by Larry Niven
Every intern thinks he is the first to see the possibilities. He will lead the resident catatonic to the hospital cafeteria, place him just outside the door, and leave him there with his thumb to his nose or his middle finger rigidly extended. Hilarious!
Sometimes he gets a surprise . . .
I had to stand on her knees to straighten her legs, but finally I got them stretched out in front of her. She was still leaning too far back, her eyes staring at infinity through a half-inch of scummy water. Still standing on her knees for leverage, I reached beneath the water, took her shoulders, and pulled her up to sitting position.
Now she’d be able to breathe.
. . . Sometimes he gets a surprise, your antic intern. He will have just finished adjusting the patient’s hand with thumb properly to nose, when the hand becomes a fist and the fist becomes a missile warhead. Catatonics are hideously strong. They have to be, to hold one position forever.
And she was sitting down. She lashed straight out and tried to punch a hole through my groin. She damned near made it. I whooped and doubled over, sucking air. Sucking, as it turned out, filthy water as I rolled helplessly over into the swamp.
I tried to uncurl. My lungs still wanted to suck water. Inch by inch, I fought my mouth to the surface, drew a lungful of sweet stinking air, and screamed.
Benito was sloshing toward me. I gestured him back. If he dropped the robes to help me, they’d quadruple in weight!
He stopped. I waited for the pain to ease a little, then tried to stand up. When I put weight on my legs it felt like she’d hit me again. I moved toward shore, doubled over.
The woman’s lower lip was just at the surface of the water. She held her arm straight out, fist clenched. “Don’t make waves,” I told her sourly as I passed. She didn’t respond, and she still looked dead. Water streamed from her nose.
I didn’t stop for any more catatonics. Gradually I was able to straighten up. Benito followed patiently, carrying both bundles, both of us wading thigh-deep in water. I ignored the floating garbage. It wasn’t getting me any dirtier than I already was.
The texture of the bottom had changed. Beneath a film of frictionless mud there were tilted slabs that had sharp corners and tended to slide . . . I stopped. Benito stopped behind me.
I said, “Feel that?”
Benito didn’t get it. “What should I feel?”
“Himuralibima’s Ford, that’s what! No telling how far it goes, but it should get us a good distance across the swamp. Here, give me that.” I took one of the bundles and started into the swamp. The footing was chancy, the slabs tended to slide, but it was better than swimming.
And I, feeling that I had earned the right to brag, bragged. “All along I wondered where the dried mud was going. It’d shrink a little when the water evaporated, but even so, that bay is huge. Where do they dump the slabs after Himuralibima gives up? Maybe I’d find a mountain of them. Or maybe they don’t want a pile of ruined clay slabs in their working area. Maybe they’re afraid of getting ticked off for sloppiness.
“So, I was right. Someone’s been dumping the slabs in the bay. Every hundred years he has to walk a little farther. Otherwise they’d show above the surface.”
“Very clever, Allen.”
“Thank kew.” No telling how far it would go, but we were a good distance into the swamp, and the water was only up to our calves. Hold your breath and make a wish, Carpentier. Or just hold your breath, the water could be over your head any second.
W
e were nearly across before it ended. The slabs dipped, and I followed the dip, walking on eggs, with the stack of robes balanced on my head. I was chin deep where the mud turned squishy soft.
So far, so good. I found an underwater ridge and followed that, going waist deep, then higher. I was wading ashore, with Benito behind me, when our luck ran out.
The broad-shouldered man who blocked our path was the same who’d blocked our path before. He shied back when he recognized us, and then he saw our situation and grinned.
I turned back to Benito. “Mind if I try this?”
“If you think it will help.”
“I wrote science fiction, remember? I ought to be able to explain a complicated idea to a moron.”
I hadn’t lowered my voice. The broad-shouldered man advanced on us, saying, “Who’s a moron?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “You’ve worse problems than that. Remember the flying lesson?”
