Escape From Hell

by Larry Niven

  The images changed like dreams. Each one appeared, hung there just long enough that you thought it might stay, then faded into another shape, or vanished leaving nothing but the black pit below. I could make out tiny human figures that persisted longer, wandering through the phantom pictures, changing them with a gesture, sometimes fighting. Sometimes when a structure vanished the people fell, down and down into the pit.

  Tremendous, beautiful buildings replaced each other too fast to be appreciated. Other, smaller cubistic ghosts rose out of the pit. Some were silly. More than one was unbelievably ugly. They flickered on and off, none ever solid. A line of elevators running up a fluted cylinder was suddenly gone, and tiny human shapes drifted down.

  “Allen, what is that?” Rosemary demanded.

  “I have no idea.”

  “It looks like — Allen, it’s the World Trade Center! Ground Zero!”

  I remembered the World Trade Center. My publisher had taken me for dinner to the Windows on the World restaurant at the top. It looked out on New York Harbor. Far away and far below was the Statue of Liberty. I’d been up in the lady’s crown once, and that was high enough to give anyone acrophobia. Now I was looking down on the torch!

  “This doesn’t look anything like the World Trade Center,” I told her.

  “Oh! You died before September eleventh. Before the Millennium.”

  “Well, yes —”

  “Allen, the World Trade Center is gone. Both towers.”

  “Gone? They decided to tear down the tallest buildings in the world? Now there’s waste!”

  “No, no, they were destroyed by terrorists. Muslim fanatics. They hijacked airplanes and flew them into the towers, crashed in about two–thirds of the way up. The fuel burned and burned, and then the towers collapsed, just fell straight down into a pile of rubble. There were people trapped on the upper floors, above the fires. Some jumped. Allen, it was a long nightmare.”

  “Both towers?”

  “Yes. Two planes for the World Trade Center towers. The third plane hit the Pentagon. No one knows where they meant to crash the fourth airplane, probably the White House, or the Capitol, but the passengers took the plane back and crashed it in an empty field.”

  It sounded like the kind of story I might have written, but Rosemary was dead serious. “Flew them into the towers. You mean deliberately?”

  “Yes. Some of them took flying lessons from American flight schools. One told the instructors he didn’t need to learn how to take off and land. Just how to navigate and fly the plane.”

  “Why would Muslims want to harm the United States?”

  Rosemary sighed. “Allen, there’s so much you don’t know! During the Cold War the United States supported Muslim fanatic insurgents against the Soviet Union. We gave them weapons and money, and they built organizations. When the Soviet Union collapsed —”

  “The Soviet Union collapsed. The Cold War is over?”

  “Yes, it came apart after the Gulf War, our first invasion of Iraq, and —”

  “The first invasion of Iraq. You’re right, it’s too much. I’m still trying to get my head around the airplanes. They intended to crash? To die with the planes?”

  “Yes, of course. A suicide mission. There have been a lot of suicide bombings. I guess most of them happened after you died. They started in Palestine, bombers going into cafés in Israel and blowing themselves up.”

  I remembered the bearded fanatic I met on the ice. “Were there a lot of those?”

  • • •

  “Suicide bombers!” Sylvia was excited. “We could use them, if you can find some! But I bet you won’t find any in this grove. This is too peaceful for them. Allen, do you think they get to wander around blowing themselves up?”

  “Sure seems like it.”

  “What would happen if you could get one to come here? What would happen to me if I got blown into — well, into sawdust and splinters?”

  “I don’t know —”

  “Allen, it’s worth trying!”

  “You really want out of here, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, Allen, I do.” She sighed. “Oh, well. Tell me the rest of it.”

  • • •

  There was only one way around the pit, a winding ledge just wide enough for both of us. The last time I’d been in this circle I could hear the Hoarders and the Wasters smashing their boulders and yelling at each other, but there was none of that here. There was a cacophony of sounds, sirens, people yelling, screams. They got louder as we went around the lip of the pit.

  The trail led us to a building. It looked like a construction shack, only a lot bigger. Clapboard and plywood, it looked very temporary. The trail led to the door, and there wasn’t any way around it.

  “What is this place?” Rosemary asked.

  I shook my head. “Never saw it before. There’s a sign.”

  SUBMIT DESIGN PROPOSALS INSIDE

  “Design proposals?” I said.

  “I know! Allen, it’s a contest. They have a contest for the design of the buildings to replace the World Trade Center. It’s supposed to be a memorial for all those who were killed, a monument, but the land’s valuable, and everyone wants to do something with it. They keep coming up with new ideas.”

  We went inside.

  Inside it looked much bigger, one big room with cubicles and a long hall through them to a door at the far end. Almost every cubicle had people in it, at least two, sometimes more. They looked through big stacks of blueprints. Every now and then everyone in the cubicle would vanish, poof! Just gone. When I tried to talk to people they ignored me, or shouted. “Can’t you see we’re busy! Go find another inspector!”

  We went down the central corridor toward the far door.

