The Top of the Volcano Read online

  “What is it?”

  I looked down at him. “I’ll tell you what it is, man. You’re acting very shitty.”

  “Sue me.”

  “Goddammit, dog, what’s got your ass up?”

  “Her. That nit chick you’ve got in there.”

  “So what? Big deal…I’ve had chicks before.”

  “Yeah, but never any that hung on like this one. I warn you, Albert, she’s going to make trouble.”

  “Don’t be dumb!” He didn’t reply. Just looked at me with anger and then limped off to check out the scene. I crawled back inside and dogged the hatch. She wanted to make it again. I said I didn’t want to; Blood had brought me down. I was bugged. And I didn’t know which one to be pissed off at.

  But God she was pretty.

  She kind of pouted and settled back with her arms wrapped around her. “Tell me some more about the downunder,” I said.

  At first she was cranky, wouldn’t say much, but after a while she opened up and started talking freely. I was learning a lot. I figured I could use it some time, maybe.

  There were only a couple of hundred downunders in what was left of the United States and Canada. They’d been sunk on the sites of wells or mines or other kinds of deep holes. Some of them, out in the west, were in natural cave formations. They went way down, maybe two to five miles. They were like big caissons, stood on end. And the people who’d settled them were squares of the worst kind. Southern Baptists, Fundamentalists, lawanorder goofs, real middle-class squares with no taste for the wild life. And they’d gone back to a kind of life that hadn’t existed for a hundred and fifty years. They’d gotten the last of the scientists to do the work, invent the how and why, and then they’d run them out. They didn’t want any progress, they didn’t want any dissent, they didn’t want anything that would make waves. They’d had enough of that. The best time in the world had been just before the First War, and they figured if they could keep it like that, they could live quiet lives and survive. Shit! I’d go nuts in one of the downunders.

  Quilla June smiled, and snuggled up again, and this time I didn’t turn her off. She started touching me again, down there and all over, and then she said, “Vic?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “What?”

  “In love? Have you ever been in love with a girl?”

  “Well, I damn well guess I haven’t!”

  “Do you know what love is?”

  “Sure. I guess I do.”

  “But if you’ve never been in love…?”

  “Don’t be dumb. I mean, I’ve never had a bullet in the head, and I know I wouldn’t like it.”

  “You don’t know what love is, I’ll bet.”

  “Well, if it means living in a downunder, I guess I just don’t wanna find out.” We didn’t go on with the conversation much after that. She pulled me down and we did it again. And when it was over, I heard Blood scratching at the boiler. I opened the hatch, and he was standing out there. “All clear,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m sure. Put your pants on,” he said it with a sneer in the tone, “and come on out here. We have to talk some stuff.”

  I looked at him, and he wasn’t kidding. I got my jeans and sneakers on, and climbed down out of the boiler.

  He trotted ahead of me, away from the boiler over some blacksoot beams, and outside the gym. It was down. Looked like a rotted stump tooth.

  “Now what’s lumbering you?” I asked him.

  He scampered up on a chunk of concrete till he was almost nose level with me.

  “You’re going dumb on me, Vic.”

  I knew he was serious. No Albert shit, straight Vic. “How so?”

  “Last night, man. We could have cut out of there and left her for them. That would have been smart.”

  “I wanted her.”

  “Yeah, I know. That’s what I’m talking about. It’s today now, not last night. You’ve had her about a half a hundred times. Why’re we hanging around?”

  “I want some more.”

  Then he got angry. “Yeah, well, listen, chum…I want a few things myself. I want something to eat, and I want to get rid of this pain in my side, and I want away from this turf. Maybe they don’t give up this easy.”

  “Take it easy. We can handle all that. Don’t mean she can’t go with us.”

  “Doesn’t mean,” he corrected me. “And so that’s the new story. Now we travel three, is that right?”

  I was getting really uptight myself. “You’re starting to sound like a damn poodle!”

  “And you’re starting to sound like a boxer.”

