ze," she voted. I understood her concern; if we used one or two rockets to open the last door, then encountered a mino- taur on the other side, we'd be out of luck. I shrugged; maze it was. As we entered the pitch-black corridor, our flashlights barely penetrated the darkness. "There must be some kind of neutralizing or damping field," Arlene whispered behind me. This bit was too close to that Jules Verne movie, where the members of the expedition get separated in the dark. I wasn't going to let that happen to us. "Fly--didn't I see a pair of goggles of some sort back in the yellow-key room?" "Did you? What of it?" "Could they be light-amplification goggles?" That sounded like a good excuse to get out of the dark. Actually, anything sounded like a good excuse to get out of that dark maze; I had the creepy feeling that creatures were shadowing us ... creatures that didn't need light- amp goggles. We returned the way we had come, and sure enough, the goggles were there. Arlene was right: one pair. "Will these even work in the energy-sucking field?" I won- dered. Arlene shrugged. How else could we find out? At the mouth of the maze we hesitated. Who was to wear them? We settled it scientifically: my vision was 20-40, barely good enough to avoid glasses; Arlene's was 20-15, better than "perfect." In other words, she got the goggles. Besides, she was the girl. I don't know why that occurred to me then; she seemed to get the goggles an awful lot. She put them on and adjusted for ambient light, then led me back into the tunnel of darkness. I don't even like haunted-house rides at amusement parks. "Oh, spit," she said. "Don't give me any bad news." "Battery's low." "I told you not to give me any bad news." "The goggles keep fading in and out." She'd stopped walking forward and I bumped up against her again. "Or maybe it's because of the field; but they're lower power than the flashlights, and they do work .. . sort of." She started moving again, and dark as it was, I made believe I was her shadow, hand on her shoulder. "Tell me what you see." "Everything is green and fuzzy. It's like looking at the world through a Coke bottle." About five minutes into the maze Arlene dived to the side, bowling me over. An exploding ball of energy lit up our surroundings for a fraction of a second; but all I saw was the back of Arlene's head. "Hell-prince!" she shouted. "Fly, use the launcher!" "Can't we run?" "No," she said, strangely insistent, "we've got to fight it!" I unslung and waited, staring wide-eyed into the black. "Where? Where is it?" "I'll guide you," Arlene said, voice lower, more in control. Holding her shoulder so she wouldn't be be- tween me and my monster, I tried to aim the rocket launcher with the other hand. I couldn't do it! "Still--stand still, beside me," she urged. "Right. Now listen . .." Another lightning ball scorched the air, pounding the wall just above my head, and I dropped the damned weapon! She didn't miss a beat. "It's right at your feet, Fly. Bend down, pick it up. "Why don't you take it? You can see!" "Fly, I don't know how to shoot it--never checked out on it. Now shoulder it, damn you." "Aim me." I was becoming impatient, but I knew she was working as fast as she could. "Left, to the left, more, more; elevate . . . shoot now!" I squeezed the firing ring. The flare of the rockets lit up a cone of vision around us but I still couldn't see the attacker. "Where is he? Where?" "Never mind--you winged him, Fly! Glancing blow to the stomach, knocked him down." "Aim me again." The second shot scored a direct hit. Normally that wouldn't stop a hell-prince. He'd only redouble his efforts. But this one must have gotten lazy in the maze, only encountering victims occasionally, and no resist- ance worth mentioning. Suddenly I realized we were facing a minotaur in something like its natural habitat. Aim me--fire!--aim me ... I loaded my sixth and final round. "Where?" Arlene waited a long time. "Fly . . . you knocked it to its butt in a chair thing with your last shot; it's still breathing, but it's not getting up." We waited; the situation remained static. "All right, kid," I said. "I guess we're officially clear." "And now I can officially tell you why we had to fight. Look at this--whoops, I mean feel this: a key card, though I have no idea what color; they all look green to me. That slime had it in its claws." "You mean it was there while I fired rockets at the hell-prince? I could have destroyed the key, too!" "Well, that's why I kept it a secret. Now aren't you glad you saved those rockets?" "I guess so," I said, not bothering to point out that if we hadn't gone into the maze at all, just used one or two rockets on the door, we'd be out of here by now, and richer in rockets, to boot. We started trekking back, and with the unerring