  People were coming in the door. They all carried blueprints and they’d rush down to find an empty cubicle to spread out their blueprints on the drafting tables. Others would come join them in the cubicle. They’d all shout at each other.

  I couldn’t stand this. I led Rosemary into one of the empty cubicles and waited. There was a stack of blueprints already on the drafting table. They looked to be for a skyscraper, but none of the drawings made any sense to me. “Can you read these things?” I asked Rosemary.

  “No.”

  “Me, neither. They don’t seem right, but I don’t know why.”

  Two men came in with more blueprints. They spread them out on top of ours and invited us to look.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked.

  “Hey, Mac, we don’t have much time! Look at this, will you?” He was a big guy, burly, dressed in work pants and a short–sleeved shirt and a hard hat, and he was all business. “Come on, come on, we have to find the flaws!”

  “Why are we doing this?” Rosemary asked.

  A woman came in. Short hair, knee–length skirt, stockings and heels, but everything was filthy. There was mud in her hair. “Quick, oh, please, quick!” She was frantically tracing out designs on the blueprint. The drawings were changing as she moved her finger over them! “Look, maybe this was it, maybe I got it, I think I have it!”

  “You sure?” The burly man sounded doubtful. He looked up at me. “Hey, Mac, what do you think?”

  “Sure, looks good,” I said, for no reason.

  “All right! We’ll go for this.”

  Everything changed. We were in another room. Bare steel, no furniture. There was a window looking out on Hell far below. We were near the top of a very tall building. Rosemary was gibbering. “Allen, where are we? What’s happening?”

  “What is happening?” I asked the burly man. “I’m Allen Carpenter. I —”

  “Hey, I read your books. Gus Bateman. You’re new here, then?”

  “Yes. Where are we?”

  “In the new World Trade Center. Maybe — maybe this one will stay!”

  “Maybe it will stay?”

  “You are new. I thought you were dead a long time ago.”

  “I was, but what are we talking about?”
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  “If we get the right design it stays up, and we get to stay here and — oh shit!”

  Something snapped below us, a girder maybe. Floor and walls shuddered. Outer walls broke free and slid. Then it all turned transparent, and the floor started to fall away from us, and we were in midair, supported by nothing, and falling.

  Bateman screamed, “Somebody has to be in charge of choosing a design!” His arms, legs, head made a five–pointed star.

  I kept thinking I’d done this before, and wondering if I’d end up in a bottle the way I had the last time. It took forever to hit the ground.

  I wasn’t in a bottle. I just couldn’t move. Every bone was shattered. It hurt, as bad as it had hurt when I was blown to pieces. I knew I’d heal, but what I really wanted was to pass out.

  Rosemary was in a fetal position next to me. There was rubble all around us. By the time I could stand up she seemed solid enough, but she didn’t want to move. “Come on!” I told her. “Before they build another one above us!”

  She didn’t move.

  “Rosemary! You don’t belong here! Whatever’s going on, you weren’t part of it. You didn’t even live in New York.” I was babbling, because none of this made any sense to me, and there were shadowy walls forming around me. “Rosemary! Come on!”

  She got up, but I had to pull her along as I looked for a way out. The walls were more solid now, but there was an EXIT sign leading to a stairway. I pulled Rosemary up to a door and ran through it. We were on a street. Dust blew everywhere. There were sirens, and people screaming, and everyone was running away. I could feel the panic, and it must have been contagious because Rosemary ran with me.

  I don’t know how long we ran. At first we were in city streets, then we were back in the pit on a narrow trail that led upward until once again we were blocked by a building.

  This wasn’t a construction shack. It was a proper office building, featureless. They were building a lot of offices like that in the years before I died. I’d always thought them ugly, but everyone who was supposed to know anything about art and architecture raved about their functional beauty or something like that.

  We stopped to look back. The kaleidoscope show had started again: buildings rose and vanished in the pit behind us. Sometimes one would stay long enough to start looking solid before it faded out to drop its inhabitants down onto Ground Zero.

  “I just don’t get it,” I said.

  “Tell me again about this place,” Rosemary said.

  I watched a rococo design like an extratall Tower of Pisa form in the pit, rise to a ridiculous height, and then collapse. “Hoarders and Wasters,” I said. “Misers and Spendthrifts.”

  “Materialists?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” I said. “People whose whole lives revolved around possessions.”

  “Then I think I know what’s going on,” Rosemary said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Bureaucrats. Either they have to spend their entire budget so they can ask for more, or they hoard it so that they’ll still have something to be in charge of.” She turned to the door ahead of us. “I’m scared of this place,” she said. “But there’s no other way, is there?” She opened the door before I could ask why she was afraid.

  Inside looked like a typical office building, a long corridor with offices on either side. There was no one in sight, but behind every door there were voices.

  “Give me my money!” The voice was querulous, trembling with rage. “It’s mine, I’m entitled!”

  “Let go of me! Security! Help!”

  Sometimes there were sounds of blows mingled with screams. “You just keeping my money because you won’t let go! I know you, you never worth anything, now you got my money and you won’t let go.”

  It was that way all down the corridor.

