Inside Outside

Inside-Outside by Philip Jose Farmer.

Two floated in the twilight void.

Arms around each other, the chin of each resting on the shoulder of the other, they spun around a common axis and turned over and over, heads over heels.

Around them (there was no above or below) was nothing. Only the invisible air pushing them towards the sun in the center of the sphere. The sun was obscured by a cloud of dust.

Jack Cull held Phyllis Nilstrom tightly while he stared past her. Presently, for he had no means of telling time in a world where the sun never moved, he saw a speck appear. His heart beat many times.

Then, the speck was much larger. Before long, he knew that the object was not heading straight for them.

Nor was it, as he had first thought, part of the debris left after the cataclysm; a building or a tree or a chunk of ripped-apart mountain. Its shape was that of a living thing, although not like any creature he had ever seen in this world.

The thing changed course and swept around in an arc, obviously after having sighted the two human beings. It came closer, and then Cull knew that it must be a member of the newcomer species, the third group to become tenants of this world.

He was not unnerved at seeing the monstrous shape. He had gone through too much too re-cently to be shaken. He was not even giving the creature his full attention but was thinking of an Earth that he remembered but had never seen, had hoped briefly to see, and now knew that he would never see.

And he thought of that time, not so long ago as men counted time by sleeps and awakenings, when events had been different. Then, not knowing the truth, wanting to know the truth, he had hoped.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, he had found it difficult to believe that he could be in h.e.l.l. This was no supernatural world. It was hard as rock, dirty as earth, stinking as garbage and un-washed bodies, a physical world obeying physical laws. . . though some things were not easily ex-plainable.

Now, he knew that it was not metaphysical, that everything had an explanation and operated by valid principles. The same cause and effect that ruled on Earth ruled here.

But, on that day of which he was thinking, he had not been so sure.

The Deadly Desert was the old h.e.l.l with its fires burned out. So said the old-timers. Jack Cull had studied the Deadly Desert so often from his apart-ment window high up in the tower that he could understand what they meant. While having coffee (instant ersatz made from crumbled rocktree leaves) in the morning (?), he stared over the city roofs, over the city walls, and out across the desert.

For as far as he could see (there was no horizon), the sands stretched. Here and there, mountains abruptly rose from the flatness. The mountains, like the desert, were treeless, shrubless, gra.s.sless.

Around them was nothing but sand and sunshine and vapors of poisonous gases from potholes.

Infrequently, a "dragon" or a "cerebus" cranked along like an old bus on its way to the junkheap.

Once, Cull saw a sway-backed "cen-taur."

Even at that distance, it looked hopelessly down at the hooves; grimy and gray and broken-spirited, as only the long unemployed could be. Every now and then, he had heard, one came into the city. He carried, not a bow and arrow with which to torment the d.a.m.ned, but a stone alms-bowl.

Mixed-up proverb. If horses were beggars. . .

This morning(?) he was, as usual, lookingup past the desert at the mountains and wondering if what they said about the mountains could be true. This city was a b.l.o.o.d.y flux of rumors; nothing, or very little, could be believed. But you liked to hold a rumor to your chest, cherish it, warm it, breathe life into it with your little hope. And this rumor said that if a man could get across the desert to the mountains, he could get away from h.e.l.l itself. Otherwise, if he couldn't, why had a barrier been put between the city and the mountains?

The main trouble about that rumor, for which he had paid much, was that he could see for himself that there was nothing beyond the desert.

No, he'd correct that. He could not see beyond the sands. The sands curved upward and upward until the desert became a blur.

No sky. Rather, there was a sky, but it was a continuation of the earth.

This was a world where the sky wasnot blue, where there was no sky, where the sun was always exactly overhead, where the only shadow was beneath a roof or beside a leaning wall.

Once, a man could fall off the edge of the world. So an old-timer had told him. But, he said, things have changed. Not for the better. h.e.l.l is a compromise of terrestrial ideas and infernal facts. And, here, compromises always seemed to work out for the worst.

Cull muttered, "Take your compromise and stick it!"

No use. He was stuck with it. He returned to his breakfast. And he gazed with revulsion at his apartment: Four stone walls (which did not a prison make), a stone bed, a stone bench, a stone table, made of granite, diorite, volcanic tuff, limestone, respectively. The stone table with grooves in it where "fiends" had planted chitinous elbows for eons(?). The stone bench with a depression in its middle where scaly or h.o.r.n.y b.u.t.tocks had rubbed back and forth for many a millimillennia.

