A squad of women in yellow canvas suits spread through the trees, attacking fleeing men. The women used only their rigid hands and feet in a sort of smooth-flowing karate. Yet they felled large men easily. With each lunge they barked out a quick animal noise of jubilant victory.
Markham ran faster, but one of the women came charging down a gravel slope and cut them off.
Russell did not hesitate. "Get on with it!" he yelled, and simply threw himself at the advancing woman. She swatted at him, connected with a solid thud. He grunted but scrambled to his feet.
"Go on! Find out! I'll see you somewhere in this mare's nest!" Russell struck an archaic pose, like a nineteenth century boxer squaring off, and glared at the yellow-suited woman. She frowned in puzzlement. Markham slipped into a stand of trees and kept moving quietly away, looking back as the two circled each other, an absurd match. But there was nothing amusing about the way the woman kicked Russell expertly in the belly. She whirled expertly and sent a heavy blow to Russell's neck. Markham could hear the loud solid snap.
He felt a stabbing sense of loss as the rickety figure crumbled into the mud.
"I... I'll come back for you," he whispered. "When you reappear, I'll..."
But there was no way to keep promises in Hell. He felt a building rage, but nothing to vent it upon except the milling, fighting ranks of humans. That was the way the Devil liked it, Markham was suddenly sure. Hell is other people, Sartre had said, though surely not anticipating this.
No, the point was to fight down your anger, and do something the Devil didn't expect.
The women in yellow were spreading into the woods, calling out orders to each other, searching. Markham got his bearings and slipped away, following an old stream bed that somehow was not filled by the earlier rain.
As he trotted along the sandy rut he found it was nearly bone dry. Somewhere up ahead the rain had not fallen.
The scent of mouldering pine needles reminded him of the games he had played in the Alabama woods when he was a boy. Form two armies, ambush your enemy in dirt clod attacks, capture their castle. And do it silently, flitting through the woods with scarcely a whisper, a mere flicker of motion. Think like an Indian, strike like a storm.
He used those skills repeatedly in the next hour, working his way around marauding bands whose only amusement seemed to be death and torture. He passed impromptu crucifixions, the nails driven so as to bleed the victims slowly, letting the weakness steal over them so that they slumped on the cross and suffocated. There were group impalements, long shafts driven up the fundament of one, out the mouth, and into another above him. Women turned helplessly, descending by slow inches on thick shafts dial skewered them by agonizing inches, rough barbs checking the rate of their skewering. He kept telling himself that their deaths were in fact liberations, and kept on, concealed in dappled pools of brooding shadow.
A land of frost. That was the way the time trap looked as he approached, weary and scraped by brambles in a hundred stinging spots.
The blue-white wall was translucent, He could see sheets of chilled air fall away from it, giving the illusion of motion, but the wall stood frozen. Beyond was an airy landscape of contorted gray hills, all angles and pivoted streamers and scooped-out, yawning bays - a world twisted into a vast handiwork. In the valleys moved more of the alien ivory blocks, some sprinkled with silvery wafers. They seemed to drift and sway at the command of some unseen wave, like motes on the ocean bottom.
Markham stepped to within centimeters of the flat cool wall. A cutting scent like ammonia hung there.
He picked up a pine limb and stuck it into the blue-tinged fog boundary. It went smoothly. He watched the murky world beyond the barrier and saw the tip of his stick emerge. Was there some optical trick? In the frostworld his stick was of normal width, but impossibly long, protruding what seemed to be hundreds of meters among the softly lit, sea-blue arctic hill-sculptures.
He pushed it in further. The pencil-like image extruded further, lancing a kilometer into the flat iceworld. He dipped it and struck a high, graceful arch. Layers of green jewel-like stone fractured, fell. He twirled the stick and chopped at a warped monument of flinty rock. It flew apart.
The ivory aliens began to dart and hover in a manic insect pattern. They were huge in his zone of Hell, but in theirs his simple pine limb stick could crush them.
Markham remembered their blind indifference to the pulped bodies they bestrode on the battlefield. He grimaced. What better than to smite a few now? - to repay a blood debt mankind as a whole owed these motes, who now swarmed about his stick, milling, uncertain.
His pine limb was a straight hard line, now, a stretched abstraction that could kill. Markham started to bring it to bear on a cluster of the aliens ... and stopped.
It would merely be more of the cycle, he saw.
Unending malice. Roiling, empty chaos.
He withdrew the limb gingerly. It looked all right except for a layer of frost. He touched it.
Searing cold made him jerk his hand away. He picked up a stone and tapped the limb. The wood sheared off at the frost line. It hit the ground and shattered with an explosive clap.
Passing into the frostworld, the stick had undergone Einsteinian swellings along its length, growing like Pinocchio's nose. But it had not been in some abstract place: very real air had frozen it.
Markham had to shove it in a few feet before the tip emerged in the ice-blue landscape. That suggested there was an invisible slice of space-time between the two worlds. A zone of refractions, Doppler confusions, perhaps portals.
There had to be some way to use that effect. But not here, where a slip into the frostworld would freeze his lungs solid.
Markham went to his right, following the slight curve in the porous barrier.
The alien land-gradually faded into a vibrating haze shot through with pink lightnings. As he walked a glow seeped into the territory beyond the invisible sheet and he could see ordinary pine forest again. He was about to try the pine limb experiment again when he noticed a bird just beyond the barrier. He had not seen it at first because it hung in air, glittering eyes fixed ahead, wings arced upward to begin a downward, propelling plunge. But it was utterly motionless.
There was something between him and the still forest. A wavering in the air, a yellowing fog swirl, a strumming sense of convective movement.
He saw nothing beyond the shimmering region, no scaly dragons or belching demons or cartoon ogres to snare him.
A shout. From behind he heard the pursuit of some hoarse voices, even - was this a memory from Alabama childhood? - the distant mournful baying of hounds.
These were running dogs, on a scent. When they found prey, treed it, their yips and yelps would signal the coming slaughter.
Well, he wasn't going to be chased any more. He picked up a hefty stick and probed through the barrier. If nothing happened -
The shock wave traveled up his arm, sucking in the stick. It came so fast he could not let go before its accelerating jolt jerked him forward, through a velvetlight breath of corrosive air, into -
Falling.
Again. His cotton clothes flapped in the rushing air.
The old phobia swarming up into his mind. For an instant he went rigid, squeezed his eyes tight.
He sensed an endless gulf below him. Bile rose in his mouth.
But he forced down his panic and opened his eyes. Get off the wheel. End the cycle. Don't let the bastards get you down.
He was in a shaft. Smooth white slabs on all sides, ceramic-hard.
He looked up and saw, dwindling far above, pine trees. Like the years of his childhood, rushing away.
He had fallen straight down the boundary sheet that separated the two sections of forest. Like falling into a crack. And now plunged toward the center of... what?