Crusaders in Hell

THE GOD OF THE GAPS Gregory Benford

The dirt road had turned to mud long ago beneath the slow gray drizzle and the tramping of feet. Gregory Markham watched the straggling line of men and women. They moved steadily but without obvious fear, as if fleeing a customary and sluggish foe. They were a herd, bothered but basically docile, moving on.

Some who had horses rode them along in the ditch, which was firmer, than the road now. Others had hitched them to lumbering, poorly made wooden carts.

Markham saw a lumbering water buffalo, head down and huffing as it pulled a long wagon. Its owner had piled furniture and mattresses, lumpy bundles and wooden boxes into the wagon-even his family, too. The buffalo had to drag all that and the wheels kept clogging with mud. The owner would climb down and shave the mud off the spokes and rim with a short shovel and then kick the animal to get it started again. Markham didn't think the buffalo had long to go.

He stood in the cover of bushes fifty meters away and just watched. Horses and water buffalo in Hell. Well, why not?

Since this place was somewhat like Earth, why not throw in precise details?-be sure the buffalo didn't have three horns, or its owner walk on all fours.

Might as well get that right.

And me lazy light rain fell straight down from the perpetual overcast and hit the ground, rather than going the other way around. Markham was sure that it could have been otherwise if whoever or whatever was in charge here had wanted to diddle with the specs a bit. He looked at his own hand. It was a little blue from the chill but there were five fingers and, the thumb worked all right; All the little details in place. He was wearing rough cotton pants with a draw string and the vaguely Mexican-style shirt, BO collar. He had awakened this time, after his last death in Hell-just opened his eyes and there were sodden pine trees overhead and rain falling in his face.

His clothes weren't wet yet so either the rain had just started or else he had materialized--he couldn't think of any other words for it-only moments before.

At least this time he hadn't had to go through the whole disgusting business with the Welcome Woman again. Or the elevator. This time was easier and maybe that meant something.

He had a glimmering of an idea, something about the fact that a single death got you out of

"life," whatever that had been, but apparently an infinite series of deaths still wouldn't let you escape this Hell.

Would anything? Moral heft? Spectacular brutality? Three Hail Marys and a sour fart?

Ignorance wouldn't, that was obvious. So he had to observe, learn. That meant staying out of the local cat fights and madness.

He had to maneuver, though, see how things worked without getting captured, used, recruited into the seemingly endless and pointless causes here. He remembered the legions of troops he had seen, marching off to interminable battles, fighting out of habit or .zest or vast ancient despair.

Everybody here seemed to have more street smarts than he did. Unsurprising, since he had been a cloistered physics professor, but humbling and irritating.

He started walking through the low bushes, parallel to the road but opposite to the traffic. Something in him didn't want to join that bedraggled, hollow-eyed bunch. They were listless, forlorn, hopeless. Cattle.

And if these refugees were fleeing something, it might be interesting.

Markham kept close enough to hear the grunts and occasional swearing from the road. He crossed several gullies where deep ruts cut into the red clay. He leaped over them, trying not to expose himself to view. He didn't know what these people were fleeing, or whether they were on one side or another of the rebellion Che Guevara had started. Or restarted...

He began to sweat despite the spattering rain. He was already soaked but a warm wind came from the hills above and he didn't mind. He remembered reading in Scientific American that merely being chilled didn't increase your likelihood of getting a cold. On the other hand, that might not apply to Godless microorganisms devilishly devised to keep the ecology of Hell running.

That was the problem-he had severe doubts whether what he had learned before meant anything here. He smiled without pleasure. He saw now that he had been a man who depended on knowing things, understanding, standing at the center of an orderly world. The quest to uncover some small new fragment of the underlying Mystery had propelled him blithely through Life-that first run-through, that opening scene in a play that now promised to run forever.

Hell wasn't fire and brimstone. Far worse, it was chaos.

He heard popping noises from the right, toward the road. Far away, but they had the characteristic thin spatting sound of gunfire. He stood still and listened. No shouting, just more popping and then the soft crump of an explosive.

He angled away from the road. The rain turned to a spitting mist and then stopped. He saw no one. Hell certainly wasn't overcrowded. He tried to remember if anyone had ever mentioned any boundary to Hell.

He pondered the point, trying to view the issue scientifically. At least doing that took him away from the weary present.

There was Earth-like local gravity. Ok, that meant space-time was curved.

Well, it couldn't have an indefinitely large surface-that would imply a highly curved space-time, which would appear as a crushing local gravity. Still, this could simply be an enormous world of low density, or a cut-off space-time, ingeniously adjusted to yield a local gravity of one G.

He remembered a student's joke slogan at the university, years ago: WHITE PAPER IS GOD'S WAY OF REMINDING US IT ISNT EASY TO BE GOD.

Designing any environment implied awesome powers. Presumably the Devil had abilities rivaling God's, or else there would be obvious flaws.

'"Alto!"

Startled, Markham ducked into some brushes without looking at whoever had shouted. A loud report boomed in his ears. He crouched down and saw a man come running toward him, leveling a rifle.

" 'ey! 'ey!"

Pointless to run. Crap. Caught within an hour.

He stood slowly, showing his hands. The man trotting toward him was dressed in loose cotton too and said something in rapid Spanish. Markham shrugged, indicating incomprehension, and remembered someone telling him in one of his previous lives in Hell that classical Greek and modem English were the working languages here. Well, this guy hadn't done his homework.

More Spanish. "No comprehende," Markham said. The man scowled, brushed back his ragged black hair, and poked Markham with the rifle. Markham began walking as the man directed and they wound their way up a deep arroyo.

Pines hid them. The rain had brought out the crisp scent of the pine needle mat they walked on and Markham fell into a rhythm, working his way up the clay hillside. The man jabbed at him with the rifle, apparently the major method of communication around here.

He had seen nothing but woods and small towns in Hell, and his mind turned to using that fact somehow. Maybe he could estimate the size of this place. How many people should be in Hell, anyway?

He remembered reading that the lifespan of people before the coming of agriculture had been about twenty years. Nasty, brutish and short, indeed.

Archeologists had gotten that average number from disinterred bodies, and had found universal signs of broken bones, vitamin deficiency and early arthritis.

So much for Rousseau's noble savage.

So if identifiable humans had been around for a million years or so, what percentage went to Hell? Say, about one half. He also recalled that until people were forced to invent agriculture-because the big game herds were running out-the whole planet had supported only a million or so people.

Okay, then with a lifespan of twenty years, keeping that population steady at one million people

... for a million years ... meant about fifty billion souls had shuffled off the mortal coil. If half went to Hell. and you added in another ten or so billion to cover the time since agriculture dawned, that was thirty-five billion people.

He smiled. The Earth itself would be jam-packed with such a population. Hell wasn't. That meant the place was huge, maybe ten times the surface area of earth. A giant planet.

Or else that far fewer people came here than he estimated.

Maybe, he conjectured. Hell was a by-product of organized religion. What a laugh, if theologians invented it, gave the Devil the idea!

Perhaps it arose because of the idea of moral order, of good of right 'n wrong. So when you died, this place attracted the doubters, the sophisticates, the .intellectuals ... the physicists.

The idea made him smile. What a fitting end for the subscribers' list of The New York Review of Books.

Distant rumblings, full of menace, rolled down from the far hills. Markham slogged on. Distant cries of agony came and went on the fitful wind. He wondered if he would see Hemingway again.

It had been sheer good luck to stumble on Hemingway shortly after arriving here.

Hem had understood at least how to get through the routine horrors of this place, had forged an internal refuge from it all. The point, Markham saw, was to endure without accepting, to never let it break your spirit. That was a good path to follow in their previous lives, of course, but it had taken

Markham at least a long while to see that. When you started out, the essential nastiness of life itself was hidden by the zest and dumb joy of youth. When friends started dying, felled by disease or dumb accidents, it sobered you.

Hem had seen that early and gotten it down on paper. What he claimed for his own was a territory of the spirit that you recognized in the gut, nothing to do with intellect at all. Even in Hell, Hem strode like a giant, because most of these rag-doll actors still hadn't comprehended what would get them through. It was one thing to understand your predicament and another, far greater thing entirely, to get through, to not let it blunt your senses or rob you of joy.

His captor shouted, jerking Markham back to the gritty present. A hoarse reply came from the trees above them.

Markham scrambled up the steep clay slope, grabbing at bushes to keep going.

When he stood up at the top, panting, a voice said clearly, "Mierda."

"Anybody here speak English?"

"Sure I do some," a tall man said, stepping from behind some eucalyptus trees.

"Who're you?"

"Person."

Markham glanced at his guard, who came wheezing up the slope, and then back at the tall man, who carried an automatic weapon with a long curved box clip.

"What else is there?"

"Devils."

"I'm no devil."

"You fight on side devils?"

"Don't fight at all."

"What you do here?"

"I was born here. Reborn, you comprehende?"

The tall man laughed lightly, his eyes never leaving Markham. "You do it with Welcome Woman?"

"God no."

"Devils say God too."

So they didn't believe he was just a mortal. "You with Guevara?"

"Maybe."

The tall man rattled off some Spanish to Markham s guard and the guard started back down the arroyo. "Hey, you come." A prod with the automatic.

"Look, I saw Guevara just before I was killed, last time." Markham omitted that Guevara had personally ordered his execution.

"I not see Guevara many days. Where he was?"

"Near the supply depot, that's all I know. He had lots of wild-eyed followers with him, I drink."

The tall man stopped. "That was one, two month ago."

"Really?" Then patching up his body and bringing him back did take time. It was oddly reassuring that even the Devil could apparently not merely snap his asbestos fingers and do everything.

"Gome! Commandante speak."

The tall man marched swiftly up the stony hillside and they came out of the trees into a flat area. Men were resting around campfires, cleaning their weapons. In the distance, down-slope, Markham could see more men crouched behind makeshift barriers of rock and felled trees. They had automatic weapons trained downhill. There was no sun, there never was, but a warming glow seeped down through the ivory clouds that seemed closer from the top of this hill.

Markham was prodded forward until they reached a tell man who was shouting at some others. Abruptly, firing came from down the hill and bullets ricocheted among the boulders higher up. Everybody hit the dirt except for the tall man and Markham. The man noticed this and laughed.

"You not afraid to die again?"

"Who wants to know?"

"I Joaquin," the man said, holding out a hand to shake. "From Spain."

"When?"

"Time of revolution."

"Which one?"

"Anti-fascist."

"That was over half a century ago, where-when-I come from."

Joaquin nodded grimly. "Si, we lost. I did not know this for some years in Hell. But hear Franco gone now."

"Yeah." The firing had stopped and the men around (hem got to their feet, brushing off dirt.

"What is position of church?"

Markham frowned. "In Spain? I don't know, I wasn't much for politics."

Joaquin's eyes narrowed. "Then you renounce the Church?"

"Huh? I don't give a damn about it."

Markham noticed several men nearby bringing their rifles up to ready.

"Say the rosary."

"I don't know it. I'm not Catholic."

"Then are demon." Joaquin smacked his lips and nodded sagely to his men.

"Hey, no-"

Somebody seized him from behind and pushed him downhill. There were three things that looked like telephone booths behind an outcropping of rock and a line of men and women waiting nearby, their hands tied behind them. As Markham stumbled down the hillside he saw that each booth had an open back wall on the downhill side and beyond each was a heap of bodies.

"Jesus, no, I-"

Joaquin ordered him bound and as two men tied his hands from behind Joaquin stepped over and casually punched him in the face. Markham's nose began dripping blood and he grunted with pain but he didn't mind that as much as the pile of bodies downhill.

"Demon feel hurt?" Joaquin asked sarcastically. "Yeah. Look-"

"Hay que tomar la muerte como si fuera asprina!" Joaquin called to his men, laughing. Then to Markham he said in heavily accented English, "You have to take death as aspirin."

"Look, is there some kind of test I can-"

"Demon, bleeds. Must be special demon," Joaquin said.

The men laughed. There was a mean edge to the sound.

"Dammit, I'm no demon at all!"

"Then swear fidelity to God."

"Which God? The Catholic one, or-"

They wrenched him away. "Okay, I vow by almighty God-"

Someone punched him in the stomach and he fell, dust filling his nose. He struggled up and hands thrust him into the line of forlorn people waiting to enter the booths. He gasped, then sneezed. Guards talked in Spanish, making some joke, and prodded him forward.

"Jesus, if they'd only listen..."

"Ah, that's expecting calm logic from a fevered mob," a man in front of him said. He was about Markham's age, with bushy hair, a sharp-nosed incisive face.

Markham recognized him, vaguely. Had he seen him in that grimy town, the one he found just after dropping into Hell? Everything was running together, like a watercolor. He had met Hemingway somewhere, yes, and some Romans ...

He shook his head. "I just got reborn. I damn sure don't want to go through that again."

