Inside Outside Read online

  DO YOU REMEMBER

  those old-fashioned snowball paperweights —the round glass ball containing a miniature world of snowmen, or igloos, or perhaps a Santa Claus fixed firmly to one side of the ball—the kind which, when shaken, produced a pleasant flurry of floating flakes to obscure, for a little while, the tiny world so safely encased, so much at the mercy of anyone who wanted to smash it.

  IMAGINE

  such a world, immeasurably larger, large enough to have its own interior fixed sun, but a world still finite, whirling freely in space, populated by a full complement of creatures of all kinds. They would be literally inside outside. But they would not know it. Not at first.

  They would try desperately to find an answer to who they were, what was their universe, what was the purpose of their lives—much as people do on Earth.

  And when disaster struck—when the hand shook the snowball—they would try desperately hard to survive. And some would find the answer.

  Other Books by Philip José Farmer

  The Lovers

  Strange Relations

  The Green Odyssey

  The Alley God

  This is an original publication—not a reprint.

  INSIDE OUTSIDE

  Philip José Farmer

  Ballantine Books • New York

  Copyright © 1964 by Philip José Farmer

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Ballantine Books are distributed in the U.S.A.

  by Affiliated Publishers, a division of Pocket

  Books, Inc., 630 Fifth Avenue, New York 20, N.Y.

  BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC.

  101 Fifth Avenue, New York 3, N.Y.

  Two floated in the twilight void.

  Arms around each other, the chin of each resting on the shoulder of the other, they spun around a common axis and turned over and over, heads over heels.

  Around them (there was no above or below) was nothing. Only the invisible air pushing them towards the sun in the center of the sphere. The sun was obscured by a cloud of dust.

  Jack Cull held Phyllis Nilstrom tightly while he stared past her. Presently, for he had no means of telling time in a world where the sun never moved, he saw a speck appear. His heart beat many times. Then, the speck was much larger. Before long, he knew that the object was not heading straight for them. Nor was it, as he had first thought, part of the debris left after the cataclysm; a building or a tree or a chunk of ripped-apart mountain. Its shape was that of a living thing, although not like any creature he had ever seen in this world.

  The thing changed course and swept around in an arc, obviously after having sighted the two human beings. It came closer, and then Cull knew that it must be a member of the newcomer species, the third group to become tenants of this world.

  He was not unnerved at seeing the monstrous shape. He had gone through too much too recently to be shaken. He was not even giving the creature his full attention but was thinking of an Earth that he remembered but had never seen, had hoped briefly to see, and now knew that he would never see.

  And he thought of that time, not so long ago as men counted time by sleeps and awakenings, when events had been different. Then, not knowing the truth, wanting to know the truth, he had hoped. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he had found it difficult to believe that he could be in Hell. This was no supernatural world. It was hard as rock, dirty as earth, stinking as garbage and unwashed bodies, a physical world obeying physical laws… though some things were not easily explainable.

  Now, he knew that it was not metaphysical, that everything had an explanation and operated by valid principles. The same cause and effect that ruled on Earth ruled here.

  But, on that day of which he was thinking, he had not been so sure.

  *

  The Deadly Desert was the old Hell with its fires burned out. So said the old-timers. Jack Cull had studied the Deadly Desert so often from his apartment window high up in the tower that he could understand what they meant. While having coffee (instant ersatz made from crumbled rocktree leaves) in the morning (?), he stared over the city roofs, over the city walls, and out across the desert.

  For as far as he could see (there was no horizon), the sands stretched. Here and there, mountains abruptly rose from the flatness. The mountains, like the desert, were treeless, shrubless, grassless. Around them was nothing but sand and sunshine and vapors of poisonous gases from potholes.

  Infrequently, a “dragon” or a “cerebus” cranked along like an old bus on its way to the junkheap. Once, Cull saw a sway-backed “centaur.”

  Even at that distance, it looked hopelessly down at the hooves; grimy and gray and broken-spirited, as only the long unemployed could be. Every now and then, he had heard, one came into the city. He carried, not a bow and arrow with which to torment the damned, but a stone alms-bowl.

  Mixed-up proverb. If horses were beggars…

  This morning(?) he was, as usual, looking up past the desert at the mountains and wondering if what they said about the mountains could be true. This city was a bloody flux of rumors; nothing, or very little, could be believed. But you liked to hold a rumor to your chest, cherish it, warm it, breathe life into it with your little hope. And this rumor said that if a man could get across the desert to the mountains, he could get away from Hell itself. Otherwise, if he couldn’t, why had a barrier been put between the city and the mountains?

  The main trouble about that rumor, for which he had paid much, was that he could see for himself that there was nothing beyond the desert.

  No, he’d correct that. He could not see beyond the sands. The sands curved upward and upward until the desert became a blur.

  No sky. Rather, there was a sky, but it was a continuation of the earth.

  This was a world where the sky was not blue, where there was no sky, where the sun was always exactly overhead, where the only shadow was beneath a roof or beside a leaning wall.

  Once, a man could fall off the edge of the world. So an old-timer had told him. But, he said, things have changed. Not for the better. Hell is a compromise of terrestrial ideas and infernal facts. And, here, compromises always seemed to work out for the worst.

