After some experimenting, the three found that they could control their movements and direction if they did things very slowly. Fortunately, the tunnel was only about twelve feet wide, so they could propel themselves from one side to the other easily. If one became suspended in the middle and could not reach the walls, another could push off from a wall and thus also push the other against the opposite side.
“We can only hope the manna’ll stop growing,” Cull said. “Whoever would have thought we’d have more than we could eat or that too much would kill us?”
“Couldn’t we dig our way out?” said Fyodor. “We could hold our breaths long enough to get into the open. Even if we died trying, it’d be better than just allowing ourselves to smother.”
“Don’t you understand?” said Cull. “So we did succeed in digging through? One awkward movement might send us flying out of this cylinder. Then what? We’d be helpless, floating in a sphere that’s thousands of miles across.”
Phyllis shuddered as if she were cold, though it was hot in the cylinder, and she said, “I don’t want to go floating through the air. I’d be absolutely helpless. And I’d go crazy with the earth way below me; I’d think I was falling all the time. I don’t want to fall forever. No, I’m staying. At least, this cylinder is something solid. A home of sorts.”
“I think the manna’s stopped growing,” said Fyodor. “Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t panic and try to dig our way out. Sometimes, it’s better to sit and think about something a while. Time then takes care of the problem.”
“You’re right. This time, anyway,” said Cull. “It has stopped.”
He licked off the thin white filaments that formed the larger darker ones and then, slowly, scooped up a handful and put it in his mouth.
“You better get this stuff before it solidifies,” he said to the other two. “It’ll melt in your mouth now, and you can get some liquid into your bodies.”
He did not tell them that the manna in the cylinder might be the last they would ever get because he did not want to depress them even further. This cloud could be the final one to form. It was possible that whatever had always made manna and distributed it throughout the sphere was still functioning but would soon quit. Everything else had, so why not this?
They followed his example. By the time they had swallowed several mouthfuls and their thirst was gone, the manna had darkened throughout and had shrunk and separated into hundreds of solid threads, each thick as a spaghetti string. These, they began to eat.
“I wish I had a container,” said Cull. He shrugged, then said, “No use wishing. Come on. Help me pilot this stuff to the middle of the cylinder. We’ll pile it on both sides, leave an aisle so we can pass through. Maybe we can drag in some more from the cloud, build up a stockpile. We may need it.”
Though all were weak, the food had strengthened them. They were able to pull loose strings of the manna, but the effort drove the lower parts of their bodies into the stuff. Then, while one picked, the other two worked as shuttles, holding balls of manna in their hands and zigzagging from wall to wall until they got to the center. Luckily, the manna was wet and sticky and stayed on the walls where it was thrown.
Even so, the two carriers went through some strange maneuvers. They found themselves propelled against the walls when they did not so wish or were turned upside down or twisted over and over until brought up against the soft mass at the other end.
After they had gotten the hang of things, Fyodor and Phyllis worked at one end; Cull at the other. The shrinking of the manna allowed light to come in, and they could see that the cloud had fallen away, rather, drifted away, from the cylinder.
Cull was happy to see this and to feel air moving over his sweating body. That meant that winds still existed, that the air in the sphere had not become one motionless mass. Pressure differentials existed.
Fyodor and Phyllis, working together, made faster progress than Cull. Also, he was slowed when his hand was stopped by something hard in the mass. He scraped the strings away from the material until he could see what it was. A branch of a rocktree was pointing straight at his belly; leaves, wet with manna, still clung to the branchlets on the big branch.
He did not say anything to the others but continued scraping. Presently, he had exposed another branch. The second one was broken off; it was about two feet long. Deciding that this find was important, he called the two to help him. They began to carry off what he had scraped away to give him room to work. In another fifteen minutes, he had reached the end of the cylinder. And he understood what had happened.
A freak of the catastrophe had jammed several branches of an uprooted rocktree into this end of the huge pipe. They were covered with manna strands. Also tangled in the branches was a line of telephone wire of indeterminate length.
He paused for a while to get his breath back. Then he crawled between two branches, and scraped away more manna.
In a minute, his head was poking out of the opening. He was looking out past the trunk and roots of the tree into space.
Nearby, slowly drifting away, was a large mass of manna. This was no longer a cloud but a conglomeration of wormy objects snarled together. Beyond it was another portion of the original cloud.
He turned over to look above or what seemed to be above. About twenty yards away, keeping pace with the cylinder, was a huge boulder. Near it rotated the body of a woman; she was badly mangled; dried blood coated her body.
Beyond the body and boulder floated other objects. A large clump of dirt. A stone table, one end broken off, turning slowly. A stone bowl, spinning much more swiftly, was above the table, just beyond the rotating ends. A little way past the table was another uprooted rocktree, much larger than the one jammed into the cylinder. It revolved very slowly, which accounted for the ability of the man in the branches to cling to them. He was a dark man with prominent epicanthial folds, a Chinese or Japanese. He saw Cull’s head sticking out, and his eyes widened. He waved at Cull and called something. He did not speak in Hebrew. Then, the tree had turned so that he was hidden by the trunk.