in- stinct such items have, the batteries chose that moment to burn out. Arlene tipped me off with, "Damn it to hell!" She pulled the goggles off and shoved them into her pocket. "God, Fly, I don't want to die in the dark." I thought she had a perfectly reasonable attitude. The idea of being caught and torn to shreds when you can't even see to fight back didn't appeal to me, either. I had a vague idea of the way we must return. I took her hand and led her as fast as possible in that direction. Even found time to pray again. The nuns always knew the power of a dark room to inspire piety. After all that, I really was in no mood for a damned imp waiting for us when we'd almost made it through the maze. It hissed, and we stopped cold ... we could hear it--but where was it? Hands shaking, I spun left and right with my scattergun, afraid to shoot lest I give away our own position. Or worse, hit Arlene! "Jesus!" Arlene shouted, finding religion as a fireball careened over our heads. What a dolt--the imp, not Arlene; the fireball lit our surroundings, and in the glare I fixed Arlene and the imp. When the fireball faded, I shot where the imp was. Arlene didn't kill time when she could kill a monster instead; she fired just as I did, and the imp was toast. We were back in the light in short order. We returned to the three-door stack. I performed the honors of opening the last door, popping through, finding the lift, pressing the down button . . . and asking Arlene if she didn't enjoy the music of screams and explosions behind us as the monsters took care of each other. They were running out of humans. "This is a hell of an invasion," she said. "You can say that again." Deimos must have been listening and eager to confirm every prejudice we had. As the lift door slid open at the next level down, we found ourselves staring into the hugest, hairiest, foulest, and pinkest butt I'd ever seen. One of the demons, Arlene's "pinkies," was standing with its backside up against the lift door. It hadn't even noticed that the door had opened. Cautiously, I raised a machine gun and Arlene raised a shotgun. We gritted our teeth against the noise and fired simultaneously. A Light Drop rectal suppository. But on the other side of Demon One was Demon Two--and it did not take kindly to our prescription. This one charged like a hausfrau on speed in a megastore. We hadn't been able to see it originally because its buddy had blocked the view. Now it dived through the door after us. The big silly got itself stuck. We took our time blowing this one to oblivion at point-blank range. Oh, our bruised eardrums! As Arlene wiped demon gunk out of her eyes, she took a gander at her clothes and asked, "Does this come out or is it like gravy?" "Don't ask me. I was never much of a house husband." Although we felt good about our most recent bout of carnage, we couldn't help but notice that we'd trapped ourselves between two demon bodies, each of which probably weighed over five hundred kilos; a half ton per baby. We'd have to climb out between them. "How are you at mountain climbing?" she asked. "How are you at spelunking?" I asked back. She owned I was right; we didn't so much climb over the bodies as burrow our way through them. It took a bit of wriggling and writhing, and breath holding, but even- tually even I made it. The next problem consisted of some imps. Mighty monster slayers such as Arlene and myself could no longer be bothered with something so trivial as a few imps. We mopped up the floor with them on our way "I think we're getting a bit cocky," Arlene said. "We earn the right to wear the haircut of our choos- ing," I shot back, and she laughed louder than ever before. We entered a warehouse through an open door and around a couple of corners; this one was stacked wall-to- wall with pinkies, none as large as our elevator pals. They charged; having nowhere else to go, I leapt up, grabbed the edge of a huge box and hauled myself onto the top, then stretched out my hand for Arlene. The way the demons screamed and growled and pounded on the box, you'd think they didn't appreciate initiative and quick thinking. They were so upset they made the box shake violently. I was afraid we might be thrown off, but by God, we hung on. Then we aimed, squeezed, and eventually the box stopped shaking. We didn't have any trouble getting down. Now we had a moment to enjoy the new decor. The motif here was gleaming chrome and intricate, blued enamel. The appearance was rather sci-fi, actually ... utterly misplaced, considering the monsters inhabiting it. But then, I didn't subscribe to Better Homes and Demons. Then we kicked the door at the far end--well, I kicked it--and found the spawning vats themselves. Huge, metal containers they were, a heaping helping of pure evil; cisterns containing