His grin was back. “I’d like to see old Benito try that with his arms full of bedsheets!”
“He won’t be able to,” I said, keeping my speech slow and distinct. “He’ll have to put them down. In the swamp.” Pause. “They’ll get all dirty.” Pause. “Imagine what that will do to his temper.”
I watched his eyes. It was getting through to him. I said, “Why don’t you step aside while you think it over?”
“Some guys would rather talk than fight,” he said contemptuously. He turned and stalked back to his point of high ground.
II
With open and steady wings to the sweet nest
Fly through the air by their volition borne
12
T
hings are definitely looking up for Allen Carpentier.”
“I beg your pardon?” Benito was looking out at the marsh, at decaying trees embedded in fog.
“We’ve got a quiet place to work, I’ve made some flint tools, and there’s everything we need for the glider. What more could we want?”
Benito sighed, and I got back to work. The first job was to find a place to loft the glider. We were on a little area of high ground, no more than thirty yards square and nestled up against the base of the cliff. The bad-tempered character was between us and everyone else. He wouldn’t let anyone else past, and he wasn’t about to bother us. I could just see his back through the mist.
First things first. I used a log to flatten out an area larger than the glider would be, then cut a long springy sapling for a ruler. After a while I had a whole collection of various lengths and thicknesses.
You draw the rough outlines, then spring the batten—in this case one of the saplings—across the important points. That makes a smooth fair curve. It was the way the Wright brothers designed airplanes, and it was the way the Douglas Gooney Bird was designed. It wasn’t until World War II, long after the age of flight was under way, that airplanes were designed on drafting tables. Before that they were designed on the loft floors, the same way that boats were designed for centuries.
I don’t know how long it took me to get it right. I wasn’t in any hurry, and Benito never tried to rush me. After a while he even developed some enthusiasm.
Did you ever try to set up ribs and make them keep their shape by tying them with vines? When the ribs are whatever you can cut off swamp willows? As a lesson in patience the job had few equals . . .
Eventually it looked like a glider. The wings weren’t precisely symmetrical, and the control surfaces pivoted on wooden bearings with dowels shaped by flint knives and thrust into holes enlarged by drill bits; the fabric was sewn with vine tendrils shoved through holes poked with a thorn; but it looked like a glider.
I remembered the cargo cults of the South Seas.
The islanders had been sorry to see the airplanes go after World War II ended. Native magicians had made mockups of airplanes and landing fields. It was sympathetic magic intended to bring back the real airplanes and the great days of cargo and trade. I told Benito about the cargo cults, amusing him greatly, and only later realized what had brought them to mind.
What I was building would never look like more than a crude imitation of an airplane. But it would fly!
I spent as much time making tools as I did working on the sailplane. A bow drill: take one bow, as for shooting arrows; get a good curve in it, and instead of an arrow, take a piece of sapling. Wrap the bowstring around the piece of sapling. You need a hard block in which the top of the sapling chunk will rotate fre
ely because you’ve worn a depression in it. Hold that block in one hand, put the drill where you want it, and draw the bow back and forth with the other hand. In about a week you can drill a hole.
I’d heard that boatbuilders in Asia preferred their bow drills to American electrics. They must have been crazy.
I worked. There were no distractions. The Builders must have altered my body radically. I didn’t get hungry, thirsty, horny, or sleepy, and I never had to go to the bathroom. I wondered what I had become. What was my power source now? A power source with no food intake and no waste outlet? If it was beamed power, Benito and I would be turning ourselves off when we dropped the glider beyond that wall.
Beyond that wall . . . I hadn’t thought much about that. What would we find outside? Dante had described a dark wood, a wilderness. Why not? A low-gravity world, native vegetation allowed to run wild . . .
No guarantees, Carpentier. There might be nothing but Infernoland itself, a tremendous cone built in airless space, with a point mass, a quantum black hole for instance, mounted at the tip to provide gravity. In that case we were dead.
