Where's Jerry?"

  Benito shook his head. "Pride. He was too proud to stay."

  PART III

  CHAPTER 20

  The third gully was narrower and cleaner. From the edge it looked empty, so that I wondered if there were a sin nobody would commit, or one nobody thought of. But lights danced dimly down there...

  From the arch it was clearer. I made out long rows of holes cut into the stone. The holes had raised stone rims. Most of them were occupied, each by a pair of human, feet sticking straight up into the air. The feet danced. Flames burned on their soles.

  "Another obsolete sin," said Benito. "Selling holy offices. Simony."

  Billy said, "Huh?"

  I translated for him. "Those guys would take money to make you a priest."

  There were signs by some of the holes. "Wharton School of Theology. Earn your Th.D. in just ten weeks! Write Registrar for application." And another: "Meditation. The new way to inner peace and serenity. Meet the greatest guru of all time. Registration fee, $350."

  Billy was aghast. "God does that to them? Just for that?"

  "They stole what belongs to God," Benito said. "There are popes in those baptismal fonts. And many others. The denomination does not seem important. What matters is the sale of the gifts of God."

  Why would aliens care about that? Well, Carpentier?

  "Benito, I don't like it here," Billy said.

  I patted his shoulder. "Me neither. Let's get out." I felt the urge to run. At least I was safe from this pit. We all were. We'd never had heavenly gifts to sell.

  The bridge over the fourth gully was just ahead, and I glanced into it from the top, intending to run on past. The strange sight held me. The damned flowed beneath us, and their heads had been turned back to front. Most of them were women.

  "Fortune tellers," Benito said before I could ask. "They tried to see the future by magic."

  And now they were not even allowed to watch where they were going. I shivered, thinking that a science-fiction writer might well end up here. But no, I'd never used magic. Only logic, and it hadn't kept me out of Hell. "Why aren't all the scientists and economic prognosticators here?" I asked. "They try to foresee the future."

  "Most of these appealed to Satan for aid. He gave it to them... or not. It is the appeal that weighs against them." He turned to move on.

  Then I recognized one of the damned.

  A little elderly lady, very prim and proper. She'd been a teacher in my nephew's school. Now she walked with her head tamed backward, and tears ran down her spine and between her buttocks. I screamed. The damned looked up at me.

  "Mrs. Herrnstein! Why?" I shouted.

  She looked away. Then she stopped and looked up. Face and back turned toward us. She'd always been thin, and I'd never thought of her as particularly feminine. Certainly she wasn't feminine now. "I belong here, Mr. Carpentier," she called. "Please leave. I don't want to be watched."

  "You belong here?" I could not see Mrs. Herrnstein with a crystal ball.

  "Yes. Whenever I had a pupil who had difficulty learning to read, I used-- I was a bad teacher, Mr. Carpentier."

  "You were a good teacher! You taught Hal more in a year than he learned in five!"

  "I was a good teacher with good pupils. But I could not be bothered with the ones who weren't so bright. If they had trouble learning to read, I said they had dyslexia."

  "Are you here because of bad diagnoses?" This was monstrous!

  "Dyslexia is not a diagnosis, Mr. Carpentier. It is a prediction. It is a prediction that says that this child can never learn to read. And with that prediction on his record-- why, strangely enough, none of them ever do. Unless they happen on a teacher who doesn't believe in educationese witchcraft."

  "But--"

  "It was witchcraft, Mr. Carpentier. Please go now."

  She walked on, crying uncontrollably, her face toward us as she walked away. I watched until she was out of sight.

  "She does not belong here," I insisted.

  "Then perhaps she will not be here long," Benito answered dispassionately. "Yet-- you will note that she did not agree with your judgment."

  "Then she's wrong too!"

  "Why do you feel so competent to judge everyone, Allen?"

  "Get it through your thick head that it's Big Juju I'm judging--"

  "It is God you are judging," he thundered.

  "All right, it's God I'm judging. If He can judge me, I claim the right to judge Him!"

  Billy seemed horrified by what I was saying. I was sorry for that. But Benito laughed and said, "How will you implement your judgment against God Himself?"

  The only possible answer to that was a feeble one, maybe, but I used it. "By withholding my worship. Benito, do you realize that the God you worship keeps a private torture chamber?"

  "Hardly private."

  "Private or public, the God Allen Carpentier worships will have to meet higher standards than that!"

  Benito didn't speak for a moment. Then he said, "We must hope our shouting was not heard. Look ahead."

  From our position at the top of the arch we had a good view of the rims of the next gully. On both sides of the gap, horned black demons moved. They were larger than men, a little smaller than the demons in the first ditch, but like them they had horns and tails, and their skin was black ebony, very different from a black man's skin. They carried--

  "Pitchforks?"

  "Certainly," said Benito.

  I couldn't help grinning a little. Pitchforks! I'd forgotten that detail. Had Walt Disney's cartoonists ever realized why their devils carried pitchforks?

  "They must not see us," Benito said. "None of us are safe from them. They guard the pit of the grafters, of those who stole from positions of trust."

  Billy shuddered. "Reckon they'd like me," he said. "Guess I took a few things from my bosses in my day. Not much, but some."

  "Not me. Free-lance writers don't have bosses," I said. Then I remembered the advance from Omniverse Publishing, nine years before I died. Somehow the novel had never jelled, and-- let's play it safe here, Carpentier. Demons wouldn't understand the publishing business.

  There was cover at the bottom of the bridge. It was all a jumble of boulders. We waited our chance, then sprinted down the bridge while none of the demons were nearby. We were hidden before another group came past. We huddled together between the rocks.

  "Too bad the bridges are staggered," I whispered. "We could have gone right across." The next bridge was thirty or forty yards to the left, with a troop of twenty-odd demons between.

  "For us this is the second most dangerous place in Hell," whispered Benito. "We must reach the next bridge without being seen. Cross at a dead run, and do not stop at the next pit. Run straight into it. There are no bridges in any case, and we could not reach one if any existed. The demons are on both sides of the pit."

  Billy shifted restlessly. "Don't like running from nothing."

  "We must," Benito said simply. He pointed. A demon strode past.

  A roughly human form nine feet tall, equipped with horns and hooves and a twitching tail. A capriform humanoid.

  How glib, Carpentier. Capriform humanoid? Demon! Why play games with yourself?

  The demon was carrying a human being, carrying him like a bowling ball, his claws inserted deep into the man's back. The man writhed and struggled. The demon didn't seem to notice. He called to three of the others. "How many New Yorkers this week?"

  They joined him in front of our rock. One twitched his tail up to his mouth. Teeth like butcher knives gnawed at the end. "Twelve."

  "Make it thirteen. And it's still Thursday on Earth. If Hideous wins the pool again I'll rip his face off."

  "You could forget to report this one."

  "Why not?" The first demon lifted his human burden to study it. "He hardly counts anyway. He stole a few hundred bucks from a friend who needed an eye operation." He addressed the man: "You won't tell on us, will you?"

  "No. I swear," said the man. His voice was choked with agony.

  "And you won't show your head above the pitch? Because if we see any sign of you--" The demon hefted his pitchfork suggestively. "We'll pull you out and tear you in little pieces and scatter you widely. It hurts a lot."

  "I won't tell," said the man.

  "Good," said the demon holding him, and he flung him. The man dropped below the rim with a mournful howl that ended in a sound half splash, half thud.

  "What's down there?" Billy whispered.

  I answered, "Boiling pitch."

  "What'd he do?"

  "Graft."

  "I kept wanting to try to save him."

  Benito said, "I would not save him if I could."

  The demons passed on. Like the warriors around the lake of blood, they looked always into the pit, always away from us. If we were careful we could move, one at a time, flitting from rock to rock to--

  "Gotcha!" a demon shouted, and I had a heart attack, right out there between two inadequate boulders. All they had to do was come and collect me, but they weren't looking. They were clumped at the rim, jabbing down.

  A human form came up dripping gobbets of black pitch and trying to wriggle free of the tines of two pitchforks. I heard, "Boss Tweed, ain't it? We been checking with some of those dead men that're supposed to have voted your ticket-- Hold him, Crazyred!" The man lurched free of one pitchfork, but the other held him fast. They beached him. They began to play with him.

  I touched Billy's shoulder. "Don't look. We can get a good way while they're busy."

  We crawled like snakes. By the time the shade of Tweed had stopped screaming, we were opposite the bridge. I looked back once and had to close my eyes. The demons had opened him up and spread him out like a frog in biology class; but unlike the frog, he was still trying to get away.

  Benito crouched like a sprinter. "Ready?"

  "Yeah."

  "Right."

  We ran.

  I heard a great bass roar of rage. I didn't look back. But as I went over the arch, last in line, I saw that the demons on the far side of the gully were running to meet us.

  One was going to make it.

  I stopped. Only for an instant; then I plunged down the arch behind Benito.

  But Billy had doubled his speed.

  The demon reached the end of the bridge off balance and skidding. "Come to Poppa!" he roared, and swung his pitchfork around.

  He was a nanosecond late. Billy shot past the tines and ran up the demon and swarmed over the huge head.

  The demon bellowed and tried to reverse eighteen feet of iron pitchfork. Benito slammed shoulder-first into his knee. The demon half-turned, and I hit the other knee sideways. Both huge legs went out from under the demon, left him blind and falling.

  Half a ton of demon slammed into the rock.

  Billy rolled away. The demon moaned and tried to gather his knees to his chest.

  "Now run!" cried Benito. "Billy!"

  A troop of demons was almost on us. I raced for the next pit, stopped at the edge. Where was Billy?

  Billy had retrieved the demon's pitchfork and was raising it for the kill.

  I yelled, "Never mind that!" and then it was just too late. Billy yelled triumph and brought the pitchfork down hard. He raised it for another thrust, and they had him. I jumped into space alongside Benito. Three-inch fingernails clicked shut behind my neck.

