There was a howl as big as the world inside me. It wanted out, and it was stronger than I was. I howled.
The priest muttered to himself. Aloud he said, “Please. Please don’t do that. If you will only stop crying, I will help you get your pitchfork.”
I shook my head. I got out a whimpered, “How?”
He sighed. “I cannot even take off my robe. I do not see how I can help. Perhaps I could act as bait somehow?” He lifted his head, his teeth grinding with the effort, to look up along the cascade of broken rock.
I stood up. I patted him on his leaden back: Clunk, clunk, clunk. “You’ve got your own problems.” I girded up my mental loins and started up the slope.
Loose rocks rolled under my feet. This was the high side of the gully. It took a long time to get to the top. I had just one advantage: part of the bridge still projected out from the cliff. I climbed in its shadow and stopped underneath. I waited.
After all, what could a demon do to me? Rip me to pieces? I’d heal.
Drop me into the pitch forever?
Throw me into the Pit of the Thieves?
One of the horned black demons strolled past, his head turned to study the pitch on the other side of the ridge. He held six yards of iron pitchfork balanced in one hand. All I had to do was leap out and grab it.
I let him go. When he was past I began to shake. The beast had three-inch claws, ten. And eight-inch tusks, two. And Carpentier was a coward.
I heard clanking and puffing below me. I turned and saw an amazing sight. The priest was coming up behind me.
I watched him. I didn’t believe it, but it was true: he was actually in motion. He sounded as if he were dying again, but every so often his hand or his foot would move and he’d be two inches higher. When I finally made myself believe what was happening, I scrambled down the cliff, got under him and pushed up on the rigid hem of his robe. I doubt it helped. I might as well have been trying to lift the world.
We reached a flattish fragment of rock just under what was left of the bridge. There we rested. The death rattle was in his throat. His eyes were closed. His face glistened.
“Thousand years,” he got out. “Been walking…thousand years…in this lead coffin. Legs like trees.” Then, “Was a priest. A priest. Supposed to…keep people out of Hell.”
“I still don’t know how we’re going, to do it.” The we was courtesy, and he deserved it. But what could he do?
“Get me up,” he said.
I got my arms under his robe. It was warm. Together we got him upright, somehow. Then I looked up…at a demon’s hooves.
The demon looked down at us, grinning. “You know,” he said pleasantly, “you’re the first one ever got this far out of the tar.”
I said, “You’re making a mistake. I’m not—” Then I leapt for it. The pitchfork struck sparks from the rock where I’d been, but I was in midair, falling.
I landed hard on a ragged-edged boulder. I rolled immediately, ready to dodge again.
The priest was gripping the business end of the pitchfork!
The demon bellowed and pulled. For an instant he had lifted the priest off the rock, robe and all. Then the priest sagged back, still gripping the tines.
I tried to climb up to help.
The priest took two steps back and off the edge of the rock.
The demon bellowed for help. He was trying to lift half a ton of leaden robe, and it wasn’t working out. I had almost reached them when the demon cried out and let go. The priest dropped through space.
I crawled down to him.
The robe was bent like tinsel and cracked down the front. The edges glowed yellow. He’d been told wrong; the robe was solid gold. When I touched it it burned my fingers.
The priest was mangled inside. He looked violently dead, except for his eyes, which followed me. If I didn’t get him out of the robe he’d fry. But you don’t move an accident victim—
He’ll heal, Carpentier. We all heal, to be hurt again. I pulled him out by his feet. The robe wasn’t contoured to let him pass, but it didn’t matter. He came out like a jellyfish. He must have broken every bone in his body.
I spoke, not to the soft-looking head but to the gray eyes alone. “You’ll heal. When you heal, there’s a way out of Hell. Benito says so. Go downhill. Downhill.”
The eyes blinked.
“I’ve got to rescue Benito,” I said. I pulled him over to the side so nobody would step on him. I picked up the pitchfork and left.
“Benito!”
I walked the ridge between the pits, calling like a lost soul. The answering voices all sounded the same, anonymous, thrumming, inhuman. “Here I am, fellah!” “Benito who?” “Who dares disturb the silence of Hell?”
“Benito!”
“Allen?”
That had to be him! But a dozen voices took it up. “Allen!” “Here I am, Allen! What kept you?”
“Benito! I’ve come to get you out!”
I listened for the Italian accent…and heard it. “Never mind. I belong here. I should not have tried to leave.”
All the flames looked alike, but I thought I had him placed now. I reached down with the pitchfork. “Bugger that! Grab the end!”
The other flames were wandering off. Benito said, “It is not long enough in any case.”
It wasn’t. I looked along the rim. There was a rough place where I might climb down partway.
Benito tried to stop me. “You are being stupid. If you fall, you will burn like the rest of us!”
“Can you reach the end?”
“Go away, Allen. This is my proper place.”
I was ten feet below the rim and almost out of footholds. The pitchfork was heavy and awkward. I tried to go further, setting my feet very carefully.
“All right,” Benito said suddenly. The huge flame moved to engulf the tines. I felt a feather touch on the haft, and the flame began to rise from the pit.
