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."