Inside Outside Part 6

"So I'd guess that. . ."

Cull stopped because the metal beneath his feet was quivering. Fyodor's eyes ballooned. Cull's and Phyllis' were bulging with panic, too. His hand, placed against the wall to steady himself, to combat the dizziness caused by the undulations of the floor, felt the wall also shake. And, looking down the tunnel as far as their torchlight shone, he could see a swell pa.s.sing along the floor, a wave of metal.

Moreover, the corner where the tunnel took an almost right-angle turn was going inward toward the other side. Then, like a stretched rubber band released, it snapped back to its original position. A second later, it again shot toward the other side. Or the other side was moving toward this side. Or both actions were taking place.

He had a terrifying vision of the tunnel col-lapsing, burying them beneath the millions of tons of dirt and rock above them. Perhaps, the whole city would slide into a chasm suddenly opened beneath it, and they. . .

No place to run. Besides, they had enough trouble keeping their balance; they could not have fled more than a few steps without falling down.

All three shrieked with horror as the floor rose and twisted, and they fell from the floor against the side of the tunnel. The wall had suddenly become the floor.

They continued shrieking as the river water poured over them. They fought to claw a hold in the metal to keep from being swept away in the current of the river.

The water rose over their heads. w.i.l.l.ynilly, they began floating alongside the wall.

Just as abruptly as it had come, the water fell away from the wall, the three with it, and they were on a wave roaring toward the other wall. Cull could see what was happening. Though Fyodor's torch had been doused, Cull had managed to hold his above the water with one hand while he thrashed with the other to keep him-self afloat. Fyodor was to Cull's right and a yard or so ahead of him so that Cull saw the other wall rushing at him. He could not find Phyllis. He struggled to get his feet in front:of him to enable them to take the impact.

Then, just as he was about to crash, the water ran away from him. His momentum brushed him gently against the wall, he sank, and found him-self standing on the walk alongside the wall. He also could, see by his torch that Fyodor (he was right beside him) was standing too and that the tunnel was righting itself. Phyllis, minus her torch, was a few yards away.

They had quit shrieking; now, they were breathing harshly. Cull was, anyway. Fyodor's mouth was open, and his chest was rapidly rising and falling. But Cull couldn't hear him, for the river water was twisting and roiling too noisily.

Then the turbulence began to lessen and the water started to regain its former oily smoothness.

After a few minutes Cull could hear Fyodor gasping.

"That answers your question about why the tunnels and shafts don't snap," Cull said between sobs. "This stuff stretches, bends, twists as no material ever built by man does. And it has a built-in self-alignment. Or so it seems."

"But isn't there a limit to its ability to stretch?" Fyodor said. "I would think that. . ."

The floor began to shake again. Cull started to get seasick. Swellsick, rather.

It was like being inside a monster snake when the snake is going over the top of a steep sharp-peaked hill. The tunnel -- their part of it -- slanted upward. Ahead of them, about two hundred yards away, the tunnel straightened out for about forty yards. Then, it dipped out of sight, apparently bending downward.

Immediately afterward, the tunnel slanted sideways. They yelled again as they slid across the walk. Just as they could no longer cling to the sur-face and were about to slide into the river, the slanting motion stopped. The tunnel straightened out. And the river, five feet higher than it had been before, a racing wall, roared down the tunnel.

They were almost swept away. But they'd scrambled up to the wall as far away from the water as possible, and, though the edge of the water struck them and almost knocked them loose, they succeeded in not being carried off.

With the abruptness of an elevator dropping, the tunnel leveled out and began righting itself.

Fyodor screamed. Phyllis screamed.

Cull whirled, and he screamed.

The backward race of the river, caused by the leveling of the tunnel, had left behind a fearsome jetsam. A river demon was clutching the edge of the walk with its paws. Its lower jaw rested on the walk, and its tongue was curled around Phyllis' right leg.

Cull, shrieking with hate and hysterical fear, leaped at the huge head and kicked furiously at one of the great eyes. One of? The eye. It was a Cyclops; a single eye glared in the middle of its low brow.

His toe drove into the eyeball. Again and again. The eyeball burst.

