Inside Outside Read online

  By then, he did get a boot in the rear, which did not hurt him one bit, but usually caused the kicker to yell with pain. If angry enough, the kicker would threaten to lynch him. This caused another embarrassing scene, where Uncle Tom would get down on his knees and lift his hands in prayer to his threatener and go into a dramatic scene, pleading and begging for mercy. All the time he was enjoying himself thoroughly, and his threatener knew it and could do little about it besides curse and threaten some more. If a lynching were organized, it would be broken up in a short time by The Authorities, and the mob severely punished. There was Law here as elsewhere.

  On the other hand, Uncle Tom did not dare walk off his job. The Law applied to him, too.

  “Where’s the owner?” Cull said, knowing that Uncle Tom was laughing inside himself at Cull’s red face.

  “Lawsy, massah, dat him outside! Undah de block! Po massah, he soon be in de cole dahk grave!”

  Which statement was a lie, and he knew it as well as Cull. No grave for anybody in this self-enclosed world. Not for long anyway.

  He might be lying about the identity of the body under the stone, too.

  “You black devil,” Cull said. “You’re trying to tempt me to grab a handful of tobacco and run down the street with it, aren’t you? And, of course, as soon as I did, you’d start hollering, ‘Stop, thief!’ “

  Uncle Tom’s eyes grew big with pretended innocence. “Oh, no, boss! Not dis poah debbil! Ah nebber say no such t’ing, ‘n yo-all know it! If yo was to bring dis heah case to co’t, massah, yo’d get trown out a co’t, beggin’ yo pahdon fo sayin so, boss! Dis heah po dahkie done learned his lesson, sahib! He ain’ nebbah again goin’ to tempt a human! No, sah, Ah done learned my place in sassiety!”

  Cull was tempted. He sweated, and he looked the store over. Could it be done? Maybe he could make a deal with Uncle Tom.

  No! He’d learned the hard way. The Authorities could locate you any time They wanted you.

  “I want some tobacco,” he said. “And this is the only place I can get it between here and work. Can you sell me some?”

  Uncle Tom grinned slyly. “Yo know us poah debbils ain’ allowed to trade in nothin’ wif yo white folks. We’s jes de moppers ‘n de dusters, de hewers o’ wood and de drawers o’ watah. No, sah, Ah cain’ t sell yo nothin’.”

  “You mean I got to go without a smoke today?” Cull said, choking with the helplessness and anger of the situation.

  “Dat’s up to yo, bwana. Nuffin Ah can do. Ah’m so sah’y.” And he grinned and resumed his picking up of the articles.

  By now, the siren had become very loud. Cull said, “Isn’t he living with a woman? Maybe I could make a bargain with her?”

  “Oh, Lawdy,” Uncle Tom said, and he laughed a high-pitched laugh. “De Massah was a bery religious man, he was. He say dat, since dere ain’ no givin’ or takin’ in marriage heah, jus as in Heaven, he ain’ gonna lib in sin wif no woman!”

  “You make me sick,” Cull said, and he went out onto the street.

  The siren was much louder. In a few seconds, the ambulance came around the corner. The crowd drew back to make way for it. The ambulance stopped a few feet from the block, and the siren’s wail died out. The driver and a passenger got down out of the front seat. Two men climbed out of the rear. One carried a folded-up stretcher; the other, two crowbars.

  Cull was disappointed, as was everybody else in the crowd.

  X had not come this time.

  If Cull was disappointed, he was also relieved. Twice he had seen X, and both times he was awed. The hair had stood up on the back of his neck; a chill had run over his skin.

  Now, he walked away, for he did not care to spend time idly watching four men(?) lift the block up and place the corpse in the rear of the ambulance. He had witnessed similar scenes too many times. Within a few hours, the dead man — no longer dead — would be back tending his store. Death, nonexistence, call it what you will, was a luxury not allowed them for long in this place.