a weird, toxic-green junk, but not thick like the slime; inside each container was the body of a half-formed monster. Arlene, on a whim of personal revulsion against the aliens, shot one of the partly formed torsos. The wound sealed up with a giant sucking sound, and the creature continued cooking. "How do you stop something like this?" she asked. "I wish I knew. We can give up the hope of a finite number of the things. They must be genetically engi- neered soldiers. The alien mastermind, whoever or what- ever it is, must be stealing our nightmares and producing them wholesale." "Uh, yeah. I wonder how long it takes for a vat to finish producing a newborn monster?" Arlene held up her watch. Six minutes later the one she'd shot was finished, and none the worse for wear. She shot it again as it stumbled out of the vat. Again and again. Now the bullets worked. We repeated the experi- ment several more times at six minute intervals. "The fluid is life-preserving as well as life-producing," I said. "But when a critter is born--" "In other words," Arlene said, "we can't do abortion, but we sure as hell can nail 'em as newborns." She wrinkled her brow. "Let's do a rough calculation: at six minutes to cook a monster, that's ten creatures per hour per vat. Say sixty-four vats in the room, means 640 monsters per hour just from this one room. Christ! That's fifteen thousand per day." "There, ah ... there could be scores of rooms." "In a few days they could have an army of millions," Arlene said, finishing her number exercise. "We still have one chance, Arlene. Find the alien mastermind and destroy it." "Yeah, that's all we have to do," she scoffed. "Piece of cake." 26 Too many, too many monsters, monsters, mon- sters," I muttered. "Monsters, monsters everywhere," she echoed. "I don't suppose it matters if there are any new types. We're doomed no matter what." "Don't say that, Arlene. We've been able to kill everything we've come up against so far. That matters. The weapons and ammunition give us a fighting chance." "Rats in a maze," she said in a tone of voice new to her. She sounded defeated. I didn't like that one bit. "You were right, Fly. Even if we always find enough ammo, it won't save us. There are millions of them. They are testing us." They are! At a moment like this I realized how important it was that we had each other. I'd experienced this same sense of defeat on Phobos, and for less cause. Now it was my turn to encourage the natural fighting spirit that burned so deeply in her. "Then how we respond to this is part of the test, as well. We won't defeat them by firepower. That's only to buy us time so we can reason out a solution." She looked at me without blinking and asked, "Fly, what if there is no solution?" "Don't believe that!" I urged, and in so doing helped convince myself. "If they were unbeatable, they wouldn't need to collect data on us." That took some of the shadows out of her dark mood. "Don't worry," she said. "I won't let you down." She'd been my buddy, my pal. We'd been careful not to confuse the issue by trying to be lovers. But this was the right moment to take her in my arms, bring our faces close together and whisper, "It's you and me. We'll go to the end together. We'll make them pay for everything." "Outstanding," she said breathily, transforming the traditional Marine bravado into something very differ- ent. A moment passed between us that reminded me of the time we could have been lovers and chose buddies instead. Now I kissed her hard and she responded. We might not have another chance. And we weren't going any farther than this; not in a place where we could so easily be reworked into dead meat, still on the hoof. "I'm feeling better," she said. "My brain is working again. You know, we're in a good spot to do some damage." "Go on." "The bottom level of Deimos, directly below us, is one huge tank that was eventually going to be filled with liquid oxygen." "What the hell for?" She flashed her sneaky smile. "You'll love this. The UAC was thinking of using the entire moon of Deimos as a spaceship, too." "You're kidding!" I said, but I could tell she wasn't. "The idea was to move it to the asteroid belt and use it for a mining base," she said, finishing the news flash. "When I first realized we were moving, I thought some of us might be back in charge here. Then I suspected the more horrible possibility of a human-alien alliance." "Jesus, what a morbid imagination! How is it I never heard about this plan even in casual talk?" "There's secret, there's top secret, and then there's 'rat us out and we'll push you out the airlock.'" "Point taken. If we're going to find out what's really going on, then, I think we need to go the same way as before. Down." We hunted through the level, but couldn't find an exit, a