"Nor I." The accent was British and the man's blue eyes darted about with piercing intelligence.

He wore a badly cut but recognizable du-ee-piece suit which looked ludicrously out of place.

"They grabbed me while I was trying to cut cross-country."

"Getting away from the battle?"

"Yes. Messy tilings. I thought isolation in these hills was clever, but there's some infernal war on."

"It's a revolt. Che Guevara against the local police and the demons." A pained expression. "Oh, not another."

"There've been some before?"

"I've heard such. No one writes down anything, there is no history-just rumors."

"How come they think we're demons?"

"There have been a lot around lately."

"Fighting?" "Precious little I know of that. I try to stay away from the endless battling."

"I'm no demon. Can't they tell?"

"They seem to think, these baby bolshies, that anyone human should've rallied to their cause already."

"Therefore, we're not human."

"A slippery syllogism, but enough, to knot around our necks, I m afraid."

The man was slight and precise, an aristocratic sparrow. His hawk-like triangular face seemed to seize upon each new morsel of fact and try to wring from it every savor of significance.

Markham looked up the line of hopeless, dejected captives, to the booths beyond. "What're those things?"

Delightful little telephone booths? Electrocution chambers, actually."

As Markham watched, two of the guards took a stiff-faced man out of the line and slapped him.

Then they spat questions at him in heavily accented English.

The man was fat but was well muscled, too, with a quick intelligence in his eyes. He licked at some blood that trickled from his lip, eyeing the two guards with contempt. Markham wondered if the resemblance to the Spanish dictator. Franco, was coincidental. Apparently none of the others noticed it.

But this figure had a certain dignity, a sturdy patient endurance that bespoke a past of authority.

"Where you from?" a guard asked the bleeding man.

"I live down the valley."

"Where that?"

He told them it was near the river that ran down on the other side of the far hills.

"Why you come here?"

"Trying to get away from the rest of you. You burned my house."

"You stay where you are, you okay. Why come here?"

"I thought the fighting would be down below."

"Why you think that?" the other guard asked suspiciously, prodding the fat man with the rusty barrel of his Springfield rifle.

"I thought you'd be brave enough to attack the demons. They were all along the river."

"You think we run?" the guard demanded sharply. The fat man smiled with undisguised disdain and said nothing.

The guard spat oat angrily, "You work with demons."

"Bullshit."

"You not demon maybe but you work with."

"Did you see them tear some of your friends apart? Back there on the road?"

"You there?"

"Sure. I saw a lot of you run away."

"Not us!" the guard said too quickly, too loudly.

"The big yellow ones, they pulled the hands off first. Then they broke the elbows and then the knees."

"We not retreat!"

"Somebody did."

Markham noticed one guard was clenching and unclenching his hands, breathing hard, eyes white. "You from demons!"

"No."

"You let demons give it to you in the ass."

The fat man said slowly, "If you are going to kill me, do it without all this.

This is stupid."

"You like the way they make you take it, face down in mud?"

The fat man said with dignity, "I hope your little trick with the wiping works. I do not want to remember you at all."

The guards both swore at him and grabbed him by the arms. They dragged him to the head of the line and thrust him into the tall booth. They attached a lead to his right foot and then pulled a kind of wire cage down over his head, making contact with the back of his neck. The fat man looked at them disdainfully, as though this was an irksome social encounter with his inferiors and he would be glad to get out of it and back to something interesting. Markham could not tell whether the man was being brave or just acting. Either way he kept it up right until the end, when a guard tripped a switch and abruptly the fat man jerked and twitched and his tongue shot out, huge and purple, his eyes bulging, like a grotesque gesture of final contemptuous farewell.

He stayed erect until the harsh rasping buzz stopped and the body collapsed, a puppet with its strings cut.

Markham bunked. "I wonder if he was...

"Bight. Franco, I'm sure of it," the Englishman said with clipped certainty.

"I saw him in person once."

"He didn't want these guys to know?"

"They'd have tortured him."

"Electrocution? Why not just shoot him?

"At first I imagined this bizarre device was to save ammunition, but I think not. The diesel, the electrical wiring-no, too complicated." His face wrinkled into a grim mask. "That wire cage around the head is the point."

"What's it do?"

The guards were dragging Franco s body through the booth. They threw it downhill, its arms flailing with false life, muscles still jumping. The eyes showed only white, the tongue lolled. It rolled into the pile of corpses, jerked a few times and lay still.

The Englishman said abstractly, gazing into the distance, "I gather from overheard talk that the booth destroys memory."

"What?" Markham felt a cold horror.

"It runs current through the easily accessible lobes. The high current then bums out the short-term memory. It may even affect the personality--not that these lot would care."

"So what? Well be reincarnated somewhere else.

"Ah, but there is some evidence that you carry your mental information with you." The man's impish eyes danced. Markham had a vague memory of this face, as though he had known of him in his past-his real-We. But where?

"Well, sure-"

"We retain our memories, else how is one to make progress?"

"Who says we do?"

"If we don't, what's the point of reincarnating us with all past memory of Hell intact? Otherwise, the Devil or Pseudo-God or whoever-whatever-runs this place might just as well begin each of our little Hellish 'lives'-" his eyebrows arched in exaggerated humor "-fresh.

Anew. Straight from our earthly graves."

"So you think there s a purpose to ...this place?"

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp," the man cackled, "or what's a heaven for?"

"I ... see." Markham was unsure if the man was merely antic, or insane. With British intellectuals it was not always obvious.

The Englishman said with grave calm, "They plan to wipe our frontal lobes."

"Jesus ...why?" Markham shifted uneasily. Up the line the guards took a swarthy young woman in black and strapped her into a booth. She didn't seem to care, just stared out at the gray sky of endless roiling clouds. "Apparently they regard us as minor functionaries, trivial demons sent to spy. If they kill us and erase our memories, then we cannot bring information back to the devil and his cohorts."

"And if we aren't..."

"Bight, Brain damage."

"I won't!"

"Haven't much choice."

"Oh yeah?" Markham shook a fist at the man. "Watch. As soon as there's-"

Without waiting for him to complete his sentence, Hell provided what he wanted. A shriek echoed across the broad hillside, from somewhere below. The cry held absolute terror and pain, mingled with a despairing surprise that transfixed everyone. It was a human wail confronting something from the deepest recesses of fear. Everyone stopped and turned toward the sound.

"The demons come," someone whispered.

Markham stepped out of line. A guard saw him and came running over and Markham spread his hands, as if in explanation; He put an expression of submissive anxiety on his face arid set his feet and waited for the right moment. The guard pointed the rifle, jabbering. Markham slapped his hand around it and jerked it free.

They think a cat in the hand means the world by the tad, he thought sourly, and before the roan could react Markham slammed the butt into the guard's face.

Shouts.

Shots.

Markham instinctively ducked. He grabbed a belt of ammunition from the guard's shoulder and rolled away. It had felt good to do that, finally take some action. He reversed the Springfield and fired off a round in the direction of the booths.

"Let's got" he shouted at the Englishman. He ran for the nearby pines, jacking a cartridge out of the breech and slamming it closed again, feeling the new round slide home from the clip.

Good stuff, he thought in a detached, lofty way. Old tech. Dependable.

He reached the trees among a peppering of shots trying to find him, a tisssip passing by his ear and singing grand elation in his feet.

He crashed into something sharp, felt a biting cut in his left leg, and rolled downslope into a hollow. Shots snapped by overhead. More distant screams. He brought the rifle up to cover the trees, but no one advanced toward him.

He crawled back up the slope and saw that what had cut him was a small crashed aircraft. Its shell of slick shiny aluminum gave him back his own face, and he was surprised to see he was heavily bearded, with long scraggly locks of brown hair.

The aircraft was light, carrying cameras and a small pilot's seat that would have fit a monkey. On its stubby nose it carried an odd emblem: a swastika

from which bloomed a vertical trident. Satan's pitchfork?

Rounds cut through the nearby trees, ricocheted spang off rocks, but Markham was transfixed by his own mysteriously transformed self. When he had died in Hell before, he had only a thin beard and short, servicable hair. Now, reborn, both were long.

He felt this must mean something, but before he could think it through, a figure broke from the nearby trees and ran toward him. Markham brought the rifle up and sighted along the barrel and then saw that it was the Englishman.

"Thought-I might-join you," the man gasped as he slipped on pine needles and crashed into the gully.

What're they doing out there?"

"You confused them. They expect ordinary people in Hell to take whatever comes along."

"Huh." Somewhere a machine gun opened up, raking the trees above with heavy fire.

"Not surprising, is it? Most are frightfully confused and numb. They've been so quite a long while."

"How do you know?"

"I've talked to a few in Greek-I learned a smattering of it at university."

Yeah? What do the Greeks say?"

Rounds thumped into the branches.

"Oh, not only Greeks. All the older ones had to learn Greek."

"Older ones?" Markham studied their situation. How could they get away?

"Oh, Egyptians, Babylonians, even hunter-gatherer types from prehistory."

"They're here?"

"Indeed. They may be the majority."

Markham remembered his estimate of the population. Fifty, maybe a hundred billion. "This isn't a solely Christian Hell, then, huh?"

"Not at all. The Babylonians think they're in some sort of staging area. Any moment a winged chariot trailing a glowing sun will descend and make this into a lush forest, they say, a heaven rich in date palms and fresh springs and easy women."

"Heaven? This?"

"Compared with scratching out an existence in a bleak dry plain, using a wooden plow? Yes."

"Not my idea of even a pleasant weekend."

"Nor mine. I say, what are you planning?"

"Nothing."

"When you dashed away, I thought-"

"Well, I didn't think. I just wasn't going to get my brains fried."

"Nor I."

"Why didn't you do something?"

"I am not the, ah, active type."

"Who are you?"

"A philosopher, Bert-"

"Fine, look, we've got to maneuver away from-"

Something napped lazily overhead. As Markham looked up he saw it bank and turn, a thing ponderous and scaly and unmistakably interested in them.

Its head was huge. Yellow eyes, with fractured red irises like shattered glass.

They peered down at the men from behind a pig snout with inflamed fleshy nostrils. Below these, flaring red-rimmed holes that dripped a bile-green pus.

Where a mouth should have been there was a crusted band of hairy warts, sickly white cysts and brimming brown sores. Its head was shaped like a bulldog's, blunt and squat and massive. As Markham watched, it hovered on languidly flapping wings and surveyed the area, its head swiveling completely around, as if on ball bearings. Then it fixed upon them again, selecting them from all it could see. Its eyes locked with Markham's. A moment passed between them, the yellow eyes flashing with malevolent lust and appetite, the fevered ancient communication of carnivore and prey.

It began its descent. The vast body was scaly, triangular, and its six-fingered claws grasped the air in anticipation. It brought bony arms up for the attack, sharp nails of crimson clashing and scraping together.

It came down on unseen currents, heavy and lumbering, its skin like aged brass. Then its swollen neck opened and Markham saw that he had been wrong: the apparent skull was only the upper half of some grotesquely misshapen head.

The neck yawned greedily, showing orange teeth that came to glinting points.

Muscles knotted, splitting the mouth into a thin, rapacious grin.

"My ... word," the Englishman whispered.

"Yeah."

The thing was heavy and inexorable. It looked aerodynamically impossible, a huge mass suspended aloft on gossamer wings of coppery reptilian sheen. And it thrust these wings forward and back as though it were batting at the air, not trying to skim through it. The things could move easily and swiftly while high up, but descent seemed difficult.

It doesn't seem to be maintaining an airflow over the wing surfaces, Markham thought. More like using the wings as oars. Maybe Bernoulli's laws don't work in Hell. But then something else must...

Slow but sure, it came.

"Run!" the Englishman cried.

"No, somebody'll just shoot us." Markham tried to think clearly.

"They'll be aiming at that."

"They already are."

They heard the thunk of bullets hitting the side of it. The leathery hide buckled in waves, spreading away from the impact, and then oozed back into place.

"No penetration," Markham said thoughtfully.

"If even machine guns can't puncture it, I fail to see what we-"

"Say, right-puncture. That's it."

"That's what?"

"It isn't flying at all. The thing's a damned balloon."

The Englishman named Bert looked doubtful. "It is a supernatural beast. You cannot assume the same laws-"

"Hell I can't. Or do you want to wait for it to come down here and eat you?"

"We should run."

"It moves sideways too fast." Markham assessed the monstrous bulk coolly.

"Even if we got across the clearing, through the machine guns, it would keep up."

"Then what-"

"We let it come to us."

"We're hopelessly-"

"Get some dried pine branches, quick."

The thing filled the air, ponderous and making a slobbering noise of greedy anticipation. The mouth split wider, purpling lips bulging, teeth gleaming a vibrant orange. Its eyes glowed with stupid energy. From the leering lips came a snakelike hiss. Abruptly the thing bellowed a high piercing attack note, a sound like a dozen blaring trumpets filled with spit.

