by Ayn Rand
“Well,” Geo said to the others, “come on then.”
Around them was a sudden click, and lights flickered all along the edges of the road.
“Come on,” Geo said again, and once more they started, passing the lights which wheeled double and triple shadows about them over the road and the opposite railing. When they reached the next turn off that led to a still higher ramp, Geo looked back. Snake’s miniature figure sat on the edge of the road’s railing, his feet on the lower rung, one pair of arms folded, one pair of elbows on his knees. The light above him.
“Keep track of the turns,” said Geo.
“I’m keeping,” Iimmi assured him.
“By the time we get to the top of whatever we’re trying to get to the top of,” rumbled Urson, “we won’t be able to see anything. It’ll be too dark.”
“Then let’s hurry,” Geo admonished.
Sunset stained one side of the towers copper while blue shadows hugged the other. By way of a plastic-domed stairway, they mounted another eighty feet to a broader highway where they could look down on the band of lights which was the one they had just left. They were beginning to clear the roofs of the lower buildings now.
On this road fewer lights were working. They were just about to enter a dark section when a figure appeared in silhouette at the other end.
They stopped, but the figure was suddenly gone. A little farther, Geo suddenly halted and said, “There!”
Two hundred feet ahead of them, what may have been a naked woman rose from the ground, and began to walk backwards until she disappeared into the next dark length of road.
“Do you think she was running away from us?” Iimmi asked.
Urson reached out and touched Iimmi’s jewel. “I wish we have some more light around here.”
“Yeah,” Iimmi agreed. They continued.
The skeleton lay at the twilight edge of the next stretch of functioning lights. The rib cage marked sharp lines on the pavement with shadow from the lamps’ glare.
“Do we turn back now?” Urson asked.
“A skeleton can’t hurt you,” Iimmi said.
“But what about the live one we saw?” countered Urson.
“... and here she comes now,” Geo whispered in a cynical stage voice.
In fact two figures approached them through the shadow. As Urson, Geo and Iimmi moved closer, one stopped, and then the other a few steps before the first. Then they dropped. Geo couldn’t tell if they fell, or lay down quickly on the roadway. But they seemed to have disappeared.
“Go on?” asked Urson.
“Go on,” said Geo.
Pause. “Go on,” from Geo.
Two more skeletons lay on the road where the figures had disappeared a minute before. “They don’t seem dangerous,” Geo said. “But what do they do? Die every time they see us?”
“Hey,” Iimmi said. “What’s that? Listen.”
It was a sickly liquid sound, like mud dropping into itself. Something was falling from the sky. No, not the sky, but from the roadway that crossed fifty feet above them. Looking down again, they saw that a blob of something was growing on the pavement ten feet from them.
“Come on,” Geo said, and they skirted the mess dripping from above them, and continued up the road, passing four more skeletons. The sound behind them turned into a wet sloshing. Turning, they saw it emerge into the light—shapeless and jelly-green under the white flare. Impaling its membrane on the skeletons, the mass flowed around them, faster, covering them, molding to them. There was a final surge, a shrinking, and its shapelessness contracted into limbs, a head, feet. The naked man-thing pushed itself to its knees and then stood straight, the flesh by now opaque. Eye sockets caved into the face. A mouth ripped apart on the skull, and the chest began to move with a wet steamy sound in irregular gasps.
It began to walk toward them, raising its hands from its sides. Then, behind it in the darkness, they saw more coming.
“Damn,” said Urson. “What do they...?”
“One, or both, of two things,” Iimmi answered, backing away. “More meat, or more bones.”
“Whoops,” Geo said. “Look back there!”
They whirled and saw seven more figures standing quietly behind them, while the ones in front advanced.
A covered flight of stairs had its entrance nearby, leading to the next level of highway. They ducked into it and fled up the steps. Geo glanced back once; one of the forms had reached the entrance and had started to climb. He was also, he realized, high enough to get some idea of the city, which stretched, beyond the transparent covering of the steps, away in a web of lighted roadways, rising, looping, descending. Two glows caught him: one, beyond the river, a red haze that flickered behind the trees and was reflected on the water itself. The other was within the city itself, orange white, nested among the buildings.