His breakfast. A quartz bowl filled with manna soup and with coa.r.s.e brown fibers, like hairy noodles, of rocktree leaves. These const.i.tuted the only vegetation, and that was only permitted, he supposed, because human beings needed roughage. They were not ectoplasm but flesh and blood. They breathed and bled, had mouths, teeth, and bowels, and so needed food with bulk. The rocktrees also existed because a generator of oxygen and consumer of carbon dioxide was needed. This was a physical universe, even if en-closed, just as physical as the Earth from which they came.

After eating the soup and drinking another cup of coffee, he started to shave with a flint razor.

One had to keep up appearances; pride was not denied, especially here. And moustaches were In.

But, during the second sc.r.a.pe of his flint razor, another earthquake struck. The floor heaved. The blocks composing the walls parted slightly. He steadied himself against the table and continued sc.r.a.ping off the whiskers. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were not going to unnerve him. Let the universe expand. He was not going to allow them to know he was breaking. As if they cared.

Result: he gashed his throat. But he was unlucky (was he?) and missed the jugular by a hair.

Swearing, he walked to the window and looked out.

Here it came! All h.e.l.l breaking loose!

From far away (remember, no horizon) a thin line appeared. It shot toward him, toward the city, grew larger as it came closer, expanded and resolved into two walls forming a sharp corner, like the prow of a ship. And, like a ship, it roared over the sands of the desert, pushing up great waves in front of it and clouds of dust on each side, a ship of the desert sailing under the wind of G.o.d's fury. Behind the prow rose towers of stone like tall masts. Out of the windows and doors of the towers shot flames. A stone vessel on fire sliding over the sands on a collision course with the city in which he lived.

"Here it comes!" he screamed. It'll smash into us, tons and tons and tons of giant blocks of granite ramming at sixty miles an hour into the city, which is also tons and tons and tons of stone blocks.

He screamed; he who had seen so much he thought he could no longer scream. He screamed. Even though he had seen this before and knew, or thought he knew, that the collision would never happen.

Nor did it. The great city, seemingly bent on plowing into him and grinding his flesh between and under the ma.s.ses of falling granite, suddenly stopped. Its walls were less than a quarter of a mile away.

There was a hush as the shouts and yells from the streets below his window ceased, Then, the great city built like a boat began to recede. Rather, as he knew from past experience, itseemed to recede, just as it had seemed to sail toward them. It was a mirage, a reflection of a metropolis only G.o.d knew how many thousands of miles away. Sometimes, during the earthquakes, strange at-mospheric disturbances occurred. Once, it had been his own city that had charged across the sands. That was when he had seen himself staring horrifiedly out of his own window in the tower.

Now, the city with flaming towers was gone. It would never do to allow commerce, intercourse, among Christian and Buddhist. Each must suffer his own h.e.l.l. The Authorities would see to that.

If The Authorities were so smart, he thought, why didn't they make this place big enough in the first place? Or did they make this setup so that human beings would be frightened (not to death), horror-stricken, never knowing if this time the two h.e.l.ls might crash?

It was then that he put his hand on his face and felt the wetness. He had cut himself with the flint and had forgotten about the cut.

He, licked the blood off his finger and thought intensely about its slight saltiness, its redness, and how it was his blood, his own. Pleasures were few here, and you had to do strange things to get your kicks. He knew a man who could lie on his back, practically bend himself double, and then could. . .

well, he had better not go on. It did not bear thinking about. Not because it was in bad taste or vulgar or against current mores, but because he hated that man for being able to get a kick that he could not.

The blood kept trickling. Although he was not worried about bleeding to death, Cull did want to repair the damage. The Exchange, where he worked, insisted on its employees looking presen-table.

Besides, prowling the streets were men and women who might become overly excited at the sight of blood and cause him no end of trouble and even pain.

He telephoned his doctor, who lived in a small room in the lowest sub-bas.e.m.e.nt of the apart-ment. (Telephones in h.e.l.l? Why not? They were the work of those who had been here before man, the "demons." There was a vast complex of lines over the city; lines strung, not on wooden poles, but on the gargoyle faces that jutted in profusion on the front of every building or else on the branches of the rocktrees.) The doctor, poor devil, was busy with another case. But, since Cull was a more important patient, the doctor arrived within five minutes. Doctor B.O., as he was called, was tired and haggard. He had once been a handsome specimen, a giant with a magnificent physique. But he was tired in body, and his spirit, which was the same thing as his body, was, if not crushed, crumpled.