The two men gathered some branches and squatted in the lowest part of the gully. The demons flexed rippling muscles and its distorted head lowered to bite.

"Got a light?" Markham asked.

"A what?"

The Englishman fished a worn book of pasteboard matches from a pocket. It tore when Markham opened it. He tried three of the thin matches and each time the head crumbled away.

He felt wind fluttering his hair.

"Where'd you get these?"

"I ... off a ... dead person."

"Oh great. Been out in the rain-" The fourth match lit, flared, and then the beating of monstrous wings blew it out.

"Stand over me!"

"But-it's so-"

"Do it!"

The spindly man stooped over Markham and the fifth match split in two. Markham cupped the sixth-and last-match and struck it carefully. It burst into welcome orange and he quickly touched it to the pile of pine branches. They caught.

Flames jumped through the pile, aided now by the fluttering wind of the beast.

"Into the mouth!" He had to yell against another moistly triumphant trumpet blast.

"Those teeth-"

"Now!"

The misshapen head struck down. They pitched the hot branches directly at it.

Most struck the lips. A few lodged in the corners of the yellow eyes, the crisp flames sending up quick puffs .of steam. Fewer still tumbled between the snapping sharp teeth and down its gullet.

"Go!"

They scrambled back as the head jerked and swung. A wet blue tongue flicked out and caught the Englishman by the wrist. It started to draw him in, toward the mouth. Markham chopped down with the Springfield and the tongue bristled suddenly with needle-point poison shafts.

These tiny swords stabbed the rifle, with demented verve, as if it were the enemy rather than the man who held it.

The Springfield started smoking. Markham dropped it. A sour stench made him choke. The tongue slipped back into the mouth and the Englishman wrenched free.

"Jump!"

They both dropped to the ground and rolled away from the lashing, aimless thrusts of the head.

The beast flapped languidly above, six feet from the ground, its head seeking them. A gust of wind blew it sideways, bringing into view an underside corrupted by fungus and open sores.

Markham crawled uphill. If they ventured out from under the thing, it could catch them as they fled. On the other hand, once it realized they were hiding under it, the demon dragon would simply land on them.

He heard a crump of something igniting. The beast shuddered and Markham rolled under the heaving, brassy scales of the belly. Small, skinny, almost vestigal legs hung there. They ended in stubby webbed duck feet of a delicate, pale tan.

"Grab on!"

"But-" The Englishman followed Markham s lead and grasped the feet. "Your fire idea certainly didn't frighten it."

"Helium wouldn't give it enough lift, so I figure." The beast twisted, struggling.

The Englishman's eyes widened in delight. "Ah! Hydrogen.'"

They felt rather than heard a dull, heavy whump.

"Then-"

The demon dragon lifted. Slowly, then faster, the igniting hydrogen deep in its belly blended with oxygen to yield a pure blue flame that shot from the head, cramming it back into the muscled neck, against the bulbous body. The escaping gas acted like a rocket, driving the demon skyward, ass-first.

The .Englishman screamed and Markham shouted, "Hold on! We'll get out of this mess!"

They arced above pines and rocky ridgelines, the venting gas driving them in a blunted parabola above the crackling rifle fire below. Wind whipped them against the steel-solid plates of the beast's coppery underbelly.

Markham felt them slowing, sensed the exhaustion of hydrogen inside. As pressure eased in the beast the rocket effect lessened. The thing curved downward, fuel spent.

They were high, but maybe not too high ... He had already died several deaths in Hell, and falling seemed to be an element in every one. This time ...

"Swing the way I do!" Markham yelled.

"I-can't-"

"Just do it."

The demon was falling. Its wings flexed weakly. Trees below swelled and Markham hoped they would come down in ones with high branches. Otherwise...

"Harder!"

They swung, clinging, Markham feeling his arm muscles knot painfully. The demon barked angrily and a wing batted at them.

"Make it tumble!"

"I don't see-"

Their timed swinging caught the beast off balance. It squawked with brassy rage. Flame leaped from its mouth but it could not spit past its own distended belly.

At their outermost extension, the weight of the two men was enough to send it tumbling sideways, wings ineffectually whacking the air. The thing kept falling and now it turned slowly in air, all skillful vectors lost.

The ground rushed up. The dragon spun over, belly-high - Markham slid down onto it. His shoes thumped into the mica-thin plates and he shouted, "Hang on!"

He had just enough time as wind whistled by him to grab a spindly thrashing leg.

The demon hit the trees with its face turned impotently skyward, yellow eyes blazing with dumb rage, Boughs broke beneath it crock-crock-crock and pine needles stung the men on faces and arms as they swirled downward with it, their world a mass of rushing green and shrieking demons.

It struck with a solid thunk. The belly bulged. It burst with a liquid poof.

A last branch lashed Markham across the face and he pitched forward onto soft humus.

He rolled over in time to see the demon give a quiver, a foul belch of hydrogen sulphide, and close its stormy eyes. The Englishman lay sprawled like a rag doll beside it, blinking and wheezing as if these both were new experiences, rich with sensation.

Markham brushed himself off. "Devil of a ride," he said.

The great demon-blimp had splattered scarlet gobbets among the pines and elms, speckling branches and leaves so that the very forest seemed to bleed. Markham kicked the crusted plates of its side and read the lines inscribed there in ornate Germanic script,

THROUGH ME YOU ENTER THE CITY OF LAMENT

THROUGH ME YOU ENTER INTO PAIN ETERNAL

THROUGH ME YOU ENTER WHERE THE LOST ARE SENT.

"Dante," the Englishman said.

"Must be like those people who wear sweatshirts that say. Property of San Quentin Prison-pure bravado."

"True, this demon didn't do very well at inflicting pain eternal on us."

"What's the rest of it say?" Markham tried to shove against the sagging belly plates and see the next line, buried under a wall of quickly purifying flesh.

"If I remember correctly, these are the famous words chiseled above the entrance to Hell. A few lines on are the famous ones,

'ABANDON EVERY HOPE, ALL YE THAT ENTER.

These words of colour touring and obscure, I saw inscribed on high above a gate.'

Or so as I recall. Defunct languages weren't my passion."

"I knew I should've gotten a classical education."

"Rubbish. No use to you here. This isn't Dante's Hell."

"Whose is it?"

"No theologian even remotely dreamed of something like this. No rules seem to apply."

"Not entirely," Markham said with a slight smirk. "Physics did this one in."

"The little trick with the hydrogen?" A begrudging smile. "You burned his buoyant gas, yes."

"I figured the dragon couldn't let much oxygen into its system, because hydrogen and oxygen explode. But it had to have a metabolism that involved oxygen-after all, it was breathing the stuff. But the two gases mingle safely-"

"Ah yes, I recall. Unless they're heated ..."

"You bet!" Markham said, eyes bright. "So our burning branches ignited the mixture, deep down in the demon's belly.

"But there was limited oxygen..."

"So it detonated slowly, pushing the hot residue out the throat"

"Which acted like a rocket."

"Yeah, luckily. I couldn't figure whether the exhaust would go out the mouth or me ass. So I grabbed on below. But if the hot stuff had come out the ass, we would've had to jump or get scorched."

"Clever, I'll grant."

"Better than that-it proves that there are physical laws that work here.

Hydrogen combined with oxygen in the presence of a hot enough flame makes them unite explosively."

"Oh, I'll agree to that, on Earth. But you haven't shown that's what happened here. Or that it will ever happen again."

"Look, we just rode this dragon to safety. How-"

"Only careful experiments can show-"

A furious flapping of wings startled them to silence. Above the trees a dark angular shape cruised, searching.

"Hustle!" Markham whispered.

They scrambled away, slipping on pine needles. Through the dark and clotted brush of the forest the heavy regular beat of wings rose, then gradually died as they made progress. Markham listened carefully.

"Maybe that s just the cleanup squad, come for the body."

"They do appear to have missed us."

Markham noted a strange silence in the woods ahead. No bird calls, not even the subtle brush of wind.

"Something funny over that way. C'mon."

They crept through tree-lined paths, angling away from the brooding zone of sepulchral silence.

Markham was reasonably sure this was not (he same hill where the battle had occurred, though it was hard to gauge distances when you were tumbling through the air on a belching, foul-breathed dragon.

They came to a gouged-out area that seemed the site of some past disaster.

Pillars and caved-in buildings poked like jagged teeth from the undergrowth. A snake slipped around a Doric column, eyed them, and left a trail of green slime as it moved off. The emerald line formed a written line, a message.

Markham gestured at the slimy numbers silently: 666.

"Ah, the number of the Beast."

"Does that mean he knows everything that's going on?"

"Perhaps. The Devil's supposed to be omnipotent.

"I thought that was God.'

A cackling laugh. "Is there a difference?"

"I hope so." Markham sat on a ruined wall of ancient red brick which reminded him of Greece.

He felt suddenly tired. Yet in Hell he could not sleep.

"You're a physicist?"

"Was. And you?"

"A philosopher."

"I think I remember your face. From the back of a book..."

"I died in 1970. Bertrand Russell."

Markham blinked. Why was Hell so densely populated with the famous? "Of course. I read a book of yours."

"History of Western Philosophy, I'll wager."

"Right. I'll bet you're surprised."

"Why?"

"You dismissed ideas of an afterlife as pure bullshit."

Russell again laughed like a cross between a barking dog and a clucking hen.

"True enough. I was a neutral monist, holding that personalities were collections of events. An aggregate, like a cricket club."

"But we're here. Some motivating personality makes the world run, and it cares about your particular cricket club. And. mine."

Russell's eyes sparkled, "Never feel absolutely sure of anything."

"Come on. You can't peddle that positivist doubt any more."

"Oh, can't I? Just because we have wakened to a comic book Hell."

"Dragons with Dante written on their hides? You think they arose from natural selection?"

"I do believe someone with a great deal of power has ordered this odd place we're in.

"Not the Devil, though?"

"Oh, I don't know his name, mind you. He can call himself whatever he likes."

"But you don't think this is a supernatural place?"

"I believe we are in the grip of a superior intelligence, that is all."

Markham preferred believing in the rule of physical law. If a capricious Devil ran everything here, there was no hope of doing anything independently. All human effort could be overruled by fiat. "You could explain our escape as just something the Devil let happen?"

"Of course.

"Even a Devil needs to make his Hell work with some order."

Russell leaned forward, rubbing his palms together as if relishing a good talk for the first time in quite a while. "You're a scientist. Let me put it to you: Isn't it perfectly possible that the old world we came from was the product of intelligent manipulation of a purely natural

"Until I woke up here, I'd have said yes. But now-"

"No no, let me be more precise. For example, our galaxy could have been made by a powerful mind who rearranged the primeval gases using carefully placed gravitating bodies, controlled explosions and all the other paraphernalia of an astro-engineer. But would such a super-intelligence be God?"

'Well, as far as we're concerned, yes."

"Not sol God was not supposed to be some mere galactic architect. Cleariy, no being who was obliged to operate within the universe, using only pre-existing laws, can be considered as a universal creator."

"I see." Markham didn't know whether he liked this line of argument. It had been strangely reassuring to die in Hell several times and be reborn, none the worse for wear. Even if you weren't hugely pleased with the place-to say the least-it did guarantee immortality. Death had been the deepest, most disturbing problem humanity faced in the old, "real" world. Its remorseless coming motivated the pyramids, vast rich art, all the grasping after tatters of immortality that lay behind great works. Awareness of it was lust about the only remaining feature which separated humankind from animals, far more important than language or tool-using or the opposable thumb. And each mortal faced it, finally, alone.

"If you as a scientist are to believe in God, you must hold that He created space-time. Eh?"

"Uh ... okay."

"But modem physics-or what I can glean of it from people passing through-holds that mere humans alone could accumulate enough matter in a small enough region to create a black hole."

"So?"

"Well, a black hole is a dosed-off space-time, is it not?"

Markham chewed at his lip. Russell's legendary quick wit was accompanied by a ready grin, a concentrated, almost wolfish gaze, a lust for the intellectual hunt. "No, a black hole destroys space-time at its center. That's what the singularity is. The whole idea of spacetime no longer works there. Anything that falls in enters that point, where our ideas of space and time and event itself no longer makes sense."

"To us." Russell said briskly.

"Yes, to us." Something was bothering Markham, plucking at his awareness. But he brushed it aside.

Russell nodded, still enjoying the pursuit "Of creating space-time, admittedly, we know nothing.

But in a sense the mathematical discovery of

black holes-and how to annihilate space-time at one vortex-like point- brings us halfway to Godhood ourselves."

"You mean if we were just smart 'enough, or had enough time to work on the problem-"

"Exactly. We would become gods."

"Rulers of space-time," Markham said sardonically. "Masters of the sevagram."