Cull waited until the man was in view again, and he shouted to him in Hebrew and in the few English words he remembered. The man shouted back in what Cull now was sure was Chinese. The tree turned again, and this time, when the man came into view, he was crouched down, tense and poised.
Cull yelled at him not to take a chance. But the Chinese launched himself outward just as the tree swung upward. Evidently, he had estimated the second when he should leave the tree and had hoped that his estimate would be correct. Propelled by his kick and the force of the upswinging tree, he sailed toward Cull. His arms were outstretched, reaching for the branches of the tree projecting from the cylinder.
Cull found himself scrambling out onto the biggest branch and then onto the trunk. He went on all fours, clinging to the stony and slippery corrugations of the trunk with fingers and toes. Then, he was in the roots of the tree and he had hooked his feet between the forks of a big root and was standing upward. He stretched as far as he dared and reached his arms upward toward the man. But the man flew over him, just a foot away. The man screamed when he realized that he had missed, and he was still screaming as he flew onward. Abruptly, as his head disappeared into a huge ball of manna, the scream was cut off. He plunged into the hardening but still soft mass up to his knees. His legs and feet thrashed violently for a minute while Cull shouted at him to straighten himself out, that there was still hope that he could get out and try another leap.
The feet quit moving. The slowly turning mass took them from Cull’s view. Sick, he watched until the feet came into his sight again. The impact of the Chinese had given the big ball a shove, it was slowly drifting away. For that Cull was thankful. This incident had made him sick, even though, compared to so many others he had witnessed very recently, it was little.
Perhaps he was so shaken because he had tried to involve himself in the fellow’s fate, had tried to change the course of events. For a mo
ment, that man’s terror had been his, and consequently so had his death.
Now, thinking this, he looked downward or past his feet, and he became paralyzed with fright. The abyss was below him; he was standing on a narrow piece of rock over miles of nothing.
For a minute, he could not force himself to move. His heart rammed against his breast, and he breathed hoarsely. His bones felt cold.
Then, knowing that he could not stay there forever, that he had to get back within the cylinder, he bent his knees slowly. When he was within reach of the root, he seized it tightly and clung on. His feet came loose and an involuntary movement of his legs straightened his body out, and he was hanging above the nothingness with his hands around the stony root. Not hanging downward, relative to the root, but straight outward as if he had no weight. Which, he told himself, he did not have. He was in no danger as long as he did things carefully and slowly and thought out the consequences of his actions beforehand.
For every action, an opposite and equal reaction, he muttered to himself. It had always been true, but, down there on the surface, when gravity — or its equivalent in centrifugal force — had existed, he had acted automatically and surely. Here he had to learn new rules.
He was in interplanetary space. Except that he had air to breathe and there were no planets.
Cull advanced each hand and took firm hold of a projection, a rootlet, a groove, and then advanced the other hand for a new hold. Once, he looked up and saw that Fyodor and Phyllis were hovering within the cylinder, suspended between the sides of the cylinder, and were staring at him. They were as terrified as he. Perhaps they were even more so, for they probably did not yet realize all the aspects of their situation. Well, by watching him, they would learn swiftly.
He gave a little pull and shot into the cylinder. Phyllis was in his way; he put out his hands and clamped them down on her shoulders. She moved backward; her body and his were in line with the axis of the cylinder. They would have continued floating out the other end and into space if he had not somehow twisted himself and gotten his feet onto the floor. There, the friction of his feet stopped them.
“You must be careful,” he said to her. “I thought I’d made that clear.”
Her eyes were very wide as she said, “What are we going to do? Float around forever? Or until our food gives out and we die?”
“We have food,” he said. “We can get some more.”
He twisted around and gave himself a little shove from the wall and floated toward the end through which he had just come. His hand closed around the branch, and he stopped himself. “I think we’d better stay at this end,” he said. “We’ve got an anchor.”
He looked out of the opening for a moment. The big ball of manna was still whirling; the feet of the dead man were just disappearing from view around its bulge. The ball was smaller than before. It was drifting away, driven by the impact of the Chinese.
“I have to think,” he said. “But I’m too tired. We’re all too tired. We need to sleep, then eat some more, get our strength back.”
“How can you sleep,” said Phyllis, “knowing that there’s nothing below you, nothing between you and a fall of maybe thousands of miles except the thin walls of this metal?”
“I’ve slept on airplanes,” he answered, “and we’re a hell of a lot safer in this than in one of those crates. We won’t fall. Not in the sense you mean, anyway. No, the only thing I’m worried about is drifting out of the tube while I’m sleeping. So, let’s find something to tie us down.”
There was only one answer, and that was the telephone wire snarled among the roots of the rocktree. To get it, he would have to crawl out again. He hesitated. He had not gotten over the reaction of hanging above the nothingness, and he would have preferred to sleep and then to eat before facing that necessity. But necessity it was, an immediate one.
He thought of asking Fyodor or Phyllis to go out for the wire, but he rejected that idea. They just were not in shape to do it now. And they did not know enough about handling themselves in free fall to be trusted. One slip, and they would be gone.