He turned back up the steps. A gurgling sound neared them as they reached the top entrance. Geo had only gotten half clear of the entrance when he yelled, “Yikes,” and then, “Duck!”
They slipped from the doorway and nearly fell, avoiding a mass of jelly the size of a two-story house which flopped against the entrance. They edged by its pulsing, transparent sides. The lamp light pierced into it a yard, and once a skull swirled toward the surface and then sank again.
Suddenly it sucked away from the entrance and shivered ponderously toward them. Something was happening at the front. Figures, three or four of them, were detaching themselves from the mother mass and preceding it.
They turned and ran along the road, plunging suddenly into an extended darkened section. A moment later there was a glow in front of them and suddenly Urson yelled, “Watch it!”
Abruptly the road sheered off in front of them; they halted, and then approached the edge slowly. The surface of the road tore away and the girders descended, webbing toward the ruined stump of a building from which the orange-white glow rose. The glow came from the heart of the edifice. “What do you think it is?” asked Geo.
“I don’t know,” said Iimmi.
They looked, and in the shadow, numberless figures were marching after them. Suddenly the figures fell to the ground, and flesh rolled forward from bone, congealed, and rose quiveringly into the edge of the light.
Iimmi started out first on the skeletal, twisted structure that descended to the glowing pit. “You’re crazy,” Geo said. The thing flopped forward another yard with a sick sound. “Hurry up,” Geo added. With Urson in the middle, they started out along the twenty-inch wide girder. Lit from beneath, their bodies were in the shadow of the girder. Only their outstretched arms burned in the pale orange light as they balanced themselves.
Before them, faintly legible on the broken building into which they were descending was the sign: ATOMIC ENERGY FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MAN
It was flanked by two purple trefoils. The beam twisted sideways, and then dropped. Iimmi made the turn, dropped to his knees and hands, and then started to let himself down the four feet to the next small section of concrete. Once he saw something, let out a low whistle, but continued to lower himself to the straightened girder. Urson made the turn next, while Geo knelt in front of him. When Urson saw what Iimmi had seen, his hand shot to Geo’s chest and grabbed the jewel. Geo took his wrist. “That won’t help us now,” he said.
Urson expelled a breath, and then continued down, slowly. Quickly Geo turned to drop now.
The entire beam structure over which they had just come was coated with a trembling thickness of the stuff. Globs dripped from the steel shafts, glowing in the light from below, quivering, smoking, splashing off into the darkness. Here and there something half human would rise either to look around or to pull the collective mass further on, but then it would fall back and dissolve. It bulged forward, smoking now, bits of it shriveling off and falling away. Geo was about to descend, but suddenly he called, “Wait a minute.” The others stayed still.
It wasn’t making progress. It rolled to a certain point in the pale, sherbe
rt-colored light, globbed up, smoked, and fell away. And smoked. And dripped.
“Can’t it get any farther?” Urson asked.
“It doesn’t look it,” said Geo.
A skeleton stood up, flesh-covered in the orange light. It tottered, its surface steaming, and then fell with a sucking noise, down into the hundreds of feet of shadow. Geo was holding tight onto the girder in front of him.
The pale light fell cleanly over his hand, wrist, and midway up his forearm.
What happened now made him squeeze until sweat came: the entire Gargantuan mass, which had only extended tentacles till now, pulsed to the edge of the jagged road, draped itself over the web of girders, and flung itself forward on the spindly metal threads. It careened toward them, and the three jerked themselves back.
Then it stopped, quivering. It boiled, it burned, it writhed, sinking, smoking through the spaces in the naked girder work. It tried to crawl backwards. Human figures leaped from its mass toward the edge of the road, missed, and plummetted like smoking bullets. It hurled a great pseudopod back toward the safety of the road; it fell short, flopped downward, and the whole mass shook beneath the smoke that rose from it. It pulled free of the support, tentacles sliding across steel, whipping into the air. Then it dropped into the shadows, breaking into a half dozen pieces before they lost sight of it below.