  CHAPTER 21

  The side of the gully was rough rock falling almost sheer. I glimpsed it in free-fall, and when I saw that there were no handholds I simply gave up. A couple of seconds later I lay broken at the bottom, staring up at the non-sky.

  In the sea of pain I couldn't tell what was broken and what was only braised. But I remembered that you're not supposed to move an accident victim. I didn't try to move.

  Rustling near me.

  "Benito?"

  "Over here."

  "Are you hurt?"

  "Yes."

  "Me too."

  "We are out of their path, I think. We need only wait to heal."

  Whose path? I was afraid to turn my head, but I turned my eyes. I found myself looking up along the fluted robe of a life-sized golden statue. No information there.

  I said, "What about Billy?"

  "Poor Billy. His urge to violence betrayed him."

  "Don't be so damned philosophical. We've got to get him out of their hands!"

  "How?"

  "Well... first we wait to heal, I guess. Where would they put him? In the pitch with the Tammany types?"

  "Look up along the edge of the gully."

  Something like an endless length of rope was falling in loops across the sky. It dropped very slowly, as if almost weightless. As it came near I saw that it was thicker than rope, and there was a tuft on the end... Where had I seen something like that recently?

  Above our heads it hesitated, then descended like a blind worm. For seconds it was hidden behind the rock slope. Then it began to rise... and the end was coiled around something that moved. Billy.

  "Minos," I said. "It's his tail."

  "Yes."

  Before we could move, Billy would be back on the island in the river of blood-- or in the river itself; he'd left the island, of his own free will. He was beyond our reach. I sighed and turned my eyes from the tiny struggling figure and the infinite sprawl of Minos' tail.

  And the statue had moved.

  It had gone past me about one yard. I turned my head, regardless of consequence. My neck wasn't broken. And there were two bare human feet beneath the hem of the golden robe. One moved a good six inches as I watched.

  "Benito. There are men in those things."

  "And women too," said Benito. "Religious hypocrites."

  He stood up carefully, testing to see if anything had healed. Apparently it had. He tried to help me up, but pain yelped in my ribs. I sat down against the slope to wait some more.

  Golden robes moved past like snails. There were men and women in those golden idols, but I saw only bare feet and shadowed faces within enormous hoods. One stopped, and turned with the same excruciating slowness that characterized his walk, and said, "Are you lost?"

  Benito said we weren't. I asked, "Are you?"

  "Why, no. I think this is my proper place." His accent was thick and hard to identify. "I have been here long enough to be convinced that God thinks so too."

  "How long is that?"

  "Over a thousand years have passed on Earth, I'm told."

  "That's a little hard to swallow," I said. "The English language isn't that old."

  "I know," said the priest. "We teach each other. I learned this language from one who came here recently, an Amie Semple MacPherson. There is little else to do as we wander this endless channel, and you may imagine that it is easier to teach each other than to search for some companion who speaks our own language."

  "Why," I asked, "don't you stop and sit down?"

  The tired gray eyes studied me from within the golden cowl. "I could fall on you. But it may be that you do not know what you say. If I stop this robe grows hot. It is too hot now. It grows hot slowly, and it grows cool slowly. Now, goodbye." He began to turn away.

  Benito said, "We could walk along with you."

  "That would please me." He finished his turn and took one lurching footstep.

  I got up. The ruined ribs only twinged. "How heavy is that robe?" I asked.

  "I never weighed it. They tell me it is gilded lead. Perhaps a ton?"

  "What did you do?"

  "Does it matter? I was young, I had not been a priest for many years. But the end of the thousand years since Christ was born were drawing to a close. People began to fear the end of the world. I urged them to give away their property. To the Church. We became very wealthy."

  "You could have given it back, afterwards."

  "We did not."

  "Did all of you end up here? The whole order?"

  "No. Some truly thought the world would end. Some believed a wealthy Church could serve souls better. But I never believed the Second Coming could be predicted, and I enjoyed the wealth. I-- do you need to know more? It was a good thing to be in the Church in those days."

  Benito tapped my shoulder and pointed. "There is our way out. The rubble from the bridge."

  It had been a bridge, high and arching like those we'd crossed before. Now it was a sloping pile of shattered rock. I looked at it curiously, but it didn't seem different from any other rock I'd seen, and I could see that normal laws of material strength didn't hold down here. It wasn't a surprise.

  "What happened to it?" I wondered. "Earthquake?"

  "I am told that all Hell shook at the moment of Christ's death," said the ex-priest.

  "So says Dante," Benito added. "Afterwards, He came to Hell and threw down the great gate in the Wall of Dis."

  "He must have been mad about something. I suppose being crucified could do that to you."

  "I would be less flippant, Allen. Look around you." Before I could answer, Benito had started climbing the ruined bridge.

  It was still a ridiculous picture. Christ was supposed to be gentle.  Using a whip on the temple money-changers was one thing; behaving like a comic-book hero was something else. I tried to imagine the bleeding, wounded, near-naked figure ripping those tremendous iron gates from their hinges, while the halo flamed angrily about His Head--

  Then gave it up and climbed up after Benito. I tested each foothold, but some of the slabs slid down anyway. Near the top the rockslide ended, and we climbed by fingerholds and toeholds. There it was that I had to repress a sudden, violent urge to giggle.

  Benito wouldn't have appreciated it. But-- no wonder Christ was so upset. Some clerk must have tried to hand Him Form D-345t839y-4583.

  ***

  The seventh pit was enormous. I stood at the end of the bridge and marveled at the thin fairy-span arching across. Carbon steel wouldn't have taken the stress; yet it was made of stone without mortar, like the fallen bridge behind us. Another miracle, and so what?

  We started across.

  It was dark down there. What I could see had a vaguely reptilian flavor to it: constant slow slitherings, and sudden flurries of violent motion.

  Benito pulled at my arm. "Why do you dawdle, Allen?"

  "What's down there?"

  "Thieves. Theft is the most profitable of sins, and very popular. Tell me, Allen, do you expect to see anything that pleases you?"

  He had me there. I didn't. But-- "I'm a writer. I've got ten men's curiosity. What's the hurry? Are we in danger here?"

  "I remind you that we are fugitives."

  I stared in astonishment. "Geryon could have stopped us. Minos could have stopped us. They didn't."

  "The demons behind us would have. Oh, very well, Allen. The real danger is at the next pit. We must cross that quickly."

  "Okay." And I looked down again.

  Reptilian, yeah. There were men and women down there... and lizards ranging in size from Chihuahua to Great Dane, and snakes whose range was even greater. I watched a tiny scarlet lizard leap from a crack in a rock to bite a man on the neck. The man burned like flash paper, dazzling me. When I looked again he was congealing from a cloud of smoke.

  Benito was watching me, not them. Let him wait.

  The land was strewn with rocks of all sizes. A stout gray-haired woman came toward us, running a tortuous path, her eyes fixed on her path-- It didn't help. Somehow she stepped between two-rocks and fell sprawling, yelling in despair. The python that had been following her caught up as she tried to run on the ruined foot. It climbed her leg and bit her on the navel.

  Woman and snake, they lay immobile. They began to change.

  "Allen--"

  I made a shushing gesture. They were changing, the snake sprouting arms and legs and head hair, the woman melting into a smooth limbless shape. Presently there was nothing left of the woman.

  The slender man who had been a snake stood up smiling. "Thanks, Gladys," he said, and walked away.

  "He stole her shape," I said. "I'll be buggered. He stole her shape!"

  "She will grow it back. In life she was probably a buyer of stolen goods, what do you call it? A fence."

  "Yeah. Wow."

  "Are you ready?"

  "Yeah." I turned and followed him. Wow. He stole her shape. How does a science-fiction writer explain that? A computer-drawn hologram. Could be. It was pretty dark down there. But I didn't believe it.

  The bridge dipped. We climbed down. Benito turned left on the ledge between the seventh and eighth pits. Benito was clearly uneasy. Interesting things were happening in the darkness on my left, but I looked into the darkness on my right for the danger Benito expected.

  It looked like a swarm of fireflies, or like a freeway seen from an airplane, or--

  This aye night, this aye night, Every night and all, Fire and sleet and candlelight, And Christ receive thy soul.

  Sleet I'd found in the Circle of Gluttons, and fire on the desert. Here at last was the candlelight: huge candle flames moving in darkness.

  From the next bridge it was no clearer. Benito kept trying to hurry me along. "You will not see anything here. Are you so fond of Hell that you would linger?"

  Slender flames moved down there in the yellow-and-black murk... and stopped, and clustered beneath us. I said, "Who are they?"

  "Dante calls this the Bolgia of the Evil Counselors."

  "That doesn't tell me a lot. And I still don't know what you're afraid of."

  A voice answered from below... a voice with little of the human in it. It thrummed like a harp. It was coming from the tip of one of the huge flames. "He is afraid of his own homecoming."

  I looked at Benito. He nodded, not looking at me.

  "Come down!" one of the flames called to Benito. It was eerily compelling, that thrumming voice. The tip of the flame wavered, turned to me. "Throw him down, you, if you're an American! That's Mussolini! Benito Mussolini!"

  Jolted, I turned to Benito. He shrugged.

  Mussolini?

  Another voice thrummed from the pit. "You are American. I know your accent. Do you understand? That's Mussolini! Throw the bastard down here where he belongs!"

  "Who are you?"

  "Does it matter? I approved the firebombing of Dresden."

  A British voice spoke from the flames. "And I led the mission. We may belong here, Yank, but so does that Eytie swine."

  Benito was backing away. When I went toward him, he turned and ran. I caught him at the edge of the next pit and tripped him. He fell heavily to the ground, and I sat on him. He was no match for me. "Mussolini!" I shouted.

  "I pulled you out of a jinn bottle!" he protested.