  I hauled back to crack him one. He didn’t move. I dropped the hand. I’d never hit Blood. I didn’t want to start now.

  “Sorry,” he said, softly.

  “That’s okay.”

  But we weren’t looking at each other.

  “Vic, man, you’ve got a responsibility to me, you know.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “Well, I guess maybe I do. Maybe I have to remind you of some stuff. Like the time that burnpit-screamer came up out of the street and made a grab for you.”

  I shuddered. The motherfucker’d been green. Righteous stone green, glowing like fungus. My gut heaved, just thinking.

  “And I went for him, right?”

  I nodded. Right, mutt, right.

  “And I could have been burned bad, and died, and that would’ve been all of it for me, right or wrong, isn’t that true?” I nodded again. I was getting pissed off proper. I didn’t like being made to feel guilty. It was a fifty-fifty with Blood and me. He knew that. “But I did it, right?” I remembered the way the green thing had screamed. Christ, it was all ooze and eyelashes.

  “Okay, okay, don’t hanger me.”

  “Harangue, not hanger.”

  “Well, WHATEVER!” I shouted. “Just knock off the crap, or we can forget the whole fucking arrangement!”

  Then Blood blew. “Well, maybe we should, you simple dumb putz!”

  “What’s a putz, you little turd…is that something bad…yeah, it must be…you watch your fucking mouth, son of a bitch; or I’ll kick your ass!”

  We sat there and didn’t talk for fifteen minutes. Neither one of us knew which way to go.

  Finally, I backed off a little. I talked soft and I talked slow. I was about up to here with him, but told him I was going to do right by him, like I always had, and he threatened me, saying I’d damned well better because there were a couple of very hip solos making it around the city, and they’d be delighted to have a sharp tail-scent like him. I told him I didn’t like being threatened, and he’d better watch his fucking step or I’d break his leg. He got furious and stalked off. I said screw you and went back to the boiler to take it out on that Quilla June again.

  But when I stuck my head inside the boiler, she was waiting, with a pistol one of the dead rovers had supplied. She hit me good and solid over the right eye with it, and I fell straight forward across the hatch, and was out cold.

  VI

  “I told you she was no good.” He watched me as I swabbed out the cut with disinfectant from my kit, and painted the gash with iodine. He smirked when I flinched.

  I put away the stuff, and rummaged around in the boiler, gathering up all the spare ammo I could carry, and ditching the Browning in favor of the heavier .30-06. Then I found something that must’ve slipped out of her clothes.

  It was a little metal plate, about three inches long and an inch-and-a-half high. It had a whole string of numbers on it, and there were holes in it, in random patterns. “What’s this?” I asked Blood.

  He looked at it, sniffed it.

  “Must be an identity card of some kind. Maybe it’s what she used to get out of the downunder.”

  That made my mind up.

  I jammed it in a pocket and started out. Toward the access dropshaft.

  “Where the hell are you going?�
�� Blood yelled after me.

  “Come on back, you’ll get killed out there!

  “I’m hungry, dammit! I’m wounded!

  “Albert, you sonofabitch! Come back here!”

  I kept right on walking. I was gonna find that bitch and brain her. Even if I had to go downunder to find her.

  It took me an hour to walk to the access dropshaft leading down to Topeka. I thought I saw Blood following, but hanging back a ways. I didn’t give a damn. I was mad.

  Then, there it was. A tall, straight, featureless pillar of shining black metal. It was maybe twenty feet in diameter, perfectly flat on top, disappearing straight into the ground. It was a cap, that was all. I walked straight up to it, and fished around in my pocket for that metal card. Then something was tugging at my right pants leg.

  “Listen, you moron, you can’t go down there!”

  I kicked him off, but he came right back.

  “Listen to me!”

  I turned around and stared at him.

  Blood sat down; the powder puffed up around him. “Albert…”

  “My name is Vic, you little eggsucker.”

  “Okay, okay, no fooling around. Vic.” His tone softened. “Vic. Come on, man.” He was trying to get through to me. I was really boiling, but he was trying to make sense. I shrugged, and crouched down beside him.

