Escape From Hell (37 page)

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.

P
ain 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 past 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 …”

So Rosemary had found her place. I said, “Hellish.”

She said, “Get out.”

I tried to stand up. It didn’t quite work.

“I mean it, Allen,” she said. “Oh, you have a choice. We all have choices. You can stay and work with me if you choose to do so.”

“I already gave you my answer to that.”

“I know you did. So get out. You are no longer welcome in Hell. Go and be saved. You already have aspects of sainthood. Go earn the rest of them. Go find out what’s beyond. Leave us to clean up your awful, awesome mess.”

“And you?”

“I made my choice, Allen. I have work to do. Here. I choose to do it.”

I turned away. Geryon grinned at me. I said, “I need a ride.”

“With all my heart,” he said. “But I can’t get above the ice. The thermals, you know.”

“Oh, give me a break.”

“And I’m afraid to get that close to the Devil. Allen, you also should be careful. He’ll be upset.”

The ice was trying to freeze around my feet. I had to keep moving.

Oppenheimer’s explosion had left a depression in the ice. As I moved into the crater, partially freed souls were trying to wriggle loose. Many shied from me, covering their faces. As I descended the ice came to an end, leaving … I couldn’t quite look at what made up the crater floor. Reality? Tiny shapes were writhing near the bottom, and I edged close to see.

By their mustaches, those were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, locked in a wrestling match while steaming water froze around them. I didn’t come close enough to be sure. I didn’t care enough. They’d had their chance.

I didn’t see Oppenheimer. I didn’t see Sylvia. Wherever they’d come back to existence, they knew the way out.

The stench grew as I crossed the ice. At first I couldn’t identify it, mixed as it was with sulfur and rot and sewage and sickness, all the stenches of Hell pouring into the partial vacuum from higher up. But as I got closer … burned hair. A world of burned hair.

The Devil was bare red scar tissue across half his face and body. He was wearing one face only, and the mouth was empty: souls must have been ripped from his lips by the blast. I became very aware that his left arm was free. Glaciers clung to the fingers. He watched me for a while, then said, “Leaving?” in a basso profundo whisper only I could hear.

“Yeah. Any messages?”

“Tell Him He could have planned a better universe by throwing dice.”

I walked wide around the Devil until I was behind his right shoulder, the arm that was still bound. Why take risks now? I jumped across a gap to reach coarse black hair, and started down.

Faint sounds drifted to me. It sounded like a choir. A choir of angels? The song was triumphant. Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus … Gloria in excelsis Deo … A dozen hymns, some recognizable, some I had never heard, blending together. During my first trip here I’d heard nothing but the wind. I listened as I descended to the grotto.

I had a long climb ahead of me, but at the end I would once again see the stars.

Notes

T
he verses in the chapter headings are generally from the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation. For sheer poetic imagery the Longfellow translation has no peers. The notes in the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of this translation are excellent.

For readability we recommend the Ciardi translation. There have been many editions of Ciardi’s translation, and we are told that our original
Inferno
caused the reissue of at least one of them, as well as a renewed interest in Dante among college students. This was a very good thing to have accomplished, and we preen.

A few of the quotes are from Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation. Sayers is better known for her Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but she was an accomplished medieval scholar. This translation is unique in that she has managed to preserve Dante’s rhyming scheme with little compromise of the meaning. In doing so she has often equaled Longfellow in poetic imagery, and sometimes excelled Ciardi in clarity. Her notes are of great help in understanding Dante’s intentions as well as the confusing political circumstances of his times. We had not discovered this translation when we wrote the first
Inferno.

For those seriously interested in Dante but handicapped by not having a working knowledge of Italian, all three of these translations are important, and we can add a fourth: the Easton Press bilingual edition, which presents the original Italian of Dante Alighieri side by side with the Allen Mandelbaum blank verse translation into English. Sometimes it is quite helpful to read the original Italian even if one’s knowledge of that language is limited to high school Latin, and it is convenient to have a line–by–line translation when doing so.

Regarding J. Robert Oppenheimer: we consulted a number of biographies, of which
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin was by far the most useful. It became clear that while Oppenheimer was never subject to Communist Party discipline, he knew people who were, and he knew that party discipline demanded unquestioning obedience to orders. It is quite clear that he knew that Ted Hall, whom Oppenheimer brought to Los Alamos and who worked on all of the most important problems, was a member of CPUSA. Despite the stringent security at Los Alamos — outgoing mail was censored, and for a time the only telephone was on General Groves’s desk — with Oppenheimer’s approval Hall was given a fourteen–day leave without supervision in 1944. He immediately took a train to New York City and walked into the Soviet Trade Mission headquarters, where he told them everything he knew about the Manhattan Project. He knew a lot, including both the Uranium (Little Boy) and Plutonium (Fat Man) bomb designs, and a lot about the rather tricky implosion lens needed to detonate a Plutonium fission weapon. It is impossible to believe that Oppenheimer was not aware that Hall would do that. The Rosenbergs were executed for passing considerably less information than Hall conveyed.

When we wrote our original
Inferno,
the Vatican II reforms and Pope John Paul II’s implementations of them had not been fully realized, and we drew much of our theological inspiration from C.S. Lewis, particularly his
The Great Divorce.
Since that time the Roman Catholic Church has made formal changes in its doctrines concerning the necessity of salvation through the Catholic Church alone, as well as considerable expansion of the doctrine of cocreation. Both doctrines have a major effect on Allen Carpenter’s speculations. While our original
Inferno
might have been thought to be in conflict with the views of the church as then expressed, the new doctrines of the current Pope seem very much in line with what we wrote, and we do not believe we are in conflict with church doctrine.

This is, of course, a fantasy novel, not a treatise on theology and salvation.

Acknowledgments

F
irst, our personal thanks to our editor, Robert Gleason, who found many things to improve in what we had thought was our finished work. We also thank Marilyn and Roberta for their specific suggestions, but also for putting up with us while we spent a year in Hell, then had to go back again for months because Bob Gleason told us to.

Others who have contributed by commenting on this work include, in no particular order, Roland Dobbins, Patty Healy, Robert Bruce Thompson, and Roberta Pournelle. We also want to thank the readers of the Chaos Manor View column who made suggestions for inhabitants of Inferno.

Obviously this work is derived from the first book,
Inferno,
of Dante Alighieri’s great poem
The Divine Comedy.
First written in the early fourteenth century, Dante’s poem remains one pillar of Italian education and is at least in theory read by every Italian schoolchild.

Both of us were introduced to Dante through the John Ciardi translation. Ciardi provides extensive notes and maps, and his translation retains Dante’s lineation but not the poet’s complex rhyming scheme; which is to say, Ciardi concentrates on making the meaning and images clear at the expense of the aural experience the original has when read aloud. It is an excellent way to get the sense and some of the feel of Dante’s magnificent work.

We later found the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation with introduction and notes by Peter Bondanella. Like Ciardi, Longfellow decided to abandon Dante’s rhyming scheme and wrote in blank verse. Unlike Ciardi, Longfellow strives for poetic imagery, and given his abilities as a poet often succeeds better than Ciardi; but of course at the expense of meaning. This edition includes the Doré illustrations, which add greatly to the Dante experience.