  "And led me here, deeper into Hell! I knew it all along!" Mussolini. What better choice for the Devil's agent, to wander through Hell corrupting souls already half corrupted? Hitler was probably loose too. If we'd run across him I'd have guessed earlier. I remembered all my suspicions, and all the unexplained things that had happened on the trip down. No wonder he could give orders!

  Well, I knew who he was now, and I knew where he belonged. We were at the edge of the ninth pit, but I took him by the heels and dragged him back to the eighth. He thrashed like a fish. He clutched at rocks and pulled a couple out of the ground, for all the good that did him.

  The pit flamed beneath us with the crowd gathered to welcome Benito home.

  I rolled him over the edge. He gave a low cry as he dropped. Before he struck bottom he burst into flame. His was very bright, brighter than most around him.

  I turned and went on.

  CHAPTER 22

  I walked until I had to stop, until the ground dropped away at my feet. There I stood like a machine whose program has ran out. After all, where would I go?

  Now I was utterly alone, with nobody to tell me about the geography of Hell, or warn me of the dangers--

  --Or make me go deeper into horror after horror when all I wanted to do was stop. Mussolini. Benito Mussolini, Il Duce of Italy. He hadn't even tried to deny it.

  What an idiot I'd been. Why hadn't I recognized him, with that massive square jaw and high forehead? I remembered reading about him in history books. Benito Mussolini had escaped from his castle prison in a glider flown by Hitler's Commando, Skorzeny, one of the most romantic figures of that war. No wonder Benito could fly a glider!

  Mussolini the fascist. He invented fascism! Killer and leader of killers, thug, ally of Adolf Hitler... back to the anonymous flame, Mussolini, evil genius behind the Italian king. Down you go, Benito, who poured me from a bottle.

  I stood there a long time before I realized what I was seeing.

  In the ninth pit the damned staggered and lurched, slipping in bloody mud, leaving more blood to make the path more slippery for those behind. They seemed dazed survivors of some lost battle.

  One showed no obvious wounds, except for his erect posture and painfully stiff walk. I stared at his face, where a macabre joke had been played. It was pale and lean, and calm; no one would have guessed that he was in pain; but the eyes burned with hate. The mustache was in an unfamiliar style, straight, but twice the width of his mouth. And the sharp white canine teeth protruding over his lower lip would have had anyone over the age of six shouting, "Vampire!"

  Well ahead of him was a sturdy fat man with a striking bearded face and blood running from a cut throat. The face was familiar. I studied him, trying to remember where I'd seen that face.

  He stared back. Then he roared in fury wrapped in a Shakespearean accent. "Varlet! Who might you be, that stare so arrogantly at England?"

  "Huh?" I shook myself. "Carp-- Carpenter."

  "Come down, woodworker, and I will have your eyes nailed shut!"

  I realized I had been staring, rudely, at people who had trouble enough without that. More of Big Juju's victims. "Sorry. Does it help if I tell you the wounds will heal?"

  I could see the shock rippling down the line, and suddenly they were all screaming curses and waving their fists. One man threatened with his severed arm held like a club.

  "Dolt! Ass who mocks us!"

  "What did I say?"

  "You cannot be such a fool!" "England" cried. "We are nearly healed now! We reach the point in the circle where--" He stopped, looking ahead, forgetting me entirely. "I see him now," he said in a voice without life or hope.

  I looked. The bridge was ahead of them, and under it was a king-sized version of all the other demons we'd passed, twenty feet tall, carrying a slender sword.

  He grinned, showing teeth nearly a foot long.

  I had to cross the bridge anyway. I walked toward the demon.

  He was killing them. They marched toward him, hanging back when they could until others pushed ahead, and he killed them. He picked a man up and sliced him from the crotch to the throat, set him down and let him walk on. Empathic pain lashed through me, and a line from a joke ran crazily through my head. About a cowboy who'd been thrown onto a barbed wire fence. He'd shown Texas courage; he'd remounted the horse and gone on. Of course he had to let the stirrups out a little...

  The fat man looked sick and scared. His face clicked suddenly into place: a painting, very famous. Henry the Eighth.

  I kept walking.

  I was crossing the bridge when Henry reached the demon. The sword was not a sword, I saw now. It was an overdeveloped fingernail on an overdeveloped middle finger as thick as a strong man's thigh. It flicked like a rapier and severed Henry's head, and the demon handed Henry his head, and Henry walked on. The sharp horn tip of the sword flicked suddenly up before my face.

  I stopped.

  "Who may you be, 0 privileged one, who run so free through Hell?"

  I got my throat working. "Allen Carpenter."

  "Where away, Carpenter?"

  "I don't know. Inward." With all the feelings that had been burnt out of me, one was left. Curiosity. Whatever Benito had planned for me, it lay downward, inward.

  The dead had stopped to wait, with understandable patience, for the demon to finish his conversation. I waved downward. "Who are they?"

  The demon seemed in no hurry. "Sowers of discord. People who advocated hatred, started wars, refused to end wars-- you know, the opposite of the peacemakers. This is a special collection. Religious schizmatics. Generally founded their own churches for their own purposes. You want political types, or lawyers who talked people into divorces they didn't want and lawsuits they didn't need, you've got to go to another part of the pit."

  "Oh."

  The demon looked fondly at "England's" receding back. "Henry there wanted a divorce. The Church wouldn't give him one. So he made himself a Church that would. Clever?"

  "On the evidence, not very."

  The demon stooped to pick up the man with the Fu Manchu mustache and the vampire teeth. "Dracula here didn't found any churches. He--"

  "Dracula! I thought he was-- Dammit, he was just a legend."

  "There are legends about him. In his homeland, Transylvania, mothers still frighten their children with his name. Dracula was just a title. Means dragon. His real name was Vlad; they called him Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler. He spent his whole life torturing and killing Turks in the name of Christ. Otherwise he'd be uphill, eyelash deep in boiling blood. About half the people he killed were his own subjects, by the way."

  Small wonder Vlad the Impaler walked funny. A wooden stake was sticking two feet out of his anus. The demon didn't need his sword. He just pushed the stake up until it didn't show, set the man down, and let him walk on. Walking funny.

  The demon picked up another. "Johann here was the only man God would reveal the exact time of Doomsday to. He could save a small party of the Chosen, chosen by him, that is. All you had to do was turn all your property over to him." The demon grinned enormously. "And you, Carpenter? Did you ever create a church of your very own?"

  Oh, boy.

  The sword's bloody tip swung away and back, rapier-quick. I ducked and ran. I fell flat on the bridge as the sword flashed again. The demon couldn't quite get at me at that angle. But the arch of the bridge dipped low, there at the end.

  I rose to sprint position, poised, took off. At the base of the arch the sword flicked toward me at knee height. I jumped it and kept running, right across and into the space above the next pit.

  The side was steep. I hit once, and bounced, and hit the bottom very hard.

  ***

  There was no unconsciousness in Hell. There was only pain and the awful strain of trying to draw a breath. Deep down behind the pain a tiny voice was saying, You don't need to breathe, Carpentier. You're dead. But I wanted to breathe, I needed to breathe, and not a sip of air could I draw.

  Eventually the air did come, in sips, then gulps. I tried to straighten out. It felt as if I were breaking my own back. Maybe my back was broken. But the sword would have been worse.

  Could I feel my feet? Yes.

  Okay. Your spine's intact. Just lie here awhile. It will heal. Sure, we always healed.

  Hey, Carpentier. Why was it Benito always healed before you did?

  Why shouldn't he? He was one of the paid staff.

  Then why did he get hurt at all?

  A woman's voice said, "What've you got?"

  "Uh?" I still couldn't get more coherent than that.

  "What've you got?" she repeated patiently. I moved my head around, slowly. It was dark and gloomy. I became aware of hideous screeching sounds, moans, screams of pain and rage, snarling dogs, the cacaphony of Hell.

  She was sitting against the sloping-side of the trench, naked, her body marked with pustules and the scars of older eruptions of the skin. She didn't seem more able to move than I was.

  But the pain in my back was easing. I said, "Broken back, probably. What've you got?"

  "Everything. Syphilis. Gonorrhea. Yaws. Trench mouth. Everything you can think of."

  "Uh huh. I know what you've been doing."

  She wailed, "But I didn't! That's why it's so unfair!"

  My eyes were getting accustomed to the gloom that hung thick down here in the pit. There were others lying about the floor and the sides of the gully. Most of them looked deathly ill.

  Across from me was a man scrabbling among thousands of pills. There must have been every variety of medication ever invented or imagined: tablets, capsules of many hues, bottles of liquids, tiny pills and pills that would choke a horse. He groaned in pain as he held up a pill and squinted at it. Finally he decided: he flung the pill back into the bathtub of them next to him.

  He sat for a moment. Then he moaned, pressing his hands hard against his belly. "It's eating me alive!" he screamed. He scrabbled for another pill. This time he gulped it without looking at it. It didn't seem to help, because he screamed even louder and went back to his inspection routine.

  I looked a question at the girl. She shrugged. "He sold cancer cures. They only worked if you didn't go to a doctor. Somewhere in that pile there may be a pill that cures him."

  "What about the rest?"

  "Some don't do anything. Some make it worse."

  I shuddered, then froze as something came howling past on all fours, foam dripping from its jaws. I'd thought it was an animal, but it wasn't. It was a man.

  "Counterfeiters. Counterfeiters always get rabies," said the woman. "If they bite you it takes a long time to heal."

  And I couldn't move! There was nothing to do but watch.

  Men and women with peeling scabs and an itch that drove them to tear at themselves. A man with no ears, unable to move and screaming for water.

  "Listen!" he shouted. "Tell Satan! Anyone! Tell Satan there is a plot to overthrow him. For water I will reveal the names of the plotters! Tell him!"

  They were all deathly ill, and they were all in pain-- except one, and he was startling by contrast. He sat against the slope of the gully, a few feet from the girl and across from me. A middle-aged cherub, comfortably overweight, his blue eyes twinkling above a mad and happy smile.