  I went to one of the doors. “No!” Rosemary tried to pull me away.

  I got loose from her and opened the door. There was a man just visible under a rabble of jeans and overalls and shapeless dresses. They were pulling at him, or sitting on him.

  I shouted, “People! You can get out of here! Follow me, we can leave Hell!”

  They stopped tearing at their victim for a moment to look at me. One of them had been sitting on the man’s head. He got up. “You going to give us our rights?” he demanded. “You going to take care of us?”

  “I don’t have your rights. I can show you the way out of here,” I said.

  “And then what? Who going to take care of us? Like Ms. Jameson here! She’s needy! She got rights same as you!”

  “Rights to what? I know the way out of Hell! Come with me!”

  “Why we got to go with you? We all right here, soon as this man give us our rights!”

  The babble started up again. “Give us! We entitled! It’s ours!”

  Rosemary looked stern. “You think this is the way to get him to help you?”

  She pointed to their victim, who shook himself loose and stood up. “You will stand in line, and be polite, or I will send for security, and you will get nothing.”

  “We got a right —”

  Rosemary smiled thinly. “You have a right to make your application in a proper and respectful manner.”

  “You don’t have to do anything!” I told them. “Come with me!” I looked at the man who was now back in charge. “You don’t have to stay here. Come with me. Escape from this awful place.”

  “To where?” he demanded.

  “He get to go, too? He don’t give us our rights, now he getting out of here? No way!”

  Rosemary almost pulled my arm off getting me out the door and back into the corridor.

  “But I want to know what’s happening.”

  “I know what’s happening,” she said. “Come on!” She pulled me down the corridor and kept pulling until we reached the other end of the building.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  “I knew someone just like him,” Rosemary said. “Harvey Janowitz. He was a clerk in the city welfare office. Got promoted after Katrina.”

  “Who’s Katrina?”

  “Hurricane, I forgot you don’t know. Allen, there was a hurricane. It hit New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast pretty hard, but mostly it broke the levees. New Orleans was flooded. It was awful. The government was going to do something about it. Harv was in the city social services department, did some favors. When they sent in the Federal Emergency Management Agency people, Harv wangled a temporary FEMA coordinator appointment. It made him important. He’d never been paid so much in his life.”

  “Was he stealing the money? There’s a place for grafters, it’s much farther down than this.”

  “No, Allen, he wasn’t stealing. He just wasn’t in any hurry! He’d never been so important. People had to be polite to him. And if he gave the money out it would be gone and he’d be back on the city payroll. Whenever people asked him for money or groceries or a trailer to live in, he found something wrong with the application and made them go out and do it again.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So the clerk was hoarding. I can see that. But what about his clients? Why are they here? What were they hoarding?”

  “Hoarders and Wasters, you said. They’re people who felt entitled to the money. There was federal money coming. Everyone was grabbing what they could get. It was free money. Let the good times roll!”

  “Blaming the victims?”

  “Allen, for a lot of people being a victim is a way of life!”

  “Oh.” I thought about that. Wasters? Wasting your life chasing victim status? “Why were you scared of that place?”

  “I was in the prosecutor’s office.”

  “Was fraud and waste your job?”

  “In a way. Allen, the prosecutor’s office is very important in the Code Napoléon. Unless the prosecutor takes an interest, it’s almost impossible to get official attention to crimes. Real or imagined.”

  “So you took bribes.”

&n
bsp; “No! Well, not real bribes. I never made any money at it. It was much more subtle than that. Allen, everyone was doing it! There was all this money from the federal government. It was all around us.”

  “But you didn’t take any?”

  “No! It didn’t work that way. The commissions are filled with old friends, the people I had dinner with, the wife of the man who sponsored my membership in my club. What am I supposed to do? Most projects do take longer and cost more than anyone expected. That’s sure better than thinking all those people are crooks. They aren’t crooks! These are the best people in New Orleans!”

  “Like the Levee Boards.”

  “Exactly!”

  “So where was the money going?”

  Rosemary shrugged. “It takes money to run a city. You have to do favors. Some groceries for precinct captains, election day workers. You have block parties. Scholarships to Louisiana State. If someone who worked for you had kids who needed college, shouldn’t you try to get them a scholarship?”

  I thought about that. “So putting the best people in charge didn’t work very well.”

  “But it did, Allen! A lot of good things did get done, you know. And we did try to take care of the poor. There were good times!” She opened the door at the end of the long hall. “Now, can we please get out of here?”

  • • •

  “You wanted to hear about everything,” I told Sylvia. She was silent so I broke off a small branch. “Is that enough detail?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Hear anything that helps?”

  “I don’t know. You’re looking for justice. Do you think you’re finding it?”

  “It’s too much,” I told her. “Yes, I can see there’s something fitting about things here, but it’s always too much!”

  “It’s a high–stakes game, Allen.” She laughed. “And it goes on for a long time. All they had to do was follow you, and they wouldn’t. I have to be blown to bits before I can do that!”

  “Do you still think that will work?”

  “I sure haven’t thought of anything else that might.”