Wheezing, the demon uncoiled the tongue from around Phyllis' leg. The whale-like body rolled over, exposing a wound about a foot in diameter, a hole out of which blood gushed. This was what had saved them, not Cull's blinding it. Crashed against some projection -- probably an island -- by the irresistible flood, the demon had been mortally wounded. Its grabbing of the woman had been a dying reflex.

They hurried away. Something struck Cull's head, and he cried with fear. Earth and smashed rocks fell around him.

He jumped back, striking Phyllis, and looked upward. A large hole had been rent in the grey metal; out of it had fallen the dirt and rocks. But, as he looked, the wound in the metal began to heal.

Slowly, the edges crawled toward the center.

"In about five minutes," he said, "the hole'll be closed."

"Have you noticed how warm the metal is?" said Fyodor.

"Friction. Heat from stretching and con-tracting."

They walked on for a minute, with Phyllis sob-bing uncontrollably. Then Fyodor stopped.

"Here's a tremendous hole," he said. He thrust the torch into the rent but s.n.a.t.c.hed it back as its flame almost went out.

"An air shaft."

Without sticking his head inside the shaft, Cull could feel the cold air. After estimating the rate of closure of the grey stuff, he put his head into the hole. There was light inside, enough for him to see to the top of the shaft and to the bottom. At the top was a great square of bright light, the outlet. It was so far above that the lower part of the shaft should have been in blackness. But it was not. Below, it was like twilight. Perhaps the interior of the shaft was coated with a light-reflecting agent. Moreover, from top to bottom, along one wall, within reach, was a series of rungs.

He withdrew his head, told Fyodor what he'd seen, and waited while Fyodor verified his story.

Then Cull said, "Let's go down the rungs. We can always go back to the top if we have to. Anyway, this shaft may go to the bottom of this whole world."

Before Fyodor could object -- if he intended to -- Cull had stepped out and was on the rungs.

Fyodor and Phyllis followed without comment as Cull began climbing downward. Above them, the edges of the hole through which they had pa.s.sed crept silently toward each other. But Cull didn't think that the hole could be entirely closed; it was just too large. There had to be limits to the self-repairing capabilities of the grey stuff.

That thought gave him another, a chillier one. The grey stuff must have been designed to withstand normal quakes. What was happening to make quakes of such magnitude? What did the city above look like now? What else was in store?

No use thinking about it. Just climb on down as swiftly as they could.

The air, moving upward, was about a thirty-mile an hour wind, so they had to cling tightly to the rungs. It was cold. Before they reached bot-tom, their teeth were chattering, and their fingers and feet were icy. Cull was glad he was wearing sandals. The water on their bodies made them even colder. But, fortunately, the air was dry and soon took the moisture off.

When they got to the end of the rungs, they found that they had to drop about seven feet to the floor of the tunnel. The shaft was the focus of four horizontal tunnels. Air rushed from each and upward through the shaft toward the outlet at the top. The dim twilight prevailed in the tunnels.

"Let's take the nearest tunnel," Cull said to forestall any long and agonizing debate. He started walking, bent against the wind down the tunnel. By now, the flame of Fyodor's torch had been whipped into blackness. Their breaths steamed and were swept away behind them. If the temperature dropped much lower, Cull thought, they'd soon become statues of ice, food for any demons that might be prowling this cold h.e.l.l.

After walking three or four miles, Cull began looking at the other two, wondering if they'd break first and suggest going back. But they didn't, and Cull refused to admit they were stronger than he.

Every four hundred yards, they came to the bot-tom of a shaft. Each was the junction for two tunnels at right angles to each other.

"I don't get the system," Cull said. "Where do the hot-air shafts go to? You'd think the hot air would come directly down here and be cooled off. But it looks as if there might be a network of horizontal tunnels just above these. Maybe the hot air is then led along a horizontal system for a while before it goes down to this level. I don't know. Also, what happens to the moisture precipitated by the cooling air? It must be disposed of somehow. Otherwise, the tunnels would have long ago been plugged with ice."

Fyodor shrugged, Phyllis was silent. The teeth of all chattered.

They walked on without a drop in temperature or rise in wind velocity. Cull was just on the point of selling himself the idea that their courage and hardihood were really stupidity. They should climb back up a shaft. No, that wouldn't work. How could they get down off the outlet to the shaft without jumping to their deaths? And, if they could not find another break in the shaft-wall, how could they get back to the sewage tun-nel? Apparently, the airshaft system and the sewage system were sealed off from each other.

So. . .?

"So!" wheezed Fyodor. He stopped. Phyllis, following closely, b.u.mped into him. Cull stopped, too, to stare at an archway in the side of the tun-nel. The chamber inside the archway was about forty feet wide and bare of any furnishings. But, at a level with his eyes, hanging against the op-posite wall of the chamber, was a tiny bright light. Or a spark, for it threw no beam. He walked on in and found that the air was much warmer than that in the tunnel. The wind was gone too. It was as if they'd come through an invisible intangible door in the archway.

The others followed him. Then, Cull stopped. The light was on the other side of a window. The window was a circle cut into the wall.

He looked through the window while his heart beat fast because there was something odd and frightening about the aperture.

There was the globe of light he'd first seen. To one side was another globe. And, way below, a cl.u.s.ter of a dozen or so lights.

"What are they?" murmured Phyllis.

"Stars," Cull said.

The bright sparks were drifting off to the right now. A huge blue star (how many lightyears away?) came into view. Then, above it, a white shimmering cloud with even whiter knots im-bedded within the shimmering gas. The blue star and the galaxy or gas cloud, whatever it was, crawled to the right, and a huge black ma.s.s ap-peared. Thre was enough illumination for Cull to see that the ma.s.s must have been made by hands (or equivalent thereof), for it was shaped like an elliptical concave mirror and antennas with strange outlines sprouted from all around the edges of the device.

Then it too drifted off to the right. A few more stars slid before him. Another device of the same apparent size and configuration as the first came into view. More stars. Not many. Another device. A few stars. Another device. Or was it the one he had first seen?

"We're looking through a port in the outer sh.e.l.l of an artificial satellite," Cull said. "But a satellite of what? Of our galaxy?"

"I don't understand," said Fyodor.

"I don't either," Cull said.

He extended his fingerpast the window. He ex-pected it to freeze with the near-absolute zero of s.p.a.ce. But he felt neither warmth nor cold. There was a resistance. Just a sensation of resistance, that's all. His finger wentpast the window about half an inch, then began meeting resistance. He withdrew the finger, and he slammed his fist into the invisible stuff. The fist drove past the window as far as his wrist and stopped. Cull withdrew the fist.

"This sh.e.l.l or field or whatever it is must en-close this whole world," he said. "But if it does, it must allow heat dissipation -- except in the im-mediate area of this window. That is how the hot air inside this world is cooled. By contact with the cold sh.e.l.l of this. . . world, h.e.l.l, what-do-you-call-it?"

"What could those machines, those. . . devices, floating by up here be for?" said Phyllis.

Cull shrugged his shoulders. Silently, for a long time, all three watched the universe spin by.

Once, the floor and walls quivered for a minute, and they knew that the earth and rock above them, rather, inward, must be shifting.

After the tremors ceased, Cull said, "You've talked to some of those who lived on Earth in the ancient days. They said that this was a flat world. Then, it was reshaped during a series of cataclysms into its present form. Some time later it began to expand. About the time that mid-twentieth century people began arriving."

Fyodor did not reply. Phyllis continued gazing out.

There was a boom down the tunnel, and the room shook again.

"Let's get out of here," Cull said. "I think we've found out all we can."

They returned the way they'd come. But, on arriving at the second conjunction of tunnels from the chamber, they discovered the cause of the noise. Rocks had fallen in through the shaft and plugged up any exit in that direction.

Cull didn't waste time but turned back to the shaft behind them. There they threw away the sacks of food and water, keeping only the ropes and two torches and some matches. They jumped up, grabbed the bottom rung, pulled themselves up to the next, and began climbing. Once, a quar-ter of the way up, they stopped climbing to cling tightly to the rungs while the walls of the shaft swayed. Above them, something exploded, and rocks fett down. Fortunately, the hole was created in the opposite side of the shaft, and so the rocks did not strike them. Or Cull thought it was only the opposite side until they got to the rent. Then, he saw that the shaft had been ripped open along at least three-quarters of its circ.u.mference. The jagged termination of one end of the split had thrust between the rungs. They had time, if they dared to take it, to crawl through the opening into a horizontal tunnel. Cull decided to dare.