  Certainly he was mad. Was it a sickness of the mind, or had some vile bacterium reached his brain?

  I had to get out of here. The most ferocious contagious diseases ever to wrack mankind were all around me. I tried to move, and stopped at once. My legs wouldn't obey, and it felt as if my spine were being twisted in a vise. Had I caught something already? Spinal meningitis, maybe?

  The madman's wandering blue eyes found me. He said, "I was a psychiatrist."

  "I didn't ask." In fact, I'd already learned more of Hell than I really wanted to know. I only wanted out. Don't tell me any more! I closed my eyes.

  "They trusted me," the mad voice said happily. "They thought we knew what we were doing. For fifty bucks an hour I listened to their life stories. Wouldn't you?"

  He subsided. The woman said, "He's crazy."

  "Thanks. I really wondered about that," I told her without opening my eyes.

  "Listen, you fell in over the edge. Have you been upslope? Have you seen a lot of what's up there?"

  "A lot."

  "What do they do to, shall we say, ladies of the evening?"

  I opened my eyes. She was tense, waiting for my words.

  "I didn't notice anything special for whores. Why?"

  "I, I... Listen, some girls don't actually sleep with the customers. They take a gentleman to a motel, they get their money in advance, then they disappear. Sometimes you can do better than that. You're just getting down to business when your boyfriend walks in the door. You see?"

  "Sure." I'd been robbed that way a couple of times in England.

  "Well," she said, "You'd think that wouldn't be as bad as being an actual... prostitute." And she looked at me.

  Somehow the memory was very dim now, of a time on Earth when a London girl had propositioned me, taken my money, and vanished from a bathroom with an unsuspected second door, leaving me in rage and frustrated lust. If I'd caught her I'd have killed her.

  But that was long ago, and nothing looked bad next to where I was now.

  So I lied. "They'd be downslope from here. I haven't been there yet."

  Satisfied, she sank back and forgot me in the examination of her ruined body.

  The mad psychiatrist noticed me again. "We were just playing," he said dreamily. "Tinkering with something we didn't understand. I knew. Oh, I knew. Let me tell you--"

  "Don't tell me." They kept hurting at me, all of them!

  "He was a catatonic. He was like a rubber doll. You could put him in any position, and he'd stay there for hours. We tried all sorts of things in those days. Shock therapy, insulin shock, lobotomy. Punish the patient for not noticing the outside world."

  "Or for not noticing you."

  I meant it to hurt, but he nodded happily. "So we put him in a hotbox and started raising the temperature. We watched him through a window. First he just sweated. Then he started to move around. At a hundred and thirty he said his first words in sixteen years. 'Get me the fuck out of here!'"

  The mad eyes found me, and his face seemed to cave in. The cherubic smile vanished. Urgently he said, "Get me the fuck out of here!"

  "I can't. I'll be lucky to get out myself." I tried moving again. There was pain, but not enough to keep me in that place. I stood gingerly and started up the slope.

  The girl cried, "You can't do that! Come back here! Come back!"

  I kept going. There were rocks to pull myself up, cracks to use as footholds. I'd climbed just far enough when another hydrophobia case raged past, biting and chewing on everyone he passed! A rock rolled from beneath my foot, and pain grated in my spine as I caught myself.

  The rabid man screamed at the psychiatrist, but the cherubic look had returned and he was smiling dreamily at the opposite wall. When I reached the top I remembered who had been in the last pit of the Eighth Circle. Frauds. Falsifiers. False witnesses.

  CHAPTER 23

  That was the last of the bolgias. Now the way led across an empty, rocky land. I turned and looked at the ten canyons rising upward behind me, light flickering from some, others marked by rising smoke or roiling heated air. It had not been a pleasant journey.

  Far ahead, through a twilit gloom that would just have had drivers turning on their headlights, I saw what seemed a cluster of great towers. There was nothmg else to see, nothing at all.

  Benito's evil counsel had brought me this far. Now it was too late. I could get back a little way, probably to the fifth pit, possibly as far as the cliff. But I'd never talk Geryon into taking me up that cliff... and there were just too many places where Allen Carpentier might belong.

  Could I talk the monster into summoning Minos? That could get me all the way back to the Vestibule. Yeah, and into the bottle again. If I were lucky. I hadn't forgotten that burrowing this far into Hell might be a crime in itself. Minos had told me that I could choose far worse for myself than "justice." Maybe I'd already made the choice.

  Or... I could just sit down. In this empty borderland I could spend a good piece of eternity before some angel noticed me.

  I sat down.

  It was very peaceful.

  It was, in fact, the only completely empty spot I'd seen in Hell. Why? Maybe it was reserved for some brand new sin, something that hadn't been invented yet... say, a development of brain research or genetics. At some time in the indefinite future I might have to vacate fast.

  Meanwhile, it was better than the bottle. I could see my navel.

  Time passed without leaving footprints. Days, I think. The stinks of Hell were still in my nostrils. The ever-present background noise might have been soothing if I hadn't known what it was: millions of moans and cries blended by distance. But nobody was hurting me or hurting at me.  I didn't have to watch people getting sliced up, or burned, or riddled by diseases, or smashed by demon cars, or distorted into obscene shapes.

  I sat and dreamed of the past. I wondered idly about the looming towers I could see in the dark distance. I wondered at Benito's ultimate purpose in luring me here. But none of it seemed to matter. I thought that even curiosity had been burned out of me.

  That would have been nice. I would have liked to turn my mind off for a long time. But it wouldn't turn off. Whatever quiet I'd found here, there was still Hell around me, and I hurt with the need to know why.

  God had created human souls; could He not uncreate the failures? God had created sleep; could He not put the failures to sleep, forever? There were no good excuses for Hell. I thought of some unsettling bad ones:

  The universe would fly off its axis if Hell's agony did not balance Heaven's bliss.

  Or: Part of Heaven's bliss was the knowledge that lots of nasty people were suffering terribly.

  Or the old standby: We were in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism.

  I got restless. The towers kept catching at my eye: blurred gray shadows on the horizon. Skyscrapers? A city in Hell? Quarters to house the maintenance crew for Infernoland? Or were they the true entrance, the tourist entrance?

  But I was only playing with plots. I didn't believe in Infernoland anymore. This was Hell, and I knew it. I finally realized what was really bothering me.

  To all intents and purposes I was back in the bottle.

  I got up. I walked toward the towers. No harm in looking.

  ***

  They weren't towers.

  They were giants, enormous humanoids, buried in the earth from the navel down. I stopped well out of their reach to study them. Their enormous eyes found me and pinned me to the landscape like a butterfly on a board, then shifted away. I was not worth their attention.

  I was glad. Unreasonably I felt that those tremendous deep eyes could see everything there was to know about me.

  One was mad. He looked down at me hopefully and said, "Ilfurb fistenant imb?" His face fell when I did not respond. Alien language, alien being. What were these aliens doing in human Hell?

  Not serving Big Juju. Not hardly. Miles of chain bound their arms to their sides.

  There were giants in the Bible and Titans in mythology. But no archaeologist had ever found human bones this size. And how could they survive Earth's gravity? The square-cube law should have flattened them into mountains of hamburger.

  Maybe they weren't from this universe at all. An attacking army from another universe made by another creator? The science-fiction writer in me, the late Allen Carpentier, wanted very much to see their legs and feet. They must be disproportionately large and sturdy to support their weight... unless they had developed in a lighter gravity field...

  While Carpentier the trapped damned soul was examining the chains that wrapped another of the giants.

  For the giants were buried just outside a chin-high wall: their chins, not mine. The wall looked too smooth to climb. I walked up to the chained giant, ready to jump, but it wasn't necessary. The chain looked like anchor cable. Whoever had wrapped it round him had a fine eye for detail. He'd have been lucky to shrug his eyebrows.

  Now, what would Benito have done here? Climbed the giant, of course.

  The thought of climbing such a monster gave me pause. Yet I was sure I could do it. Up the chain, stepping in the links, as far as his shoulder; beware of snapping teeth. Then onto the wall and down.

  If Benito had told the truth... if what I remembered of Dante was true... I would then be in the last Circle of Hell, the Circle of Traitors. Traitors to nation, to overlord, to benefactor, to parents and siblings. A great ice plain, and the traitors embedded in it. There would be nothing but the cold to stop me from crossing it, and I knew I couldn't freeze to death.

  It looked so easy. What had Benito left out?

  I remembered the great ice plain well enough. The college boy had been jolted at finding part of Hell already frozen over. Benito hadn't said anything that jarred with my own memories of Dante.

  But there had to be a joker in the deck somewhere. Benito had been a power in Hell. He'd given orders to others of Hell's minions. He'd demonstrated demonic strength against a tank of a man in the great swamp.

  Carpender, why didn't he do that to you?

  Maybe it was guilt that stopped him. He'd writhed and torn at the ground, but he hadn't actually hit me, not once. He'd uprooted jagged rocks while trying to use them as anchors, but he hadn't tried to hit me with them. And for all his presumed safe-conduct, he was back where Minos had sentenced him, with the Evil Counselors.

  Maybe Satan or God or Big Juju had rendered some kind of judgment against Benito. With me as the agent.

  But why hadn't Benito fought?

  The giant tried to shake himself. The chains barely rustled.

  No danger there.

  You writhe and you struggle, but there's no way around it. Me too, giant. From every possible direction it looked the same. It was going to be unreasonably easy for Allen Carpentier to enter the Circle of Traitors... the place of punishment for those who had betrayed their benefactors.

  I thought it over for a long time. Then I turned and started back.

  CHAPTER 24

  Going back was harder. The dip at the lower end of the tenth bridge was steeper, and now I was climbing it. I crossed the pit without looking down and climbed backward down the high end of the bridge.

  I saw the next bridge close by, and made for it.

  A sword's point flicked up before my eyes. I stopped. Surely he'd been under a different bridge? I'd skewed my path deliberately. But a half-human, half-bestial head beyond the sword's point shook itself negatively.