Russell sniffed with donnish primness. "Similarly, there is absolutely nothing which requires that we attribute this Hell to anything more than a natural God or Devil. He-or It-could quite simply have arranged v the galaxies to form, or life to begin, for example. No need for creation out of nothing, ex nihlio. Indeed-"

"You're just stuffing everything we don't know into a box and calling it God."

"Ah, quite right. At Cambridge we called that the God of the Gaps. Then, every time you physicists turned a new leaf, brought light on some subject. God retreated."

Markham nodded, still somewhat troubled by the silent forest they had found.

He studied the trees nearby, melancholy drooping willows. Was there a dead zone in the woods to his left, a curious noiseless region like the one he had noticed before? He felt jumpy.

Russell said with lordly reserve, "I do not wish to make this God the friend of ignorance. If we are to find God here, it must surely be through what we discover about things, rather than through remaining ignorant."

Markham said fervently, "Damn right. If we can just do a, few experiments, try to-"

"No, wait, you misunderstand. Let me frame my point more precisely. You surely accept the possibility that in the remote future, humanity might be able to place great regions of the universe under intelligent control."

"Well..." Markham had always been rather leery of wild-eyed speculation, of what-ifs piled atop one another to dizzying heights of absurdity.

"Then such a zone would be totally technologized. Why, then, is it so difficult to suppose such a superintelligence cannot have existed before us?"

"There's no evidence-" Markham stopped.

"Exactly. This may be such evidence.'

Some innate sense of what science was about forced its way forward. Markham said irritably,

"Look, intelligence comes from the upward evolution of matter. That means-"

"Yes, yes, matter first, mind later.

"All the science we have-"

"Assumes that the universe is not a self-observing, self-organizing system."

"Sure, because-"

"Of bias, pure and simple."

"No, it's ..." Markham's voice trailed off. You ... you've thrown every basic proposition into doubt. If mind comes first, and organizes matter now ..."

"Note that the universe didn't have to start this way. You can have your Big Bang or this new Inflationary Universe scenario I've been hearing about.

Cherish whatever beginning cosmology you desire." Russell beamed happily.

"Clutch it to your bosom. But in this catch-all Hell, you must at least admit the possibility that somewhere in the last ten or twenty billion years- that is still a good value taken from the Hubble constant, isn't it?"

Markham nodded silently, drinking.

"In those billions of years, somehow mind, came to the fore, at least in our little neck of the universe."

"And it moved upon the waters and made Heaven and Hell."

"Well, Hell at least. We have no evidence of Heaven.

Markham blinked. "You ... dunk this might be all.

"Why not?"

"But there must be something better ...

Markham saw sourly that Russell could easily be right. This place might be a mild improvement on me "real" world, since you couldn't die, but nobody had said anything about any place better now that he thought about it. The best anyone could envision was a return to the old world itself.

"In a way," Russell said dreamily, "this is a philosopher's paradise."

"I think I'd prefer the Moslem one, with houris and infinite banquets."

"No no, that would be hopelessly boring."

"I could sure as hell use a stiff drink, right now."

Russell waved away such base pursuits. "Actually, this place reminds me in a way of why I took up mathematics, I wanted something that was not human and had nothing particular to do with the messy Earth, or with the whole accidental nature of the universe. I wanted something like Spinoza's God, which wouldn't love w in return.

"Ha! Here everything hates us. Very personally, too."

"I prefer to believe that in this place Mind rules, not brute Matter."

"Gee, that makes me feel better already."

"Sarcasm?"

"Demons chasing us, horrible deaths every time you look around, you can't screw or eat or drink with any pleasure, or even sleep-"

"Well, admittedly there -are some sensory details missing."

"Details? You call-" Markham was on his feet, fists balled into hard knots, feeling the frustration in him about to explode-when something made him freeze. The silence...

It had reached the nearby trees now, a ghostly enveloping deadness that clasped the air in clammy cold. A fine mist seemed to hang suspended on a crystalline inert nullity.

"Run!"

Russell dashed away as quickly as Markham, his spry step belying the generally thin and delicate look of the man. His absurd three-piece suit flapped as he ran, his tie streaming behind.

They crashed through brush and thickets, oblivious to stinging scratches and painful poking limbs. And abruptly stumbled into a meadow, where a figure in white coasted along above the ground.

"What?" Markham gasped.

"It doesn't appear to be a demon."

"But he's flying."

At the sound of their Voices the figure swerved and glided toward them.

Alabaster blades of light streamed from his flowing robes. He held up a hand, palm forward, and called, "I beseech you, which way did you come?"

"Back there." Markham gestured. There s some land of dead zone."

"That would be a timetrap the Beast has sent for Russell said piercingly, "A trap in time?" He stepped forward and deftly felt the hem of the man's flowing robe where it rippled lightly in the air.

The floating figure Said airily, "A place where- temporarily, though that is not only a bad pun, but a positive confusion-all space-time vectors are very nearly wholly spacelike."

"In other words," Markham said, time slows.

The being nodded. 'Time becomes as syrup. One swims through it with only muted, mudlike motions.

"Are you a poet?" From Russell's intent expression Markham gathered that the philosopher either disliked the alliteration or else drought this hovering creature was somehow important.

"No," the man said simply, "I am an angel called Altos."

"In Hell?" Russell demanded.

"We labor where we must."

Altos had begun drifting downhill, away from the direction of the timetrap.

Markham trotted to keep up and felt in the wake of the angel a breath of warm, tropical air. He breathed in a scent of sweet wildflowers and a rich, spicy aroma of meat turning on an open spit.

His stomach rumbled. An avalanche of images smothered him in sensual longing.

Pink-nippled breasts. Prime rib, marbled with fat. Ivory thighs slowly spreading in silent invitation. Incense burning in shrouded rooms where cries of pleasure drifted. Milkshakes. The grunting squeezed pleasure of a good,

full shit. Crisp lettuce. The heavy smoke of a Cuban cigar. Lunging shudders between a pair of high-heeled shoes. Musky lamb curry. Dozing in golden sunlight halfway through a winter's morning. A lingering moist kiss in a darkened hallway. Ripe olives-He felt a stirring, a building of lust long denied. All his senses collided and he could barely gasp,

"Heaven! Is there a Heaven?"

Altos looked with mild, distant curiosity at the two running men, as if they were a bothersome detail. He was gaining speed and they had begun to pant as they dashed in his wake across the green meadow, wet grass slipping and squeaking under their shoes.

Why, I believe so. I am not a framer of definitions."

"But, look! You must have been there," Markham shouted as the figure picked up velocity and began to rise at a steady angle to clear the trees ahead. "Who gives you your orders?"

"Oh," the receeding voice called out blandly, "I do not receive orders. I respond to the will of the world." Altos rose into the perpetually troubled sky, his robes trailing a last faint aroma of distant pleasures, and waved langorously.

"What the Hell did that mean?" Markham gasped, stopping.

"Bloody angel is just as big a fool as we all," Russell said sardonically.

"Well, at least he doesn't have to walk."

They tumbled into the ditch together, spattered with grime and wheezing for air. It had been only an hour since the angel lofted free and clean and serenely into the air, leaving them to pick their way through brambles.

"I wonder if we could've grabbed his legs, hung on, gone to Heaven."

"If he's like most archbishops I've known, he would ve shaken us free."

Russell hugged himself, his suit now shredded and stained almost beyond recognition.

"Wish this rain would let up."

"It keeps down the visibility. That's the only reason we eluded those fellows with rifles."

"They looked like Guevara's."

"Ah yes, baby Bolshies on the march." Russell shook his head in wonderment.

"How they can think simply potshotting at demons will topple a being who has been at this business for a billion years or more-"

"How do you know how long this has been here?"

"I assume it predates all religions."

"Maybe it caused them?"

"Perhaps religion is simply an early idea which has been found wanting. This place may be a faded experiment."

"So we're abandoned here?"

"Or waiting for further examination by a busy, distracted God."

Markham found this idea disquieting. He took refuge in physics. "The idea of time may not mean much in a place where it can be slowed down."

"Or speeded up. Yes. I've thought much upon these matters. It has been-oh yes, when did you die?"

Markham wiped the drizzle from his face and shivered. It didn't seem right, being chilled in Hell.

"In 1998."

"It doesn't seem so long a time-some twenty-eight years have elapsed since I died. Perhaps time is malleable here, in much the same way 'they' managed to give me my body as it was when I was fifty, despite the fact that I died at age 98."

"Mine's the same as when I died-fifty-two."

"Evidence of some pleasant intention, then, or else we would all be dragging about as cadavers."

This struck Markham as an unexpected shaft of light "Yes, and we don't seem to get sick, either.

I probably won't even get a cold from this rain we're in, and-"

A hideous shriek split the air. Through the roiling fog that Shrouded the trees they saw a yellow thing like a huge hornet swiftly zoom into view, wings beating like some gargantuan hummingbird. Its beak was long and pincerlike, and in it a man wriggled, screaming.

The long twisted body of the beast wriggled as if in a vast sensual orgasm of anticipation. It jerked its head eagerly, steam spouting from holes in the beak, eyes fevered and flashing red.

Wails of torment shook the man in helpless delerium. The hornet-beast eagerly reared its head back and with quick, convulsive gulps bit the man into thirds.

Its muscled throat knotted and swallowed and in ten seconds the man was gone.

"So much for the theory of a kindly providence," Russell said mildly.

The contorted yellow thing did not hear them, for which Markham was thankful.

It hovered, eyes rapidly scanning the terrain, and then darted away on humming wings.

"This ditch seems quite homelike, compared to the open," Russell said.

"I'm afraid we're going to have to move," Markham said, pointing. From the nearby fog emerged a line of men, rifles and machetes at the ready.

"If we can see them, they'll see us when we leave this ditch," Russell said.

"If we-"

Something big and bile-green fluttered down from the clouds. Its grasping claw plucked one armed man up by his head, and called like a shrill bluejay. The bloated thing was all feathers and foaming hunger, with a mouth like a cut throat and five feet that clutched at the Soldier with hot purpose. It tore a leg free and stuffed the blood-gushing morsel into its grinning mouth. The man screamed once, hopelessly, and then went Slack

"Come on!" Markham leaped over Russell and ran swiftly down the ditch.

They went fifty meters before shots began to snap and buzz above them. Markham reached a stand of trees and lunged for cover, scrambling among the wet aromatic leaves. They were out of sight of the men behind and he ran faster, watching the sky above for something awful to descend.

Instead, he ran into a tall man in fatigues who slugged him casually in the stomach with the butt of a submachine gun.

They huddled among a ragged band of other prisoners and tried to stay out of the rain. Gunfire cracked nearby and flights of ornate flying demons scudded across the sky. Anti-aircraft rounds exploded among them like dark flowers blooming, making distant hollow thumps. Some of the chunky blimp-types took hits. They wheeled and veered and tumbled out of the sky, trailing smoke.

"At least Guevara's giving them something to think about," Markham said.

"Meaningless." Russell sniffed disdainfully. Thinking is exactly what isn't going on. And surely the Devil can conjure up an infinite supply of such creatures.

"Nothing's infinite except to mathematicians, Markham said pointedly. Russell had spent decades in the pursuit of perfect. Immutable knowledge by plumbing the foundations of mathematics, only to find that such certainly was impossible. Godels proof that there were unprovable axioms in any mathematical system had law to rest this splindly man's quest. Russell ignored this jibe and pursued his lips. Did you ever wonder why die Devil permits rebellion!"

"Boredom?"

"Perhaps ... but equally likely, he likes its distraction value."

"Throwing us off the scent of something?"

"Ummm." A mirthful expression flashed across the wrinkled face. "Give mankind's nature, if you ever try to get people to not think, you will surely succeed."

"You think this fighting is a sideshow?"

"Hell doesn't seem a place designed for learned reflection, does it?"

Markham looked at their bedraggled lot, squatting in ankle-deep mud. Another of the silvery aircraft, apparently used by the Devil for observations, lay smashed nearby. In the cockpit tolled a wizened monkey-man, head caved in on impact. On impulse Markham inspected the wreck, pulling it apart to see how it flew.

"Standard piston engine," he murmured in the drizzle. If there were no physical laws, and everything ran by devilish intervention, why bother with cam shafts and carburators?

Cables for the TV cameras and electrical controls spilled out like shiny intestines. An idea flickered. Markham coiled up some cabling and wiring, tying them around his waist. In the somber gloom of the rain their guards, laughing in a shack nearby around a roaring fire, took no notice;

"I must say, I don't like the look of those," Russell said tightly.

Markham saw approaching them the fate he had been dreading. Horsedrawn carts lurched up the hillside, bringing the field generator and two of the mindwipe booms.

"That's our little Lenin, is it?"

On horseback, riding with a clear air of authority, came Che Guevara. He shouted directions at the troops in a harsh mixture of Spanish and English.

Uniformed men and women scurried to set up the booths.

