Thinking … machine
, Snake said. Radio …
“A radio is a thinking machine and there’s one in there that’s hurting your head?” interpreted Iimmi, tentatively, and with a question mark.
Snake nodded.
“How come the one he showed us before didn’t hurt him?” Urson wanted to know.
Iimmi looked up at the imposing housing of WMTH. “Maybe this one’s a lot bigger.”
“Look,” Geo said to Snake, “you stay here, and if we see anything, we’ll come back and report, all right?”
“Maybe it stops later on,” Urson said, “and if he ran forward, he could get out the other side. It may just stop after a hundred feet or so.”
“Why so anxious?” asked Iimmi.
“The jewels,” said Urson. “Who’s going to get us out of trouble if we should meet up with anything else?”
They were silent then. Their shadows faded over the pavement as the yellow tinge in the sky turned blue. “I guess it’s up to Snake,” Geo said. “Do you think you can make it?”
Snake paused for a moment, then shook his head.
“Well,” Geo said to the others, “come on then.”
Around them was a sudden click, and lights flickered all along the edges of the road.
“Come on,” Geo said again, and once more they started, passing the lights which wheeled double and triple shadows about them over the road and the opposite railing. When they reached the next turn off that led to a still higher ramp, Geo looked back. Snake’s miniature figure sat on the edge of the road’s railing, his feet on the lower rung, one pair of arms folded, one pair of elbows on his knees. The light above him.
“Keep track of the turns,” said Geo.
“I’m keeping,” Iimmi assured him.
“By the time we get to the top of whatever we’re trying to get to the top of,” rumbled Urson, “we won’t be able to see anything. It’ll be too dark.”
“Then let’s hurry,” Geo admonished.
Sunset stained one side of the towers copper while blue shadows hugged the other. By way of a plastic-domed stairway, they mounted another eighty feet to a broader highway where they could look down on the band of lights which was the one they had just left. They were beginning to clear the roofs of the lower buildings now.
On this road fewer lights were working. They were just about to enter a dark section when a figure appeared in silhouette at the other end.
They stopped, but the figure was suddenly gone. A little farther, Geo suddenly halted and said, “There!”
Two hundred feet ahead of them, what may have been a naked woman rose from the ground, and began to walk backwards until she disappeared into the next dark length of road.
“Do you think she was running away from us?” Iimmi asked.
Urson reached out and touched Iimmi’s jewel. “I wish we have some more light around here.”
“Yeah,” Iimmi agreed. They continued.
The skeleton lay at the twilight edge of the next stretch of functioning lights. The rib cage marked sharp lines on the pavement with shadow from the lamps’ glare.
“Do we turn back now?” Urson asked.
“A skeleton can’t hurt you,” Iimmi said.
“But what about the live one we saw?” countered Urson.
“… and here she comes now,” Geo whispered in a cynical stage voice.
In fact two figures approached them through the shadow. As Urson, Geo and Iimmi moved closer, one stopped, and then the other a few steps before the first. Then they dropped. Geo couldn’t tell if they fell, or lay down quickly on the roadway. But they seemed to have disappeared.
“Go on?” asked Urson.
“Go on,” said Geo.
Pause. “Go on,” from Geo.
Two more skeletons lay on the road where the figures had disappeared a minute before. “They don’t seem dangerous,” Geo said. “But what do they do? Die every time they see us?”
“Hey,” Iimmi said. “What’s that? Listen.”
It was a sickly liquid sound, like mud dropping into itself. Something was falling from the sky. No, not the sky, but from the roadway that crossed fifty feet above them. Looking down again, they saw that a blob of something was growing on the pavement ten feet from them.
“Come on,” Geo said, and they skirted the mess dripping from above them, and continued up the road, passing four more skeletons. The sound behind them turned into a wet sloshing. Turning, they saw it emerge into the light—shapeless and jelly-green under the white flare. Impaling its membrane on the skeletons, the mass flowed around them, faster, covering them, molding to them. There was a final surge, a shrinking, and its shapelessness contracted into limbs, a head, feet. The naked man-thing pushed itself to its knees and then stood straight, the flesh by now opaque. Eye sockets caved into the face. A mouth ripped apart on the skull, and the chest began to move with a wet steamy sound in irregular gasps.
It began to walk toward them, raising its hands from its sides. Then, behind it in the darkness, they saw more coming.
“Damn,” said Urson. “What do they … ?”
“One, or both, of two things,” Iimmi answered, backing away. “More meat, or more bones.”
“Whoops,” Geo said. “Look back there!”
They whirled and saw seven more figures standing quietly behind them, while the ones in front advanced.
A covered flight of stairs had its entrance nearby, leading to the next level of highway. They ducked into it and fled up the steps. Geo glanced back once; one of the forms had reached the entrance and had started to climb. He was also, he realized, high enough to get some idea of the city, which stretched, beyond the transparent covering of the steps, away in a web of lighted roadways, rising, looping, descending. Two glows caught him: one, beyond the river, a red haze that flickered behind the trees and was reflected on the water itself. The other was within the city itself, orange white, nested among the buildings.
He turned back up the steps. A gurgling sound neared them as they reached the top entrance. Geo had only gotten half clear of the entrance when he yelled, “Yikes,” and then,