He opened his little black bag, slapped something on the wound to close it up, and covered it with a salve.

"What caused the earthquake this time?" Cull said.

The doctor replied with chips of weariness drop-ping off his voice and flakes of sullenness darting from his manure-brown eyes.

"Another famine in China."

His voice croaked with exhaustion as he gave his Lewisian explanation. Half a million souls, en-cased in solid flesh, had moved into h.e.l.l over-night. And h.e.l.l had expanded to make room for them.

Hence, the stretching of the unlimited yet bounded universe. Hence, the outward thrust of the Buddhist city, the creva.s.ses in the earth, the buildings reeling and sometimes toppling. The other city was a mirage?

Oh, no! Never!

The doctor knew what this meant for him and his fellows. More work. No sleep. He was so tired that he even dared complain to Cull. Of course, he knew how lenient Cull was and that he would not, probably, turn him in. He even suspected him, wrongly, of being a member of the underground abolitionist society.

"Don't b.i.t.c.h to me," Cull said. "We're all in the same boat."

"Yes," the demon whined as he snapped his little black bag shut and walked toward the phone, knowing it would ring for him in a few seconds.

"Yes. We're in the same boat. But you hold the position of a first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger on a luxury liner. While I, you might say, am only a coal shoveler in the black gang."

"There was a time when it was the other way around," Cull said.

The phone rang, and Cull answered it. He decided to let Doctor B.O. leave. Why argue? Once, when this world had been a small place, constructed according to the Ptolemaic model, the "devils" -- or Arga.n.u.s as they called them-selves -- outnumbered man. They ruled as any strongly prejudiced and arrogant majority always does. Then, when this place -- call it h.e.l.l -- was re-formed to the Copernican structure, and mankind on Earth began breeding in geometrical progression, though no less pa.s.sionately than before, the fiends were suddenly in the minority.

Topsy-turvy. Even here things changed. They had to because h.e.l.l was a reflection, if distorted, of Earth.

But changes do not have to be for the better. According to the fiends, they were for the worse.

Now, the fiends were only a fraction of the population. Might makes right. The fiends, once masters, became slaves. Oh, slavery was legal and rightly so, for only human beings should have civil rights. And the fiends were not human beings. Even they, liars that they were, would not claim that. They had their pride. Besides, if it were not for the fiends, would human beings have been in h.e.l.l?

Doctor B.O. put down the phone and ran out of the room. He was a flash of red edged with the blue of autointoxication.

He had left the receiver off the hook, for which oversight he would pay later. Curiosity had not slackened so much in Cull that he no longer took up the tension when he had a chance. He picked up the phone and listened, hoping to hear something out of the ordinary. Something to give him a kick. There was the hum of a line waiting to be used. Then, a voice with a Slavic accent, saying, ". . .somewhere deep below. It has to be because that's the only place we've never been. Look in the sewers."

There was a click. Cull put the receiver back on the hook, picked up his briefcase, and walked out.Look in the sewers, he thought. What the h.e.l.l was behind that remark? Look for what? Then, as he went out into the street, he forgot about it.

The street was blocked by a crowd that had gathered around a corpse half-hidden beneath a block of granite tumbled by the quake. Death did not awe or attract them. It was what death brought running that made them stand around and wait when they probably had urgent business elsewhere.

He waited, too. He was late for work as it was, but he was not going to miss out on this even if he were fired. He would have hated dismissal, since being out of a job was h.e.l.l. But he wanted to see what death would bring.

From far away, he heard the first faint wheeeee of the siren. It was distant, so he knew he had time to step into a store and buy, or try to buy, a package of Roll-your-own. The owner was not in sight.

The slave, a huge black fiend who insisted on being called Uncle Tom, was replacing various items that had been shaken off the shelves and counter. Stooping over, he looked up at Cull and grinned, his toothpaste-white fangs gleaming against the inkblack face. He was far darker than any Negro, for the darkest Negroes were not ac-tually black but a deep brown. His hair was wooly and cropped close to his head, and his lips were so thick as to be a caricature of a Congolese.