"Amazing, the types you see here," Russell said bemusedly. "I ran into a crazed scribbler of popular fictions a while back who drought this was all run by some primordial God named Cthulhu." Russell pronounced the name as though it were an involuntary prelude to active nausea. "Poor chap was keeping a diary. He said that when he returned to the real world he would publish it and become rich and everyone would at least know that he had been right." He shook his head.

Markham whispered, "Here, if you want to keep on trying to understand, take this."

Russell watched as Markham snaked a cable down his pants leg and into his shoe. Beneath his locks he affixed the cable to some bands of bare wire.

"Thoughtful of the Devil, giving me this long hair."

"I don't-"

"Quick!" Markham whispered instructions as Russell slipped the cable around himself, the etherial philosopher all elbows and fussy bother when confronted with a real-world problem.

Markham stepped between Russell and the others to shield his movements.

Scowling troops were pulling the prisoners together, prodding them toward the booths. "This means they're falling back," Markham whispered. "They'll mindwipe us to keep information from falling into the Devu's hands.''

"Typical," Russell said ascerbically. "That Guevara is armed to his mad teeth and stupid as a stump. This isn't the way to cause real damage to the Devil.

Only by-" An impatient guard applied his boot to Russell's backside, sending him in an abrupt trot downhill. Markham moved along quickly, watching for an opportunity to escape. But Guevara was near the booth crew and they were on the alert. If Markham bolted they would simply catch him, beat him, and shove him into the booth anyway. In the scuffle they might well find the cabling, too.

He stepped forward when his turn came. A woman in fatigues and looking bored roughly attached the wire cage to his head. She seemed completely unconcerned, as though these bodies were mere meat to be processed. The banality of evil, Markham drought. Far more chilling than all the technicolor monsters of this place. Far more ... human.

She jabbed him in -the side with a dull knife and shoved him onto a metal platform. A thin mist began settling through the trees. He smelled the pungent taste of pine and thought of his childhood, when he had run through southern woods and sucked in that wonderful smell and knew he would live forever. They tied him securely. Elementary circuit theory, with Markham as the resistor.

He inched the cable forward with his right toe, poked it through his shoe and into firm contact with the ground plate. Now if only they didn't notice-

"Aha!" Guevara called, seeing Markham. "This time you not get away."

Markham smiled without humor. "You can run but you can't hide."

Guevara frowned, puzzled, which was just as Markham had intended. It gave him a moment to shuffle slightly to the left, inching the wire cage around his head into close contact with the cabling. He had never drought about Ohm's law in a personal sense. V = IR with himself as R meant that, unless he shorted the V to ground, his skin would carry the I, seizing up his heart. And frying away all capacity for speculation, thought, redemption.

They delayed a moment to tie Russell into the next booth. The man had a birdlike dignity, his soiled suit flapping about him in the drifting drizzle as he defiantly regarded Guevara.

"Scoundrel," was all he said, the word summoning up all the dislike of an ivory tower moralist for those who are pinned to the muddy world.

"We're either going to wake up as morons," Markham whispered, "or in a pile of corpses. Either way, keep quiet."

He saw Russell's eyes flash momentarily with defiant anger. The bored woman pulled a switch and Markham felt a jolt snap through him, heard a crackling, smelled a sharp rank odor of burning hair.

His muscles jumped, his eyes bulged. But though a myriad rippling threads swam in his eyes, he did not black out. An eternity of surging, enfolding pain made him dance and writhe. Then it was over and his legs gave out and he sagged.

Dumbly he remembered not to gasp for air as hands untied his arms. A foot caught him in the chest and he tumbled over backwards. A soft cushion stopped him. He felt cold flesh under him. Squinting an eye open, breathing shallowly, he saw a tangle of bodies and, nearby, the hideous contorted face of a Negro woman, eyes staring at him in the perpetual blank reproach of the dead.

When the killing crew had moved on, Markham crawled from under the pressing weight of still-warm bodies. He stumbled away and only stopped when a familiar voice hissed, "Wait!"

Russell bounded into view. The rain had stopped and dim light suffused the land.

Markham said happily, "I told you it would work! Physics rules."

"You may have a point." Russell rolled up his shirt and displayed a cable wound round his scrawny belly. "I got it all the way round, as you said."

"What about your feet?"

"I got the wires round my head and down to here."

"Not to your feet?"

"Well, no, there wasn't time." Russell displayed how the cable ran halfway down his body, no more.

"That wouldn't short-circuit a voltage. It would just kill you a little more slowly."

Russell drought. "I see, one needs a complete connection. I didn't understand that point."

"But you're here, alive."

"So I am. I don't suppose..."

"No. The way you had it rigged, it shouldn't have worked."

The thought struck both men at the same time.

"Something else saved me," Russell said.

"But how?"

Russell smiled wolfishly. "Something intervened to save my dear fragile dunking apparatus."

"What you said earlier; about God being the stuff we can't explain ..."

The two rumpled men stared at each other.

Russell said hollowly, "Yes. All that fatuous talk about God's being present in those physical phenomena which science hasn't touched on yet. Wedding ignorance with the miraculous. A comic idea, back among the fellows at

Trinity. Just the thing to bring a derisive bray of donnish doubt."

"Then it's ..." Markham did not like the conclusion, somehow, but he was forced to it. "You were saved by the God of the Gaps."

"Right. Only here, He is made manifest."

To us.

"Yes. Somehow, to us. Not to the poor souls who had their very selves blotted, back on that decaying pile." Russell's famous sadness for the blighted human predicament filled his haggard yet undaunted face.

"And so we were given a sign..." Markham was not entirely comfortable with this thought, but he found no way around it.

"Hold on, that reminds me ..." Russell walked back to the piles of corpses.

They were already turning bluegreen. Markham gathered that if flesh decayed here as on Earth.

Russell pointed at a naked woman who had already started to bloat.

"I noticed this as I was waiting for Guevera to move on," Russell said.

The woman had been stripped and beaten before her electrocution. Starting below her breasts and winding around the body were scrawled words, inflamed, as though written with a blowtorch:

Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel.

"Ummm. Guevera's work?"

"I think not. Notice that it's a palindrome?"

"What's that?"

"A phrase that reads the same whether read forward or back."

"But dwell is misspelled."

"Indeed. To Bt the palindrome form, a bit of cheating is winked at. Perhaps this dwel is an old English form. And using an '&' mark is not greatly sporting in the palindrome game. In any case, such a thing is quite beyond the capacity of those thugs."

"Then who... ?"

"The electricity seems to have played over her skin, scorching it."

"My God, the pain ..."

"Yes. All to send a message." Russell's great eyes were sad.

"To who? Us?"

"Who else would see it?"

"From the Devil? Or Altos?"

"Before we become positively Biblical, might I point out something?" Russell held up a finger.

A distant rumbling and snapping, punctuated by hideous mournful cries.

"What's that?"

Russell nodded. "We'll be given no respite to ponder this latest morsel of fact. The demons are coming."

Markham listened, nodded. "Yeah. The God of the Gaps wants us to obey the oldest rule."

"What's that?"

"Keep moving. Think later."

Russell laughed heartily and they both slipped into the woods, off on more adventures that could be, for all they knew, without end.

Several hours of hard slogging through muck and mire sank them back into the cloying, persistent awfulness of Hell.

Russell finally collapsed, exhausted. He sat staring at an impassible lake of mud and said pensively, "Odd, isn't it? People who farmed and labored thought of Heaven as primarily a place to rest Hell was pain, flames, torture. And here we sit, resting in the rain."

"And nary a demon with a pitchfork in sight." Markham settled onto a somewhat dryer spot, beneath a willow tree. Even in tills depressing gray drizzle, its lovely limbs bowing to the ground were the most beautiful things he had yet seen in Hell. He wistfully recalled the crisp look the old world had, its sense of flavors and unexpected, casual loveliness. Though he had never thought about it while alive, the world then seemed to promise a presence, sources of surprising order, a guiding overall principle. He suddenly missed that terribly.

Hell displayed the same general landscapes, but its spaces seemed empty, its vistas the bare product of mechanical perspectives. No haunting beauty arose from its forests and hills, no thrust of burgeoning, willful life. Amid such yawning vacancy he felt desperately alone.

Russell wrapped his ragged suit around himself to ward off the chill. "Quite so, the demons appear to merely happen by. They don't rapaciously, continuously seek us out."

"Yeah. Can't figure it..."

"I wonder if a Hell invented by intellectuals would simply be a place which they couldn't explain."

Markham toughed loudly. Russell looked startled, eyes wide, blinking. "I was being serious."

"Uh, sorry. Beg pardon, m'lord."

"And what's that mean?" Russell gave Markham the full force of his famous scowl, his nose like a beak beneath glaring eyes.

"Well, you were a lord, after all."

The philosopher was startled again. "I was?"

"Of course. Lord Russell. You inherited it from your father, I think."

Russell sat down slowly, his haughty air of indignant affront turning to puzzlement. "I... did?"

"Can't you remember?"

"Well... m." Russell looked embarrassed.

"You won the Nobel Prize, too. For literature, some essays or something."

"Really? Not for peace? I seem to recall working for peace."

"No, they usually give that to people who negotiate treaties."

"Lake Mr. Kissinger, you mean? I saw him a few disasters ago, being carried off by a talking black snake."

"Wish I'd seen that."

"I rather enjoyed it, yes. But I've been thinking about an .earlier remark of yours. It has been 28 years since I died, but I can remember very little of my life before that. It's been fading gradually. The longer I'm in Hell, the more foggy become my recollections."

"You can't expect to keep stuff from the nineteenth century fresh at hand."

"Usually it's the other way, isn't it? That you remember the name of your favorite teddy bear but cannot recall last week?"

"That's just aging. We're dead."

"Ummm. Good point."

"Still, you're just as feisty as your writing was. I wonder how your personality survives, if your memory doesn't?"

"Perhaps that's my soul." Russell rolled his eyes in donnish jest.

"Y'know," Markham said sarcastically, "ritual irony and Brit class postures won't get us anywhere."

"I assure you-"

"You can't 'assure' me of anything! You've been here 28 years and learned nothing!"

The two men glared at each other, Russell drawing himself up into his ostrich-like dignity. His suit was a wet, bedraggled thing. "You can scarcely expect anyone to make sense of this madness, this meaningless chaos."

"Not unless we can do something concrete," Markham said, "an experiment."

"Ah, the old scientific ethos," Busseu said sardonically.

Markham decided to take a different tack. He hunched forward, hands outspread.

"Look, if you're right, memory fades with time around here. That means our technical knowledge will slip away. Use it or lose it. I'll bet."

"I'm not dotty, if that's what you mean," Russell said primly.

A distant bellow rang through the foggy arroyo where they huddled. It sounded reptilian, trailing off ominously into bone-crunching bass notes. Markham waved ft away and kept on earnestly, "Look, you remember lots of theology and stuff, maybe you can piece it together and find some kind of due, something we could apply rational analysis to, get-"

I'm surprised you haven't considered the implications of that time trap, then," Russell said archly.

"How so?"

"The ability to suspend time surely implies some tinkering with causality, no? If time can stop or even run backward, then what's die sense of moral action? There is no guilt if effects do not even follow from causes."

Markham frowned. "I don't..."

"Then such a time snare must be the creation of something .that stands outside the realm of morality, theology, of everything."

"Look, we need something practical, not some abstract-"

Russell's eyes flashed. "If you want to do some-" a disdainful drawing-down of his mouth-"engineering, then look to whatever causes those traps."

Markham blinked. "Y' know, that might actually tell us something. Come on."

He surged to his feet and set off into the mist. Russell scrambled after him, calling, "I only framed it as a hypothesis."

"Hurry up. The time trap might go away."

They tried to find their away back through the shrouded hillsides, but bearings were hard to keep in the shifting gray banks of fog. They stumbled among stunted trees and tricky, sandy slopes. Just as Markham began to think any effort was futile, the cloying wet mist lifted. A faint nwmwimm grew as a warm white cloud enveloped them. "What's this st-"

An insect buzzed past his ear, another flew into his eyes. He batted them away. Three more landed on his arm.

"A swarm!" Russell called.

"Head downhill. Well-"

A wasp-thing hovered in front of his eyes, gossamer wings humming. A tiny voice cried, "Help us!"

He looked closer. The wasp body was a series of slender. Jointed tubular sections, connected with a bulbous abdomen by a slender waist, A sharp green stinger dripped clear fluid at the tail.

But this was far larger than any wasp he had ever seen, and covered in a crusted blue sheen.

Spindly forelegs were held out toward him, beseeching.

Atop the body was not the normal insect's bulging eyes, but instead...

"It's a woman's ... face," he said wonderingly.

The tiny features were pinched with anxiety, the eyes large and white. She cried forlornly, "Help!"

Horrified and intrigued, Markham suddenly realized that the low hum of the insect hoarde was not merely the beating of myriad wings, but also a thing chorus of pleading voices, each shouting different messages as they hovered around the two men. Some buzzed angrily at his ears. Others attempted to attract his attention by flying up his nose or into his loose-fitting clothes.

