Escape From Hell Read online

  Sylvia laughed. “No kidding?”

  “I don’t just mean what we are doing. Sylvia, I read lots of science books. I read archeology books. No archeologist ever found remains of a Titan!”

  “Allen, there are a lot of things no one ever found, only one day they did, and everything changed!”

  “And maybe they weren’t so big back on Earth,” I mused. “Tell me, giant, was Hercules real?”

  “Of course he was. Tough bugger,” Antaeus said.

  “Tell us.”

  He began a long story about a conflict between empires I had never heard of. It became apparent that Antaeus would have held us there forever. I caught Sylvia’s eye; we jumped from his back, and ran.

  Running, we felt the cold like a blow. “Keep your eyes open,” I said.

  “Keep running,” she said. Antaeus was reaching for us. His feet were frozen solid in the ice, but he had a long reach. The ground was uneven — well, yes, we were kicking protruding heads; I could hear grunting and cursing. But we’d outrun that huge hand.

  A vast lake of ice, filled with souls. Some were waist deep. Others were buried to the neck. The circles were smaller here, but there was no lack of space.

  “My eyes! They’re frozen open!” Sylvia exclaimed.

  I too was looking out at the world through a shell of frozen tears. I said, “They could be frozen shut.” Sylvia nodded.

  She looked down at souls beneath her feet, just their heads and shoulders protruding. We heard a rustling, a perpetual chattering of teeth. Sylvia nodded: just like Dante. “Hello?”

  A buried soul said, “How did you get loose?”

  “Virtue, ma’am, sheer virtue. Do you know that you’re almost out of Hell?”

  “I’ll never get out. I drowned my children.”

  “Why?” Sylvia demanded.

  “So I could kill myself, but then I couldn’t go through with that.”

  Sylvia shuddered, then, still using the pickaxe as a walking stick, turned away.

  “Did you think of killing your children?” I asked her.

  “No. I worried about hurting them. Allen, should we do anything for her?”

  “Up to you. You have the tools.”

  “I don’t know. Allen, this is a horrible place! And I don’t want to choose. I don’t!”

  “You’ve done your part,” I said.

  “How?”

  “Phyllis and Sammy. They’d never have got out without you. And for that matter, you gave the Evil Counselors another chance.”

  “I don’t think any of them got out.”

  “They had their shot. Phyllis can leave anytime she wants.”

  She thought about that a moment. “Come on, it’s cold. Do we have far to go?”

  “Far enough. And it’s no good shivering. You just have to put up with it.”

  “Aren’t we Stoic?”

  “It’s what Benito told me. He was right.”

  We walked on in silence, trying to endure the cold. Our joints became stiff and it was an effort to talk. Finally I said, “A man with no future now, but who might have a future?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “He would have to be in here.”

  “Yes? Allen, do you have an idea?”

  “No.”

  We walked steadily. Satan loomed up before us. Gigantic, frozen waist deep into the ice, babbling like a madman. But he’d spoken to me. “What will you tell God when you see Him? Will you tell Him that He could learn morality from Vlad the Impaler?”

  “I may have an answer,” I said.

  “To what?” Sylvia asked, but she didn’t sound very interested. I could understand that. The cold wind sapped all our will to live. It would be tempting to lie down and let the ice cover us.

  Forever, I thought. And that can’t be just. There must be a way to rescue some. Surely all these did not deserve to be here. Forever. In the cold chill wind. Forever.

  “Hello!” Someone was shouting.

  He was standing near the edge of a dish–shaped crater, buried in ice up to his kneecaps. “You!” he said. “The explosion melted some of the ice. But not enough.”

  I recognized him then. “I was talking to you,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Allen Carpenter. This is Sylvia Plath.”

  “Robert Oppenheimer.”

  “Oppenheimer.” I remembered. “You said you built an atomic bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer. Director of Los Alamos Laboratories.”

  “Yes. How did you get free of the ice? You were alone before the explosion. Did you free your companion?”

  “Yes, but not from the ice. I was blown to bits. Ended up at the very top of this place, had to get all the way down here again.”

  “Tough journey?”