  Cull muttered, “Take your compromise and stick it!”

  No use. He was stuck with it. He returned to his breakfast. And he gazed with revulsion at his apartment: Four stone walls (which did not a prison make), a stone bed, a stone bench, a stone table, made of granite, diorite, volcanic tuff, limestone, respectively. The stone table with grooves in it where “fiends” had planted chitinous elbows for eons(?). The stone bench with a depression in its middle where scaly or horny buttocks had rubbed back and forth for many a millimillennia.

  His breakfast. A quartz bowl filled with manna soup and with coarse brown fibers, like hairy noodles, of rocktree leaves. These constituted the only vegetation, and that was only permitted, he supposed, because human beings needed roughage. They were not ectoplasm but flesh and blood. They breathed and bled, had mouths, teeth, and bowels, and so needed food with bulk. The rocktrees also existed because a generator of oxygen and consumer of carbon dioxide was needed. This was a physical universe, even if enclosed, just as physical as the Earth from which they came.

  After eating the soup and drinking another cup of coffee, he started to shave with a flint razor. One had to keep up appearances; pride was not denied, especially here. And moustaches were In.

  But, during the second scrape of his flint razor, another earthquake struck. The floor heaved. The blocks composing the walls parted slightly. He steadied himself against the table and continued scraping off the whiskers. The bastards were not going to unnerve him. Let the universe expand. He was not going to allow them to know h
e was breaking. As if they cared.

  Result: he gashed his throat. But he was unlucky (was he?) and missed the jugular by a hair.

  Swearing, he walked to the window and looked out.

  Here it came! All hell breaking loose!

  From far away (remember, no horizon) a thin line appeared. It shot toward him, toward the city, grew larger as it came closer, expanded and resolved into two walls forming a sharp corner, like the prow of a ship. And, like a ship, it roared over the sands of the desert, pushing up great waves in front of it and clouds of dust on each side, a ship of the desert sailing under the wind of God’s fury. Behind the prow rose towers of stone like tall masts. Out of the windows and doors of the towers shot flames. A stone vessel on fire sliding over the sands on a collision course with the city in which he lived.

  “Here it comes!” he screamed. It’ll smash into us, tons and tons and tons of giant blocks of granite ramming at sixty miles an hour into the city, which is also tons and tons and tons of stone blocks. He screamed; he who had seen so much he thought he could no longer scream. He screamed. Even though he had seen this before and knew, or thought he knew, that the collision would never happen.

  Nor did it. The great city, seemingly bent on plowing into him and grinding his flesh between and under the masses of falling granite, suddenly stopped. Its walls were less than a quarter of a mile away.

  There was a hush as the shouts and yells from the streets below his window ceased, Then, the great city built like a boat began to recede. Rather, as he knew from past experience, it seemed to recede, just as it had seemed to sail toward them. It was a mirage, a reflection of a metropolis only God knew how many thousands of miles away. Sometimes, during the earthquakes, strange atmospheric disturbances occurred. Once, it had been his own city that had charged across the sands. That was when he had seen himself staring horrifiedly out of his own window in the tower.

  Now, the city with flaming towers was gone. It would never do to allow commerce, intercourse, among Christian and Buddhist. Each must suffer his own Hell. The Authorities would see to that.

  If The Authorities were so smart, he thought, why didn’t they make this place big enough in the first place? Or did they make this setup so that human beings would be frightened (not to death), horror-stricken, never knowing if this time the two Hells might crash?

  It was then that he put his hand on his face and felt the wetness. He had cut himself with the flint and had forgotten about the cut.

  He, licked the blood off his finger and thought intensely about its slight saltiness, its redness, and how it was his blood, his own. Pleasures were few here, and you had to do strange things to get your kicks. He knew a man who could lie on his back, practically bend himself double, and then could… well, he had better not go on. It did not bear thinking about. Not because it was in bad taste or vulgar or against current mores, but because he hated that man for being able to get a kick that he could not.

  The blood kept trickling. Although he was not worried about bleeding to death, Cull did want to repair the damage. The Exchange, where he worked, insisted on its employees looking presentable. Besides, prowling the streets were men and women who might become overly excited at the sight of blood and cause him no end of trouble and even pain.

  He telephoned his doctor, who lived in a small room in the lowest sub-basement of the apartment. (Telephones in Hell? Why not? They were the work of those who had been here before man, the “demons.” There was a vast complex of lines over the city; lines strung, not on wooden poles, but on the gargoyle faces that jutted in profusion on the front of every building or else on the branches of the rocktrees.)

  The doctor, poor devil, was busy with another case. But, since Cull was a more important patient, the doctor arrived within five minutes. Doctor B.O., as he was called, was tired and haggard. He had once been a handsome specimen, a giant with a magnificent physique. But he was tired in body, and his spirit, which was the same thing as his body, was, if not crushed, crumpled.

  He opened his little black bag, slapped something on the wound to close it up, and covered it with a salve.

  “What caused the earthquake this time?” Cull said.

  The doctor replied with chips of weariness dropping off his voice and flakes of sullenness darting from his manure-brown eyes.