He felt a thousand minute pinpricks as small hands grasped his skin. He shivered with disgust.

Without thinking, he slapped at them. Tiny bodies tumbled from the air, screaming.

Small things struck the ground. Some survived, but scuttling brown insects dashed from under leaves and stones to attack the wounded survivors. Markham bent down, confused by the welter of tinny voices, and watched a black beetle dose sharp pincers around the neck of a swollen fly.

Blood spurted. Markham thought irrelevantly that insects did not have red blood. As the fluid oozed from the plump little body he studied the small contorted face and felt remorse.

Until one bit him.

It had settled on his neck and plunged a sharp pinprick snout into a vein. He slapped at it, which only drove thee point further in.

"Damn! He slapped at others, and saw Russell was dancing madly, beating his suit with flailing hands.

"That's right! That's right!" called the woman-face, still hovering before him.

"Call them off!"

"They are of the mad," she explained reasonably.

A blue mote nipped his nose painfully. He squashed it, wiped his hand on his pants.

"Good," the woman-wasp called. "Send them to the other shore, great general."

He looked around wildly for some escape. The swarm seemed larger, a dense white cloud orbited the two men. A spherical galaxy of insectoid things, he thought, each with an obscenely mismatched head. Markham saw match-head sized faces of all races, some churning in endless loops, others with eyes dosed as if in sleep or prayer, still more screaming incoherently in strident bursts.

Some made droning speeches or gave hoarse mad barks. Another flitted into Markham's face, as if demanding attention-but when he looked, the head lolled, yellow eyes frozen, skin a putrid decaying mass, worm-ridden. Yet the thing buzzed on, a doomed soul harnessed to a brute insect engine.

Markham slapped it from the sky in revulsion and pity. Most of the motes simply wheeled about the two men, their voices like tiny saws, neither threatening nor giving ground when Russell and Markham began walking rapidly downhill.

Again the tiny woman's voice called, "Lead us! Show us a way, giant prophet."

"I don't know any," Markham said.

"Give us sup with devil-juice."

"If I had a fly swatter-"

"Yes! Yes! Thousands of us crave it." Her ten wings beat in an almost sexual frenzy.

A tinny cry went up from the swarm; "Free us! Free us!"

Russell slapped at several of them and barked, "From what?"

A welter of piping voices called out to Russell as they spun and fluttered about his head.

"Accursed form!"

"Hunger eats like worms in belly!"

"Want suck demon!"

"Crush me!"

"Inhale me!"

"Hot kiss of frog's tongue!"

Markham caught a foul scaly thing crawling into his ear, crushed it between his fingernails, flicked it away. "What do they mean?" he asked the wasp-woman.

"Some are beset by hungers. Others wish to leave this foul form."

Russell caught in midair a large one which was pleading for death. He popped it in two and a rank acid odor turned the air blue. The men trotted away from the spreading murk, but the swarm stayed with them, humming with feral desires

Markham could sense but could not name.

"Those who would die, please crush," the wasp-woman pleaded, flying nearly into Markham's eye.

"If you'll leave us, yes," Russell bargained.

"I would travel in your wake," she answered, darting around Russell's wrinkled neck.

"Why?" Markham asked, methodically smashing his cupped hand into the path of all who ventured near. When they understood that he would accommodate them, dozens of hornet-people dove directly into his swinging hands. They died with sharp, brittle cries of almost sensual agony.

The wasp-woman hung by his ear. "I would suck the green blood-pap of a demon."

"We don't want to tangle with them."

"But you are a world-strider, and so will cross them."

"Not if I can help it." Markham panted with exertion.

"They come to test you, yes, vast man." The waspwoman seemed sure other prediction.

"Try to follow us and la knock you from the air," Russell said imperiously, patience gone. "If I suck the green-gore pap, I can become a frog or rat,"

the wasp-woman explained as though this were a laudable and common enough ambition.

"Bravo," Markham said sarcastically.

"Get away!" Russell shouted.

"If will not lead to demon," the wasp-woman cried, "then crush me."

"Well, no, I ..." Despite his horror, to Markham this careening mote was a person, even if it was a dreadful perversion of nature.

"Is chance I return as worm to sup shit! Or be weevil," the wasp-woman pleaded.

"And you would rather be that?" Russell was puzzled.

"Would rest from endless gyre!"

The wasp-woman's passionate plea bothered Markham. He could not bring himself to swat her into oblivion.

Russell pointed at the air. "Look!"

The weaving flecks united for a long moment, hovering, forming letters that drifted lazily before the men:

Emit

No

evil;

live

on

time.

"Why are you doing that?" Markham asked the wasp-woman.

"Do what? We fly, we seek."

Russell said slowly, "They don't know what they're doing. Something else is using them."

"To write little epigrams?" Markham snorted.

"It's another palindrome."

Markham blinked. "Time. Time trap. We should keep going."

"Thirst for blood juice!" a small keening came in his ear.

"Dammit! We can't stand this!" He smashed a few more of the eager suiciders.

His hands were thickly spattered with gore now, and stung.

"Then I will banish them!"

She turned and wove a pattern over their heads, spewing a milky fluid behind her. It curied into orange smoke as it descended, scattering the swarm. They fled, sobbing and calling curses at her.

"I don't... are you their ruler, somehow?" Russell asked.

"I hold sway," she said, wings beating the air with a tired drone. "I have been among the cursed and the crawling for centuries now, and have learned their vexed arts well."

Russell observed, "But not well enough to escape the form."

Her slit of a mouth pouted forlornly. "I must suck the green-pap five times, so a frog told me."

"A frog?" Markham wondered if animals talked in Hell. So far he had seen only domesticated animals and birds.

"It promised me knowledge, if I would approach to be eaten.

Markham said, "So you..."

"Gladly made my way into its mouth cavern.

This shook even Russell's aristocratic demeanor. "All to discover that drinking demon blood five times will do ... something?"

"Will make me a person! Like you." She said this with awe and desire.

Markham asked, "You were once?"

"When I came, a shepherdess! was. Then I transgressed. Spread thighs and made sup with a snot-eater. It gave me ram and at its spurting moment pierced my brain with its prick-sucker."

Russell paled. "Well, at least the sins are more picturesque here. I'm sure..."

"Then was I cast among the crawlers and flyers. Please let me come with you. I see knowledge, a path from this vile station."

Markham wondered if this implied a sort of reversed transmigration of souls.

The Hindus-had imagined that they could work their way up the chain of being, eventually attaining nirvana. Here you could easily slip down evolution's slick steps, end up a bug. And the Hell of it was that you knew what you were.

Was this a parody of Earthly beliefs, a joke? Or the truth? Perhaps both...

Russell eyed her with hooded eyes, as though he were examining a student in oral exams at Cambridge. "Ummm. You were a Christian?"

"Oh yes, sir. A humble and devout servant."

Russell said wryly, "At last, a religious person. Very well."-He nodded peremptorily at Markham. "We are all seeking knowledge. Let us travel together."

Markham had explained his thinking to Russell, and the philosopher showed a quick ability to get through the thickets of jargon and find the kernel of physics. Markham had wondered how the time trap could work, and in pondering the riddle realized that perhaps the trap itself was a huge due. After all, if the God of the Gaps intended them to figure anything out. He-or She, or It, or whatever-would have to allow them some ability to experiment. They certainly couldn't deduce the essence of Hell by abstract thinking alone. "Like Descartes crawling inside the famous stove, to deduce the properties of the world by pure undisturbed thought alone, Russell had remarked when Markham brought up the point.

So, to Markham, this meant they must be able to experiment in some way, Russell's survival of the electrocution was perhaps a hint, a gesture, an encouragement. To learn more they had to try something different, not Just slog around in the mud, waiting for demons or Guevera to find them again.

So Markham had been thinking of the time trap, and how it might work. In Einstein's relativity, the basic unit was the space-time interval. He had scribbled this out for Russell-and, resting on a tuft of grass nearby, the wasp-woman-in a patch of sand: (ds)^2 = (dx)^2 - c^2 (dt)^2

"See, ds is the length of an interval in space-time," Markham said, expecting to have to step through the equation slowly. He started to describe in his familiar professorial cadence how the notation dt meant a small, differential change in time. But the philosopher waved away his explanations, remarking that he had himself written a book about relativity and its implications well before Markham was born. Daunted, Markham went on to point out that the only thing which had the differential ds = 0 was light itself. Ordinary matter couldn't move fast enough-at the speed of light, o-to do that.

Markham felt a forgotten pleasure, the muted joys of the orderly classroom. He went on with assurance, "Now, let's assume general relativity applies to this space-time, shall we? Then-"

"To suspend time means making dt = 0," Russell said crisply.

"Uh, yes. To do that, there has to be a region where the differential of physical lengths, dx, changes sign. Then-"

"What is a negative length?" Russell asked acidly.

"It's a mathematical way to say that measurements made in such a vicinity would show a warpage. A region where length measurements make no sense.

"Impossible," Russell said.

"I can show it's true by integrating over the manifold," Markham said with irritation. No wonder this guy didn't get the Nobel for peace, he thought.

Russell screwed his lips around, squinted at the sand. and nodded grudgingly.

Markham was glad to finesse the point, because he was a little rusty with this area of mathematical physics, and anyway it was hard to do calculations in the dirt. The majestic authority of mathematics lost a lot in this medium.

"I fail to follow," Russell said. "A physical distance can't change from positive to negative."

"Right. That means there must be some singularity there."

"Where?" the wasp-woman piped in.

"I'd say at the boundary of the time trap. Inside, dt == 0 and dx is a real, ordinary quantity. But not if we pass from ordinary time into a time-frozen state."

"Magic not work in devil's paw," the wasp-woman said. "I see many who try, they shrunk to toads."

Markham shrugged. "I've always wondered what it would be like to be a frog."

Russell said, "I assuredly have not."

"If you were, wise one," the wasp-woman said, giggling, "would you eat me?"

Her tinkling laughter made the Englishman redden.

They were tired and dejected long before Markham spied a twisted tree and a crumbling flank of rocky ridge that had stuck in his memory. From Acre he was able to work their way around the broad sweep of a hill, across a roiling rain-swollen stream, and down into a low range of scrub forest. In there, somewhere, the time trap had nearly snared them.

But someone or something was blocking the way, Red flares lit the canopy of milky clouds above, paling the dull sun-like glow overhead. Sudden rattling reports rolled down from those clouds, like news from an Olympian struggle.

A strange low wooong wooong answered from the pines nearby.

"Rather odd," Russell remarked, blinking owlishly.

"I'm pretty damn sure the time trap was that way, down a gully and up in some ruins. Remember?"

"I've never been one for spatial relationships."

A clanging from the clouds, like a vast cracked gong. The wasp-woman's tiny voice called, "Demons? I drink!"

"Stay with me. You might be useful," Markham said.

He crouched down the way he had seen men do in combat movies and ran across a small clearing for the cover beyond. It had never been obvious that running bent over was actually effective. It kept you out of the way if they shot a little high, but on the other hand it slowed you down, too, exposing you to fire longer. Halfway across the wooong sound came and something rushed over him. There was no loud report, nothing, just the wake of something huge passing by. It cast a sudden cold stab into his back.

He reached the other side and plunged into the trees. He felt the wasp-woman inching across his neck. It made his skin crawl, but she wouldn't be able to keep up if she didn't hitch rides. To him she seemed a woman, human, someone he in his old fashioned way felt instinctively should be protected ... not a mere makeshift insect. He was doubly sure that back in Life, he would never have felt this way. He could not quite understand why; was Hell changing him this quickly? He had been here only a few weeks, at most.

There was movement ahead. Markham watched vague ivory forms glide among the trees. He studied them carefully. A cool light refracted around them in waving strings, giving a watery sensation of multiple surfaces, of solid bodies that were nevertheless in constant flux. Alabaster light seeped among the branches.

Shadows shrouded their ghostly passage. Markham noticed there was utter silence here, as though nature were holding its breath.

"What's on?"

Russell thumped down beside him, panting from his run. His hearty salute had seemed to boom in the stillness, making Markham jump. But the gliding, blocky, wavering things did not seem to notice or change their stately movements.

"What are those?"

"Not dragons."

"Maybe the Devil's come up with something new."

The wasp-woman called into Markham's ear, "Hoar Gods."

"What're they?"

"I saw before, ere I came to six-legged perdition. Hoar God bring frost.

Banish devils." She held onto his ear with six spindly legs and underlined her description by stamping on his earlobe in some kind of tattoo signal.

"But they're not from, er..." Russell seemed reluctant to use the word. "Ah, God, are they?"

"From Hoar place," she said.

"Do you have any notion of what god they represent?" Russell went on. "What were the gods of your time?"