  “Very.”

  “But you came back. From being vaporized.”

  “Yes.”

  He thought about that a moment. “Can you get me out of here?”

  “Possibly. But why are you here? This is a place for traitors.”

  “I was no traitor,” Oppenheimer said. “I almost was. I had been prepared to be a traitor. But I never was.”

  “Maybe you should explain that,” Sylvia said.

  “And who are you to ask?”

  “She’s Sylvia Plath,” I said. Of course he would never have heard of her.

  “I’m the one carrying the pickaxe,” Sylvia said. “And I’m freezing.”

  “All right. All my friends were Communists. My wife, my mistress, all Communists. It seemed like the right thing to do. There was Depression in the United States, but not in the Soviet Union —”

  “There was famine in the Soviet Union during the American Depression,” Sylvia said.

  Oppenheimer nodded agreement. “I know that. But we thought most of that was just American propaganda. The Soviet Union was the refuge for the poor and the oppressed. The workers’ paradise!”

  “You bought that?” I said.

  “All my friends did. The professors at the universities did. The scientists did.”

  “But you found out different?” I had a thought. “Did you follow the party line after Stalin made the pact with Hitler?”

  He held his head high. “I never followed anyone’s party line.”

  “So what did you do?”

  He looked sad. “I said I thought it was a tactical move, to gain time.”

  Sylvia laughed. “Brilliant. Of course it was that, for both Hitler and Stalin.”

  “So you went on making excuses for Stalin.”

  “Everyone around me did. But I had my doubts. There were these stories. Albert Einstein told me one that bothered me.”

  “Einstein? You knew Einstein?” Sylvia asked.

  “Of course I knew Einstein. He told me about a letter he’d got from a Jewish girl in Russia. Her name was Regina Golbinder. Her father had been a Communist Party leader in Berlin. When Hitler came to power they stuck it out for a while. The Communists and the Nazis were allies against the Socialists. But then the parties had a falling–out. Hitler started in on the Jews. Golbinder and his family fled to the Soviet Union for refuge. Regina was fifteen then.”

  “Stalin put the whole family in a camp. But Regina had been to the United States on a trip with relatives, and they had visited Einstein. So she wrote him a letter. To Professor Albert Einstein, Princeton University, United States of America. She mentioned her visit with an uncle who was a physicist. She’d only been a little girl at the time, but she hoped he’d remember her, and could he write to Stalin and ask why they were in this awful labor camp?”

  “Einstein wrote to Stalin, but nothing came of that. Nothing. He also got up a package of food and toiletries and clothes and sent it to Regina. The camp guards stole most of it, but now they were a little afraid of her. She had a powerful friend in the United States! Allen! Dig me out of here, for God’s sake!”

  I sighed and reached for the pickaxe. Sylvia shrugged and handed it to me. I began to chip at the ice near his righ
t knee.

  “And that made you question Communism?” Sylvia asked.

  “It made me look into things a little deeper,” Oppenheimer said. “Einstein knew a lot about it. He would only tell you if you asked. So I asked, and found out it wasn’t a workers’ paradise. It was a horrible place. Famines. Famines caused by Stalin himself!”

  Oppenheimer winced every time the pickaxe came down. I dug steadily deeper. Traitors all … but if Hell was a training ground, they’d have to be freed. One at a time.

  “Hold up a second,” Sylvia said. She scooped out ice chips and hurled them away. “You already knew all this, of course.”

  “I had heard it, but it’s different when Einstein tells you!”

  “So you quit the party,” I said.

  “Technically I never joined. I never had a party card. But yes, I quit. I’d have had to anyway after Groves asked me to be director at Los Alamos.”

  “So why are you here?” Sylvia demanded.

  He wrenched his right foot loose. “Keep chipping! Sylvia, I am here because I wouldn’t betray my friends. They asked me to help. They knew something was up at Los Alamos, and they kept asking me, they kept telling me that Russia was an ally and deserved to know about the device. Roosevelt was sharing information with the British but not with Russia, and it wasn’t fair.”

  “I knew better than that; the British were sharing with us, too, and they were ahead of us in some ways, at least at first. The Russians told us nothing. But Allen, Sylvia, I was supposed to turn in my friends for asking! I couldn’t do that! So I just didn’t do anything. I didn’t help them, but I wouldn’t betray my friends, either.”

  “You did nothing.”

  “You did nothing. And you made your choice,” Sylvia said.

  “No. I wouldn’t make a choice. I did my duty! I built the bomb!”

  Gain mastery of the sciences and varied arts

  You may do all this, but karma’s force

  Alone prevents what is not destined

  And compels what is to be.

  “What the heck was that?” I asked.

  “The Satakatrayam Gita,” Sylvia said. “Camus turned on his head. Davey Crockett. Be sure you’re right and go ahead, because everything’s inevitable anyway.”

  “Something like that,” Oppenheimer said.

  “Don’t be an egomaniac. Someone else would have built it,” Sylvia said. “Of course you know that. But if you let someone else do it, you wouldn’t be the one who built it.”

  Oppenheimer looked away.

  “And that got you here,” Sylvia said. “In the circle of traitors. For not betraying your friends? Robert, it sounds a bit thin.”

  He sighed. “I know it does. Look, all right, there’s more to the story. Look, I had to choose! I could betray my friends. My own brother, even!”

  “That or betray your country,” I said.

  “Or all mankind! What we were building could give absolute power! How could any country be trusted with that?”

  “I’m not a judge,” I said.

  Sylvia frowned. “Neither am I.” She scooped out more ice chips.

  “Quantum physics,” Oppenheimer said. “God throws dice to build the universe. None of this matters anyway.”

  “Your quantum physics says we can’t understand everything,” Sylvia said. “We’re not smart enough and we never will be. But we make choices, and they count. Cocreation. God wants us to help build the universe. Choices count, Robert. Chip just there, I think, Allen.”

  I shortened up my grip on the pick so I could be more accurate, and chopped furiously between his feet.

  Oppenheimer strained. “Allen, Sylvia, I think that does it.” He wriggled and wrenched and his left foot came free. “Where now?”

  Sylvia pointed at a misty mountainous shape.

  “Sylvia, that’s the Devil.”

  She grinned. I saw his fear, but he started walking. Would he trust us? Trust must be difficult for traitors.

  “You never suspected Greenglass and the others at Los Alamos?” I asked.

  “I may have suspected them. All right, I did suspect some of them.”

  “You brought in Fuchs,” Sylvia reminded him. “And there must have been others. You had to know what they would do.”

  “How do you know about this?” I asked Sylvia.

  “Allen, I knew some Communists when I was in school. Anyone who spent any time with Communists would know what they’d do once they got into Los Alamos.”

  “Oh.”

  Oppenheimer sighed. “But Allen! Truman offered to share everything with the whole world! With the UN! I didn’t give away anything he wasn’t willing to!”

  “Only the Soviets turned him down because they already had all the atomic secrets,” Sylvia said. “That’s what I learned in school.”

  “I never told the Russians.”

  “Did you let Communists outside where they could?”

  Oppenheimer didn’t answer her.

  We trudged on. The cold seeped into my soul. “I’m still not a judge.”

  “So what are we doing?” Oppenheimer said.

  “I’m leading us out of Hell.”

  “Why us? Why me?”

  “Everyone. Everyone who wants out.”

  “Two at a time?” He tried to laugh. He was limping: chunks of ice still clung to his feet. “You must believe in the steady state universe.”

  “Hoyle? That theory generated some good stories. Robert, did you believe in an infinite universe? No beginning, no end?”

  “For a while. Then they found the sound of the Big Bang, the microwave background. But Allen, if there’s a God, don’t you have to take him as infinite?”

  “Don’t know. Physicists don’t like infinities, do they?”

  “I like infinity,” Sylvia said.

  “It would mean we could all get out,” said Oppenheimer. “It would take time, but we’d have enough.”

  “That’s what I need to know,” I said. “Just that we all have the option.”

  Oppenheimer stopped walking. “But we can’t all escape, you know. There are those who just won’t accept eternity. What about … mmm.”