  "You can't go back, Carpenter."

  "I have to."

  The blade hung before me, rock-steady. I could have chinned myself on it. I half-stepped forward and the blade moved too fast to follow. Now it pricked the tip of my nose.

  I shrugged and turned back.

  I took no chances. I crossed the inner pit again and circled through the wasteland beyond. Two bridges away, I crossed again-- on my belly. I slid down the high end of the bridge and kept crawling along the ridge above the ninth pit. He couldn't be under all the bridges.

  Couldn't he just. Like the damned clerk. He was waiting when I tried to stand up. At this, the low side of the pit, he had the angle on me. "You can't go uphill," he said. "I really don't know how to make it plainer."

  "I'm from the Vestibule," I said. "I don't belong here."

  "You never created your own church, Carpenter?"

  Oh, dammit! "Listen, those weren't in competition with God or anybody! All I did was make up some religions for aliens. If that was enough you'd have every science-fiction writer who ever lived!"

  "We've got him," said the demon, and he pointed with the sword.

  I forgot the sword entirely. I leaned far out over the edge of the pit to see. "What in Hell-- to coin a phrase-- is that?"

  It was, in a sense, the last word in centaurs. At one end was most of what I took for a trilobite. The head of the trilobite was a gristly primitive fish. Its head was the torso of a bony fish... and so on up the line, lungfish, proto-rat, bigger rat, a large smooth-skinned beast I didn't recognize, a thing like a gorilla, a thing like a man, finally a true man. None of the beasts had full hindquarters except the trilobite; none had a head except the man. The whole thing crawled along on flopping fish-torsos and forelegs and hands, a tremendous unmatched centipede. The human face seemed quite mad.

  "He founded a religion that masks as a form of lay psychiatry. Members try to recall previous lives in their presumed animal ancestry. They also recall their own past lives... and that adds an interesting blackmail angle, because those who hear confession are often more dedicated than honorable. Excuse me."

  For the line of victims had bunched up while we talked. The demon turned and sliced at them rapidly, to a tune of scream and curses. The centaur creature he sliced into its separate components, and it went past him in a parade, on arms and forelegs and wriggling fishy fins. The sword flicked up again just as I'd decided to make a break for it.

  A bead of blood formed at the tip of my nose. "I'm not like him," I said quickly. "He played the game for real. With me it was just a game." I backed away until the tenth bolgia was an emptiness beneath my heels. He couldn't reach me now. "Take the Silpies. They were humanoid but telepaths. They believed they had one collective soul, and they could prove it! And the Sloots were slugs with tool-using tentacles developed from their tongues. To them, God was a Sloot with no tongue. He didn't need a tongue; He didn't eat, and He could create at will, by the power of His mind." I saw him nodding and was encouraged. "None of this was more than playing with ideas."

  The demon was still nodding. "Games played with the concept of religion. Enough such games and all religions might look equally silly."

  "You can't do this!" I shouted. "Listen, there's a friend of mine in the Eighth Bolgia, and it's my fault he's there, and I've got to get him out!"

  "Did anyone promise you it would be easy? Or even possible?"

  "Whatever it takes," I said, and thought I meant it.

  "Step closer."

  I walked to the edge. Carpentier shows his good faith.

  The sword flashed twice. I heard and felt the tip grate along my ribs. It left two vertical slashes along my chest and belly. I reeled back with my arms wrapped around myself to bold my guts in.

  The demon was watching me steadily. What could he be waiting for?

  I knew. I stepped forward and dropped my arms. Carpentier shows his inability to learn.

  The sword flashed twice more, leaving two deep horizontal slashes, perhaps mortally deep. A living man would have fainted from shock. I couldn't.

  "Games," said the big evil humanoid. "Your move."

  I studied the slashes and the flowing blood. Shock did seem to be slowing down my thought processes, but presently I saw what he meant. I said, "What do I use for a pencil?"

  "You'll think of something."

  I studied my fingernails. I thought of something.

  I gouged a ragged X in the top left square of the diagram. The sword flashed to place an 0 in an adjacent corner.

  ***

  I climbed the first slope of the bridge on fingers and toes. When I could walk I held my arms wrapped around myself, holding me in. The pride of my victory seemed excessive tor a stupid game of tick-tack-toe.

  As I left the bridge I heard him call, "Carpenter?"

  I turned my head.

  "Best two out of three?"

  My imagination was dead of shock. The only dirty word I could think of was one I'd never use again, not after seeing the place of the flatterers. I just kept walking along the rim.

  The eighth pit was a canyon filled with firelight. "Benito!" My voice echoed hollowly between the canyun walls. "Benito!"

  Some of the flames wavered. Thrumming voices, retarded by the transfer from voice to flame tip, floated upward.

  "Leave the damned to suffer alone."

  "Benito who?"

  "Bug off, you!"

  The canyon stretched endlessly away in both directions in a gentle curve. If it was a full circle, it could hold millions. How was I to find Benito?

  "Benito!" There was panic in my voice. The strain hurt my slashed chest. "Benito!"

  "Benito Mussolini? He just passed me going that way--"

  "No, it was the other direction."

  "You're both wrong. Mussolini's in the boiling lake."

  A fat lot of help I'd get here. And if I found him, what then? How was I going to get him out?

  How did he get out in the first place? Maybe he'd already left again. A frustrating thought, because I couldn't do a thing about it, and it would mean I'd played my game with the demon for nothing. I hoped Benito was already out, but I had to assume he was still in there.

  The canyon wasn't all that deep. What I needed was a climber's rope. Yeah, an asbestos one, stupid! Benito was on fire! For that matter, I hadn't seen any ropes anywhere.

  I thought for a second about the chain on the giant. It would mean passing the demon twice--

  No. Even if I got the chain loose, it was too heavy to move, and the freed giant would probably crush me for my trouble. I was glad I didn't have to decide to face the demon's sword again. I don't know what I would have done.

  Well? Think, Carpentier! There are tools in Hell. Sure, boats carry rope. Now we're getting somewhere. A heavy rope, kept wet while Benito climbs- Wait a minute. Haw do we climb the cliff when there's no rope yet? There haven't been any boats since the gaudy alien Geryon took us down. Tackle. Geryon again?

  And if it doesn't work, back in the bottle while Benito burns?

  Benito was smarter than I was. Maybe he'd think of something. "Benito!"

  Mocking, thrumming voices answered.

  I thought of fourteen feet of sword blade attached to a twenty-foot demon. Disable the demon (with what?), cut the blade loose (how?), send it down to Benito. But could he climb something that sharp? Or would he lose his fingers immediately? Did fingernail burn?

  Waitaminute! There were smaller demons, higher up, carrying iron pitchforks!

  I made for the bridge. In a few steps I was running. If I slowed down I'd want to stop, because I was terrified of what I planned.

  ***

  I was in too much of a hurry. I was trotting toward the base of the tremendous bridge over the chasm of thieves when something flashed scarlet from behind a rock. I turned, frowning...

  ...and there was agony, flashing out from my neck to engulf me and drown me. I felt my bones soften and bend.

  The pain drew back like a broken wave receding, but it left a blackened mind. I was confused; I couldn't think. A homely bearded man bent over me, saying urgent words that made no sense.

  "Which way is out?" He was huge, I realized. A giant. I stepped toward him-- and I was tiny and four-legged; my belly scraped the ground. A lizard. I was a lizard.

  The bearded man repeated himself, enunciating each word. "Which Way is out? How can I leave Hell?"

  Vengeance. I advanced on him. Bite the son of a bitch! He backed away, still talking, but I couldn't understand him.

  He stopped and seemed to brace himself.

  I leapt. I sank my teeth into his belly. He howled, and I dropped to the ground, writhing in new agony.

  When my mind cleared I was a man. I rolled away fast from the red lizard and didn't stop until there was a rock between us. The lizard stayed where he was, watching me.

  I was making for the next bridge when his words came back to me. My dumb reptile brain had registered them only as sounds.

  "You can't speak!" he'd wailed. Then, "Tell me! I'll let you bite me, but tell me the way out!"

  He was a scarlet splash on a gray rock. Still watching me.

  I pointed downslope, toward the lake of ice. "There! All the way to the center, if I haven't been lied to myself!"

  I glanced back once after I'd crossed the next bridge. The lizard was poised on the rim, staring down. As I watched, he made his decision. He leapt into the pit.

  Now what was that all about? Never mind, Carpentier, you've got other concerns...

CHAPTER 25

  Far below me, the golden monks stood like so many statues. Every couple of seconds one or another would rock forward as if its base were unstable. The broken bridge dropped in a cascade of rock.

  I stopped to catch my breath (Habit, Carpentier! You could give that up), then went down the broken slope with some care. It would have been easy to break an ankle.

  I had reached the floor of the canyon before I noticed that one of the monks bad turned completely around to stare at me. His slate-gray eyes were the oldest, the weariest I had ever seen, and I recognized them.

  He said, "Didn't you pass here a week ago?"

  "A few days, I think. And you've only come this far?"

  "We hurry as fast as we can." The gray eyes studied me. They were so tired; they made me want to sag down and rest. "May I ask, what game are you playing? Are you a courier or something equally unlikely?"

  "No. I--" Why not tell the truth? He wasn't about to run tell someone. "I've got to steal a pitchfork from one of the ten-foot demons in the next pit over."

  "Don a cloak like mine," he said. "See what it does to your sense of humor."

  I sank down against the bank. Those tired eyes... "I'll wear the cloak," I said. "You get Benito out of the Pit of the Evil Counselors. Okay?"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I pushed a good friend into the Pit of the Evil Counselors. If I can't--"

  "But why would you do a thing like that?"

  I howled. It startled me more than him. I'd been about to say something else entirely. But no words came, and I threw back my head and howled. The tears streamed down my face.