"I come from when Caliph ruled, awaiting the return of Mohap. Christ was boy, Mohap big man with red member." She seemed pleased to be addressed so seriously.

"Um. Some ancient era," Russell said, losing interest, and with a sharp clap the tree next to him dissolved like a melting candle.

"Down!" Markham cried.

Wooong-and trees behind them turned to glassy, sliding waterfalls.

The two men pressed themselves flat. Another wooong rippled through the air.

Markham turned and studied the patchy damage in the forest, trying to triangulate the source.

"Funny," he said quietly. "There's no pattern."

"Not coming from one place?"

"There's no design to it, as near as I can see. Just random gulps taken out of the trees."

"Perhaps they're not firing at us at all."

The wasp-woman's small buzzsaw whine persisted, "Hoar Gods will chill all."

Markham chuckled, despite a keen sense of threat. "How long does it take for Hell to freeze over?"

"Hoar Gods try. Come, go, try!" She rasped out her displeasure at his levity, whirring around his head. He remembered the long stinger and caught the clear glint of paralyzing poison at its tip.

This sobered him more than did the dissolved trees.

Russell commented pensively, "It does seem quite as chilly here as on an Oxford morning. I can't recall Hell being this damp, either."

Markham studied the shifting, quilted radiance ahead. "We can't be far from the time trap."

"Can this be part of it?" Russell asked.

"They can't be inside the trap, or they wouldn't be moving at all."

"Hoar gods come from stillness!" the wasp-woman explained, as if to demented children. She buzzed him again, spitting at his eyes. Markham began to see why she might well have deserved to be sentenced to insecthood. Whoever she had been in a past life, it certainly wasn't Salome.

"Come out of a space where there is no change in time?" Russell shook his head. "What can that mean?"

"Look, there's got to be a zone where the spatial interval approaches zero. Maybe these Hoar Gods come from that... whatever it is," Markham finished lamely. "We could try to speak to them, discover-"

"Forget that. They might try out their woooom-gun on you, instead."

"Well, I think it is worth the-"

"We've got to get around them, reach the time trap itself."

"1 still believe-"

"I help," the wasp-woman called eagerly.

"How?" Markham asked disbelievingly.

"I can make them think only of me."

"Well..."

"If I can prick them, they die!"

Markham eyed the sharp needle she carried and decided this was as good an idea as any he had.

Her mood swings were enough to put him on edge, and he would be glad to have that outsized weapon pointed at someone-or something-else.

"Good, I like that. Look, we can try to work our way around ..."

It all happened so fast Markham had to rely on pure Instinct.

One moment he and Russell were creeping forward, trying to flank around the watery alabaster radiance. The wasp-woman had droned off among the bushes, to distract the entities she called the Hoar Gods, but could not farther describe. Russell had remarked that he thought that she had simply affixed a folk-theology term from her own era to a phenomena she couldn't understand.

Markham didn't care. To him the rumblings ahead were an obstacle to his first true chance to learn something real, something physical, about Hell. He had heard enough conflicting tales and mad hypotheses. He wanted data.

So he carefully duck-walked through the low, thorned bushes, waiting for a sign that they could make a break ... And the world split.

To their right a vibrant line ran straight down from the clouds, white-hot and sky-searing. It was like slicing a canvas, peeling back the rustic scene and exposing beneath it the crude cardboard backing. The air. was scooped away from the scratch-line and behind was ... nothing. White void. Endlessness.

It happened in seconds-soundless, without tremor of warning. Markham watched as smoky white nothingness spilled from the cut in reality. He started to get to his feet -and noise crashed about him, swarmed over his back, hammered his ears. He whirled. To his left the trees were broken off, leveled, bare ragged stumps. Beyond them lay an open muddy field. On it masses of men and animals clashed in crazed final combat.

A glistening ebony elephant trampled bronzed warriors into the. mud, snorting and bellowing.

Arrows found targets, mortar rounds burst among clotted knots of struggling figures.

And among the hooting of victory and hopeless moans of defeat strode white blocky structures, oblivious to the chaos about them, never deviating in their slow stately glide. Beneath them an invisible weight slammed warriors to the mud and ground them into it, spattering blood in the air. Behind them, a purpling wake choked the men and woman who had survived their massive passage.

Markham spun back to the right.

The seam that split Hell widened. Milky stuff diffused from it. He felt a cold bristling at the back of his neck and knew the cascading torrent was death, and perhaps worse.

To the right, the battle roared and hooted and waxed bloody.

"Russell! Run!"

The Englishman stood transfixed. "Wait - I've seen something like this before. Give the insect a chance to -"

One of the massive blocks dimpled. A dark brown wave spread from a single point in its hard sheen. It wavered.

Markham frowned, fighting down his impulse to flee. "Is that...?"

"Yes," Russell said professorially, "the little woman. She explained to me that these 'Hoar Gods' can fend off attacks from large, slow-moving things, like man or beast. And also small, fast-moving arrows or bullets or the like.

But not a small, slow-moving creature, she said - such as herself."

"Sounds like they-have limited their response time windows."

The angular shimmering thing turned, as if wounded. The battle around it quieted. Fighters stopped, lowered spears and bulky guns to watch the gravid chalk-mountain death.

Markham waved his hand at the panorama, where only moments before there had been deep woods. "This battle, what...?"

"These things simply appear suddenly, huge armies materializing, dying, then vanishing. I've watched them from afar. And there are those levitating white objects, too," Russell said, "I've seen them before, at various foolish contests. Perhaps they seek out such events."

"Look, let's-"

The muddy field stretched far into the distance, and above the fray floated at least a dozen of the milky oblong tilings. They had been coasting among the carnage, but now as the nearest block veered from its path, crippled by the spreading brown stain, so did its companions. They converged on their wounded brother.

Markham heard-but in his mind, not his ears-the rasping voice of the wasp-woman. "I go! Am eaten! Go you!"

The split sky to his right yawned larger.

One of the effervescing white blocks began to shower the struggling ranks below with quick bursts of sprinkling, fine-grained amber light Again came the woooom and again an answering thunder roll, this time from the forest on the next hill.

"Dammit, run!"

He could see a wedge of the amber glow projecting toward them.

He took two steps and a something burst inside his head.

White.

Light.

-liquid rainbows sparkling

-booming musk melody

-impaled on shrill sharp shafts of vinegar

-granite flowers imploding

-slide and splash and wrenching fire-pain chorus

He sat down heavily amid mud and crushed, bloodstained grass.

Russell cried, "What's wrong?"

"I..." Markham did not know how to describe the sudden avalanche of blistering sensation and swarming, scattershot knowledge that had rushed through him.

"Get up!"

"I know who they are-the white things."

"Demons?"

"No. Aliens."

"Seems a fine distinction, here."

The wasp-woman had somehow done her deadly work. The radiance from the wobbling alien rippled, shifted colors-and it abruptly crashed into a phalanx of troops, throwing bodies in high arcs.

"Let's go to the right, where the thunder was," Markham yelled over the rolling din of battle.

"The wasp-woman-"

"She's gone. Shell be a dog in her next incarnation."

Russell ran after Markham, who was ducking among the trees at a steady lope, trying to avoid the slabs of amber luminescence that rained down. "How do you know that?"

"I have no idea. Those aliens projected a lot of information directly into my memory. But it's not an experience I want to repeat.'

A rank of women carrying pikes spilled pell-mell by them, shouting in some strange tongue.

"They're aliens," Markham panted, "not just from another planet, but somehow from another space-time."

"Why then these battles?"

"They're using them. For training. A sort of military exercise."

Russell ducked around a bewildered, dazed man with an antique pistol, its charge spent. "More madness."

"No, there's a point. Those white things are living creatures. They test their war games here, with human cannon fodder. They come through the edge of the time trap, visit Hell, and go back."

"To where?"

"The images..." Markham shook his head to clear it. He wanted to stop, sift through the myriad sensations be had received from one brief brush with the amber glow.

Men and women came scattering pell-mell through the forest now, trying to escape the white gliding aliens. They still carried on their mindless fighting even as they fled. A short fat woman in a toga and carrying a crude iron short-sword came at Markham and he dodged her awkward thrust. He grabbed the cuffed hilt from her and tripped her with his left foot. She squawked and cursed and Markham ran on, holding the weapon. The sword was heavy and ineptly made, but he felt better to have it.

"There's a glimmering over there," Russell called. Markham saw through the trees a curious wan blue glow and headed that way. The time trap might give off Doppler-shifted light, if his suspicions about the space-time singularity were right. Blue light would be up-shifted from some other place, maybe from the land of the Hoar Gods.

"They're here to practice on us, then?" Russell asked, panting heavily. His suit flapped with his loping stride and he had not even loosened his tie.

"I got the impression we were vermin as far as they cared. Maybe they're pest exterminators from Alpha Centauri."

"The Devil's not an anthropocentric twit. then," Russell wheezed. "Makes Him, or It, more believable. I wonder if Hell is built to a galactic scale?"

"Let's go see," Markham said, trotting down an incline toward the shifting zone ahead. "There's a dead spot over there."

"For once I agree with your empirical approach. There is so much structure to Hell, there must be a larger design. Something planned to-"

A squad of women in yellow canvas suits spread through the trees, attacking fleeing men. The women used only their rigid hands and feet in a sort of smooth-flowing karate. Yet they felled large men easily. With each lunge they barked out a quick animal noise of jubilant victory.

Markham ran faster, but one of the women came charging down a gravel slope and cut them off.

Russell did not hesitate. "Get on with it!" he yelled, and simply threw himself at the advancing woman. She swatted at him, connected with a solid thud. He grunted but scrambled to his feet.

"Go on! Find out! I'll see you somewhere in this mare's nest!" Russell struck an archaic pose, like a nineteenth century boxer squaring off, and glared at the yellow-suited woman. She frowned in puzzlement. Markham slipped into a stand of trees and kept moving quietly away, looking back as the two circled each other, an absurd match. But there was nothing amusing about the way the woman kicked Russell expertly in the belly. She whirled expertly and sent a heavy blow to Russell's neck. Markham could hear the loud solid snap.

He felt a stabbing sense of loss as the rickety figure crumbled into the mud.

"I... I'll come back for you," he whispered. "When you reappear, I'll..."

But there was no way to keep promises in Hell. He felt a building rage, but nothing to vent it upon except the milling, fighting ranks of humans. That was the way the Devil liked it, Markham was suddenly sure. Hell is other people, Sartre had said, though surely not anticipating this.

No, the point was to fight down your anger, and do something the Devil didn't expect.

The women in yellow were spreading into the woods, calling out orders to each other, searching. Markham got his bearings and slipped away, following an old stream bed that somehow was not filled by the earlier rain.

As he trotted along the sandy rut he found it was nearly bone dry. Somewhere up ahead the rain had not fallen.

The scent of mouldering pine needles reminded him of the games he had played in the Alabama woods when he was a boy. Form two armies, ambush your enemy in dirt clod attacks, capture their castle. And do it silently, flitting through the woods with scarcely a whisper, a mere flicker of motion. Think like an Indian, strike like a storm.

He used those skills repeatedly in the next hour, working his way around marauding bands whose only amusement seemed to be death and torture. He passed impromptu crucifixions, the nails driven so as to bleed the victims slowly, letting the weakness steal over them so that they slumped on the cross and suffocated. There were group impalements, long shafts driven up the fundament of one, out the mouth, and into another above him. Women turned helplessly, descending by slow inches on thick shafts dial skewered them by agonizing inches, rough barbs checking the rate of their skewering. He kept telling himself that their deaths were in fact liberations, and kept on, concealed in dappled pools of brooding shadow.

A land of frost. That was the way the time trap looked as he approached, weary and scraped by brambles in a hundred stinging spots.

The blue-white wall was translucent, He could see sheets of chilled air fall away from it, giving the illusion of motion, but the wall stood frozen. Beyond was an airy landscape of contorted gray hills, all angles and pivoted streamers and scooped-out, yawning bays - a world twisted into a vast handiwork. In the valleys moved more of the alien ivory blocks, some sprinkled with silvery wafers. They seemed to drift and sway at the command of some unseen wave, like motes on the ocean bottom.

Markham stepped to within centimeters of the flat cool wall. A cutting scent like ammonia hung there.

He picked up a pine limb and stuck it into the blue-tinged fog boundary. It went smoothly. He watched the murky world beyond the barrier and saw the tip of his stick emerge. Was there some optical trick? In the frostworld his stick was of normal width, but impossibly long, protruding what seemed to be hundreds of meters among the softly lit, sea-blue arctic hill-sculptures.

He pushed it in further. The pencil-like image extruded further, lancing a kilometer into the flat iceworld. He dipped it and struck a high, graceful arch. Layers of green jewel-like stone fractured, fell. He twirled the stick and chopped at a warped monument of flinty rock. It flew apart.

The ivory aliens began to dart and hover in a manic insect pattern. They were huge in his zone of Hell, but in theirs his simple pine limb stick could crush them.