  Where did the ambulance come from? Who made it? Where was it made? What was its method of propulsion? Who knew? It resembled, superficially, the automobiles of Earth — as Cull dimly remembered them. It had a black chassis of metal or plastic, a windshield, four wheels with rubber or plastic tires, a steering wheel, a hood. But what kind of motor lay under that hood, no one knew. There was no grill, nothing to indicate a radiator. And the motor was absolutely soundless.

  Who knew what was going on in this world? Cull did not. He’d been here… how long? Two years or twenty?

  The sun hung in the middle of the sky, and the sky was no sky but a continuation of the earth. The earth curved up and away and rounded upon itself and became the heaven. If you had a telescope powerful enough to pierce the atmosphere, so they said, you could see people walking upside down over your head and towers with their points hanging down like stalactites. If you could walk around this world, you would find yourself at a point where you could look upward at the very spot from which you had taken your first step on your journey.

  If… if… if. No telescopes, of course, though it was theoretically possible to build them. And no walking up the horizon. That was just not possible, not across the no longer burning but still deadly desert.

  It was enough to stare from a tower window and see the city itself curving upward. Enough to scare the… what would you call it?… out of you.

  Naked, with a briefcase, he walked the streets of the city. Others, naked too, thronged the wide thoroughfares between the towering buildings. All were men and women of various ages from twenty or upward. There were no infants, children, or adolescents here. Where were they? In some other city? Or elsewhere, outside this ingrown world?

  The adults arrived here in the same body, or similar body, as that they had possessed on the other world of Earth. They were the same age they had been when they died. Cull had memories, vague as most of his memories of the previous life, of having died in an automobile accident. He had been, he thought, about thirty years old. He had had a wife, three children, aged eight, six, and three. His wife was blonde, good-looking, and something of a shrew. He could not remember her face accurately, though it seemed to him that she had a nice nose, overfull lips, a rounded chin, and a dimple on one of her cheeks.

  His profession? Questioned, he would have replied that he had been an electronic engineer and marketing supervisor, but he remembered very little of electronics. When the fatal accident happened, he was on his way upward in the great organization to which he belonged. The other car (it had run a stop light, or had he?) cut off his hopes forever. Not just his hopes of rising high in the company, of getting rich and powerful, but also his hopes of going to Heaven. If he had not been so full of hate for his boss at the moment he was killed, if he had had a chance to cool off, to forgive his boss, to regain the love he was supposed to feel for all humanity (which, unfortunately, included his boss), and if he had not also at that moment been hating his wife, whom he suspected of infidelity, though he had no proof whatsoever, and if he had not at that particular second also turned his head to watch the sway of hips of a long-legged brunette on the side walk, if… if…

  It was not fair. He had been a good man; he had led a Christian life, had actively supported the Church, been chairman of several philanthropic and social welfare committees, he had never killed except while defending his country in wartime, he had never…

  What use to think about it? He thought, we grow no older. And this is strange, for our physical state is much the same as on Earth. We eat and excrete, copulate (without children being produced), suffer pain and feel pleasure, bleed, even die. Something has been altered in us to defeat aging and to sterilize us.

  Something but not everything. Just enough. The toothless who had false teeth on Earth had false teeth here. Cull still had a gold bridge between two teeth. If a man lacked a finger, a hand, an arm, a leg, an eye, a testicle on Earth, he also lacked it here. But there was some law of equity, for a total amputee
on Earth found that one leg and one arm had been restored. The totally Terrestrial blind had one eye, invariably the left.

  And the insane, the idiotic, the senile, those suffering with St. Vitus’ dance, paralysis agitans, scrofula, elephantiasis, syphilis, multiple sclerosis, and so on were cured. Nor did these diseases come back.

  Those who had lost eye or limb complained, of course, that it was not fair. If the diseased and senile could be wholly repaired, why were they, the halt and lame, discriminated against? No answer. Who said anything about this setup was fair?

  Nothing bore thinking about, yet he could not keep from thinking about it.

  And so, thinking, he went around the corner and found himself, as every morning(?), before the Exchange.