secret door, anything. While we were searching, Arlene's mood improved. That we were still alive was a miracle. Any monsters who tried to have us for lunch would get a bad case of indigestion. No matter what we were up against, I was going to bet on human unpredicta- bility. We hadn't spent a couple of billion years clawing to the top of the food chain for nothing. "Fly, have you noticed how this section is shaped?" Actually, I hadn't. We'd been working our way along the inside of the wall in search of switches. "It's shaped like a skull," she said. "These guys are running out of ideas," I answered. "Those two pillars over there," she said, pointing, "are the eyes." "Cute," I said. Less cute was the pumpkin that sud- denly came out of nowhere and began firing at us. Arlene and I hadn't shot anything in whole minutes. We deflated the pumpkin; and this one acted more like a balloon with the air let out that any of its brothers, as it zigged and zagged on the way down. We chased it beyond the two pillars, where we found its limp and leaking remains sitting like a cork on a narrow ladder-tube leading down. "At last," she said, "a guidepost." "Just what the place needs," I concurred. And now what? Should we still continue "down"? Or was it time to settle once and for all whether we were bugging out and reporting or going after the mastermind ourselves? I stared at the tube. So far as I could tell, down was still the only way out. So far, our paths still coincided. But there would come a time when one of us would have to prevail: either Arlene's romantic sense of duty to the entire human race, or my more practical duty to her as my buddy, as a Marine, and--all right, let's face it--and as a man to a woman. We popped the "cork" and climbed down what seemed like two hundred meters, down into the heart of the lox tank. The climb was long enough to make us tired even if we weren't carrying all the crap that was neces- sary to keep us alive. By the time we reached bottom, my hands were aching and my right knee was acting up. I could imagine how Arlene was feeling from the way she tottered on her feet. I hurried over to catch her if she fell, but she recovered herself and made no comment. We found a cozy room with four doors and a single switch in the center. "Do you hear that?" Arlene asked. Until she mentioned it, I hadn't heard anything but our heavy breathing; but then I noticed something so unbelievably loud that a deaf man should have felt it; concentration is a funny thing. It sounded like the World Trade Center taking a stroll just outside. We rotated slowly, tracking the noise, and I thought about that movie with the tyrannosaurus stomping around. "Well, Fly, what now? I doubt we could climb back up again." I looked up; the hole we'd climbed through was far over our heads. "We already know there's no way to get us out in that direction. We're here; if an exit exists, it has to be through one of those doors." "Besides, we came here to do a job, Fly, even if that means fighting Godzilla." I shrugged; what else was there to say? "One switch; four doors. Which one does it open?" I went to a door at random and tried to open it manually. Nothing. It wouldn't budge, even when I kicked it. The behemoth still marched back and forth outside, shaking the entire building with every step. "I can't help it," I said at last, "I'm a born lever- puller." "You're repeating yourself," Arlene repeated. She flattened against the wall as I slapped the switch, then joined her. All four doors opened smoothly, simul- taneously. "Move out!" I shouted. As fast as we could, we bolted through the door and entered a tiny, garagelike room looking into a brilliantly lit, silver and white, chrome-covered keep--the size of Texas. Wings from the central room extended like an X into the huge tank. We slid outside on the double. The sound of the walking skyscraper inspired speed on our part--and that was without even bothering to look behind to see what was making all the ruckus. Halfway to one of the wings, I couldn't stand the suspense; like Mrs. Lot, I looked back. I thought I'd seen everything. After imps and demons and pumpkins and hell-princes, I'd be able to handle anything else they threw at us! At least that's what I thought. I'd also thought the hell-princes were giants when I first saw them. My scale was in for a rude awakening. "Mother Mary!" I shouted involuntarily. The others weren't monsters any longer, not compared to this! It stood five meters tall, with piston-driven legs sup- porting a body that must have weighed hundreds of tons. Deep within its massive structure came the grinding of many gears. The arms were also piston-driven, and the left arm ended in a huge box that didn't look anything like a lunch box. "No!" This time it was Arlene who had glanced behind and echoed my opinion. Now that we'd had our turn at making noise, it was time for the colossus to speak. The scream of rage that came out of its mouth was so loud that it was as if the two long horns--one on each side of its head, and growing out so far as to end over the muscled shoulders--were actually 50,000-watt stereo speakers amplifying the sound so that everyone could hear it from Deimos to Phobos to Mars. While it roared, the arm with the box on the end pointed at us. That broke the spell. We were both very good at noticing anything pointing at us. We ran like hell itself was on our tail, up the left wing seconds ahead of a terrific detonation. A miniature cruise missile had missed us, impacting against the far wall. Even at a distance of two hundred meters, the explosion knocked us off our feet. We ran as we'd never run before. All the eighteen- wheelers in the universe were coming at us on a down- grade to doom. We needed an exit ramp. "Look!" Arlene screamed, pointing at a narrow hole where the wings joined the central building we'd just exited. She dived through without a hitch. Me, I got stuck--it was Phobos all over again! But I wasn't going to waste an opportunity, even with the wits scared out of me. I turned and loosed a few rounds from my trusty rocket launcher. I figured, Why the hell not? The rockets struck dead-on--with no apparent effect. The titan roared; a good translation, I guess, would be, "Now it's my turn!" 27 The steam-driven demon returned fire, striking the wall of the wing, blowing us to the ground. The good news was that this finished the task of getting me through the hole. We were so stunned, we could barely pick ourselves up from the floor; a floor that was shaking from the ap- proaching leviathan. "Get up!" I said, grabbing Arlene by the arm and pulling her to her feet. The colossus stomped straight toward us, and I knew that a flimsy piece of wall would be like a piece of Kleenex to the thing even before he ripped through it without slowing down. We staggered in the other direction, up the other wing, "My right foot's numb!" Arlene hollered. "It's asleep!" I heard the fear in her voice. I'm sure she could hear the fear in mine, too. "Wake it up," I said, and while she stomped her foot, forcing the blood to circulate, I fired a few more rockets at the monster. There was no effect worth mentioning. "This thing won't die!" Arlene shouted as we ran. "Not without something heavier," I agreed. Arlene stared at the far wall and started mumbling to herself, obviously making thumbnail calculations. I added one and one, and got two human beings crazy with terror. As we rounded the corner of the next wing, we heard the steam-driven demon crunching after us. At least he wasn't moving any faster than a brisk walk. At his size, if he didn't tire, that walk would finish us. I didn't want to think about the missiles he could fire. We turned another corner. So long as we heard him but didn't see him, I figured we were doing our best. "Fly!" Arlene cried. "Near as I can figure, this room is much larger than the Gate gravity field the aliens set up." She took another deep breath, coughed, continued: "The periphery of the room should be at normal Deimos gravity." "Close to zero, you mean." "Yes." I froze, staring at the far wall. Something was nagging at the back of my brain. This was no time to ignore hunches, instincts, or sudden revelation. "Arlene, we've got to lure Godzilla out of the anomaly and into the normal gravity zone." She didn't ask why. She had a better question: "Which one of us?" She was right. The only way to do this was for one of us to get into the zone and taunt the creature until it charged. Arlene did some quick mind reading. "There's only one choice," she said. "I'm faster, you lumbering ox." I couldn't argue with her about that. I was already a lot more winded than she. I used to kid her about having the fastest cleats in the Light Drop; now it was life or death riding on her foot speed. She must not have liked my expression. "Fly, it has to be me! Besides, you're a much better shot with the rockets." "Lot of good that's done us." "It's the only weapon might even slow it down," she insisted; and there was no arguing with logic. She stopped running and so did I. She put her hand on my cheek and it was warm and damp. We were both sweating like mad. "If I don't make it," she said, forcing her breathing to slow, and the words to come out slow and easy, "it's been a cool couple of years. Take care, Fly, and when you start firing those rockets, try not to mix me up with the big guy." I wanted to say too much, so I only nodded and kept my mouth shut. She jogged toward the distant wall, looking back over her shoulder once. I felt like a heel, but she was right. Got sweat in my eyes, too. Then the