I kept working.
And eventually, there it was. The Fudgesickle, by Carpentier and Company. “This is a demo, madam. The finished model will have many other desirable features, such as landing gear and seats for the crew, and metal fastenings . . .”
“Will that hold together?” Benito didn’t seem particularly worried. His tone was more one of abstract curiosity.
“I think so. We shouldn’t put much strain on it, but I’ve noticed we don’t weigh what we should. Infernoland seems to be built on a lower gravity planet than Earth.”
“Yours is the most curious delusion I have yet encountered here. Well, if it will fly, we may as well try it. The sooner you are done with this idiocy, the sooner we can reach the center and escape.”
I could have killed him. So the Fudgesickle wasn’t a thing of beauty. It would fly! And it was a lot better way out than his.
I didn’t try to kill him for three reasons. First, he’d break my neck. Second, he had been useful as a guide; he’d gotten me fabric. Third, I needed his help getting the Fudgesickle high enough on that cliff above us for a launching.
We pulled the glider up the slope and carried it until the land fell away as a steep cliff. The swamp bubbled like sludge, with sickly lights glowing among the odd-shaped bushes and trees.
“If we crash down there, we’ll never get out,” I said. “Can you fly this thing?”
“I have flown them.” Benito laughed, with real humor.
“What?”
“I have done this before. We launched the glider from a much higher cliff. An Austrian soldier came to get me out of a sticky situation.” He settled himself at the controls.
Something familiar about that story . . . but Benito was looking out at the swamp, and I didn’t ask him. He looked awfully big and heavy to be a glider pilot, and I had to remember that we didn’t weigh what we should. I strained against the fuselage and shoved outward.
It wouldn’t have worked if we hadn’t been massless or nearly so. Even then I kept wondering about that. It chewed at my soul the way a ragged tooth attracts the tongue. How could we have weight and no mass? The wrong weight, and . . .
Infernoland. Disneyland of the Damnable. How long had they kept me in that bottle? Clarke’s Law kept running through my head, an old axiom of science fiction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
In my time it would take magic, the supernatural, to make that many people, not weightless, but massless. It wasn’t even possible in theory to extract the inertia and leave the weight. But they could do it, the Builders, the God Corporation. Why? It must have cost a lot. Just how big a paying audience did they have?
Who was watching us now?
I heaved against the plane, and then there was no room for thought. The plane dropped like a rock, with me hanging onto the tail, crawling forward to get into the rear seat. Benito knew how to fly, all right. He let us dive, just missing the cliff, until we had built up speed; then he leveled out, taking us above the swamp and toward the red-hot city.
Dis. Dante had described it, glowing with red-hot mosques, with demons on the walls to guard it. I didn’t see any demons. I’d take them on faith. If the Builders could build Minos, they could make demons.
We were about a hundred feet above the swamp, and keeping steady altitude. There must have been warm air rising from the hellish brew below us. Then we were over the wall, and Benito banked sharply left to catch the updraft. The plane rose steadily, gliding along the gentle curve of the wall.
Benito shouted, “This won’t do any good, you know.”
“We’re getting higher, aren’t we?” I pointed down. The swamp had shrunk until I could see the gentle curve of the cliff beyond it. Cliff and red-hot wall were concentric arcs of circles.
The view to the right went down forever. Beyond what seemed the biggest maze ever built, steam rose in a thick curtain. Through wind-torn rents in the steam I could glimpse factories belching out ugly black dirt, a line of electric pylon towers. Towers? Nothing like that in Dante! How reliable was our source? And forests, a yellow glow of desert . . . on and on, down and down.
What had it all cost? Thousands of times as much as Disneyland. This was more like a terraforming job on a whole planet. What kind of people would build Infernoland and people it with unwilling damned souls?
If this worked out, I would never know.