Markham remembered their blind indifference to the pulped bodies they bestrode on the battlefield. He grimaced. What better than to smite a few now? - to repay a blood debt mankind as a whole owed these motes, who now swarmed about his stick, milling, uncertain.

His pine limb was a straight hard line, now, a stretched abstraction that could kill. Markham started to bring it to bear on a cluster of the aliens ... and stopped.

It would merely be more of the cycle, he saw.

Unending malice. Roiling, empty chaos.

He withdrew the limb gingerly. It looked all right except for a layer of frost. He touched it.

Searing cold made him jerk his hand away. He picked up a stone and tapped the limb. The wood sheared off at the frost line. It hit the ground and shattered with an explosive clap.

Passing into the frostworld, the stick had undergone Einsteinian swellings along its length, growing like Pinocchio's nose. But it had not been in some abstract place: very real air had frozen it.

Markham had to shove it in a few feet before the tip emerged in the ice-blue landscape. That suggested there was an invisible slice of space-time between the two worlds. A zone of refractions, Doppler confusions, perhaps portals.

There had to be some way to use that effect. But not here, where a slip into the frostworld would freeze his lungs solid.

Markham went to his right, following the slight curve in the porous barrier.

The alien land-gradually faded into a vibrating haze shot through with pink lightnings. As he walked a glow seeped into the territory beyond the invisible sheet and he could see ordinary pine forest again. He was about to try the pine limb experiment again when he noticed a bird just beyond the barrier. He had not seen it at first because it hung in air, glittering eyes fixed ahead, wings arced upward to begin a downward, propelling plunge. But it was utterly motionless.

There was something between him and the still forest. A wavering in the air, a yellowing fog swirl, a strumming sense of convective movement.

He saw nothing beyond the shimmering region, no scaly dragons or belching demons or cartoon ogres to snare him.

A shout. From behind he heard the pursuit of some hoarse voices, even - was this a memory from Alabama childhood? - the distant mournful baying of hounds.

These were running dogs, on a scent. When they found prey, treed it, their yips and yelps would signal the coming slaughter.

Well, he wasn't going to be chased any more. He picked up a hefty stick and probed through the barrier. If nothing happened -

The shock wave traveled up his arm, sucking in the stick. It came so fast he could not let go before its accelerating jolt jerked him forward, through a velvetlight breath of corrosive air, into -

Falling.

Again. His cotton clothes flapped in the rushing air.

The old phobia swarming up into his mind. For an instant he went rigid, squeezed his eyes tight.

He sensed an endless gulf below him. Bile rose in his mouth.

But he forced down his panic and opened his eyes. Get off the wheel. End the cycle. Don't let the bastards get you down.

He was in a shaft. Smooth white slabs on all sides, ceramic-hard.

He looked up and saw, dwindling far above, pine trees. Like the years of his childhood, rushing away.

He had fallen straight down the boundary sheet that separated the two sections of forest. Like falling into a crack. And now plunged toward the center of... what?

More blazing whiteness. The shaft walls expanded away from him, opening into a vast chasm. Still he fell.

But somewhere in him came the strength to relax, to still the screaming childlike fear.

He spread his arms, caught a sweet warming breeze. Banked.

Swooped.

Flew.

His spread arms and legs stabilized him, provided wind resistance, slowed his fall.

Markham the kite, sailing the fevered winds.

His eyes brimmed with hope. He felt the first true elation he had enjoyed in a great while. At last, he could do something.

The shaft walls were mottled with dark caves. At the entrance of each a hideous brown-red thing crouched. Orange eyes followed his gliding fall, as if eager to intercept his flight.

Markham heard a shout and looked up. A black-haired woman tumbled out of a silky sky. Her yellow canvas coveralls fluttered and slapped. She cried out for help and beat her arms. She was enveloped in pure blind panic and shot downward like a stone.

She passed Markham, eyes rolling at him, mouth jagged and red. He watched her dwindle away below.

Then one of the cave-creatures leaped from the side and somehow snared her.

Together the two veered to the side, the woman's screams higher pitched now and forlorn, as though she glimpsed her fate.

As Markham sped by them, the rusty-skinned thing was picking apart the woman, using three of its legs to hold the still-shuddering corpse.

Don't let the bastards get you down, he reminded himself. He had slid down a thin wall in the time trap. This was the layer where space contracted, admitting flaws and tangles. Some passing whorl of casuality had sucked him in.

The Devil had mastered space-time so deftly that he could freeze time, and stuff the snarled loops of space into a mere slice. Through that wedge the Hoar Gods had penetrated into the human Hell, and surely had provoked Satanic glee. Maybe the land of frost he had glimpsed was an alien Hell. Why not a plurality of Hells, to match the plurality of worlds? And let the inmates disembowel each other... But was such a practice entirely Devilish?

Maybe Russell's phrase was literally true - in the interstices of Hell there were thin sheets of Godliness. Openings. Opportunities. Gaps.

When Russell speculated out loud, did some eavesdropping Entity take him up on it? That would explain his surviving the electrocution - the Entity, leaving its calling card?

If so. God had a sense of humor. Russell had meant a gap in knowledge, but this tube Markham was plunging down was a physical gap, a wedge ... an exit.

So God made puns. That made a certain wonky sense. After all, the Devil kept leaving his signature in unlikely places: the snake that wrote out 666.

And something had left those two palindromes...

The Devil would have no interest in prodding him and Russell into further explorations. But perhaps other forces than Satan operated here.

Was there some God in this Gap? He swooped sideways, enjoying the sensation of buoyancy, of at last controlling the fear of falling that had plagued him all his previous Life. He banked past the spider-things that crouched in their caves. He came tantalizingly close, provoking them. But they saw he had his bearings, could veer away if they sprang. So they gave him red-eyed glares and watched him descend.

To what? To fall implied a curved space-time, a geometry rounded by mass or... He remembered Russell's speculations. A geometry shaped by Mind? - some massive intelligence from the primordial ages of the swelling universe?

Did that lie below?

He felt both joy of release and a sullen, brooding fear.

What had the angel said, that Altos respond to the will of the world.

Falling was a sort of response, though not voluntary. Had the physicist's Mass been replaced by Will?

It was the kind of question Russell would have liked. And Hemingway, too, if you could phrase it to him right. A lot of the souls Markham had seen here would like to know what lay waiting below him.

And he owed it to Russell and the poor wasp-woman and all the rest who had given of themselves, to try, to make it through.

He had been falling for at least a day. The cave-things had tried again and again for him. He had evaded the last one by inches, banking sideways and finally going into a sudden, balled-up plummet.

Now below something slowly grew. He spread his arms further, cupping the wind, slowing himself more than mere Newtonian laws allowed. Markham saw a patchy land rise toward him, a quilted place of hills and deep blue lakes.

He spread his legs, his pants snapping in the breeze. Then the whipping of the warming wind abated. He slowed still further. He thought of a billion worlds that the time trap boundary might enter onto - alien planets, eras of history, the fantastic contorted geometries of mathematicians...

He drifted down into the courtyard of a shadowed sandstone ruin.

It had once been a temple with Corinthian columns. Now the roof had caved in and half the columns sprawled, cracked and scavenged.

Two men sat on the broken flagstones of the square, talking.

Markham landed with a mild bounce. The land was rich and verdant. Grapes hung in bunches bigger than a man's head. From orderly rows of stakes grew plots of tomatoes, of ripe wheat, of odd globular fruit. Men and women worked the fields. Some strolled, hand in hand.

If this was Hell, he wouldn't mind.

The two men were old, heavy-browned. One wore a sweater, shorts, sandals. The second wore nothing and was quite hairy.

Markham walked over to them, easing the kinks out of his knotted muscles. "I wonder if -"

The sweatered man looked up. "Oh, it's you," he said in heavily accented English. Markham couldn't spot the accent but the man was swarthy, full-lipped. Mediterranean, almost Asiatic.

"W-what?"

"We heard you were coming."

The nude man nodded. Markham felt a shock as the shaggy head lifted and wise old eyes regarded him. "I heard you ver bringing my friend Russell," Einstein said with a thick German accent.

"You? Here?"

"I haff been waiting for my friend a long time."

"But you were a saint! How could you end up in Hell, when -"

Einstein smiled broadly, eyes crinkling. "Do not bother with questions we cannot attack."

"Yes," the clothed man said solemnly, "we have learned that here."

"Where is 'here'?" Markham demanded.

"We are in a quiet zone," Einstein said.

"A Gap?"

"If you vish." Einstein shrugged away matters of definition.

"We are beneath the Rude Lands, where you were," the other man said.

Markham felt a sudden flush of joy rush over him. "Then I've ... I've escaped?"

"From Hell? No," the swarthy man said slowly. "And how long you or any of us will remain here, no one knows."

"Is ... God here?"

Einstein chuckled. "Nein, but every one thinks that when they first come here. I haff not seen the gentleman."

His mind aswirl with speculations, Markham turned to the other man. "Who... are you?"

"Thales of Miletus," The man held out his hand, but flat palm up, not in the traditional handshake. Markham pressed his palm into that of Thales, remembering that the handshake formality he knew was a Roman custom. Thales had died centuries before the rise of Athens, much less Rome.

Markham tried to recall his undergraduate smattering of Greek history. Thales had introduced abstract reasoning into science, devised the method of deductive reasoning, and claimed that everything was in essence made of water, the one substance he knew had both solid, liquid and vapor forms. The

Athenians had regarded him as the greatest of the early philosophers.

Markham sat down unsteadily on the chipped flagstones. One gave him a hard jab, as if this world were reminding him of its persistent, gritty, painful reality.

"You ... were both mathematical reasoners," Markham muttered, staring into the two faces that beamed at him. "I suppose I am, too, though I'm really a fly on the wall compared to you..."He smiled wanly. "Have I come to some sort of refuge?"

Thales's mouth twisted in disapproval. "You dismiss me as mere numerologist?"

"Well, no -"

"I remind you that in the city of Miletus I once humiliated the so-called 'practical' men by cornering the market in olive presses. When the crop came good - as I had calculated, a half year before - I charged them, great and often. I laughed muchly while they scowled, and thus made my fortune. No mere abstract reasoner, I."

"I'm sorry, sir. I didn't mean ..." His voice trailed off. It had been millenia since Thales died.

"You can remember that far back?"

"Of course. Oh, I spy your intent. In the Rude Lands memory rubs away on the stones of agony."

Einstein said, "Here, not."

Markham said eagerly, "In all that time, have you found out what's going on here?"

Thales blinked. "Why, no. It is barely possible to learn this fool tongue."

"English?"

"Yea. It is ripe with tangle and contort."

"But you've had -"

"A year, no more."

Markham gaped. Einstein said, "Ja, and I haff been heir perhaps a few months."

"That's -"

"Vee know vye you are disturbed," Einstein said. "Vee are in a pocket, a leftover is maybe. A drain which collects junk, I denk." Einstein chuckled agreeably.

Somehow Markham had never thought of Einstein as a stooped little man with a broad, comic accent. Yet here he was, no icon, but a cheery figure brimming with life. Markham found he was blinking back tears. To come to this, a green and warm paradise, in the company of the greatest minds in history...

Thales said stubbornly, "I cannot ponder this point of singular points, Einstein, when you persist in saying that there are no such things as points."

Einstein shook his shaggy head. "Let us go back to time, eh? You here, me here, this new Junge Markham - proves that gedanken experiment is right. All time arrows here can go forward or back. Only solution to field equations, I say, is a singularity "n time. Not space!"

Thales slapped his palm to the stone. "A single time would mean frozen time, as up there!"

He jagged a finger at the filmy blue sky. A few yellow puffball clouds coasted by lazily. Looking up into it reminded Markham of the open simplicities of childhood.

"Nein! Field equations are clear."

"Not so. Your third derivative term -"

"One haff to interpret the intergral convergence -"

"You look for God in equations!"

"Vee haff proved that in Hell, time radiates from a non-temporal center, nicht wahr?" He scowled at Thales.

The Greek replied, "A possibility, yes. But the center may be God, or may be Devil - cannot tell from physics, not yet. We need more data."

Markham said wonderingly, "Then we can figure this out, if we just reason together..."

Both men looked at Markham with pity. "So that is vat you denk?" Einstein said. "Nein!"

Markham sputtered, "But, but - "

"Nein, you are coming for harder task," Einstein said gently. "Hier there are real problems.

Come, we must get down to the truly difficult werk."

Markham smiled. Russell and the wasp-woman had paid a price to put him here, and yet he had reached no plateau of the spirit. The whirl of Hell would go on, revealing new levels, and he would go with it.

But what could be the real problems? If Einstein hadn't solved them...

Somewhere, he drought he heard the keening, malicious laugh of the angel.

Altos. And a low bass one, as if from Satan himself.

What if, Markham thought, they were two faces of the same coin?