More blazing whiteness. The shaft walls expanded away from him, opening into a vast chasm. Still he fell.
But somewhere in him came the strength to relax, to still the screaming childlike fear.
He spread his arms, caught a sweet warming breeze. Banked.
Swooped.
Flew.
His spread arms and legs stabilized him, provided wind resistance, slowed his fall.
Markham the kite, sailing the fevered winds.
His eyes brimmed with hope. He felt the first true elation he had enjoyed in a great while. At last, he could do something.
The shaft walls were mottled with dark caves. At the entrance of each a hideous brown-red thing crouched. Orange eyes followed his gliding fall, as if eager to intercept his flight.
Markham heard a shout and looked up. A black-haired woman tumbled out of a silky sky. Her yellow canvas coveralls fluttered and slapped. She cried out for help and beat her arms. She was enveloped in pure blind panic and shot downward like a stone.
She passed Markham, eyes rolling at him, mouth jagged and red. He watched her dwindle away below.
Then one of the cave-creatures leaped from the side and somehow snared her.
Together the two veered to the side, the woman's screams higher pitched now and forlorn, as though she glimpsed her fate.
As Markham sped by them, the rusty-skinned thing was picking apart the woman, using three of its legs to hold the still-shuddering corpse.
Don't let the bastards get you down, he reminded himself. He had slid down a thin wall in the time trap. This was the layer where space contracted, admitting flaws and tangles. Some passing whorl of casuality had sucked him in.
The Devil had mastered space-time so deftly that he could freeze time, and stuff the snarled loops of space into a mere slice. Through that wedge the Hoar Gods had penetrated into the human Hell, and surely had provoked Satanic glee. Maybe the land of frost he had glimpsed was an alien Hell. Why not a plurality of Hells, to match the plurality of worlds? And let the inmates disembowel each other... But was such a practice entirely Devilish?
Maybe Russell's phrase was literally true - in the interstices of Hell there were thin sheets of Godliness. Openings. Opportunities. Gaps.
When Russell speculated out loud, did some eavesdropping Entity take him up on it? That would explain his surviving the electrocution - the Entity, leaving its calling card?
If so. God had a sense of humor. Russell had meant a gap in knowledge, but this tube Markham was plunging down was a physical gap, a wedge ... an exit.
So God made puns. That made a certain wonky sense. After all, the Devil kept leaving his signature in unlikely places: the snake that wrote out 666.
And something had left those two palindromes...
The Devil would have no interest in prodding him and Russell into further explorations. But perhaps other forces than Satan operated here.
Was there some God in this Gap? He swooped sideways, enjoying the sensation of buoyancy, of at last controlling the fear of falling that had plagued him all his previous Life. He banked past the spider-things that crouched in their caves. He came tantalizingly close, provoking them. But they saw he had his bearings, could veer away if they sprang. So they gave him red-eyed glares and watched him descend.
To what? To fall implied a curved space-time, a geometry rounded by mass or... He remembered Russell's speculations. A geometry shaped by Mind? - some massive intelligence from the primordial ages of the swelling universe?
Did that lie below?
He felt both joy of release and a sullen, brooding fear.
What had the angel said, that Altos respond to the will of the world.
Falling was a sort of response, though not voluntary. Had the physicist's Mass been replaced by Will?
It was the kind of question Russell would have liked. And Hemingway, too, if you could phrase it to him right. A lot of the souls Markham had seen here would like to know what lay waiting below him.
And he owed it to Russell and the poor wasp-woman and all the rest who had given of themselves, to try, to make it through.
He had been falling for at least a day. The cave-things had tried again and again for him. He had evaded the last one by inches, banking sideways and finally going into a sudden, balled-up plummet.
Now below something slowly grew. He spread his arms further, cupping the wind, slowing himself more than mere Newtonian laws allowed. Markham saw a patchy land rise toward him, a quilted place of hills and deep blue lakes.
He spread his legs, his pants snapping in the breeze. Then the whipping of the warming wind abated. He slowed still further. He thought of a billion worlds that the time trap boundary might enter onto - alien planets, eras of history, the fantastic contorted geometries of mathematicians...
He drifted down into the courtyard of a shadowed sandstone ruin.
It had once been a temple with Corinthian columns. Now the roof had caved in and half the columns sprawled, cracked and scavenged.
Two men sat on the broken flagstones of the square, talking.
Markham landed with a mild bounce. The land was rich and verdant. Grapes hung in bunches bigger than a man's head. From orderly rows of stakes grew plots of tomatoes, of ripe wheat, of odd globular fruit. Men and women worked the fields. Some strolled, hand in hand.
If this was Hell, he wouldn't mind.
The two men were old, heavy-browned. One wore a sweater, shorts, sandals. The second wore nothing and was quite hairy.
Markham walked over to them, easing the kinks out of his knotted muscles. "I wonder if -"
The sweatered man looked up. "Oh, it's you," he said in heavily accented English. Markham couldn't spot the accent but the man was swarthy, full-lipped. Mediterranean, almost Asiatic.
"W-what?"
"We heard you were coming."
The nude man nodded. Markham felt a shock as the shaggy head lifted and wise old eyes regarded him. "I heard you ver bringing my friend Russell," Einstein said with a thick German accent.
"You? Here?"
"I haff been waiting for my friend a long time."
"But you were a saint! How could you end up in Hell, when -"
Einstein smiled broadly, eyes crinkling. "Do not bother with questions we cannot attack."
"Yes," the clothed man said solemnly, "we have learned that here."
"Where is 'here'?" Markham demanded.
"We are in a quiet zone," Einstein said.
"A Gap?"
"If you vish." Einstein shrugged away matters of definition.
"We are beneath the Rude Lands, where you were," the other man said.
Markham felt a sudden flush of joy rush over him. "Then I've ... I've escaped?"
"From Hell? No," the swarthy man said slowly. "And how long you or any of us will remain here, no one knows."
"Is ... God here?"
Einstein chuckled. "Nein, but every one thinks that when they first come here. I haff not seen the gentleman."
His mind aswirl with speculations, Markham turned to the other man. "Who... are you?"
"Thales of Miletus," The man held out his hand, but flat palm up, not in the traditional handshake. Markham pressed his palm into that of Thales, remembering that the handshake formality he knew was a Roman custom. Thales had died centuries before the rise of Athens, much less Rome.
Markham tried to recall his undergraduate smattering of Greek history. Thales had introduced abstract reasoning into science, devised the method of deductive reasoning, and claimed that everything was in essence made of water, the one substance he knew had both solid, liquid and vapor forms. The
Athenians had regarded him as the greatest of the early philosophers.
Markham sat down unsteadily on the chipped flagstones. One gave him a hard jab, as if this world were reminding him of its persistent, gritty, painful reality.