The Waste Lands (Page 130)
“My girl’s a corker, she’s a New Yorker, I buy her everything to keep her in style, She got a pair of hips Just like two battleships, Oh boy, that’s how my money goes.
My girl’s a dilly, she comes from Philly, I buy her everything to keep her in style, She’s got a pair of eyes Just like two pizza pies,
Oh boy, that’s how—“
Gasher reached out, seized Jake’s ears as if they were jug-handles, and yanked him to a stop. “There’s a hole right ahead of yer,” he said. “With a voice like yours, squint, it’d be doin the world a mercy to letcher fall in, so it would, but Tick-Tock wouldn’t approve at all, so I reckon ye’re safe for a little longer.” Gasher’s hands left Jake’s ears, which burned like fire, and fastened on the back of his shirt. “Now lean forward until you feel the ladder on the t’other side. And mind you don’t slip and drag us both down!” Jake leaned cautiously forward, hands outstretched, terrified of fall-ing into a pit he couldn’t see. As he groped for the ladder, he became aware of warm air—clean and almost fragrant—whooshing past his face, and a faint blush of rose-colored light from beneath him. His fingers touched a steel rung and closed over it. The bite-wounds on his left hand broke open again, and he felt warm blood running across his palm.
“Got it?” Gasher asked.
“Yes.”
“Then climb down! What are you waitin for, gods damn it!” Gasher let go of his shirt, and Jake could imagine him drawing his foot back, meaning to hurry him along with a kick in the ass. Jake stepped across the faintly glimmering gap and began to descend the ladder, using his hurt hand as little as possible. This time the rungs were clear of moss and oil, and hardly rusted at all. The shaft was very long and as Jake went down, hurrying to keep Gasher from stepping on his hands with his thick-soled boots, he found himself remembering a movie he’d once seen on TV—Journey to the Center of the Earth. The throb of machinery grew louder and the rosy glow grew stronger. The machines still didn’t sound right, but his ears told him these were in better shape than the ones above. And when he finally reached the bottom, he found the floor was dry. The new horizontal shaft was square, about six feet high, and sleeved with riveted stainless steel. It stretched away for as far as Jake could see in both directions, straight as a string. He knew instinctively, without even thinking about it, that this tunnel (which had to be at least seventy feet under Lud) also followed the path of the Beam. And somewhere up ahead—Jake was sure of this, although he couldn’t have said why—the train they had come looking for lay directly above it.
Narrow ventilation grilles ran along the sides of the walls just below the shaft’s ceiling; it was from these that the clean, dry air was flowing. Moss dangled from some of them in blue-gray beards, but most were still clear. Below every other grille was a yellow arrow with a symbol that looked a bit like a lower-case t. The arrows pointed in the direction Jake and Gasher were heading. The rose-colored light was coming from glass tubes which ran along the ceiling of the shaft in parallel rows. Some—about one in every three—were dark, and others sputtered fitfully, but at least half of them were still working. Neon tubing, Jake thought, amazed. How about that? Gasher dropped down beside him. He saw Jake’s expression of sur-prise and grinned. “Nice, ennet? Cool in the summer, warm in the win-ter, and so much food that five hunnert men couldn’t eat it in five hunnert years. And do yer know the best part, squint? The very best part of the whole coozy fakement?” Jake shook his head.
“Farkin Pubies don’t have the leastest idear the place even exists. They think there’s monsters down here. Catch a Pubie goin within twenty feet of a sewer-cap, less’n he has to!”
He threw his head back and laughed heartily. Jake didn’t join in, even though a cold voice in the back of his mind told him it might be politic to do so. He didn’t join in because he knew exactly how the Pubes felt. There were monsters under the city—trolls and boggerts and ores. Hadn’t he been captured by just such a one?
Gasher shoved him to the left. “Gam—almost there now. Hup!” They jogged on, their footfalls chasing them in a pack of echoes. After ten or fifteen minutes of this, Jake saw a watertight hatchway about two hundred yards ahead. As they drew closer, he could see a big valve-wheel sticking out of it. A communicator box was mounted on the wall to the right. “I’m blown out,” Gasher gasped as they reached the door at the end of the tunnel. “Doin’s like this are too much for an inwalid like yer old pal, so they are!” He thumbed the button on the intercom and bawled: “I got im, Tick-Tock—got him as dandy as you please! Didn’t even muss ‘is hair! Didn’t I tell yer I would? Trust the Gasherman, I said, for he’ll leadjer straight and true! Now open up and let us in!”
He let go of the button and looked impatiently at the door. The valve-wheel didn’t turn. Instead a flat, drawling voice came out of the intercom speaker: “What’s the password?”
Gasher frowned horribly, scratched his chin with his long, dirty nails, then lifted his eyepatch and swabbed out another clot of yellow-green goo. “Tick-Tock and his passwords!” he said to Jake. He sounded worried as well as irritated. “He’s a trig cove, but that’s takin it a deal too far if you ask me, so it is.”
He pushed the button and yelled, “Come on, Tick-Tock! If you don’t reckergnize the sound of my voice, you need a heary-aid!” “Oh, I recognize it,” the drawling voice returned. To Jake it sounded like Jerry Reed, who played Burt Reynolds’s sidekick in Smokey and the Bandit. “But I don’t know who’s with you, do I? Or have you forgotten that the camera out there went tits-up last year? You give the password, Gasher, or you can rot out there!” Gasher stuck a finger up his nose, extracted a chunk of snot the color of mint jelly, and squashed it into the grille of the speaker. Jake watched this childish display of ill temper in silent fascination, feeling unwelcome, hysterical laughter bubbling around inside him. Had they come all this way, through the boobytrapped mazes and lightless tunnels, to be balked here at this watertight door simply because Gasher couldn’t remember the Tick-Tock Man’s password?