I saw in the high weeds along the side of that decayed road something I had never seen before: a road sign. I had noticed them in films and read about them in books, but I had never seen one. It was of faded green and white Permoplastic, with its lettering almost obscured by dirt and vines; but when I pushed the vines away I could read it:
I looked at it for a long time. Something about the presence of this ancient thing, there in the weak sun of early spring, gave my body a sudden chill.
I picked up Biff in my arms and walked quickly down the road and around a bend.
And I saw spread out in front of me, half buried by trees and bushes, a cluster of Permoplastic houses— perhaps five hundred of them, filling a kind of shallow valley below me. The houses were set rather far from one another, with what once must have been parks and concrete streets between them. But there was no sign of human habitation. In what must have been the town’s center were two large buildings and a huge white obelisk.
As I approached the town I began to push through rosebushes and honeysuckle, near-dead from winter, and I saw that the houses, perhaps once brightly colored, were all faded to a uniform bone white.
I walked into Maugre with trepidation. Even Biff seemed nervous, and squirmed in my arms and clawed at the straps that held my backpack. Where the town began was a haphazard trail through the underbrush between the houses; I began to follow it. I could not tell if the houses had porches, since the fronts of them were so overgrown; on only a few of them were doors visible through the bushes and weeds and honeysuckles.
I was heading toward the obelisk. It seemed to be the thing to do.
One house I passed had fewer obstructions between me and its door and I set Biff down and pushed my way through the growth and came up to it, scratching myself several times on rosebushes as I did so. But I hardly noticed the scratches, the sensation of being in a dream or a hypnotic trance was so strong.
I was able, after some tearing of weeds, to get the front door open and, with a kind of awe, step inside. I was in a big living room with nothing in it. Absolutely nothing. The light was dim from the mold-covered and dusty plastic windows.
Opaque Permoplastic is the most tenacious—the most dead— material designed by man, and the entire room was merely a huge seamless hollow cube of it, all pink with rounded corners. There was no indication that anyone had ever lived there; but I knew that the nature of the material was such that the house could have been lived in for a hundred blues and have no signs—no scuff marks on the floor, handprints on the walls, smoke stains on the ceiling, no visible remnants of children playing or fighting or of where a favorite table had sat throughout the life of a family.
For some reason I shouted, “Is anybody home?” It was a phrase I had learned from films.
There was not even an echo. I thought sadly of those men in the film drinking from large glasses and laughing.
We headed for the obelisk. As we got closer the path became wider, easier to walk, and we came to the near-clearing of two big buildings and the obelisk more quickly than I had expected.
The obelisk was whiter than the bone white of all the buildings. It was about sixty feet wide at its base and rose about two hundred feet into the air, resembling the Washington Monument that I had seen in so many books and films and that was all that remained of the city of Washington, D.C.
There was a glass double door, only partly overgrown by blue morning glories, at the base of it, and as I walked around I saw that each of the four faces of the structure had a huge door. And on the fourth side I saw, up high and in large, raised letters, these words:
I read it over twice. Was the “shield” the obelisk itself? Or was it within the doors?
I set Biff down and began trying the doors. The third one slid open with no effort.
Inside was a lobby, lit by the light through the glass doors. Two broad staircases, descending, were on either side of me. Another, narrower staircase went up. I hesitated only a minute and then began to go down the stairs on my left. After six or seven steps down, just as it was beginning to get dim, a soft light began to come from the yellow walls on either side of me, and on one wall were written these words:
And then, six or eight steps further down, other soft lights came on and I saw these words on the wall, which at this level was of a different color—gray:
And when I came to the bottom of the staircase I found myself in a huge, long, wide hallway with glass chandeliers of soft pink that came on gently at my approach and signs on each side of me that glowed:
And then, astonishingly, there began the sound of soft music, light and airy, of flutes and oboes; and, about fifty yards ahead of me, a great spray of water began to rise from a broad pool, and varicolored lights—blue and green and yellow—began to play over it and there came the sound of the water falling, the sound of the fountain.
I walked toward the fountain, marveling. Biff jumped from my arms and ran ahead of me and, without hesitating, perched herself on the edge of the pool, put her head down, and began to drink.
I came up slowly to her, bent down, cupped my hands with the cool, fresh water, raised it to my hot and dry face, and smelled it. It was clean and pure. I drank handfuls of it, and then washed my face in it.
The pool’s sides were made of thousands of little squares of silver tiles, with white lines of mortar between them, and in the bottom of the pool, under the water, was a giant mosaic, in black and gray and white tiles, of a humpbacked whale with its back arched and its flukes spread.
The water of the fountain jetted up from between a group of three dolphins, curved and vertical, carved in black. I had seen something like it in a picture book called
It was like seeing the birds at the edge of the sea turning in flight, or a storm on the gray ocean, or the great ape Kong in his slow and graceful falling.
Beyond the fountain the great hallway ended at the top of a “T,” with huge double doors going to the right and to the left. Over the doors to the left were the words:
and over the other door was simply:
