A small animal crossed their path, and in a blink, one of Snake’s hands scooped up a sharp rock, flung it and sunk it into the beast’s head. They quartered it on Iimmi’s blade and had almost enough to fill them from the roast made with fire from the jewels. Following their own shadows into the afternoon, they continued silently up the river.
It was Urson who first pointed it out. “Look at the far bank,” he said.
The river had become slower, broader here. Across from them, even with the added width, they could make out a man-made embankment.
A few hundred meters farther on, Iimmi sighted spires above the trees, still across the river. They could figure no explanations till the trees ceased on the opposite bank and the buildings and towers of the great city broke the sky. Many of the towers were ruined or cracked. Nets of girders were silhouetted against the yellow clouds, where the skin of buildings had stripped away. Elevated highways looped tower after tower, many of them broken also, their ends dangling colossally to the streets. The docks of the city across the water were deserted.
It was Geo who suggested: “Perhaps Hama’s Temple is in there. After all, Argo’s largest temple is in Leptar’s biggest city.”
“And what city in Leptar is that big?” asked Urson in an awe-filled voice.
“How do we get across?” asked Iimmi.
But Snake had already started down to the water.
“I guess we follow him,” Geo said, climbing down the rocks.
Snake dove into the water. Iimmi, Geo, and Urson followed. Before he had taken two strokes, Geo felt familiar hands grasp his body from below. This time he did not fight; there was a sudden sense of speed, of sinking through consciousness.
Then he was bobbing up in chill water. The stone embankment rose to one side and the broad river spread to the other. He shook dark hair from his eyes and sculled toward the stones. Snake and Urson bobbed at his right, and a second later, Iimmi at his left. He switched from sculling into a crawl, wondering how to scale the stones; then he saw the rusted metal ladder leading into the water. He caught hold of the sides and pulled himself up.
The first rung broke with his full weight, dropping him half into the water again, and his hands scraped painfully along the rust. But he pulled himself up once more, planting his instep on the nub of the broken rung; it held. Reaching the top, he turned back to call instructions: “Keep your feet to the side.” Snake came up now, then Urson. Another rung gave under the big man’s bare foot when he was halfway up. As he sagged backward, then caught himself, the rivets of the ladder tugged another inch out from the stone. But they held. Iimmi joined them on the broad ridge of concrete that walled the river. Together now on the wharf, they turned to the city.
Ruin stretched before them. The buildings on the waterfront looked as though they had been flung from the sky and broken on the street, rather than built there. Girders twisted through plaster, needling to rusted points.
They stepped down into the street and walked a narrow avenue between piles of debris from two taller buildings. After a few blocks, the building walls were canyon height. “How are you going to go about looking for the Temple?” Urson asked.
“Maybe we can climb up and take a look from the top of one of these buildings,” Geo suggested. They raised their eyes and saw that the sky was thick with yellow clouds. Where it broke, twilight seeped.
They turned toward a random building. A slab of metal had torn away from the wall. They stepped through into a high, hollow room. Dim light came from white tubes about the wall. Only a quarter of them were lit; one was flickering. In the center of the room hung a metal sign:
NEW EDISON ELECTRIC COMPANY
Beneath it, in smaller letters:
“LIGHT DOWN THE AGES”
Great cylinders, four or five times the height of a man, humped over the floor under pipes, wires, and catwalks. The four made their way along one walk toward a spiral staircase that wound up to the next floor.
“Listen!” Urson suddenly said.
“What is it?” Geo asked.
One of the huge cylinders was buzzing.
“That one.” Urson pointed. They listened, then continued. As they mounted the staircase, the great room turned about them, sinking. At last they stepped up into a dark corridor. A red light glowed at the end:
EXIT
Doors outlined themselves along the hall in the red haze. Geo picked one and opened it. Natural light fell on them. They entered a room in which the outer wall had been torn away. The floor broke off irregularly over thrusting girders.
“What happened here?” Urson asked.
“See,” Iimmi explained. “That highway must have crashed into the wall and knocked it away.”
A twenty-foot ribbon of road veered into the room at an insane angle. The railing was twisted but the stalks of streetlights were still intact along the edge.
“Do you think we could climb that?” asked Geo. “It doesn’t look too steep.”
“For what?” Urson wanted to know.
“To get someplace high enough to see if there’s anything around that looks like a temple.”
“Oh,” said Urson in a reconciled voice.
As they started across the floor toward the highway, Geo suddenly called, “Run!” As they leaped onto the slanted sheet of concrete, a crack opened in the flooring over which they had just walked. Cement and tile broke away and crashed to the street, three stories down. The section of road on which they perched now wavered up and down a good three feet. As it came to rest, Geo breathed again and glanced down to the street. A cloud of plaster settled.
“That way is up,” Urson reminded him, and they started. In general the walk was in good shape. Occasional sections of railing had twisted away, but the road itself mounted surely between the buildings on either side of them through advancing sunset.
It branched before them and they went left. It branched again, and again they avoided the right-hand road. A sign half the length of a three-masted ship hung lopsidedly above them on a building to one side:
THE HUB OF
WORLD NEWS,
COMMUNICATION,
& ENTERTAINMENT
As they rounded the corner of the building, Snake suddenly stopped and put his hand to his head.
“What is it?” asked Geo.
Snake took a step backward. Then he pointed to WMTH.
It…hurts…
“What hurts?” asked Geo.
Snake pointed to the building again.
“Is there someone in there thinking too loud?”
Thinking…machine…Snake said. Radio…
“A radio is a thinking machine, and there’s one in there that’s hurting your head?” interpreted Geo tentatively, and with a question mark.
Snake nodded.
“Yes what?” asked Urson.
“Yes, there’s a radio in there and it’s hurting him,” said Geo.
“How come the one he showed us before didn’t hurt him?” Urson wanted to know.
Iimmi looked up at the imposing housing of WMTH. “Maybe this one’s a lot bigger.”
“Look,” Geo said to Snake. “You stay here, and if we see anything, we’ll come back and report, all right?”
“Maybe he can get through it,” Urson said.
Snake looked up at WMTH, bit his lip, and suddenly started forward, resolutely. After ten steps he put his hands to his head and staggered backward. Geo and Iimmi ran forward to help him. When they got back beyond the effects of WMTH, Snake’s face looked drained and pale.
“You stay here,” Geo said. “We’ll be back. Don’t worry.”
“Maybe it stops later on,” Urson said, “and if he ran forward, he could get out the other side. It may just stop after a hundred feet or so.”
“Why so anxious?” asked Geo.
“The jewels,” said Urson. “Who’s going to get us out of trouble if we should meet up with anything else?”
They were silent then. Their shadows over the pavement faded as the yellow tinge of the sky fell before blue. “I guess it’s up to Snake,” Geo said. “Do you think you can make it?”
Snake paused, then shook his head.
Geo said to the others: “Come on.”
A click—and lights flickered all along the edges of the road. Almost a third of the lights still worked and now flared along both sides of the rising ramp, closing with the distance through the twilight.
“Come on,” Geo said again.
The lights wheeled double and triple shadows about them on the road as they reached the next turnoff that led to a still higher ramp. Geo looked back. Snake, miniature and dimmed by distance, sat on the railing, his feet on the lower rung, one pair of arms folded, one pair of elbows on his knees above a puddle of shadow.
“I hope someone is keeping track of where we’re going,” Geo said a few hundred yards on.
“I can get us back to New Edison,” said Iimmi. “If it’ll do any good,” he added.
“Just 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 smeared one side of the towers with copper while blue shadows slipped down the other. Smaller walkways led to the buildings around them. By way of a plastic-hooded stair, they mounted another eighty feet to a broader highway where, stepping out, they could look down on the necklace of light they had just left. New Edison and WMTH still towered behind them. There was an even taller building before them. They had cleared the lower roofs.
On this road fewer lights were working. There were often five or six dark in a row, so that they moved with only the glow of a neighboring roadway twenty yards to the side to light them. They were just about to enter another of these dark sections when a figure appeared in silhouette at the other end.
They stopped.
The figure was gone.
Deciding it was only their imagination, they started again, peering through the incomplete darkness on either side. A little farther, Geo suddenly halted. “There…”
Two hundred feet ahead of them, what may have been a naked woman rose from the ground and began to walk backward until she disappeared into the next length of dark road.
“Do you think she was running away from us?” Iimmi asked.
Urson touched the jewel on Iimmi’s chest. “I wish we had some more light around here.”
“Yeah,” Iimmi agreed. They continued.
The skeleton lay at the beginning of the next stretch of functioning lights. The rib cage marked sharp shadows on the pavement. The hands lay above its head, and one leg twisted over the other in an impossible angle.
“What the hell is that?” Urson asked. “And how did it get there?”
“It looks like it’s been there a little while,” said Iimmi.
“Do we turn back now?” Urson asked.
“A skeleton can’t hurt you,” Geo said.
“But what about the live one we saw?” countered Urson.
“And here she comes now,” Geo whispered.
In fact, two figures approached them. As Urson, Geo, and Iimmi moved closer, they stopped, one a few steps before the other. Then they dropped. Geo couldn’t tell if they fell or lay down quickly on the roadway.
“Go on?” asked Urson.
“Go on.”
Pause.
“Go on,” Geo repeated.
Two 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 from the sky, but from the roadway that crossed theirs fifty feet overhead. 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 the road above and continued up the road. They passed four more skeletons. The plopping behind them became a sloshing.
As they turned, it emerged under the white and flaring lamps. Translucent insides bubble-pocked and quivering, it slipped forward across the road toward the skeletons. Impaling itself on the bones, it flowed around them, covered them, molded to them. A final surge, and its shapelessness contracted into arms, a head, legs. The naked man-thing pushed itself to its knees and then stood, its flesh now opaque. Eye sockets caved into the face. A mouth ripped low on the skull, and the chest began to move. A wet, steamy sound came from the mouth hole in irregular gasps.
It began to walk toward them, raising its hands from its sides. Then, behind it in the darkness, they saw the others.
“Damn,” said Urson. “What do they…”
“One or both of two things,” Geo answered, backing away. “More meat or more bones.”
“Whoops!” Iimmi said. “Back there—!”
Behind them seven more stood, while the ones in front advanced. Urson slipped his sword from his belt. The gleam of the streetlight ran down the blade. Suddenly he lunged at the leading figure, hacked at an upraised arm, sprang back. Severed at the elbow, the wound dribbled down the figure’s side.
The arm splashed on the macadam. Quivering, the gelatinous mud contracted from the bone. As Urson danced back, one of the figures behind the injured one stepped squarely on the blob, which attached itself to its ankle and was absorbed.
A covered flight of stairs had its entrance here, 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. They were high enough to get some idea of the city. Outside the transparent covering of the steps, the city spread in a web of lights, rising, looping, descending like roller-coaster tracks. Two glows caught him: beyond the river, a pale red haze flickered behind the jungle and was reflected on the water. The other was within the city, a pale orange nested among the buildings.
He took all this in during a glance as he ran up the steps. A gurgling became a roar behind them as they reached the top. Geo was only clear of the entrance when he yelled, “Run!”
They slipped from the doorway and staggered back. A mass of jelly the size of a two-story house flopped against the entrance. They edged by its pulsing sides. The lamplight pierced its translucent sides, where a skull caught in the jelly swirled to the surface, then sank.
“By Argo…” swore Urson.
“Don’t try to cut it again, Urson!” Geo said. “It’ll drown us!”
It sucked from the entrance and shivered ponderously. Something was happening at the front. A half-dozen figures were detaching themselves from the parent and preceding it.
Geo: “They can’t go very fast—”
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Urson said.
They ran up the road, plunging suddenly into a darkened section. There was a glow in front of them. Suddenly Urson yelled, “Watch it!”
Abruptly the road sheared away. They halted and approached the edge slowly. The surface of the road tore away and the girders, unsupported, sagged toward the ruined stump of the building from which rose the orange glow. One wall of the building still stood, topped by a few girders that spiked the darkness. The glow came from the ruin’s heart.
“What do you think that is?” asked Geo.
“I don’t know,” Iimmi said.
It sloshed along the road behind them. They looked. In the shadow, numberless figures marched toward them. Suddenly the figures fell to the ground, and without a halt in the sound, flesh rolled from bone, congealed, and rose, quivering, into the light.
“Get going!” Geo ordered.
Iimmi started out first on the twisted beams that descended to the glowing pit.
“You’re crazy,” Urson said. It flopped another meter. “Hurry up,” he added. With Urson in the middle, they started along the twenty-inch width of girder. Lit from beneath, most of their bodies were in the shadow of the beam. Only their arms, outstretched for balance, burned with pale orange.
Before them, legible on the broken wall,
ATOMIC ENERGY FOR THE BETTERMENT OF MAN
was flanked by purple trefoils. The beams twisted sideways and then dropped to join others. 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. When he 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. “What is it?”
Urson expelled a breath and then continued down slowly, without speaking. Quickly Geo turned to drop—
The beam structure over which they had just come was coated with trembling thicknesses of the stuff. Globs hung pendulously from the steel shafts, glowing in the light from below, quivering, smoking, dropping off into the darkness. Here and there something half human rose to look around, to pull the collective mass farther on; but then it would fall back, dissolve. Sagging between the girders, noisome, thick, it bulged forward, burning in the pale light, smoking now, bits shriveling, falling away. Geo was about to go on. Then he called, “Wait a minute.”
It wasn’t making progress. It rolled to a certain point in the sherbet-colored light, sagged, smoked, and dropped away. And smoked. And dropped.
“It can’t get any farther?” Urson asked.
“It doesn’t look it,” said Geo.