He sighed, told them what he intended doing, and began hand-over-handing along the tree. This time he kept his eyes straight ahead although he was not helped much by this device. No matter which way he looked, above, below, or straight ahead, he was looking “down.” But, he reassured himself, he knew what he was doing, he was in no danger whatever if he kept his grip, and he had to have the wire.
In half an hour, he was back inside the cylinder with the sixty feet or so of wire trailing him. Though he was shaking with fear and exhaustion, streaked with dirt and sweat, he continued working until he had coiled the wire into a large circle. Then, with the help of the other two, he looped parts of it around the outside edge of the cylinder and also around the tree trunk. After making sure that these were secured tightly, he formed three small loops. Into these they fitted themselves and pulled the loops more tightly around their waists.
“Now,” said Cull, “we can sleep safely. On a bed softer than any king ever had. On air. But it may not be a comfortable sleep, despite that. There’s no gravity to make the secretions from your sinus and nasal passages drain. The stuff may accumulate in one place and choke you. So, don’t be alarmed if you wake up and can’t get your breath. Blow the stuff out. Pleasant dreams.”
He closed his eyes and was instantly asleep. When he awoke, he knew that something was wrong. He stared straight up at the “ceiling” of the cylinder, for he was stretched out along the longitudinal axis of the cylinder. His heart was beating fast; something had alarmed him, and he did not know what.
The interior of the big pipe was dim, so he knew that the sun had lessened its radiance for the half-night. Raising his head slightly and slowly, he looked down the tunnel. He saw a shape at the other end, something filling the O and blocking off most of the light. The outlines were those of a human or something resembling a human. Except that blackness rose from its back, a silhouette of folded wings.
He knew instantly that it must be a “demon.” He remembered seeing a creature like this several times before in the streets, when streets had existed. Then, the wings had been mere exotic or awesome appendages, useless. Now, with no gravity, they should be able to function, to fulfill the promise of their form.
Cull turned his head and saw the floating bodies of his companions, still held by the wires. Fyodor was snoring; Phyllis was breathing raspingly.
Below Phyllis was the broken-off branch of the rocktree. It floated an inch off the “floor.”
The demon was moving slowly down the tunnel now. He was crouched so that the tops of his half-folded and slightly beating wings would not scrape against the ceiling, and he held in one hand a stone knife. His mouth was open enough for the dim light to show two long, white canines against the sootiness of his skin.
Cull suddenly turned within the loop and reached down. His fingers closed on the broken branch, and he rotated again inside the circle of wire and raised the branch so that it pointed toward the figure at the other end. With all his force, he launched it down the tunnel. Then, not waiting to see if it was going straight, he grasped the loop with both hands and pulled outward. He slid out from the stretched wire easily and was trying to find something solid to use as a launch for himself, when he heard the branch strike. There was a thump, and the demon said, “Whoosh!” as the air was driven from him by the impact of silicon-impregnated wood against his solar plexus. He threw up his hands, the knife flew from his grasp, and he moved backward. If he had not involuntarily extended his wings so that they scraped against the walls of the cylinder, he would have sailed backward from the open end and out into space. But the friction of the wings held him, and he floated face up.
Cull progressed toward him swiftly but in zigzag fashion by shooting from one wall to the other, like a ricocheting bullet. If he had dived straight ahead down the pipe, he would have rammed into the demon and both would have gone on out into the airy void. There, he woul
d have been helpless, whereas the winged demon, once recovered, could have maneuvered as he pleased.
Cull reached out a hand as he pushed from one wall to another and plucked the flint knife out of the air. When he came down against the demon, he put one arm around his neck and with the knife hand he began sawing against the jugular vein. The demon opened his eyes then and started to twist to get away. Cull turned with him, intent on his cutting and hoping he could sever the vein before the demon could bring his powerful muscles into full and effective action. Or before he could shove with his feet against the wall and drive them both out.
Suddenly, Cull’s neck and shoulders felt wet and warm, and he knew that the jugular blood was squirting over him. He kept cutting, for the demon had not quit struggling; he had the vitality of a tiger. Sharp nails raked Cull’s ribs, and the demon bent his neck and tried to force the ends of his canines into Cull’s throat. Cull pressed closer to the demon so that he could not bend his neck at an angle and use his teeth. The creature stopped clawing Cull’s side and reached down to seize his genitals. Cull, knowing that one squeeze of those superhumanly strong hands would cripple or kill him, brought his knees up and shoved away from him. However, he did not shove backward along the longitudinal axis of the cylinder but at an angle which brought him with a thump against the wall. The force of his drive bounced him off that wall and across the cylinder into the opposite side. But he stopped moving.
The reaction of his shove had pushed his antagonist also against the wall and kept him from sliding all the way outward. Now the demon was upside down, his body limp and his outstretched wings against the walls. Cautiously, Cull moved toward him by jumps which used only the power of his toes to propel him from one side to the next. He held his legs stiff and straight and his arms outstretched. Reaching the mouth of the cylinder, he seized an ankle of the corpse and then pulled it backward and toward the other end. Halfway along the length, he moved more swiftly, knowing that he could grab the wire loop and stop himself and demon from shooting out of that mouth.
Inside Outside Page 10