He called, “Can you hold me?”
I laughed with relief. “You don’t weigh as much as an ounce! I could lift a thousand of you!” After all I’d been through, suddenly it was going to be easy.
The flame rose higher along the haft…and I felt the first warming of the metal.
I waited until I was sure I could filter the panic from my voice. Some of it may have got through anyway. “Benito? Hurry.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No, never mind. Just hurry.” I was afraid he’d let go.
The metal was uncomfortably warm.
It grew hot.
Down there where a huge flame was rising in dreamy sloth, the metal began to glow dull red. He wouldn’t notice; his own bright flame would blind him to it. Up here it was too hot to hold, but I held on, my teeth clenched against the scream.
The scream grew bulky in my throat. I stopped breathing to hold it in. If Benito gave up now to save me pain, I’d never, never find the courage to do this twice.
The metal was cherry red around the flame. My hands began to sizzle. I wasn’t breathing, but the smell of cooked meat worked its way into my nose. I couldn’t imagine how my hands still held. I was clenching them with everything I had, but the muscles and nerves must be cooked through. Charred through. I knew that smell too: dinner ruined. My head was thrown back, my eyes clenched tight. There was no sensation but the fire.
“You can let go,” said Benito. He was beside me, clinging to the cliff, his body no longer hidden by the flame.
I tried to let go.
My hands were charred fast to the haft. I tried to knock the pitchfork loose. It came loose, all right, and slid bumping into the eighth bolgia with my charred hands still attached.
Benito had to virtually lift me up the cliff.
• • •
• • •
From A WORLD OUT OF TIME
Over the years I gradually realized that my favorite characters were all tourists. Beowulf Shaeffer, Louis Wu. Kevin Renner was a tourist who joined the Navy.
What woul
d a Niven character do if I put him where they wouldn’t let him be a tourist?
RAMMER
I
Once there was a dead man.
He had been waiting for two hundred years inside a coffin, suitably labeled, whose outer shell held liquid nitrogen. There were frozen clumps of cancer all through his frozen body. He had had it bad.
He was waiting for medical science to find him a cure.
He waited in vain. Most varieties of cancer could be cured now, but no cure existed for the billions of cell walls ruptured by expanding crystals of ice. He had known the risk. He had gambled anyway. Why not? He’d been dying.
The vaults held over a million of these frozen bodies. Why not? They’d been dying.
Later there came a young criminal. His name is forgotten and his crime is secret, but it must have been a terrible one. The State wiped his personality for it.
Afterward he was a dead man: still warm, still breathing, even reasonably healthy—but empty.
The State had use for an empty man.
Corbell woke on a hard table, aching as if he had slept too long in one position. He stared incuriously at a white ceiling. Memories floated up to him of a double-walled coffin, and sleep and pain.
The pain was gone.
He sat up at once.
And flapped his arms wildly for balance. Everything felt wrong. His arms would not swing right. His body was too light. His head bobbed strangely on a thin neck. He reached frantically for the nearest support, which turned out to be a blond young man in a white jumpsuit. Corbell missed his grip; his arms were shorter than he had expected. He toppled on his side, shook his head and sat up more carefully.
His arms. Scrawny, knobby—and not his.
The man in the jumpsuit said, “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” said Corbell. My God, what have they done to me? I thought I was ready for anything, but this—He fought rising panic. His throat was rusty, but that was all right. This was certainly somebody else’s body, but it didn’t seem to have cancer, either. “What’s the date? How long has it been?”
A quick recovery. The checker gave him a plus. “Twenty-one ninety, your dating. You won’t have to worry about our dating.”
That sounded ominous. Cautiously Corbell postponed the obvious next question: What’s happened to me? and asked instead, “Why not?”
“You won’t be joining our society.”
“No? What, then?”
“Several professions are open to you—a limited choice. If you don’t qualify for any of them we’ll try someone else.”
Corbell sat on the edge of the hard operating table. His body seemed younger, more limber, definitely thinner, not very clean. He was acutely aware that his abdomen did not hurt no matter how he moved.
He asked, “And what happens to me?”
“I’ve never learned how to answer that question. Call it a problem in metaphysics,” said the checker. “Let me detail what’s happened to you so far and then you can decide for yourself.”
There was an empty man. Still breathing and as healthy as most of society in the year 2190. But empty. The electrical patterns in the brain, the worn paths of nervous reflex, the memories, the person had all been wiped away as penalty for an unnamed crime.
And there was this frozen thing.
“Your newspapers called you people corpsicles,” said the blond man. “I never understood what the tapes meant by that.”
“It comes from popsicle. Frozen sherbet.” Corbell had used the word himself before he became one of them. One of the corpsicles, the frozen dead.
Frozen within a corpsicle’s frozen brain were electrical patterns that could be recorded. The process would warm the brain and destroy most of the patterns, but that hardly mattered, because other things must be done too.
Personality was not all in the brain. Memory RNA was concentrated in the brain, but it ran all through the nerves and the blood. In Corbell’s case the clumps of cancer had to be cut away. Then the RNA could be leeched out of what was left. The operation would have left nothing like a human being, Corbell gathered. More like bloody mush.
