Inside Outside

by Philip José Farmer

  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 passed 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 bottom, 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 Hell.

  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 bottom 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 tunnel? Apparently, the airshaft system and the sewage system were sealed off from each other.

  So…?

  “So!” wheezed Fyodor. He stopped. Phyllis, following closely, bumped into him. Cull stopped, too, to stare at an archway in the side of the tunnel. 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 opposite 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 cluster 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 imbedded within the shimmering gas. The blue star and the galaxy or gas cloud, whatever it was, crawled to the right, and a huge black mass appeared. Th”re was enough illumination for Cull to see that the mass 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 shell 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 finger past the window. He expected it to freeze with the near-absolute zero of space. But he felt neither warmth nor cold. There was a resistance. Just a sensation of resistance, that’s all. His finger went past 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 shell or field or whatever it is must enclose this whole world,” he said. “But if it does, it must allow heat dissipation — except in the immediate area of this window. That is how the hot air inside this world is cooled. By contact with the cold shell of this… world, Hell, 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 quarter 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 fell 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 circumference. 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. Cu
ll 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 scraped 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 sex organs, the female just above the male.

  The next two idols were more human and were nonhermaphroditic. The male sported a tremendous phallus, and the female had huge breasts, 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 encircling 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 gods and goddesses 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 entrance, was a head.

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

  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 entrance. 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 underneath 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 thunder of the quake was filling it as if it were a Titan’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.”

  “Well?” Cull said.

  “Well, I’m not a demon. Not in the sense you mean. I’m a member of a race, species, what you’d call an extraterrestrial. The people of our planet resemble yours, physically. Except that, on our world, many are given shapes not intended by Nature. Genetic manipulation, direct transmutation of protoplasmic configurations, reworking of cells at a microscopic level. We have our reasons for doing this. I won’t go into them.”

  Cull was beginning to get seasick from the combined roll, pitch, and yaw of the tunnel. But he fought it, for he had to find out all the demon could tell them.

  “This place is Hell for us, too,” it said. “But there aren’t so many of us here because we ceased to exist on our planet, became extinct, long ago. Just as we were getting started, getting civilized. What we’d call civilized, not you.”

  “O.K.,O.K,” Cull said. “But what about those machines surrounding this sphere? Who put them there? What’s their purpose?”

  “Who?” it howled. “The Others! The Others!”

  “What Others?” Cull howled back at him. The roar, rumble, and shriek outside were deafening. And the contortions of the tunnel were becoming even more violent.

  “Another type of sapients! Immeasurably older than either of us! More knowledgeable, more powerful by far! We offended them, and this is our punishment!”

  “But what about us?” Cull yelled. “What about…?”

  “You offended them, too! Early, early!”

  “How? We don’t even know them!”

  “Your primitive ancestors did!”

  “How could they? And who are the Others?”

  “I can’t tell you! I can’t! I can’t! That’s part of our punishment! We’ve been treated, inhibited! We’re under a compulsion! We know, but we can’t tell you! I’ve told you all I can! And if I weren’t so terrified, I couldn’t tell you this much!”

  “But those machines? Our physical resurrection? The fabrication of this world! How? Why?”

  “It’s not metaphysical or supernatural! It’s physical. Obeys the laws, principles, of the universe we knew. Some laws we don’t know! But They do! They’ve got Power! Power we would have had some day, if we hadn’t been wiped out through our own arrogance and foolishness! Power you Terrestrials could have, if you could overcome your own type of damned foolishness!”

  “Tell me! Tell me!” Cull screamed. But Fyodor began banging the demon’s head on the floor while he shouted, “X! X! X! Tell me about X!”

  Suddenly, with that instability of mood and irrationality of behavior that made these creatures so terrifying to human beings — before man outnumbered demon — he began laughing. It wasn’t hysterical laughter. It was genuine amusement.

  He laughed until he choked. Then, recovering, he said, “Would you believe me if I told you that X was a human traitor? That he helped us because he wanted to torment you with a hopeless hope?”

  “No, I wouldn’t!” bellowed Fyodor.

  “Would you believe it if I told you he is the Savior you hope for? But, in this pocket of the universe, he has to behave as the Others tell him? Obey Their laws?”

  “No, no!”

  The demon started laughing again. After which, he cried, “Would you believe it if I told you everything I’ve said was a lie? That everything I’ll tell you from now on is a lie? Or that, just maybe, there’ll be one or two truths among all the lies? Why not? You Earthlings and your truth! You make me sick! What is truth?”

  Cull meant to kill him then. He was out of his mind. Fyodor was, too. He
gripped the demon’s throat and began choking him. Fyodor’s own face was as purple as the demon’s. And Cull stood up, swaying, and tried to stomp the demon on his face. He wanted to break bone under his foot, mash the nose, kick the teeth out, break the eardrums, burst the eyeballs.

  There was a sound as of a giant tree being broken in two. Cull was hurled against the side of the tunnel. Stunned, he vaguely realized that this portion of the tunnel had been ripped off and that it had been thrown, sideways, down the hill.

  Over and over it rolled. Its occupants, Fyodor, Phyllis, the demon, himself, the stone trunks, the stone heads, the desiccated corpses, the head of X, rolled with it. Down the hill the cylindrical tunnel rolled, and over and over the occupants slid and fell. Why the four weren’t crushed by the statues, Cull didn’t know. But they weren’t, though, once, an idol slid by him, so close it scraped his shoulder. He did tangle with the demon, and it grabbed Cull in his arms, pinning him and making him helpless.

  “Ah, you beautiful thing, you!” he chanted.

  “This world is Hell! It is supernatural! What you saw through the window is only an illusion to keep you going in your search for the truth and the escape!

  “Lies, lies, lies! But maybe one truth, or half-truth, concealed in the midst!”

  There was a crash as the tunnel stopped rolling. The demon was torn from Cull. Before Cull could recover from his stunned condition and attack him, the demon leaped up. It bent over and bit Cull savagely on the shoulder.

  Cull was too deadened to feel much pain at that moment. Later, it was almost more than he could stand.

  “The Mark of Cain!” the demon shouted, Cull’s blood on his mouth. “Signature of Satan! Bite of Baal! Or what have you! Kiss your baldheaded friend, seeker of X, for me! Tell him that X still lives, that X will give him salvation, paradise, if he can find X!