biggest monster in the universe rounded the edge and loped by. It walked right by me, sniffed the air with nauseating nostrils, and stopped! That unbelievable head slowly began to turn in my direction. I gave myself up for dead . . . but Arlene had other ideas. She made so much noise she could have been a three-piece band. She caterwauled, taunted, laughed, pointed, howled and hooted, and tap-danced for a big finish. She passed the audition. The big mother raised its missile arm. Arlene, back against the wall in the corner, planted her feet firmly and shoved off, like a kid shoving off in a pool to get a head start at a swim meet. Darn near zero-g could be fun. She streaked sideways along the adjacent wall, and the missile impacted astern of her, pissing off the steam- demon. "Roaaaarrrrrrrrrgggggggrrrrrraaaaaaaauuughghh," it complained, stomping after her. She crouched, safe in a corner, watching every move the enemy made. When Godzilla stopped halfway and fired another three mis- siles, she was ready for it. She timed her leap to take her farther along the back wall, out of the blast radius. As the demon pumped after her, I had a clear view from behind, and noticed that a whole rack of small missiles was built into the creature's back! What did that say about the thing's creators? Then, one cannonball-crashing step past the invisible line did the trick, and the big guy launched into the air, smashing against the high ceiling. "Welcome to the gravity zone, sucker!" I yelled, then stepped out of cover and fired a barrage of rockets at a target that was just too damned big to miss. Hell, Lieutenant Weems could have hit this one. The rockets exploded against the demon, knocking it farther back against the wall. This got its attention. Eyes big as dinner plates looked at me in an unkindly fashion. The demon raised its arm, but didn't fire. This was because it was slowly rotating in the air like a windmill. Good old zero-g! Every time it lined me up for a shot, it had shifted again. And while it was unable to steady itself, I kept firing rockets. By the time it managed to stabilize itself and line up a shot, I had pumped a total of fifteen rockets. Fifteen, and it didn't give a spit! Realizing that sooner or later the steam-demon might get off a missile in my direction, I made plans. The essence of virtually every martial art--and they taught us a lot in the Light Drop Infantry--is to use the other guy's own weapons against him. Like, what the hell? What did I have to lose except my life, and all Earth? I stood perfectly visible and stopped shooting; I wanted that titanic SOB to finally bring its missile launcher to bear. Sounds stupid, I know . . . but it really was all part of the plan. I meant to do that! Behind me the walls came to a point, and there was another hole in the wing just begging for me to fill her up. I waited until the steam-demon drew a bead on me ... then I dived into the slit as it fired. By the time the cruise missile impacted against the wing wall, I'd rolled on the other side of it, protected. What happened next was in the hands of Sir Isaac Newton. The force of the shot threw the demon backward against the wall with such terrific force that five meters of solid monster was torn to shreds. It sounded as if an entire supermarket had been slam-dunked into the side of a mountain. The next sound was music to my ears: Arlene giving a war cry of such glee and joy that I wanted to join her around some prehistoric campfire to gloat over the dead enemy and marvel at our own survival. I still exercised some caution as I peeped around the wall. A few lights still flashed and flickered on the demon as it feebly tried to crawl. But this baby wasn't going to bother us anymore. "Shall we put it out of our misery?" asked Arlene as she rejoined me. "Does it deserve so merciful a fate?" I asked. She raised an eyebrow in surprise. Sometimes I think she underestimated my intelligence. What, only girl Marines can get away with sounding pompous? "Best to play it safe," she said. "I don't want to get back on that merry-go-round." I nodded. It only took the rest of my rockets, fired point-blank, to turn the prone body into cotton candy. "Whose turn is it to name the new monster?" I asked when the job was done. "You saw it first," she said. "All right, then: steam-demon. That's what I kept thinking when I watched it move." "Not bad, Fly. You're getting better at this. Maybe you could be a writer." "No need to be insulting," I said, patting her on the head in a patronizing way. This time I could get away with it. I felt good. It's not every day you trick an unstoppable force into an immovable object. We explored and found a huge, round manhole in the floor near where the demon was originally standing. Perhaps it had been performing guard