Geo released his hand. “My arm hurts,” he said, shaking it.
They climbed up to the road again, carefully. “Any ideas what happened?” asked Iimmi.
“What ever it was, I’m glad it did,” said Urson.
Something clattered before them in the darkness.
“What was that?” asked Urson, stopping.
“My foot hit something,” Geo said.
“What was it?” asked Urson.
“Never mind,” said Geo. “Come on.”
Fifteen minutes brought them to the stairway that went to the lower highway. Iimmi’s memory proved good, and for an hour they went quickly, Iimmi making no hesitation it turnings.
“God,” Geo said, rubbing his forearm with his other hand. “I must have pulled hell out of it back there. It hurts like the devil.”
Urson looked at his hand and rubbed them together.
“My hands feel sort of funny too,” Iimmi said. “Like they’ve been wind-burned.”
“Wind-burned nothing,” said Geo. “This hurts.”
Twenty minutes later, Iimmi said, “Well, this should be about it.”
“Hey,” said Urson. “There’s Snake.” As they ran forward, now, the boy jumped off the rail, grabbed their shoulders, and grinned. Then he began to tug them forward.
“You lucky little so and so,” said Urson. “I wish you’d been with us.”
“He probably was, in spirit, if not in body,” Geo laughed.
Snake nodded.
“What are you pulling for?” Urson asked. “Say, if you’re going to get headaches like that, you’d better teach us what to do with them beads there.” He pointed to the jewel at Iimmi’s and Geo’s necks.
Snake nodded and tugged forward again.
“He wants us to hurry,” Geo said. “We better get going.”
The road finally tore completely away, and four feet below them, over the twisted rail, was the mouth of a street that led into the waterfront. Snake, Iimmi and then Urson vaulted over. Urson shook his hands painfully when he landed.
“Give me a hand, will you?” Geo asked. “My arm is really shot.” Urson helped his friend over.
Almost as though it had been in wait, thick liquid gurgling sounded behind them. Like a wounded thing it emerged from behind the broken highway, bulging up into the light which shone on the ripples in its shriveled membrane.
“Run it!” bawled Urson, and they took off down the street. In the moonlight, the ruined piers spread along the waterfront to either side of them, some even slanting into the silvered water.
Turning once, they saw it bloat the entrance of the street, fill it, and then pour across the broken stones, slipping across the rubble of the smashed wharf.
When Geo hit water, he was aware of two things immediately as the hands reached for his body. First, the thong was yanked from around his neck. Second, pain seared his arm as if the bones and ligaments were suddenly replaced by white-hot cords of steel, and every vein and capillary had become part of a webbing of red fire.
It was a long time before consciousness. Once he was lifted. And when he opened his eyes, the white moon was moving incredibly fast above him toward the dark shapes of leaves. Was he being carried? And his arm hurt. There was more drowsy half consciousness, and once a great deal of pain. When he opened his mouth to scream, however, darkness flowed in, swathed his tongue, and he swallowed the darkness down into his body and into his head, and called it sleep—
* * *
A spool of copper wire unrolled over the black tile floor. Scoop it up quick. Damn, let me get out of here. I run past the black columns, glimpsing the cavernous room, and the black statue at the other end, huge, and rising into shadows. Men in dark robes are walking around. (Not only could they see, this time; they could hear the thinking.) Just don’t feel up to praying this afternoon. I am before the door, and above it, a black disk with three white eyes on it. Through the door, up black stone steps. Wonder if anyone will be up there now. Just my luck I’ll find the Old Man himself. Another door with a black circle above it. Push it open slowly, cool on my hands. A man is standing inside, looking into a large screen of glass. Figures moving on it. Can’t make them out, he’s in the way. Oh, there’s another one.
“I don’t know whether to call it success or failure,” one says.
“The jewels are ... safe or lost?”