  The monk said something in a foreign language. He tottered toward me and stopped. He didn't know what to do. "There, there," he said. "It will be all right. Don't cry." With a touch of bitterness he added, "Everyone will notice."

  There was a howl as big as the world inside me. It wanted out, and it was stronger than I was. I howled.

  The priest muttered to himself. Aloud he said, "Please. Please don't do that. If you will only stop crying, I will help you got your pitchfork."

  I shook my head. I got out a whimpered, "How?"

  He sighed. "I cannot even take off my robe. I do not see how I can help. Perhaps I could act as bait somehow?" He lifted his head, his teeth grinding with the effort, to look up along the cascade of broken rock.

  I stood up. I patted him on his leaden back: Clunk, clunk, clunk. "You've got your own problems." I girded up my mental loins and started up the slope.

  Loose rocks rolled under my feet. This was the high side of the gully. It took a long time to get to the top. I had just one advantage: part of the bridge still projected out from the cliff. I climbed in its shadow and stopped underneath. I waited.

  After all, what could a demon do to me? Rip me to pieces? I'd heal.

  Drop me into the pitch forever?

  Throw me into the Pit of the Thieves?

  One of the horned black demons strolled past, his head turned to study the pitch on the other side of the ridge. He held six yards of iron pitchfork balanced in one hand. All I had to do was leap out and grab it.

  I let him go. When he was past I began to shake. The beast had three-inch claws, ten. And eight-inch tusks, two. And Carpentier was a coward.

  I heard clanking and puffing below me. I turned and saw an amazing sight. The priest was coming up behind me.

  I watched him. I didn't believe it, but it was true: he was actually in motion. He sounded as if he were dying again, but every so often his hand or his foot would move and he'd be two inches higher. When I finally made myself believe what was happening, I scrambled down the cliff, got under him and pushed up on the rigid hem of his robe. I doubt it helped. I might as well have been trying to lift the world.

  We reached a flattish fragment of rock just under what was left of the bridge. There we rested. The death rattle was in his throat. His eyes were closed. His face glistened.

  "Thousand years," he got out. "Been walking... thousand years... in this lead coffin. Legs like trees." Then, "Was a priest. A priest. Supposed to... keep people out of Hell."

  "I still don't know how we're going, to do it." The we was courtesy, and he deserved it. But what could he do?

  "Get me up," he said.

  I got my arms under his robe. It was warm. Together we got him upright, somehow. Then I looked up... at a demon's hooves.

  The demon looked down at us, grinning. "You know," he said pleasantly, "you're the first one ever got this far out of the tar."

  I said, "You're making a mistake. I'm not..." Then I leapt for it. The pitchfork struck sparks from the rock where I'd been, but I was in midair, falling.

  I landed hard on a ragged-edged boulder. I rolled immediately, ready to dodge again.

  The priest was gripping the business end of the pitchfork!

  The demon bellowed and pulled. For an instant he had lifted the priest off the rock, robe and all. Then the priest sagged back, still gripping the tines.

  I tried to climb up to help.

  The priest took two steps back and off the edge of the rock.

  The demon bellowed for help. He was trying to lift half a ton of leaden robe, and it wasn't working out. I had almost reached them when the demon cried out and let go. The priest dropped through space.

  I crawled down to him.

  The robe was bent like tinsel and cracked down the front. The edges glowed yellow. He'd been told wrong; the robe was solid gold. When I touched it it burned my fingers.

  The priest was mangled inside. He looked violently dead, except for his eyes, which followed me. If I didn't get him out of the robe he'd fry. But you don't move an accident victim--

  He'll heal, Carpentier. We all heal, to be hurt again. I pulled him out by his feet. The robe wasn't contoured to let him pass, but it didn't matter. He came out like a jellyfish. He must have broken every bone in his body.

  I spoke, not to the soft-looking head but to the gray eyes alone. "You'll heal. When you heal, there's a way out of Hell. Benito says so. Go downhill. Downhill."

  The eyes blinked.

  "I've got to rescue Benito," I said. I pulled him over to the side so nobody would step on him. I picked up the pitchfork and left.

  ***

  "Benito!"

  I walked the ridge between the pits, calling like a lost soul. The answering voices all sounded the same, anonymous, thrumming, inhuman. "Here I am, fellah!" "Benito who?" "Who dares disturb the silence of Hell?"

  "Benito!"

  "Allen?"

  That had to be him! But a dozen voices took it up.

  "Allen!" "Here I am, Allen! What kept you?"

  "Benito! I've come to get you out!"

  I listened for the Italian accent... and heard it.

  "Never mind. I belong here. I should not have tried to leave."

  All the flames looked alike, but I thought I had him placed now. I reached down with the pitchfork. "Bugger that! Grab the end!"

  The other flames were wandering off. Benito said, "It is not long enough in any case."

  It wasn't. I looked along the rim. There was a rough place where I might climb down partway.

  Benito tried to stop me. "You are being stupid. If you fall, you will burn like the rest of us!"

  "Can you reach the end?"

  "Go away, Allen. This is my proper place."

  I was ten feet below the rim and almost out of footholds. The pitchfork was heavy and awkward. I tried to go further, setting my feet very carefully.

  "All right," Benito said suddenly. The huge flame moved to engulf the. tines. I felt a feather touch on the haft, and the flame began to rise from the pit.

  He called, "Can you hold me?"

  I laughed wih relief. "You don't weigh as much as an ounce! I could lift a thousand of you!" After all I'd been through, suddenly it was going to be easy.

  The flame rose higher along the haft... and I felt the first warming of the metal.

  I waited until I was sure I could filter the panic from my voice. Some of it may have got through anyway. "Benito? Hurry."

  "Is something wrong?"

  "No, never mind. Just hurry." I was afraid he'd let go.

  The metal was uncomfortably warm.

  It grew hot.

  Down there where a huge flame was rising in dreamy sloth, the metal began to glow dull red. He wouldn't notice; his own bright flame would blind him to it. Up here it was too hot to hold, but I held on, my teeth clenched against the scream.

  The scream grew bulky in my throat. I stopped breathing to hold it in. If Benito gave up now to save me pain, I'd never, never find the courage to do this twice.

  The metal was cherry red around the flame. My hands began to sizzle. I wasn't breathing, but the smell of cooked meat worked its way into my nose. I couldn't imagine how my hands still held. I was clenching them with everything I had, but the muscles and nerves must be cooked through. Charred through. I knew that smell too: dinner ruined. My head was thrown back, my eyes clenched tight. There was no sensation but the fire.

  "You can let go," said Benito. He was beside me, clinging to the cliff, his body no longer hidden by the flame.

  I tried to let go.

  My hands were charred fast to the haft. I tried to knock the pitchfork loose. It came loose, all right, and slid bumping into the eighth bolgia with my charred hands still attached.

  Benito had to virtually lift me up the cliff.

  CHAPTER 26

  We went inward. I followed Benito, nursing my charred wrists. He had to haul me up the last bridges by the slagk of my robe. The pain never stopped. The nerves gave no sign of having been cauterized by the red-hot iron. The charred bone broke away; the black flesh split to expose red flesh.

  It'll heal, Carpentier.

  Oh, shut up. And call me Carpenter. Carpentier the Famous Author is dead.

  In the empty borderland between the tenth pit and the giants, we sat down. Presently Benito spoke. "Thank you."

  "Yeah. I'm sorry I pushed you in."

  He didn't say anything. I said, "I thought I had to do it. I thought it was right."

  Still nothing. "Look," I said, "I was raised to believe that Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler were identical monsters."

  Benito sighed. "Sometimes, toward the end, perhaps we were. I didn't start that way. I meant well." He laughed bitterly. "I had good intentions. We know what is said to be paved with those."

  "Tell me about it."

  He spoke musingly, without looking at me. "After the war I saw my country humiliated. No one believed in anything. Corruption everywhere, laboring people working against wealthy people, middle class working against the government, everyone fighting each other and everyone ruining each other. If they'd only work together-- we were Romans, once. We ruled the world. We could be great again, instead of a joke for Clemenceau and Lloyd George to swat aside."

  "So you made people work together?"

  "I gave Italy hope. For years I even stopped Hitler from taking Austria. Allen, if I'd chosen the side of the Allies in the second war, would I have as great a place in history as Stalin?"

  I couldn't say anything to that.

  "Yet he killed ten million peasants. Adolf never equaled that record. As for me, in the early days we used castor oil, not clubs." He sighed. "But you can never stop, once you begin seeing what is better for people than they know themselves. The opposition will make a thorough mess of everything you've done, and you know they will destroy the country. What do you do? Destroy the opposition. Now they really have grievances. Bigger opposition, more police needed to suppress them. But I meant well. I loved my people to the day they killed me."

  "'The purpose of power is power.'"

  "What?" Benito was badly shocked.

  "Never mind. Quote from a novel, Nineteen Eighty-four. So then you tried to set up a government here?"

  "For my sins, I did." Benito's sudden laugh was like my own howling in the sixth bolgia: there was an agonized laugh in him, and it clawed its way through his throat. "Oh, Allen! And you think you've seen Hell! A government among the Evil Counselors-- When I tried to get out they stopped me; they needed me as figurehead. Never mind, I got out anyway. I had to."

  "But you never did anything but good for me. Or anyone else you met, down here."

  "How are your hands?"

  We looked. Two tiny infant's fists were forming at the lumpy bones of my wrists. "We must wait until they heal. You will never climb with those!" He laughed.

  We sat and talked. Hours went by.

  "I think the worst was when they shot my cabinet people. Italians shooting men whose only crime was to love Italy and trust me--" He shuddered. "Those are strange scars on your chest."

  "I had to play games with the demon in the tenth bolgia." Funny, we didn't see him, coming back.

  "Games?"

  Reluctantly I told him. It could have been embarrassing, but it wasn't. He didn't thank me again. Instead he smiled and said, "Do you still believe that Hell is a place of entertainment?"