  “And there’s this. How many wanderers will be coming through with a pickaxe?” I shivered. The wind was so cold. Nitrogen gone near liquid, it might have been.

  But above the wind I heard running footsteps. We all turned to look behind us.

  “I don’t want to die again,” Oppenheimer said.

  “I don’t, either,” Sylvia said. “But I did. Who’s telling you about suicide?”

  “Just a thought. I just worked something out —”

  Whatever he was going to say was interrupted. A bearded man, naked, was running across the ice shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

  Sylvia turned to me. “Is that the same one you told me about?”

  “I don’t know! Keep away from him, Sylvia!”

  “You survived,” Oppenheimer said. “I saw you blown to froth and you’re here again.”

  “Yes, but —”

  “No one deserves to be here forever,” Oppenheimer said. “No one.” He ran forward toward the naked man. The man tried to dodge, but Oppenheimer had him around the waist. They stood there like lovers for a moment.

  Then there was a point of brilliant light, expanding.

  Chapter 33

  Seventh Circle

  The Cliff Edge

  * * *

  Already I’d reached a place where the dull thrumming

  Of the water tumbling down to the circle below

  Was heard ahead like the sound of a beehive’s humming.

  So plunging over a steep chasm we found

  That dark–dyed water, bellowing with a din,

  Such that the ear would soon be stunned with sound.

  Pain enveloped me, drowning my other senses. I tried to hear, and heard a world–swallowing roar. I sniffed heat and lightning. I saw white light everywhere, dwindling, converging to one side. A golden inchworm arced pa
st me, growing larger.

  It came to me that I was a shrinking cloud. The worm circled me; became a flying snake; became Geryon, shrieking. Then I was man–sized and solid, but shattered. I fell like a bag of broken glass, and lay waiting to heal.

  I was on the ledge above the Eighth Circle. Usurers cowered. Coins caught by the shock wave sprayed away in fan shapes, gold and silver and brass.

  “Maniac!” Geryon shrieked above the roar. “Carpenter, what have you done? You’ve freed the worst souls in Hell!”

  I considered blaming Oppenheimer, but screw it. Knowing I could free anyone, that was the point of it all. They could all be loosed if they were willing. Regardless of what it cost, now I knew.

  The flaming toadstool was still rising through Hell’s murky air. Geryon moaned, “It’ll melt the iron roof and the stone above. It’ll rain lava on us. It’ll melt through to Earth! Is this what the prophets had in mind? Dead rising to greet the living —”

  “It’s slowing,” I said. My jaw and voice were soft and mushy. “Calm down. It’s four thousand miles to the Earth’s surface. Even a hydrogen bomb only reaches a few miles high.”

  Behind me, someone cleared her throat.

  Rosemary’s pavilion stood behind me, and several of her entourage: souls in finery and souls in robes and a few naked; large demons and small. The little demons looked like those in the Second Bolgia, but they had folded batlike wings. The big ones, eight and ten feet tall, were watching me like prey.

  I sat up.

  “Well, Allen?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said. “Maybe we’re each and all looking for our place. Some belong in Heaven, maybe. Some here. We learn a little, we move a little. There aren’t many of us loose at any one time, but we’ve got forever. Where’s Sylvia?”

  She gaped. “Sylvia Plath? I don’t know. I could learn —” Her lips twitched, a smile, a grimace. “I have these little demons as messengers. Obsolete. I’ve got a phone. Why should I bother? You know as well as I that Sylvia has earned her exit if she chooses to go. Allen, what have you done?”

  I shrugged.

  “You’ve freed tens of thousands of the most dangerous souls in Hell,” she wailed. “Boiled them out of the ice. They’ll have to be caught and judged, each one of them. We’ll have to intercept them before they can get out and do … God knows what they could do. We don’t have the manpower, soulpower, demonpower, paper and computers and wax tablets, whatever’s needed, the bureaucracy doesn’t have enough of any of it for this!” She covered her face with her hands. The ragged man, Roger, began a powerful massage on her neck. “How will we get it all done? It’s … it’s …”