Well, he thought, why not"? A mechanical rat…
Thus far, every one of Galing's stage settings had been especially well detailed and realistically drawn. At the beginning of each new act in this senseless drama, Joel had been convinced, to one degree or another, that it was perfectly real. If Galing could go to the trouble of setting up that scene with the aquamen, why not a robot rat to nibble at his shoe and throw a bit of fear into him?
At least they had not put him in a place where genuine rats could come to dine on him. The mechanical rodent was a little extra insurance for them, a nasty deterrent that would keep him from going down into the storm drains. They had evidently put some thought into it… They had sent the rat to chew on his sole; they had caused it to escape down the drain; and they thought that, knowing the tunnel contained rats, Joel would certainly choose to leave his cell through the front door, according to the program. Anyway, if they hadn't really endangered him, it must mean that they didn't actually want to kill or maim him.
Or maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe they hadn't used a real rat simply because they couldn't get hold of one.
Whatever the case, they had underestimated his anger and frustration. When he had a choice between twelve-pound rats and Galing's program, he had gladly chosen the rats.
Joel threw the machine to the floor of the tunnel. Transistors and circuit boards broke inside of it.
He held the candle pan high and continued down the drain, no longer worried about rats.
What he did have to worry about was the moss. He was afraid it was going to block his escape.
The deeper he went into the subterranean passageway, the thicker the moss became. It grew on the curved walls of the drain, above his head, below his feet, on both sides of him. When he first noticed it, the moss only flourished in widely scattered patches. But the farther he walked the larger those patches became and the closer they were to one another — until the stuff finally sheathed every inch of the inside walls of the corrugated steel pipe. It was spongy, damp and blue-green, and it shimmered prettily in the candlelight. Once it had claimed all the metal surface, it stopped growing laterally and began to thrust tendrils into the air space; it was as thick and often as long as a young girl's hair. It was cold to the touch, unnaturally cold for plant life. In places it thrived so well that he was forced to squeeze through a narrowed tunnel, sometimes on his hands and knees, the wet moss dragging over him like the hands of a corpse.
Moss slapped across his eyes.
He pushed it aside.
It got in his mouth.
He spat it out.
Once when he stopped to rest, he made the mistake of examining the growth too closely. He saw that the hair-thin filaments which constituted the mother-plant were in a constant sate of agitation. They twisted through one another, abraded one another, braided one another… They slithered like snakes, writhed, wrapped together and pulsed as if fornicating, extricated themselves only to form new entanglements. The moss appeared to have the life energy and some of the mobility of an animal, as if some crude intelligence were at the core of it.
He didn't like to speculate about that. He was certain that the moss was not just another illusion, not some clever prop that had been built by Henry Galing and his gang. But if it were real… Hell, in that case he was not in any reality that he had ever known before. The earth he'd come from harbored no creature that was half plant and half animal.
The Twenty-third Century?
Impossible.
To think as much was to entertain insanity.
He got up and continued his journey, although the storm drains no longer seemed a safe and reasonable alternative to the escape that Galing had offered him. When the moss dangled from the ceiling, he felt as if long tentacles were reaching for him. When it swelled up from all sides and narrowed the passageway, he saw it as a stomach that was closing around him, digesting him.
Eventually, he came to five human skeletons that dangled from the wall. The bones were startlingly white against the blue-green vegetation. The moss had grown through the rib cages, into the bony mouths and out of the empty eye sockets; it held them in suspension, as if it were displaying them. Side by side, the five macabre figures looked like the victims of an unearthly crucifixion. Without proof, without needing proof, he knew that the damned moss had somehow murdered them…
XII
He began to look for a way out of the tunnels.
Although he supposed it could have been his imagination, as overwrought as he was, Joel swore that the damned moss sensed his fear. It knew. It also knew that he wanted out — and it wanted him. The spongy tendrils, as thick as spaghetti now, writhed much faster and more violently than they had done before. And when he squeezed through a tight passage, he had considerable difficulty escaping from the moist, clinging vegetation — as if it were trying to grip and hold him…
Ten minutes later, after he had taken several turns in the drainage network, he found an exit. The wall ladder was hidden beneath the moss, and he saw it only when the light from his dying candle was reflected by a pitted metal rung, the only bit of the ladder that the moss had not claimed. A glint of orange caught his eye, then the sheen of machined steel, and there it was.
The moss writhed so fast now that it made a soft whispering noise like the hissing of a snake.
He put the candle on the floor and sought the other rungs. He ripped the moss away from them. Thousands of icy tendrils curled and wriggled wormlike in his hands. They lashed around his fingers and encircled his wrists, struggling to save themselves. But he was stronger. He tore the moss away in huge handfuls, tossed it to the floor behind him. In five minutes he had cleared the lower, half of the ladder.
He started to climb.
Below, the moss closed over the candle and snuffed it out. The tunnel was as black as the inside of a sealed coffin.
On the rungs above him, the moss fought back, whipped his face, seeking a hold on him.
He tore it loose and pitched it to the floor.
Pulpy, disgusting strands slid into his nostrils, pressed insistently at his tightly closed lips, and slithered into his ears as if striking for the ear drum and, eventually, the brain.
Cursing, he freed himself and continued the climb, holding tightly to the ladder with his right hand and fighting the vegetation with his left.
The moss hissed in the darkness.
The hoary strands that grew from the ceiling groped at his back, clutched his neck…
Fifteen minutes after he'd started up, Joel reached the top of the ladder. Gasping for breath as the moss roiled about his head, he found the access plate, prized it away, and levered himself into the corridor overhead.
Strands of moss lapped out of the hole, examined the hall floor, and strained to touch him.
He dropped the access plate back over the opening, then lay on the floor in the dim purple light and listened to his heartbeat gradually slow down.
He recognized this place. Behind him the hallway went on for a hundred yards until it came to a set of bright yellow doors. The doors were closed. No other rooms or corridors opened from the hall. The walls were gray and undecorated. The ceiling was low, gray, and contained one central lightstrip. In front of him the hallway ran another hundred yards and ended at a pressure hatch and a four-foot-square computer display screen which was built into the wall. He knew — intuitively or perhaps because he had been here before — that the room beyond that hatch held all the answers to this puzzle.