  "No. I didn't even then. I think Geryon convinced me."

  "Geryon?"

  "Yeah. You may not have noticed, but Geryon is the only nonhuman in Hell who really looks like an ET, an extraterrestrial, something from another world. He's consistent. Not like those patchwork demons, animal traits grafted on a human frame. And when I climbed aboard him I kicked machinery around his waist."

  "So?"

  I had to laugh. "Oh, really, Benito! An antigravity belt? When they've already proved they can take the  mass and weight out of anything they like? Geryon was lying. Lying without saying a word."

  "And it was Geryon that convinced you? You have seen no proper miracles?"

  "I saw one."

  I told him where the pitchfork had come from. "That priest climbed the broken bridge in half a ton of gold. He hung from the demon's pitchfork until the demon had to let go, and he knew what would happen then."

  Benito smiled. "Yes, that was a miracle."

  "Too right. I know a miracle when I see one."

  "Then you are more fortunate than most of us." He looked thoughtful. "Geryon has looked a little different each time I have seen him."

  "That worried me too. Just how often have you made this trip?"

  "Six times. Each has been easier for me, although not for the one who accompanied me to the exit. As I told you, it does not matter how many start. Only one leaves."

  "And there really is a way out... There was a time when I thought you were just leading me into something more horrible. I'm still scared, but not of that."

  "Now there remains only the lake of ice. You have nothing to fear."

  "I'm afraid to relax. Too often I've thought I was through the worst part."

  His look probed my soul. "When the iron began to grow warm in your hands--"

  "Tell me all about it."

  "I think not. But now there is only the ice. It will be colder than anything you can imagine, but we can endure it. Nothing can bar us now! Soon we reach the center, and then--" He stopped.

  "And then?"

  "You will see." He looked me in the face. "I think you have enough courage."

  "Even now I feel it leaking away. Spit it out, Benito."

  "We will meet Lucifer and pass him. Ignore anything he says. When we have passed that, go uphill to Purgatory." He paused. "Without me."

  "But you've traveled this route? You know where it leads?"

  "No, and yes. I have not traveled it, but I know where it leads."

  "How?"

  "By faith, and by Dante's description."

  "Dante's been wrong a couple of times. Admit it, Benito: you don't know what happened to those six you rescued."

  "I know. But I have not seen."

  "Do you want to leave Hell? Or are you afraid of what's tihere?"

  "How are your hands?"

  They were a child's hands now, still too small to support my weight.

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "I would leave Hell if I could. I belong here, so long as there are lost souls to oe rescued."

  "You sent six men and women into the unknown, but you were afraid to go yourself."

  He didn't answer, only looked at me.

  I stood up. "Come on. My hands'll heal before we need them."

  ***

  They healed.

  We climbed the torso of a chained giant. It was easier than mountain climbing, and harder: mountains don't shake, mountains don't snap at you with teeth the size of medieval shields. We stepped across space from the giant's shoulder to the flat top of, a wall. From the wall I watched Benito slide down on the seat of his pants-- if he'd been wearing pants. A pity he hadn't found a better way down in six previous trips.

  I slid after him.

  Imagine one of the Great Lakes frozen over, seen on a moonless night. Maybe it looked like that. I'd never seen any of the Great Lakes. To me it was an ice-skating rink for a society of teleports: big enough to hold, say, one percent of a population of five billion. The wall behind me seemed arrow-straight; the dark ice, infinite.

  A breath of a breeze whispered around us and leeched all the warmth from our massless souls. I stiffened with the shock, then crouched down and tried to shelter in my own arms.

  Benito was standing. "That will not help. Nothing helps," he said patiently. "You must bear the cold."

  If he could do it... I stood up and closed my eyes tight against the soft, unreasonably cold breeze. Surely it was below freezing, way below freezing. How cold was it? If it could kill a man in minutes, or seconds, I'd never know it. I couldn't die.

  "Benito? Burst into flame again for your good friend."

  "I would if I could. My apologies, Allen." Benito took my arm. We walked.

  It had certainly been worth asking.

  Was it water ice we walked on? For all of me, it could have been dry ice, or frozen nitrogen, or something even colder.

  I kicked something that cursed me without emotion. I tried to open my eyes. The wind's tears had frozen them shut. I pulled them open, painfully, with my fingers.

  "Leave them open," Benito said without pity, "and they will freeze open."

  When the urge came to blink I fought it. Then there was no need, for my eyes would not close. I looked back at what I'd kicked. I said, "Sorry."

  The face was handsome, photogenic, dignified in middle age, undignified in the way it grimaced and bent to the ice for shelter. Had I seen that face sometime, on television? Maybe. The man was buried to his chin in the ice. At the sound of my voice he cried, "Wait! Are you American?"

  "Aren't we all? I can't seem to find anything but."

  The head called to another head sitting like a cabbage on the ice. "George! Maybe we can settle this now." It turned back to me. "Late American? Do you know anything about the ABM controversy?"

  "Sure. Antiballistic missiles to knock down incoming missiles. The controversy was over whether to build the ABM system."

  "Wonderful! All right, sir. George was a Democrat, and I was a Republican. The Democrats were against building the system. The Republicans were in favor of it. But which of us was right?"

  "I haven't the faintest idea," I said. "Do you really have nothing better to talk about than that?"

  "No!" the man I'd kicked said sharply. "We do not! One of us had to be right! So why are we both here?"

  The cold wasn't just getting to me; it had gotten me. I wanted out, not conversation. I said, "Other crimes, maybe."

  "One of us was wrong," George said. "Senator Gates here thought the system was a waste of money, but he went along with his party. He--"

  "It was more than a waste of money! It used up efforts we could have spent on a laser system! Sir, I've seen how accurate a laser defense system could be against incoming missiles. But politics dictated that I must support the ABM system. I went along."

  "I don't know anything about the darned lasers," George said, "except they were highly experimental. Experimental weapons did a lot for the Nazis, didn't they?" He snorted contempt, then sneezed on the freezing air. "I was convinced that the ABM system was needed to defend the country against an atomic attack. But our party platform was in favor of military cutbacks. Officially, so was I."

  "Now, sir," Senator Gates said to me, "we can't both have been wrong."

  "I think rm getting the picture. You both thought you were wrong."

  "...Yes."

  "And a mistake could wipe out the United States of America."

  Neither answered.

  "For what it's worth," I said, "we're still getting Americans in Hell. Corbett died much later than you."

  "Thank you," said ex-Senator Gates, "and they both turned their faces to the ice again.

  "But you were both traitors in your minds."

  "Thank you for your help," said ex-Senator George. it was a dismissal.

  We walked with care, to avoid kicking heads. There were certainly enough of them. But now it was worse; here the dead had been buried supine, and we would have been stepping on faces.

  Once I missed my step and came down hard on a human face. The ice across its eyes crackled under my feet, and I leapt back fast. "Sorry!"

  "Thanks," I heard.

  "Mistake."

  "Thanks, oh, thanks," it said, weeping. "I haven't cried in years. The damned ice froze across my eyes, and I couldn't cry. Thanks."

  I felt awful. This was an awful place. "That's okay," I said. I bent and picked the remaining shards of ice from her eyes. "What'd you do?"

  "I don't want to say."

  Okay.

  I tore the ice visors from a couple of dozen pairs of eyes. Always they froze over again almost immediately. Only one ever said "Thanks." Finally I gave it up. There were just too many.

  And the next head I passed screamed, "The ice! Stupid! Tear off the ice! You did it for the others!"

  I stopped. "Who're you?"

  "None of your business!"

  I turned away.

  "The ice! Wait! Al Capone, I'm Al Capone! You want names? That's Vito Genovese, trying to turn his face! Wait, I'll show you Lepke! Wait!" He was shouting against a chorus of voices trying to drown him out. I kept walking.

  When the noise was behind us Benito said, "I knew Vito Genovese."

  "Was he worth talking to?"

  "No. Were you thinking of going back? It's cold, Allen."

  Sound whispered all around us. Partly it was the breeze, which had stiffened. Partly it was the chattermg of teeth. I'd suppressed that reflex in myself; it wasn't warming me at all.

  But in all that expanse of ice, there was only one point of motion. I caught it in the corner of my eye, way off to one side. Doubted my senses. Kept looking. Saw it again.

  "Benito?" I pointed.

  He found it. "I had no idea. I thought I was the only one."

  "You may be. It seems to be one man. And a dog."

  They had noticed us, and they angled to meet us. As they came closer I saw my mistake. The dog was a lizard, its scarlet color leeched from it by the cold. And the man was the black-bearded thief who had stolen my shape at the seventh pit.

  We studied each other. No greeting seemed appropriate. Finally I gestured and said, "Benito Mussolini. I'm Allen Carpenter."

  "Jesse James. This lizard is Bob Ford."

  "What was that all about that business there at the bridge?"

  "A bunch of us got together," said Jesse. "We thought maybe we could cooperate in getting one of us out. It turned out a man couldn't throw a lizard far enough. But we could stand a human pyramid against one of the walls, and the top man could throw a lizard at the bridge. I was the lizard."

  "Funny nobody thought of it before."

  He sighed. "It's getting those animals to work together, that's the problem. All the time we were trying to make the pyramid, some of us in the lizard form kept biting the ones in human form. We didn't get anything done till we had a dozen big lizards to guard us while we made the pyramid."

  "Figures. Why'd you jump back?"

  "I had to tell them which way was out."

  "You might not have got out again. They might not even have let you take human form again."

  He nodded.

  I remembered something. A line from a song. "It was little Robert Ford, that dirty little coward, I wonder how does he feel, for he ate of Jesse's bread, and he slept in Jesse's bed, and he laid Jesse James in his grave-- "Bob Ford. Didn't he kill you? Shot

  you while you were taking a bath?"