A skeleton stood, flesh running in the orange light. It tottered, steaming, and fell with a sucking noise into hundreds of feet of shadow. Geo was holding tightly to the girder in front of him.
The orange light fell cleanly over his hand, wrist, shadow starting at his elbow.
What happened made him squeeze until sweat came: the gargantuan mass, which had only extended tentacles till now, pulsed to the jagged edge and flung itself on the metal beams. It careened toward them. They jerked back.
Then it stopped.
It boiled, it burned, it writhed. And it sank, smoking, through the naked girder work. It tried to crawl back. Human figures leaped toward the road edge, missed, and plummeted 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. It slipped free of the beams, tentacles sliding across steel, whipping into air. Then it dropped, breaking into a dozen pieces before they lost sight of it.
Geo released the girder. “My arm hurts,” he said.
They climbed back to the road. “What happened?” asked Iimmi.
“Whatever 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 to the lower highway. Iimmi’s memory proved good, and for an hour they went quickly, Iimmi making no hesitation at turnings.
“God,” Geo said, rubbing his forearm. “I must have pulled hell out of my arm back there. It hurts like the devil.”
Urson looked at his hands and rubbed them together.
“My hands feel sort of funny,” Iimmi said. “Like they’ve been windburned.”
“Windburned, nothing,” said Geo. “This hurts.”
Twenty minutes later, Iimmi said, “Well, this should be about it.”
“Hey,” said Urson. “There’s Snake!” They ran forward as the boy jumped off the rail. Snake grabbed their shoulders and grinned. Then he began to tug them forward.
“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 migraines at times like that, you’d better teach us what to do with those beads there.” He pointed to the jewel at Iimmi’s and Geo’s necks.
But Snake just tugged them on.
“He wants us to hurry,” Geo said. “We better get going.”
The fallen floor had made descent through New Edison impossible. But the roadway still continued down, so they followed it along. Twice it cracked widely and they had to clamber along the rail. All the streetlights were out here, but they could see the river, struck with moonlight, through the buildings. Finally the road tore completely away, and four feet below them, over the twisted rail, was the mouth of the street that led to 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.
And almost as though it had been in wait, thick liquid gurgled behind them. A wounded thing, it emerged from behind the broken highway, bulging up into the light, which shone on the wrinkles in its shriveled membrane.
“Run it!” bawled Urson. They took off down the street. In the moonlight, the ruined piers spread along the waterfront to either side.
They saw it bloat the entrance of the street, fill it, then pour across the broken flags, slipping across the rubble of the smashed buildings.
On the edge of the wharf they looked back. Now the thing wavered, spreading tentacles left and right. From one of these a man formed. Standing at the head of the flowing mess, he raised a hand and beckoned to them in the moonlight.
Geo hit water and was aware of two things immediately as the hands caught him. First, the thong was yanked from around his neck. Second, pain seared his arm as if the nerves and ligaments were suddenly laced by white-hot strands of steel. Every vein and capillary had become part of a web of fire.
It was a long time before consciousness. Once he was lifted and he opened his mouth, expecting water. But there was only cool air. And when he opened his eyes, the white moon was moving fast above him toward the dark shapes of leaves, then was gone behind them. Was he being carried? And his arm…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. Scoop it up quick. Damn, let me get out of here. Run past the black columns, glimpsing the cavernous room and the black statue at the other end, huge, rising into shadows. Men in dark robes walking around. Just don’t feel up to praying this afternoon. I am before the door; above it, a black disk with three white eyes on it. Through the door, now up the black stone steps. Wonder if anyone will be up there. 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. Figures moving on it. Can’t make them out; he’s in the way. Oh, there’s another one. Jeepers…
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 anymore. 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 has made my blood run colder.
What do we report to Hama Incarnate?
It would be silly to say anything now. We 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 superamoeba.
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 junked 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, reeeeeal slow. Oops. 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. Oh, priests coming down the path. Oops again, there’s 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. 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 the black earth. Lift it out. Is it all there? Open it up; peer in. At the bottom in the folds of paper: tiny scraps of copper, a few long pieces of iron, 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…Damn, my robe’s caught on the handle.
And drop.
Skinned my shin again. Someday I’ll learn. Uh-oh, Dunderhead is going to blow a condenser when he sees my robe torn. Oh, well, sic vita est.
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 my 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 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.
A harsh voice: 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 dour priest with small paunch. There are mirrors along the vestibule, reflecting the blue and yellow from the colored panes. In the mirror I see pass: a dour priest, preceded by a smaller figure with short red hair and a spray of freckles over a flattish nose. As we pass into prayer, there is the maddening, not quite inaudible jingle of metal, muffled by the dark robe—
Geo woke up, and almost everything was white.