“What’s been done to you is not the kind of thing that can be done twice,” the checker told him. “You get one chance and this is it. If you don’t work out we’ll terminate and try someone else. The vaults are full of corpsicles.”
“You mean you’d wipe my personality,” Corbell said unsteadily. “But I haven’t committed a crime. Don’t I have any rights?”
The checker looked stunned. Then he laughed. “I thought I’d explained. The man you think you are is dead. Corbell’s will was probated long ago. His widow—”
“Damn it, I left money to myself!”
“No good.” Though the man still smiled, his face was impersonal, remote, unreachable. A vet smiles reassuringly at a cat due to be fixed. “A dead man can’t own property. That was settled in the courts long ago. It wasn’t fair to the heirs.”
Corbell jerked an unexpectedly bony thumb at his bony chest. “But I’m alive now!”
“Not in law. You can earn your new life. The State will give you a new birth certificate and citizenship if you give the State good reason.”
Corbell sat for a moment, absorbing that. Then he got off the table. “Let’s get started then. What do you need to know about me?”
“Your name.”
“Jerome Branch Corbell.”
“Call me Pierce.” The checker did not offer to shake hands. Neither did Corbell, perhaps because he sensed the man would not respond, perhaps because they were both noticeably overdue for a bath. “I’m your checker. Do you like people? I’m just asking. We’ll test you in detail later.”
“I get along with the people around me, but I like my privacy.”
The checker frowned. “That narrows it more than you might think. The isolationism you called privacy was—well, a passing fad. We don’t have the room for it…or the inclination, either. We can’t send you to a colony world—”
“I might make a good colonist. I like travel.”
“You’d make terrible breeding stock. Remember, the genes aren’t yours. No. You get one choice, Corbell. Rammer.”
“Rammer?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“That’s the first strange word you’ve used since I woke up. In fact—hasn’t the language changed at all? You don’t even have an accent.”
“Part of my profession. I learned your speech through RNA training, many years ago. You’ll learn your trade the same way if you get that far. You’ll be amazed how fast you learn with RNA shots to help you along. But you’d better be right about liking your privacy, Corbell, and about liking to travel, too. Can you take orders?”
“I was in the army.”
“What does that mean?”
“Means yes.”
“Good. Do you like strange places and faraway people, or vice versa?”
“Both.” Corbell smiled hopefully. “I’ve raised buildings all over the world. Can the world use another architect?”
“No. Do you feel that the State owes you something?”
There could be but one answer to that. “No.”
“But you had yourself frozen. You must have felt that the future owed you something.”
“Not at all. It was a good risk. I was dying.”
“Ah.” The checker looked him over thoughtfully. “If you had something to believe in, perhaps dying wouldn’t mean so much.”
Corbell said nothing.
They gave him a short word-association test in English. That test made Corbell suspect that a good many corpsicles must date from near his own death in 1970. They took a blood sample, then exercised him to exhaustion and took another blood sample. They tested his pain threshold by direct nerve stimulation—excruciatingly unpleasant—then took another blood sample. They gave him a Chinese puzzle and told him to take it apart.
Pierce then informed him that the testing was over. “After all, we already know the state
of your health.”
“Then why the blood samples?”
The checker looked at him for a moment. “You tell me.”
Something about that look gave Corbell the creepy feeling that he was on trial for his life. The feeling might have been caused only by the checker’s rather narrow features, his icy blue gaze and abstracted smile. Still…Pierce had stayed with him all through the testing, watching him as if Corbell’s behavior was a reflection on Pierce’s judgment. Corbell thought carefully before he spoke.
“You have to know how far I’ll go before I quit. You can analyze the blood samples for adrenalin and fatigue poisons to find out just how much I was hurting, just how tired I really was.”
“That’s right,” said the checker.
Corbell had survived again.
He would have given up much earlier on the pain test. But at some point Pierce had mentioned that Corbell was the fourth corpsicle personality to be tested in that empty body.
He remembered going to sleep that last time, two hundred and twenty years ago.
His family and friends had been all around him, acting like mourners. He had chosen the coffin, paid for vault space, and made out his Last Will and Testament, but he had not thought of it as dying. He had been given a shot. The eternal pain had drifted away in a soft haze. He had gone to sleep.
He had drifted off wondering about the future, wondering what he would wake to. A vault into the unknown. World government? Interplanetary spacecraft? Clean fusion power? Strange clothing, body paints, nudism? New principles of architecture, floating houses, arcologies?
Or crowding, poverty, all the fuels used up, power provided by cheap labor? He’d thought of those, but they didn’t worry him. The world could not afford to wake him if it was that poor. The world he dreamed of in those last moments was a rich world, able to support such luxuries as Jaybee Corbell.
It looked like he wasn’t going to see too damn much of it.
Someone led him away after the testing. The guard, walked with a meaty hand wrapped around Corbell’s thin upper arm. Leg irons would have been no more effective had Corbell thought of escaping. The guard took him up a narrow staircase to the roof.