  "Hanging a picture. Yeah, he shot me, all right. I was following your advice-- for which I thank you, stranger." He laughed. "And there was Bob Ford's head sitting on the ice. I thought it over for a while. I wandered around and around him, wondering what I could do to him, and wondering if I still hated him." The lizard was rubbing affectionately against his leg. "I finally bit him, on the nose."

  It hit me like a stiff shot of good whiskey. "You can get out of the ice!"

  "Sure, friend. I just reached into that man-shaped bubble and picked up a lizard. Well, which way now?"

  "Inward," Benito said. "Let us go. It is cold here."

  That had to be the most unnecessary statement of all time. We moved inward, and the wind came up. It was blowing right in our faces. Pretty soon it was a real howler, as bad as the circle of the winds. I wondered if Corbett had ever got back there...

  The wind whistled past us and lifted Jesse off the ice. The lizard squealed and leaped after him, and the wind caught it too. Man and lizard were bowled end over end across the ice, then lifted and flung high and outward. I watched them dwindle.

  "So close," I said. "They were so close!"

  "They were not ready," Benito said. "Perhaps they must see what is done to others. Theft and treachery may not have been all they did. It is even possible that they will be blown all the way back to the Vestibule and must make their way back. Come."

  "But--"

  "They know the way, Allen. Come!"

  "All right." We bowed our heads against the wind and staggered on. The wind had been entirely too selective for coincidence. It had thrown Jesse and Ford an unguessable distance without knocking me or Benito off our feet. I thought it was a good omen... for us.

  CHAPTER 27

  Suddenly there were no more heads. There was only the ice, and the wind that had blown the others away. We leaned into it and kept moving.

  I said, "Hell has run out of sins?"

  "Look down."

  Hell had not run out of sinners. They were buried beneath the ice in weird positions. Once I looked down, and then no more.

  We walked crouched, wrapped in our own arms, to no purpose. The wind had early sucked every erg of heat out of us.

  I saw motion ahead, high up.

  As we drew near a shadowy mass loomed around the suggestion of motion. Pterodactyls on a mountain? Restless, rhythmic motion, like the wings of enormous birds. And gradually it all came clear.

  There was a humanoid form, a hairy torso more than a mile tall. We stood at the bottom, at waist level, and looked up at three vast faces whose features were almost lost in distance. Bat wings flapped on either side of each face, and the wind was now beating down at our heads.

  This was a very different picture from the dapper gentleman who offers to buy your soul. Or from Milton's epic hero, proud and unrepentant. One could not imagine playing riddles or chess games with this hideous, miserable, helpless mountain. I studied it almost without fear.

  All three pairs of jaws were moving in the same rhythm as the wings. Something fluttered around the lips...

  "Benito, what's he chewing on?"

  "Are you sure you want to know?"

  "Skip it. Which way is out? Hey--" I reached to stop him, not fast enough. Benito was striding straight toward Lucifer.

  He stopped at the edge of the ice.

  The ice ended short of Lucifer himself. There was three feet of empty space all around the enormous waist.

  And no navel. I couldn't have missed it. It would have been big enough to hide a battleship.

  "You must climb down," said Benito.

  I looked into the gap. "After you."

  He shook his head. "I cannot leave. There are others to rescue."

  "I don't go without you."

  "You have not shown such fear before."

  "It's not all fear. You've rescued seven of us, now rescue yourself. You've earned it. If this doesn't lead to where you think it does, we can help each other get back."

  "What if I turn back now, leaving you here?"

  I'd wondered about that myself. "I don't know, and that's the truth. But there's a moral problem. You're a better man than I am--"

  He smiled sardonically. "I? The murderous dictator you pushed into the eighth pit?"

  "You've changed since you reached Hell. You've given me no evil counsel, I guess that's the point. If you haven't changed in Hell, if you haven't earned the right to leave, then I haven't and won't. If you can't go, I can't."

  "I, I think I can go. I choose not to."

  "If you can leave Hell, you'll have to prove it."

  He studied my face... and then he smiled a joyful, luminous smile. He turned and stepped across the gap and had two fistfuls of coarse hair. And a sound beat down at our heads, a wind with an almost subsonic voice in it.

  "Carpenter."

  I looked straight up. Lucifer's middle face was looking down the curve of Lucifer's chest. Two fluttering human legs protruded like a ghastly cigarette from the corner of the mouth. It spoke, and the deep bass voice blew down to me.

  "What will you tell God when you see Him?"

  I didn't answer.

  "Will you tell Him that He could learn morality from Vlad the Impaler?"

  Benito was far below, clinging like a tick in the billowing hair, waiting for me. I stepped across, and worked my way down. As I did my weight seemed to increase, against all the laws of physics. It scared me. I was back in Infernoland, climbing down into the quantum black hole Big Juju had used for artificial gravity...

  Benito looked up at me curiously. "What did he say to you?"

  I shook my head.

  We descended, getting heavier. There was a point where I must have weighed tons, and all of it pushing inward toward my navel. No quantum black hole crushed and swallowed me. I hadn't really expected one.

  Benito worked his way around until his feet pointed at me, and kept climbing. I followed his example.

  Now we climbed up. Once I found breath to laugh at the picture we would have made: two men climbing at least half a mile of hairy leg, like ticks in the Devil's hair. I half-expected to pass a dong the size of the Empire State Building, testicles like twin Astrodomes. There was nothing but hair.

  The climb seemed endless, but it ended, not in ice but in an echoing grotto of gray rock, dimly lit.

  The Devil's hooves still loomed over us, big enough to stamp a city flat.

  We lay on our backs on the smooth rock, panting. Somewhere a running stream made a bright, happy gurgling sound. The dim light came from a single bright pinpoint source overhead. The rock curved inward over our heads, but it never closed. It stretched away like the neck of an inverted funnel, straight up for an unguessable distance.

  Presently I got up and found the stream and drank from it. The water was clear and sweet. There is the peace of deep sleep, and once I had thought there would be peace in death. I drank again, then lay with my fingers trailing in the water. Peace in death: I'd found it.

  But Benito was on his feet. "Onward!" he cried, and began to climb. The handholds were not difficult, and he moved like a spider monkey, or like a fat man who no longer weighs anything at all.

  He looked down from the inward-tilting gray slope of grotto roof. "A four-thousand-mile climb, if Dante was half right!" he bellowed cheerfully. "Are you coming?"

  "I'm afraid not."

  "What did you say?"

  "No."

  I sighed in exasperation when I saw him climbing back down, but I'd half-expected it. He dropped the last few feet, and it did seem he fell like a settling balloon, too slowly. "What was it Satan said to you?"

  "He asked me what I would say to God."

  "Well?"

  "I have to know something before I can speak to God at all."

  Benito waited.

  "I have to know the purpose of Hell."

  "Come and ask Him!"

  "You don't get it. Every torture in Hell was too much, too late. Punishment? But it's infinite punishment for things that are little in comparison. Dracula caused a lot of people a lot of pain and death, but it ended. George only lied to people to make them buy things! And what about the fat lady in the Vestibule area?

  "What's the point? To teach us a lesson? But we're dead. Revenge, punishment? Completely out of proportion. Balance? Does the universe need as much pain in it as pleasure? I couldn't take Heaven if that was the case."

  "There is a reason, and the reason is good. I know."

  "Yeah? I don't. There's only one possible excuse for Hell, and I almost missed it in the ravings of a crazy psychiatrist. It has to be the final training ground. If nothing can get a soul into Heaven in its life, there's still Hell, God's last attempt to get his attention. Like a catatonic in a hotbox, like me in that bottle, if Hell won't make a man yell for help, then it was still worth a try."

  Benito was nodding. "You may be right. You may have found the purpose of Hell."

  "Yeah. Yeah, but do you see where it leaves me? Everyone in Hell has to be able to leave once he's learned enough about himself. Everyone, even the trees in the Wood of the Suicides, even the poor devils in the boiling pitch and the sullen types anchored under the lake. Even the ones who think they're satisfied, the ones in the First Circle. And I can't leave Hell until I'm sure they can do it."

  Benito nodded. "We go back."

  "No, no, you idiot!" I was furious. "How can I tell anyone he can leave unless I know you did it? You're going up! And I'm going to watch you do it!"

  He thundered, "Carpenter, you must still learn humility!"

  "Granted. And you?"

  "But they need me. They... ah. They have you."

  "They have me." I put out my hand. "Goodbye, Benito. Good luck. I hope you find--"

  He stepped past my hand and wrapped his arms around me and squeezed all the air out of me. I said something like "Huff!" and hugged him back. We held the embrace for a long moment. Then Benito released me and turned away fast-- I couldn't see his face-- and started climbing.

  I lay flat on the rock and looked up. At the end of the vertical tube, the pinpoint light source had all but vanished, leaving Benito nearly invisible. Many hours later the light brightened again, and I knew I was seeing the sun. Benito was a dark fleck that moved if I watched it long enough.

  He had made good progress before the light dimmed and went out.

  The water sounds burbled back from the rock walls.

  I lay with my arms folded behind my head, taking joy in laziness. The peace of this place was almost tangible. Worrying seemed inappropriate here: a breach of good manners.

  What did they do to Billy? Did the priest get out all right? How could any thinking being do such a thing to Mrs. Herrnstein? I've got to get back.

  But I felt no sense of urgency. The damned had all the time there was, and so did I. Hell was the violent ward of a hospital for the theologically insane. Some could be cured.

  I would have to return to Hell. I was afraid of that; not afraid of the pains, or that the demons would catch me, because the pains would heal, and pain in the right cause is a badge of honor. As to the demons, there'd be no chance they could hold me. Not now. I knew.

  No. My fear was of the doubts that would return.

  They would come, and I'd just have to live with them, and fight them with my memory of these few moments of peace. There were no doubts here. None at all. The light was back, and there was a tiny mote in it that moved even as I watched. My eyes were better than human now; else I'd never have seen him at all.

  The light was dimming with sunset when the mote moved out of it and left it clear.