"Ya.s.sah, Ma.r.s.e Cull," he said. "Whuffo yo comes in heah for, suh, ma.s.sah, yo lawdship?"

"Uncle Tom," Cull said. "How would you like to be kicked in the a.s.s?"

And he felt angry at himself for saying that, because Uncle Tom had incited him into doing so, had hoped he would.

"Oh, lawdy, Ma.r.s.e Cull, Ah doan mean no of-fense, nowhow, no suh. Ah's jes a poah ole dahkie, yo lawdship, tryin' to get along wif mah white bettahs. Ah's so sah'y Ah hu't yo feelin's, ma.s.sah.

Please doan beat me, Ma.r.s.e. Ah'll lick yo boots and kiss yo a.s.s, ma.s.sah, jes lahk us no-good culluhd folks is supposed to do. Ah'm jes a po ole dahkie."

"For G.o.d's sake cut it out," Cull said. He was frustrated. The fiend had found a way to needle and taunt the human beings, and when they told him he wasn't human and wasn't supposed to talk like a Negro, he would remind them that they had always said Negroes weren't human either.

Besides, he was a n.i.g.g.e.r angel (his own words), and before The Fall he had always talked thus.

Been St. Michael's own houseboy, he said. Then, he would laugh -- fangs flashing in the frame of that genuinely black face -- and say that The Fall had been no comedown for him. In Heaven, he'd been no better off. Well, maybe, because St. Michael was real quality-folks, and down here he had to serve white trash.

By then, he did get a boot in the rear, which did not hurt him one bit, but usually caused the kicker to yell with pain. If angry enough, the kicker would threaten to lynch him. This caused another embarra.s.sing scene, where Uncle Tom would get down on his knees and lift his hands in prayer to his threatener and go into a dramatic scene, pleading and begging for mercy. All the time he was enjoying himself thoroughly, and his threatener knew it and could do little about it besides curse and threaten some more. If a lynching were organized, it would be broken up in a short time by The Authorities, and the mob severely punished. There was Law here as elsewhere.

On the other hand, Uncle Tom did not dare walk off his job. The Law applied to him, too.

"Where's the owner?" Cull said, knowing that Uncle Tom was laughing inside himself at Cull's red face.

"Lawsy, ma.s.sah, dat him outside! Undah de block! Po ma.s.sah, he soon be in de cole dahk grave!"

Which statement was a lie, and he knew it as well as Cull. No grave for anybody in this self-enclosed world. Not for long anyway.

He might be lying about the ident.i.ty of the body under the stone, too.

"You black devil," Cull said. "You're trying to tempt me to grab a handful of tobacco and run down the street with it, aren't you? And, of course, as soon as I did, you'd start hollering, 'Stop, thief!' "

Uncle Tom's eyes grew big with pretended in-nocence. "Oh, no, boss! Not dis poah debbil! Ah nebber say no such t'ing, 'n yo-all know it! If yo was to bring dis heah case to co't, ma.s.sah, yo'd get trown out a co't, beggin' yo pahdon fo sayin so, boss! Dis heah po dahkie done learned his lesson, sahib!

He ain' nebbah again goin' to tempt a human! No, sah, Ah done learned my place in sa.s.siety!"

Cull was tempted. He sweated, and he looked the store over. Could it be done? Maybe he could make a deal with Uncle Tom.

No! He'd learned the hard way. The Authorities could locate you any time They wanted you.

"I want some tobacco," he said. "And this is the only place I can get it between here and work.

Can you sell me some?"

Uncle Tom grinned slyly. "Yo know us poah debbils ain' allowed to trade in nothin' wif yo white folks. We's jes de moppers 'n de dusters, de hewers o' wood and de drawers o' watah. No, sah, Ah cain' t sell yo nothin'.''

"You mean I got to go without a smoke today?" Cull said, choking with the helplessness and anger of the situation.

"Dat's up to yo, bwana. Nuffin Ah can do. Ah'm so sah'y." And he grinned and resumed his picking up of the articles.

By now, the siren had become very loud. Cull said, "Isn't he living with a woman? Maybe I could make a bargain with her?"

"Oh, Lawdy," Uncle Tom said, and he laughed a high-pitched laugh. "De Ma.s.sah was a bery religious man, he was. He say dat, since dere ain' no givin' or takin' in marriage heah, jus as in Heaven, he ain' gonna lib in sin wif no woman!"