  “Listen, man,” Blood said, “this chick has bent you way out of shape. You know you can’t go down there. It’s all square and settled, and they know everyone; they hate solos. Enough roverpaks have raided downunder, and raped their women, and stolen their food, they’ll have defenses set up. They’ll kill you, Vic!”

  “What the hell do you care? You’re always saying you’d be better off without me.” He sagged at that.

  “Vic, we’ve been together almost three years. Good and bad. But this can be the worst. I’m scared, man. Scared you won’t come back. And I’m hungry, and I’ll have to go find some dude who’ll take me on…and you know most solos are in paks now, I’ll be low mutt. I’m not that young any more. And I’m hurt pretty bad.”

  I could dig it. He was talking sense. But all I could think of was how that bitch, that Quilla June, had rapped me. And then there were images of her soft tits, and the way she made little sounds when I was in her, and I shook my head, and knew I had to go get even.

  “I got to do it, Blood. I got to.”

  He breathed deep and sagged a little more. He knew it was useless. “You don’t even see what she’s done to you, Vic. That metal card, it’s too easy, as if she wanted you to follow.”

  I got up. “I’ll try to get back quick. Will you wait…?”

  He was silent a long while, and I waited. Finally, he said, “For a while. Maybe I’ll be here, maybe not.”

  I understood. I turned around and started walking around the pillar of black metal. Finally I found a slot in the pillar, and slipped the metal card into it. There was a soft humming sound, then a section of the pillar dilated. I hadn’t even seen the lines of the sections. A circle opened and I took a step through. I turned and there was Blood, watching me. We looked at each other, all the while that pillar was humming.

  “So long, Vic.”

  “Take care of yourself, Blood.”

  “Hurry back.”

  “Do my best.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  Then I turned around and stepped inside. The access portal irised closed behind me.

  VII

  I should have known. I should have suspected. Sure, every once in a while a chick came up to see what it was like on the surface, what had happened to the cities; sure, it happened. Why, I’d believed her when she’d told me, cuddled up beside me in that steaming boiler, that she’d wanted to see what it was like when a girl did it with a guy, that all the flicks she’d seen in Topeka were sweet and solid and dull, and the girls in her school’d talked about beaver flicks, and one of them had a little eight-page comic book and she’d read it with wide eyes…sure, I’d believed her. It was logical. I should have suspected something when she left that metal I.D. plate behind. It was too easy. Blood’d tried to tell me. Dumb? Yeah!

  The second that access iris swirled closed behind me, the humming got louder, and some cool light grew in the walls. Wall. It was a circular compartment with only two sides to the wall: inside and outside. The wall pulsed up light and the humming got louder, and the deckplate I was standing on dilated just the way the outside port had done. But I was standing there, like a mouse in a cartoon, and as long as I didn’t look down I was cool, I wouldn’t fall.

  Then I started settling. Dropped through the floor, the iris closed overhead, I was dropping down the tube, picking up speed but not too much, just dropping steadily. Now I knew what a dropshaft was.

  Down and down I went and every once in a while I’d see something like 10 LEV or ANTIPOLL 55 or BREEDER-CON or PUMP SE 6 on the wall; faintly I could make out the sectioning of an iris…but I never stopped dropping.

  Finally, I dropped all the way to the bottom, and there was TOPEKA CITY LIMITS POP. 22,860 on the wall, and I settled down without any strain, bending a little from the knees to cushion the impact, but even that wasn’t much.

  I used the metal plate again, and the iris—a much bigger one this time—swirled open, and I got my first look at a downunder.

  It stretched away in front of me, twenty miles to the dim shining horizon of tin can metal where the wall behind me curved and curved and curved till it made one smooth, encircling circuit and came back around around around to where I stood, staring at it. I was down at the bottom of a big metal tube that stretched up to a ceiling an eighth of a mile overhead, twenty miles across. And in the bottom of that tin can, someone had built a town that looked for all the world like a photo out of one of the water-logged books in the library on the surface. I’d seen a town like this in the books. Just like this. Neat little houses, and curvy little streets, and trimmed lawns, and a business section and everything else that a Topeka would have.