  “Another famine in China.”

  His voice croaked with exhaustion as he gave his Lewisian explanation. Half a million souls, encased in solid flesh, had moved into Hell overnight. And Hell had expanded to make room for them. Hence, the stretching of the unlimited yet bounded universe. Hence, the outward thrust of the Buddhist city, the crevasses in the earth, the buildings reeling and sometimes toppling. The other city was a mirage? Oh, no! Never!

  The doctor knew what this meant for him and his fellows. More work. No sleep. He was so tired that he even dared complain to Cull. Of course, he knew how lenient Cull was and that he would not, probably, turn him in. He even suspected him, wrongly, of being a member of the underground abolitionist society.

  “Don’t bitch to me,” Cull said. “We’re all in the same boat.”

  “Yes,” the demon whined as he snapped his little black bag shut and walked toward the phone, knowing it would ring for him in a few seconds.

  “Yes. We’re in the same boat. But you hold the position of a first-class passenger on a luxury liner. While I, you might say, am only a coal shoveler in the black gang.”

  “There was a time when it was the other way around,” Cull said.

  The phone rang, and Cull answered it. He decided to let Doctor B.O. leave. Why argue? Once, when this world had been a small place, constructed according to the Ptolemaic model, the “devils” — or Arganus as they called themselves — outnumbered man. They ruled as any strongly prejudiced and arrogant majority always does. Then, when this place — call it Hell — was reformed to the Copernican structure, and mankind on Earth began breeding in geometrical progression, though no less passionately than before, the fiends were suddenly in the minority.

  Topsy-turvy. Even here things changed. They had to because Hell was a reflection, if distorted, of Earth.

  But changes do not have to be for the better. According to the fiends, they were for the worse. Now, the fiends were only a fraction of the population. Might makes right. The fiends, once masters, became slaves. Oh, slavery was legal and rightly so, for only human beings should have civil rights. And the fiends were not human beings. Even they, liars that they were, would not claim that. They had their pride. Besides, if it were not for the fiends, would human beings have been in Hell?

  Doctor B.O. put down the phone and ran out of the room. He was a flash of red edged with the blue of autointoxication.

  He had left the receiver off the hook, for which oversight he would pay later. Curiosity had not slackened so much in Cull that he no longer took up the tension when he had a chance. He picked up the phone and listened, hoping to hear something out of the ordinary. Something to give him a kick. There was the hum of a line waiting to be used. Then, a voice with a Slavic accent, saying, “…somewhere deep below. It has to be because that’s the only place we’ve never been. Look in the sewers.”

  There was a click. Cull put the receiver back on the hook, picked up his briefcase, and walked out. Look in the sewers, he thought. What the Hell was behind that remark? Look for what? Then, as he went out into the street, he forgot about it.

  The street was blocked by a crowd that had gathered around a corpse half-hidden beneath a block of granite tumbled by the quake. Death did not awe or attract them. It was what death brought running that made them stand around and wait when they probably had urgent business elsewhere.

  He waited, too. He was late for work as it was, but he was not going to miss out on this even if he were fired. He would have hated dismissal, since being out of a job was Hell. But he wanted to see what death would bring.

  From far away, he heard the first faint wheeeee of the siren. It was distant, so he kn
ew he had time to step into a store and buy, or try to buy, a package of Roll-your-own. The owner was not in sight. The slave, a huge black fiend who insisted on being called Uncle Tom, was replacing various items that had been shaken off the shelves and counter. Stooping over, he looked up at Cull and grinned, his toothpaste-white fangs gleaming against the inkblack face. He was far darker than any Negro, for the darkest Negroes were not actually black but a deep brown. His hair was wooly and cropped close to his head, and his lips were so thick as to be a caricature of a Congolese.

  “Yassah, Marse Cull,” he said. “Whuffo yo comes in heah for, suh, massah, yo lawdship?”

  “Uncle Tom,” Cull said. “How would you like to be kicked in the ass?”

  And he felt angry at himself for saying that, because Uncle Tom had incited him into doing so, had hoped he would.

  “Oh, lawdy, Marse Cull, Ah doan mean no offense, nowhow, no suh. Ah’s jes a poah ole dahkie, yo lawdship, tryin’ to get along wif mah white bettahs. Ah’s so sah’y Ah hu’t yo feelin’s, massah. Please doan beat me, Marse. Ah’ll lick yo boots and kiss yo ass, massah, jes lahk us no-good culluhd folks is supposed to do. Ah’m jes a po ole dahkie.”

  “For God’s sake cut it out,” Cull said. He was frustrated. The fiend had found a way to needle and taunt the human beings, and when they told him he wasn’t human and wasn’t supposed to talk like a Negro, he would remind them that they had always said Negroes weren’t human either.

  Besides, he was a nigger angel (his own words), and before The Fall he had always talked thus. Been St. Michael’s own houseboy, he said. Then, he would laugh — fangs flashing in the frame of that genuinely black face — and say that The Fall had been no comedown for him. In Heaven, he’d been no better off. Well, maybe, because St. Michael was real quality-folks, and down here he had to serve white trash.