  This was housed in one of those tremendous and fantastic (until he got used to it) buildings that abounded in this city. The building reared at least two thousand feet, which was not as tall as many buildings on Earth. But it was a mile wide and composed of the most colossal stone blocks he — or anyone else — had ever seen. Each block, hewn from granite, porphyry, diorite, basalt, or marble, was a fifty-foot cube. They had been piled on top of each other without mortar and, every two blocks, were stepped back so the entire structure resembled a hanging garden of Babylon. On every block were carved thousands of faces and little statues. No gargoyles, as you would expect, but human faces; faces with every shade of every emotion known to mankind.

  Fiends had carved those features. But neither man nor devil had quarried those cliff-high blocks and piled them one on the other. Who? Nobody knew. The fiends claimed they had found the city built thus. And had moved in. This was when the country outside the city walls burned with what seemed an eternal flame, and the human beings who came to live there roasted without dying.

  On either side of the great building, towering even above it, were two statues. These looked as if they were intended to represent toads halfway in the process of turning into men, or vice versa.

  Their great mouths gaped open, and into them, or out of them, rushed air. Everywhere through the city were statues like these, and they provided the background noise for the city. Rumble and whoosh of hot air going into the mouths of some; rumble and whoosh of cold air out of the mouths of others.

  Over the tremendous arch of the portal of his destination were carved (by human hands and in Hebrew letters): DO NOT ABANDON HOPE. He stepped through the portal and into a hallway a hundred feet wide and three hundred feet high, however, the corridor was no more than three hundred yards long, then, through a hundred-foot high but ten-foot wide entrance into the Exchange itself.

  The room was carved out of a single piece of stone, a titanic block hollowed so that the interior resembled the inside of a basketball. The seats and the aisles between the seats started from the bottom and ran up along the curve of the ball. Up and over the ceiling so that some of the fiends, who had once used this room, must have sat quite upside down. Or else the carvers had chiseled out those ceiling-seats because of a distorted sense of humor. The human beings had never found out. Any fiend questioned would reply that he was only an ignorant demon and couldn’t remember.

  However, men and women could sit only to the point at which the walls began to curve inward near the ceilings. And in almost every seat was a human being who held a phone in one hand and in the other, a graphite-and-plastic pencil with which he was busily writing on a sheet of parchment. The parchment was tanned human skin from which the hairs had been removed. White or light brown skin, of course, because black skin made the graphite marks almost invisible. And skin, of course, because there was no paper. No trees except for the rocktrees, and the rocktree leaves made poor paper.

  The skin was supplied to the Exchange by various agents. The Exchange asked no questions but paid off with the various and strange commodities the suppliers demanded. Occasionally, The Authorities caught up with the suppliers. Then, there was a shortage of paper for a while until the skinners could recruit and train new workers. The Authorities could, it was supposed, break up the organization from top to bottom if They wanted to put forth the effort. But They did not work by magic; They used human or fiendish hands. And the human agents for The Authorities had a habit of being stoned to death on the streets or caught and tortured before being torn apart.

  The people before the phones scribbled their notes, then summoned a runner. The runner raced up the steps of the aisle, took the note, and ran down to the bottom of the bowl. This was occupied, except for a broad aisle around the bottom, by a large platform of stone. Workers sat at stone tables at the foot of the platform and answered telephones. These were the screeners. They took messages from the people on the seats along the wall. If they thought a message important, they handed a note to a runner. He took the note to the Chairman.

  The Chairman sat on a huge polished diorite throne in the center of the platform. The throne was very plain, very massive, yet could be rotated by a gentle push of the occupant’s foot. There was no perceptible distance between the chair, which must have weighed two tons, and the platform on which the throne rested. Yet, the throne must have had little friction between its under surface and the platform, or else machinery existed beneath. Efforts to lift the throne had failed, but it turned easily and would spin swiftly if pushed hard.