  Except a sun, except birds, except clouds, except rain, except snow, except cold, except wind, except ants, except dirt, except mountains, except oceans, except big fields of grain, except stars, except the moon, except forests, except animals running wild, except…

  Except freedom.

  They were canned down here, like dead fish. Canned.

  I felt my throat tighten up. I wanted to get out. Out! I started to tremble, my hands were cold and there was sweat on my forehead. This had been insane, coming down here. I had to get out. Out!

  I turned around to get back in the dropshaft, and then it grabbed me.

  That bitch Quilla June! I shoulda suspected!

  The thing was low, and green, and boxlike, and had cables with mittens on the ends instead of arms, and it rolled on tracks, and it grabbed me.

  It hoisted me up on its square flat top, holding me with them mittens on the cables, and I couldn’t move, except to try kicking at the big glass eye in the front, but it didn’t do any good. It didn’t bust. The thing was only about four feet high, and my sneakers almost reached the ground, but not quite, and it started moving off into Topeka, hauling me along with it.

  People were all over the place. Sitting in rockers on their front porches, raking their lawns, hanging around the gas station, sticking pennies in gumball machines, painting a white stripe down the middle of the road, selling newspapers on a corner, listening to an oompah band in a shell in a park, playing hopscotch and pussy-in-the-corner, polishing a fire engine, sitting on benches reading, washing windows, pruning bushes, tipping hats to ladies, collecting milk bottles in wire carrying-racks, grooming horses, throwing a stick for a dog to retrieve, diving into a communal swimming pool, chalking vegetable prices on a slate outside a grocery, walking hand-in-hand with a girl, all of them watching me go past on that metal motherfucker.

  I could hear Blood speaking, saying just what he’d said before I’d entered the dropshaft: It’s all square and settled and they know everyone; th
ey hate solos. Enough roverpaks have raided downunders, and raped their women and stolen their food, they’ll have defenses set up. They’ll kill you, Vic!

  Thanks, mutt.

  Goodbye.

  VIII

  The green box tracked through the business section and turned in at a shopfront with the words BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU on the window. It rolled right inside the open door, and there were half a dozen men and old men and very old men in there, waiting for me. Also a couple of women. The green box stopped.

  One of them came over and took the metal plate out of my hand. He looked at it, then turned around and gave it to the oldest of the old men, a withered toad wearing baggy pants and a green eyeshade and garters that held up the sleeves of his striped shirt. “Quilla June, Lew,” the guy said to the old man. Lew took the metal plate and put it in the top left drawer of a rolltop desk. “Better take his guns, Aaron,” the old coot said. And the guy who’d taken the plate cleaned me.

  “Let him loose, Aaron,” Lew said.

  Aaron stepped around the back of the green box and something clicked, and the cable-mittens sucked back inside the box, and I got down off the thing. My arms were numb where the box had held me. I rubbed one, then the other, and I glared at them.

  “Now, boy…” Lew started.

  “Suck wind, asshole!”

  The women blanched. The men tightened their faces.

  “I told you it wouldn’t work,” another of the old men said to Lew.

  “Bad business, this,” said one of the younger ones.

  Lew leaned forward in his straight-back chair and pointed a crumbled finger at me. “Boy, you better be nice.”

  “I hope all your fuckin’ children are hare-lipped!”

  “This is no good, Lew!” another man said.

  “Guttersnipe,” a woman with a beak snapped.

  Lew stared at me. His mouth was a nasty little black line. I knew the sonofabitch didn’t have a tooth in his crummy head that wasn’t rotten and smelly. He stared at me with vicious little eyes. God, he was ugly, like a toad ready to snaffle a fly off the wall with his tongue. He was getting set to say something I wouldn’t like. “Aaron, maybe you’d better put the sentry back on him.” Aaron moved to the green box.