Fyodor followed with several inches to spare around him. Phyllis got through just as the grey stuff began to meet. Her foot sc.r.a.ped against the jags and began bleeding.

Cull didn't wait to examine the injuries but began walking swiftly down the tunnel. They were close enough to the surface, he thought, for them to locate an exit. The cracking open of the shaft was lucky. He didn't fancy climbing to the top of the shaft only to be trapped there, unable to get down to the ground without leaping a hundred feet or maybe a thousand feet. Or else having to wait until the shaft toppled over.

He was right in his estimate. They came across a pole. It led up a shaft about sixty feet and ended in another tunnel. There was daylight at one end of the tunnel. They trotted toward it, but they stopped before reaching it.

They had come to the beginning of a long line of stone statues.

Idols. Broken idols.

The first was a squat semihuman figure roughly cut out of granite. Below its bulging belly were enormous male and female primary s.e.x organs, the female just above the male.

The next two idols were more human and were nonhermaphroditic. The male sported a tremen-dous phallus, and the female had huge b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a swelling abdomen, and very thick hips and legs.

These two and the androgynous statue were the only ones in the entire line that were not headless. The rest consisted of trunks and jagged necks with the broken-off heads lying on the floor near their feet.

It was evident, from the cracks completely en-circling the short thick necks of the first three statues, that the heads had also been broken off at one time. But they had been refitted to the necks. Cull supposed that some sort of gluing agent had been used. This meant that demons had done the job, for glues of any strength were not available to humans.

They walked in silent review of the silent ranks. Past human and half-human torsos, past stone heads of bulls, lions, hawks, ibises, jackals, past the trunks of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses and demons with six arms and four arms and eight legs. Past the bearded and the beardless heads on the floor.

Four times, they came across the mummified and stiff corpses of men propped against the wall.

These were not headless.

Then, at the end of the line, near the tunnel en-trance, was a head.

The head of X, torn not too long ago from the corpse, rested on the floor and stared out the en-trance.

Fyodor began weeping.

"Let's not have another maudlin scene," Cull said. "We've more important things to do. Such as finding out what's going on here."

He walked on past the head and out of the en-trance. He was standing on the slope of a hill. The hill was outside the walls of the city. And the city was a shambles. The walls had fallen outward, and their tumble revealed the dashing of towers to the ground, the shattering of the great buildings. The Brobdingnagian blocks comprising the walls and towers had slid apart as if made of hollow blocks of balsa. And the blocks forming the statues or cylinders around the air shafts had fallen away and exposed the twisted, bent grey stuff.

The surface of the desert was split open, cracked. One wide, crooked fissure ran from un-derneath the city and across the plain for as far as he could see. And there were thousands of shorter, thinner crazes.

Abruptly, the tunnel from which they had just emerged was undulating like an eel, and the thun-der of the quake was filling it as if it were a t.i.tan's megaphone. Yet, Cull could hear even above the bellow, a high-pitched hyenalike laughter. The series of loud cachinnations was only a few feet behind him.

They came from a demon. The same one who had fled down the sewage tunnels with the head of X. He was standing not a foot away, his hands on his hips, his head thrown back, his mouth wide.

Laughing.

Before Cull could do anything, he was shoved to one side by Fyodor. Fyodor hurled himself on the demon, bore him down, and began banging the demon's head on the floor.

"X! X! X!" he screamed. "Why X? What is X? Who? Who?!"

Cull ran up to the two, then sat on the floor and seized the demon's arms to help Fyodor hold him down. Suddenly, the demon quit laughing, tears welled from his eyes, and he sobbed.

This surprised Fyodor so much that he quit pounding the demon's head. It surprised Cull, too.

He'd never seen a demon weep.

"Men," the demon said, crying, "I know some things you don't know. But there's a lot I don't know. And I am, basically, as helpless, and as hopeless, as you."