duty. Arlene did the inspection and laughed. "You're going to love this," she said, standing up. "Let me guess. It needs a key." "You don't like having to mess with keys, do you?" "Not when I'm fresh out of rockets." But we had plenty of time for a scavenger hunt. Great. Whoever came up with the need for all these keys was on a par with the guy who invented cross-merging back on Earth. No torture too severe. "I'll bet I know where it is," Arlene said. Following her lead, we returned to the still-sparking, burning body of the steam-demon. Arlene found a key stuck in a slot in the creature's belly. So he had definitely been the guardi- an. She started to pull it out and quickly yanked her hand away, cussing. "What's the matter?" "It's freakin' hot!" Being careful not to burn herself on the quickly slagging metal, she gingerly extracted it, shielding her eyes from the heat with her other hand. Wisps of steam rose off the purple computer key card, but it retained its shape. She grinned like a kid who'd just gotten the prize in the cereal box. We ran to the door in the floor, the hole for a mole. Arlene plugged it into the slot. The hatch rose, then rotated open. Through this opening we saw a brilliant, eye-hurting red. A rickety, wooden ladder descended out of sight. "I can hardly believe it," she said. "Believe what?" "Has to be, babe. Fly, we're looking right at the wall of the hyperspace tunnel itself." We looked long and hard. "Now what?" she asked. I shrugged. When there's no data, flip a coin. After all, the ladder wasn't even charred. I reached my naked hand down into the red-red- redness. I touched a color. Arlene touched my shoulder. "What does it feel like?" she asked. I told her: "You'd think it would be hot, but it isn't. It's ice-cold." "Weird," she said, and put her hand down next to mine. "So what's outside a hyperspace wormhole?" she asked. "Outer space?" I suggested. "That river of faces we saw earlier? Heaven and hell? Death?" We glanced at each other and nodded. Holding hands, we took a deep breath and stepped into the redness. Crimson red. Fire-engine red. Rose red. Bloodred. Lipstick red. Martian red. The color curled around us like cold, smothering, arctic water, filling our brains with the redness of death. We were on fire! But I felt no pain. The experience was not pleasant. The flames burned away our clothing and weapons, but not our skin. The ladder vanished; it was only in our minds, any- way. For a while we slipped and slid as if we were at a crazy amusement park; but at least we could see. No matter how bad a situation, I was always grateful for light. 28 The red tunnel was bathed in the kind of hazy glow you get in a dark room when you're developing photos. So long as I could see my hand in front of my face, I wasn't going to freak. But that was the only good thing about the situation. Then we fell into a room. Room? Some sort of internal organ . . . the walls, floor, and ceiling were pink, pulsat- ing flesh, ribbed and liberally coated with slippery mu- cus. Once again both Arlene and I were naked as jaybirds. Instinctively, I covered myself again, just as I had before. "Oh, come on, Fly!" Arlene complained. "You're a human being, thank God. We have little enough to remind us of who we are and why we're here ... we don't need you being shy on top of everything else." I slowly took my hands away. But I tried not to look to hard at Arlene--I didn't trust myself. We were buddies; I wanted it to stay that way. "This place stinks," Arlene said. Maybe my nose had stopped working. I counted myself lucky; the organ was diseased, sickly, and I was glad I couldn't smell it. There was a downward slope that wasn't so steep as to cause us to lose our footing altogether, but I wasn't comfortable as we stumbled through the giant organ. I had a disturbing sense of what organ it was ... a place we've all been before. "I just had a bad thought, Fly; I hope whatever burned away our clothes didn't also burn away all the microbes in our guts that help us digest food. Without them, we'll die of starvation no matter how much we eat." "I doubt it," I said, my voice shaky, as if I hadn't used it for decades. "I don't feel ravenously hungry, so evi- dently the Gate left the MRE food in my stomach. Probably left the microbes, as well. . . anything or- ganic." We both jumped when the demonic uterus started contracting. I had always hated amusement parks. Then we were sliding out of control. I grabbed Arlene's hand and she squeezed hard. The contractions pushed us along the floor to a "door," a giant, semitransparent cyst membrane with a doorknob in the middle. The knob was made of some kind of cartilage. I pushed my arm into a wet opening all the way to the shoulder and turned the knob. Two corpses were on the other side. They'd only been