  On the throne sat the Chairman. He was a big man, claiming to be seventy years old physically but 1700 chronologically. That is, relative to Cull’s time, and exclusive of Hell’s own time, which was no time or forever. The Chairman’s head and face were covered with long white hair; his beard fell to his skinny ankles, his beard in which he wrapped himself as in a robe and covered his (reputedly) withered sex. He called himself Angelo — a strange name for a denizen of hell. It was rumored that he knew Dante, who was also said to be a citizen of this city.

  But Hell was a bloody flux of rumor and counter-rumor. Who should know better than Cull, who dealt in them?

  As Cull stepped inside he was greeted by a blast of voices, the ringing of a hundred phones. Since he was late, according to the huge hourglass by the doorway, he would have hurried to his seat. But he looked up at the faces in the chamber, and he halted, horrified. It was true, though he could not at first believe it. Every man in the chamber, except the Chairman, was clean-shaven! There was not a single moustache anywhere!

  He felt humiliated, ridiculous, and, above all, betrayed. Why had not any of his so-called friends told him that moustaches were Out? Some friends! They wanted to get him just as much as his enemies.

  Now, he was not only conspicuous because he was late; he was being laughed at.

  There was nothing he could do. To turn tail and run for home to shave off the out-of-fashion moustache would make him even later, and the Chairman certainly would not like that. Moreover, the others would laugh at him just that much more.

  Head down, cheeks burning, he climbed up the steps between the rows and slid into his own seat behind his own table. His phone was ringing as if the person on the other end had world-shaking news. Perhaps he did.

  He lifted the phone and said, “Hello? Who is it? Anything good?”

  The voice at the other end spoke in pidgin Hebrew and with a Swedish lilt. “Agent Sven Jalmar speaking. From sector XXB-8N/B.”

  Cull had memorized the great map in the next room; he knew where Sven was. Or approximately, because the map of the city would have changed somewhat since its recent expansion. He had expected the telephone lines to be down because of the quake, but the break must have been swiftly repaired.

  “Sure, I got something good,” said Sven. “How many fallen angels can stand on the point of a needle?”

  “You dumb Scandinavian joker,” Cull said. “You know we’re busy. Did you call up just to pass the time with your dull jests?”

  “Time? Here? Now you’re the clown. No, Agent Cull, I didn’t call just to hear your insults. I’ve got something hot. Or, at least, I think it is.”

  “You think it is?” Cull said. “You’d b
etter have some validation! I’ll report you for wasting my time before I’ll stick my neck out on a wild goose chase!”

  “Heavens!” Sven said. “And mixed metaphors, too. How much validation can you get here? I said I got a hot lead, but I can’t bring you sworn, signed, and witnessed evidence. For all I know, this guy may be a nut. The Devil knows there are plenty here.”

  “Guy?” Cull said. “What guy?”

  “He won’t give any name but Fyodor. Calls himself God’s Idiot Slav. A baldheaded long-bearded coot. Looks like he had gone through hell before he ever left Earth. He can talk to you himself. He rambles a bit, but he’s convincing, convincing as Satan Himself. Wait a minute! Don’t hangup! I’ll get him!”

  He left before Cull could yell at him not to tie up the line. The Chairman was looking at him, giving him the look that rattled the bones inside Cull. He knew then that Sven would have to produce something extraordinary or both of them would be in — perhaps literally — hot water. The Exchange had terrible and effective ways of enforcing discipline or punishing mistakes. And you could not hide. Who should know better than he, who had tracked down some of those who had decided to quit working for the Exchange? Once you hired in and learned the secrets, you were in. No way out.

  Cull drummed his fingers on the stone desk before him and bit his lips until he could taste the blood. Then, he regretted the taste because it reminded him of a punishment he had seen inflicted on a man who had angered the Chairman.

  He was sweating, too, despite the cool flow of air from the ancient and invisible but ever-effective air conditioning system. After what seemed an hour (and may have been), Sven’s voice boomed in his ear.

  “Sorry to take so long, Cull. Here he is! Fyodor!”

  “Fyodor, God’s Idiot Slav, here!” said a high-pitched voice. “I bring you good news, great news!”