The Long Sleep

XI

He was afraid of rats. He remembered only too well the size, strength, and potential ferocity of the specimen that had been contentedly gnawing on his shoe when he woke in the prison cell. When he'd met it's glittering red eyes he had seen no fear in it; indeed, he felt that it was carefully, brazenly sizing him up, calculating its chances if it were to attack. If it hadn't been alone, if another rat had been with it… How many of its relatives lived down here in the drains? Dozens? Hundreds? If they were to come after him, not one at a time but in legions, he knew that he would not be able to save himself.

Then, when he was hardly more than a dozen steps into the drain, he saw the rat. It was sitting in the middle of the tunnel floor, facing him. He almost turned and ran before he realized that something was wrong with it. Its eyes were dark brown circles; they were no longer bloodshot, no longer red and glittering. And it was absolutely motionless, as if it were dead — except that it was on its feet and not in any posture of death.

Ready to jump sideways and run if it should begin it move, he closed in on the rat. It remained still, silent, dark-eyed. He knelt beside it, touched it, picked it up, turned it over, and saw that it was a machine.

Well, he thought, why not"? A mechanical rat…

Thus far, every one of Galing's stage settings had been especially well detailed and realistically drawn. At the beginning of each new act in this senseless drama, Joel had been convinced, to one degree or another, that it was perfectly real. If Galing could go to the trouble of setting up that scene with the aquamen, why not a robot rat to nibble at his shoe and throw a bit of fear into him?

At least they had not put him in a place where genuine rats could come to dine on him. The mechanical rodent was a little extra insurance for them, a nasty deterrent that would keep him from going down into the storm drains. They had evidently put some thought into it… They had sent the rat to chew on his sole; they had caused it to escape down the drain; and they thought that, knowing the tunnel contained rats, Joel would certainly choose to leave his cell through the front door, according to the program. Anyway, if they hadn't really endangered him, it must mean that they didn't actually want to kill or maim him.

Or maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe they hadn't used a real rat simply because they couldn't get hold of one.

Whatever the case, they had underestimated his anger and frustration. When he had a choice between twelve-pound rats and Galing's program, he had gladly chosen the rats.

Joel threw the machine to the floor of the tunnel. Transistors and circuit boards broke inside of it.

He held the candle pan high and continued down the drain, no longer worried about rats.

What he did have to worry about was the moss. He was afraid it was going to block his escape.

The deeper he went into the subterranean passageway, the thicker the moss became. It grew on the curved walls of the drain, above his head, below his feet, on both sides of him. When he first noticed it, the moss only flourished in widely scattered patches. But the farther he walked the larger those patches became and the closer they were to one another — until the stuff finally sheathed every inch of the inside walls of the corrugated steel pipe. It was spongy, damp and blue-green, and it shimmered prettily in the candlelight. Once it had claimed all the metal surface, it stopped growing laterally and began to thrust tendrils into the air space; it was as thick and often as long as a young girl's hair. It was cold to the touch, unnaturally cold for plant life. In places it thrived so well that he was forced to squeeze through a narrowed tunnel, sometimes on his hands and knees, the wet moss dragging over him like the hands of a corpse.

Moss slapped across his eyes.

He pushed it aside.

It got in his mouth.

He spat it out.

Once when he stopped to rest, he made the mistake of examining the growth too closely. He saw that the hair-thin filaments which constituted the mother-plant were in a constant sate of agitation. They twisted through one another, abraded one another, braided one another… They slithered like snakes, writhed, wrapped together and pulsed as if fornicating, extricated themselves only to form new entanglements. The moss appeared to have the life energy and some of the mobility of an animal, as if some crude intelligence were at the core of it.

He didn't like to speculate about that. He was certain that the moss was not just another illusion, not some clever prop that had been built by Henry Galing and his gang. But if it were real… Hell, in that case he was not in any reality that he had ever known before. The earth he'd come from harbored no creature that was half plant and half animal.

The Twenty-third Century?

Impossible.

To think as much was to entertain insanity.

He got up and continued his journey, although the storm drains no longer seemed a safe and reasonable alternative to the escape that Galing had offered him. When the moss dangled from the ceiling, he felt as if long tentacles were reaching for him. When it swelled up from all sides and narrowed the passageway, he saw it as a stomach that was closing around him, digesting him.

Eventually, he came to five human skeletons that dangled from the wall. The bones were startlingly white against the blue-green vegetation. The moss had grown through the rib cages, into the bony mouths and out of the empty eye sockets; it held them in suspension, as if it were displaying them. Side by side, the five macabre figures looked like the victims of an unearthly crucifixion. Without proof, without needing proof, he knew that the damned moss had somehow murdered them…