shadows seen through the membrane; we couldn't tell what they were. One was male, the other female. After our experience with deja vu, I experienced a momentary shock of thinking the bodies were our own! They weren't, but they could have been related to us--similar body types, similar faces. I sure as hell knew who they were, though: one was the third woman in Fox Company besides Dardier and Arlene, Midori Yoshida. The man was Lieutenant Weems. I felt a curious lack of emotion, looking at the pair. They lay in an awkward position, head-to-head, each with a pistol in the other's mouth. It was pretty clearly a suicide pact--I supposed because of finding themselves in hell. Arlene leaned down to separate them, and we made a horrific discovery: they weren't just lying tete-a-tete; their heads were joined together, fused at the crowns, the scalp flowing smoothly from one to the other. . . like Siamese twins joined at the head. The hair color faded continuously from blond (Weems) to black (Yoshida) without seam or break. "Jesus and Mary," I gasped. "I don't guess there's any question why they blew their brains out," Arlene whispered, dropping the bodies. Arlene silently pointed to bloody imp prints all around the bodies. We both knew the shape of an imp footprint when we saw one. Judging from the depth of the heels, the bastards had been dancing around the bodies of their human victims. I spat at one of the footprints. Arlene gripped my shoulder. "Fly, please don't think I'm a ghoul--but goddamn it, we need those pistols! And much as I like looking at your . . . your manly chest, I think we need the clothes, too. Definitely the boots." She had a point. A stomach-turning, revolting point; but still one against which I couldn't argue. We spent the next several minutes robbing the corpses and throwing up in the corner. But afterward we each had a pistol and twenty-six rounds. To exit the room we had to squeeze through a narrow opening that looked exactly like . . . well, I didn't like to even think about it. I volunteered to go first, and she didn't object. "Fly," came her voice as we wriggled and writhed through the orifice, "do you ever get the feeling you're being born again?" I'm not a huge fan of morbid jokes; this time all I could do was shudder. "Arlene--maybe we shouldn't be piss- ing off the only friend we've got down here by blas- phemy." The moist, decaying walls pressed in around my shoulders, but I could still push through, and where I went it was easy for Arlene to follow. The thought crossed my mind that the passage might narrow so much that I'd become stuck. I wasn't completely rational about this one. I was so glad to pop out the other end that I barely minded the seven imps waiting on the other side. For one truly insane moment I wondered if that would make Arlene Snow White! Then I was busy again, doing my job. Arlene was right behind me, doing her job. We only had a brace of pistols. The sons of bitches didn't stand a chance. As was the usual case after a good killing, we took advantage of the opportunity to do more sightseeing. Not once did I regret that neither of us had thought to bring a camera. "So this is hell," Arlene said. "What they want us to think of as the infernal re- gions," I replied. Hell was made of fleshy walls, an open field whose ground was a mottled scalp with comically giant, prickly hairs growing out of randomly scattered tufts, rivers of fire, a black and red swirling sky . . . and air that stank of urine, decayed flowers, and bitter lemons. There may have been a hint of old cat boxes mixed in there as well. "Come to think of it," I contin- ued, "not a bad try." "One of their more creative efforts." We saw a single door, sagging with moldy, rotten timbers. The stonework lintel was crumbling. Arlene strolled to the unpromising portal and made a close inspection. "Fly, come look at this." I went, but my stomach wished I hadn't. There were mites or larvae eating away at the stone, the wood, the fleshy walls, everything! "Quite an attention to detail," Arlene said as if evaluating an artwork. The next moment she stopped being an art critic. A cloud of the tiny creatures came off into the air as if we'd pounded on the door, but neither of us had touched anything. They settled on her. More followed and they settled on me. Holding up my hand, I could see dozens of little specks spreading across my flesh . . . and there was a very slight itch. "Damn it, get off'n me!" Arlene shook her arms wildly, but enjoyed no more success than I. We ran, rolled, and still the little vermin hung on. They were worse than lint. "Ah, the hell with it," I said. "They don't seem to be killing us. First chance, we'll take a bath." "Or go through a teleporter," she said. "Being living organisms, they would probably go through with u