“What do you call it?” the first one asks. “I don’t know any more.” He sighs. “I don’t think I’ve taken my eyes off this thing for more than two hours since they got to the beach. Every mile they’ve come closer has made my blood run colder.”
“What do we report to Hama Incarnate?”
“It would be silly to say anything now. We just don’t know.”
“Well,” says the other, “at least we can do something with the City of New Hope since they got rid of that super-amoeba.”
“Are you sure they really got it?”
“After the burning it received over that naked atom pile? It was all it could do to get to the waterfront. It’s just about fried up and blown away already.”
“And how safe would you call them?” the other asks.
“Right now? I wouldn’t call them anything.”
Something glitters on the table by the door. Yes, there it is. In the pile of strange equipment is a U-shaped scrap of metal. Just what I need. Hot damn, adhesive tape too. Quick, there, before they see. Fine. Now, let the door close, real slow. Ooops. It clicked. Now come on, look innocent, in case they come out. I hope the Old Man isn’t watching. Guess they’re not coming. And down the stairs again, the black stone walls moving past. Out another door, into the garden, dark flowers, purple, deep red, some with blue in them, and big stone urns. Some priests are coming down the path. Ooops again, there’s old Dunderhead. He’ll want me inside praying. Duck down behind that urn. Here we go. What’ll I do if he catches me? Really sir, I have nothing under my choir robe. Peek out.
Very, very small sigh of relief, now. Can’t afford to be too loud around here. They’re gone. Let’s examine the loot. The black stone urn has one handle above. It’s about eight feet tall. One, two, three: jump, and ... hold ... on ... and ... pull. And try to get to the top. There we go. Cold stone between my toes. And over the edge, where it’s filled with dirt. Pant. Pant. Pant.
Should be just over here, if I remember right. Dig, dig, dig. Damp earth feels good in your hands. Ow! my finger. There it is. A brown paper bag under granules of black earth. Lift it out. Is it all there? Open it up, peer in. Down at the bottom, beyond the folds of the edges where the top had been twisted tightly together, are the tiny scraps of copper, a few long pie
ces of dark metal, a piece of board, some brads. To this my grubby little hand adds the spool of copper wire and the U-shaped scrap of metal. Now, slip it into my robe and—once you get up here, how the hell do you get down? I always forget. Turn around, climb over the edge, like this, and let yourself down. Damn, my robe’s caught on the handle.
And drop.
Skinned my shin again. Some day I’ll learn.
Now let’s see if we can figure this thing out. Gotta crouch down and get to work. Here we go. Open the bag, and turn the contents out in the lap of the dark-colored robe, grubby hands poking.
The U-shaped metal, the copper wire, fine. Hold the end of the wire to the metal, and maneuver the spool around the end of the wire to the metal, and maneuver the spool around the end of the rod. Around. And around. And around. Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go round the mulberry bush; I’ll have me a coil by the morning.
Suddenly a harsh voice in the distance: “And what do you think you’re doing?”
Dunderhead rides again. “Nothing, sir,” as metal and scraps and wires fly frantically into the paper bag.
The voice: “All novices under twenty must report to afternoon services without fail!”
“Yes, sir. Coming right along, sir.” Paper bag jammed equally frantically into the folds of my robe. Not a moment’s peace. Not a moment’s! Through the garden with lowered eyes, past a dour-looking priest with a small paunch. There are mirrors along the vestibule, huge slabs of glass that rise thirty feet, reflecting the blue and yellow light back and forth from the colored windows of the temple. In the mirror I see pass: a dour-looking priest, proceeded by a smaller figure with short red hair and a spray of freckles over a flattish nose. And as we pass into prayer, there is the maddening, almost inaudible jingling of metal scraps, muffled by the dark robe.
* * *
Geo woke up, and almost everything was white.
* * *
CHAPTER VIII
The pale woman with the tiny eyes rose from over him. Her hair dropped like white silk threads over her shoulders. “You are awake?” she asked. “Do you understand me?”