We were higher than the cliffs to our left. It seemed that we had climbed fast, faster than we had any right to. But we were nearly weightless. Or massless? But the people Charon had whacked with his stick hadn’t flown off like Ping-Pong balls! I’d have to think this through and I didn’t have time. Benito! He had both weight and mass, more than me!
But whatever we weighed it wasn’t all that much, and most of what the Fudgesickle had to lift was its own structural weight. We were rising. We continued to rise until we were in the hideous gray fog that served Infernoland for a sky.
It stank: excrement, oil, smog, sickness, slaughter houses, everything hideous. There wasn’t even the honest smell of sweat and locker rooms.
“We’ll have to turn now,” Benito said. “We can’t stay in the updraft if we can’t find it.”
“That’s right. Go!”
We banked left, then straightened out. The fog began to thin. We were doing it! Passing over the rings we’d struggled through. A wind full of weightless people bounced us about, then let us go.
Rising land, and a long line of wrecked bridge. A war tapered off as combatants noticed us. The ground was closer now.
We passed over Minos’s palace, a huge spot of color carved out of the Circle of Virtuous Pagans. It was even bigger than I’d thought, and reminded me of the Red Spot on Jupiter, but not as big . . .
The villas of the First Circle slid below us. Far to my right was a golden pimple that might be their planetarium. Nearly below, a massive squarish castle in a nest of moats. Ahead the ground rose sharply.
That was a remarkable cliff. I could see strata laid out as if in a fresh road cut, but thousands of layers all nicely shaded. Earthquakes aren’t that neat. I’d have loved to climb that cliff . . . but the problem was that the land was rising to meet us.
We crossed it, still aloft, and surged a little on an updraft. There was the final wall ahead. We were going to make it.
Have at you, Builders! You can’t keep a science-fiction writer in Hell!
Even so, no hero worth writing about would have left Infernoland with so many questions unanswered. He would have led a revolution against the Builders, and never mind the odds. The plane would have been for reconnaissance, not escape.
Heinlein, van Vogt, “Doc” Smith, Robert Howard, all the men who wrote of mighty heroes: what would they think of me now? Fleeing. Go, Carpentier! Go, go!
And suddenly we were losing altitude again. The plane dipped sharply just over t
he cold river. I should have known it would.
“We’re not high enough!” I shouted.
“Obviously. What now?”
“Take us back to the thermals! Get up higher, we can try it again.”
“As you wish.” He didn’t say it wouldn’t work. He just banked left again and headed us back down into the bowl. Toward the winds.
Even below the gray fog, Infernoland’s lighting was not good. Gloom and night, all the way down. Infernoland was a vast funnel, leading down, down . . . down where Benito said we had to go. And we were flying there.
Suddenly we were in the winds. People flew about us like flurries of autumn leaves, some together, some alone. Aerial whirlpool ahead, which Benito avoided. And off to the left a straight updraft, flailing human shapes rising helplessly toward Infernoland’s invisible roof. Just before they vanished into the gray stinking fog, the air column topped out and they streamed away to both sides.
“There,” I said. I pointed.
Benito shrugged expressively.
“I’m getting pretty damn tired of your defeatist attitude!”
He banked toward the updraft. Suddenly we were rising as in an elevator. I caught startled faces, and some of the whirling victims tried to swim toward us through the air, but they were rising faster than we were. They couldn’t catch us. I was glad. Massless they might be, but if I could feel the wind roaring past my ears and tugging at my hair, then people clinging to the wings would foul the airstream. We’d all crash.
We left the updraft and were carried along with the others. Sure enough we were just at the edge of the fog, so that we could hardly see below. This was it! We were as high as we’d been above Dis, and much closer to the wall. “Now!” I shouted.
Benito even grinned at me as he turned toward the wall. This time we’d make it!
As he banked, something bulky hit him in the face and knocked him back into the seat, then slipped past and wrapped itself around me. I struggled to rip it off, and it fought back. We’d picked up a passenger.