pulp cereal part seven

I awoke to a loud bang, or more of a quick series of bangs, like all the rifles at a military funeral going off not quite in unison. The great cog I had pitched my tent on shook a little, I smelt a little smoke, and then there was silence. Well, as close as it gets inside a massive clockwork device. I admit, it was surprisingly quiet inside, compared to what you might expect: the finest swiss craftsman could not make a clock this quiet, and yet the entire complex made barely more noise than the grandfather clock that stood in the hallway in my childhood and ticked and tocked it’s way through the night.

What made it even more odd was that there had been a great deal of noise outside the clock, when we had been on the walkway I had barely been able to hear anything but grinding and ticking and whirring. Yet here, inside the contraption, I could sleep soundly until Gary Dirin’s penchant for dynamite woke me.

Well, in any case, I was awake, so I got up and took down my tent, as it were: merely the long rifle, propped up on one end by my pack and the other by gary dirin’s pack, with my blanket draped over the whole affair. The cog/floor was slightly warm to the touch, so it made a surprisingly pleasant place to sleep; the tent was merely to ward away the ever present light that came from who knows where but filled the clock with a yellowish glow, that made sleep impossible. Gary had brought his dark glasses: I hadn’t suspected there would be any need for mine.

I rolled the blanket, took up my pack, and lugging gary’s pack behind me, I ducked into the corridor as the doorway came around, or rather, as I came around, and headed down to find out what Gary was up to. As I had suspected, he had been up to trying to blast open a certain vault-like door, and as I had told him the night before, it hadn’t worked. He wouldn’t admit to it, of course, despite the blacked metal around the hatch and despite the way his left front pocket didn’t hang quite so heavily as before. You have never seen such a comical sight as Gary Dirin, the greatest man I had ever known, sheepishly denying that he had dome something foolish.

I saw little use for getting upset: the dynamite made me more than a little nervous and I was rather glad to be rid of it. And I hadn’t been entirely sure that the door wouldn’t have been blasted clean open: in fact, I had somewhat hoped it would, so as to save us some time and trouble. But it did not, and now we knew, and that was that. So I clapped Gary on the back, thanked him for the wake-up call, handed him his pack, and prepared myself some breakfast.

The door remained stuck fast afterward, much to my dismay. And so we took out the map Gary had pried from the wall the night before, unrolled it, and reviewed again our other route. To our left, a massive chain of sorts ran clanking down out of the ceiling and into the floor. Each link was a large bucket, large enough to hold several men when upright. But the chain was running down, the buckets were tipped over now, and to ride along, we would have to jump up inside one and cling to the bottom, which was the top now, and hold on until, according to the map, it ran to the floor of the vast chamber, into what we assumed was another underground lake, turned around, filled with water, and came back up, to cool the device while it did whatever it was it did.

This, then, was the plan. Except we had no idea of the route other than a simple pictograph on a very thin metal map. What we did know was that while we were holding on to the possibly quite smooth interior of the buckets, we would traverse some distance outside of the clock, where an untold number of our assailants may still be waiting. And then we would be dunked into a lake for who knows how long before we came back up, at which point we would return back into the device, somewhere on the other side of this door, but somewhere safe, we could only hope.

All the faith we had to go on was a passage in Gary’s book, which he had now revealed was not his own work, which described doing exactly this thing in order to reach the ’stellar network,’ as it was called in the book. This, Gary told me, was our halfway mark, and once past it, the going would be somewhat easier, while at the same time, somewhat harder.

I had some fears as to how this plan would carry out, but I hadn’t come this far to wimp out, and the prospect of working our way back to the top, and trying to fight our way out, without anything to show for it, didn’t exactly appeal to me. I had but one more of the mysterious black bullets, and my rifle gave me little comfort against the terrors we had already faced.

So Gary and I fastened our things securely, stood by the chain, and waited. Time enough to get in sync with the chain’s speed, time to watch and see inside to see that several bars ran around the outside of the buckets that would provide good grips, presuming they held fast long enough to take us down. And then Gary leaped and I leapt after, and we grabbed at the bars and managed to get a good grip, just as the bucket passed neatly through the hole in the floor and down through the machine.

I must admit, the journey down was disappointing. I saw nothing of the factory, if it was a factory, for we passed through a pipe most of the way, punctured occasionally by rooms like the one we had just left, and then we came out the bottom and gary and I clung as high as we could inside the bucket, for we could see that several dark figures were stationed on the lower rungs of the walkway. But they only patrolled a short ways down, and then we were past them, and heading steadily towards a vast dome at the bottom, which I hadn’t seen before because of the clock being in the way.

And then we entered the dome and went into another dark tunnel and the track curved to one side, and we came out the bottom of what I presumed was another factory of some kind from all the noise. We were nearly horizontal now, and I could see a vast lake below us. Then the bucket hit the bottom, water flowed up around us, we dunked under completely, I panicked, the bucket lurched fully upright, and we came back out and were going up again. And Gary Dirin and I poked our heads out the top of the water just in time to enter another dark tube.

The trip back up was a little more interesting, as we could see that a great many dark figures patrolled the upper reaches of the walkways, and a great many yellow lights shone forth from the walls. But we were not spotted, as far as I could see, and very quickly we came back into the device itself, and the chain ran up a tunnel, and popped out in the center of a large reservoir. We went up a little ways, then suddenly the chain lurched and we turned horizontal, and Gary and I were poured out of the bucket, along with the water, into the pool.

And that was the end of that. We swam to the edge and pulled ourselves out, and looked to one side and saw the same door we had been stuck behind just a few minutes before. I confessed to Gary that I was rather unimpressed with the trip, to which he responded with laughter. What had I expected, he asked, gigantic spinning blades, or perhaps to be dropped with the water directly onto red hot metal, to be boiled away? Cooling systems, as he was quite happy to explain, don’t work like that, the mix of hot and cold is bad for the metal. The parts that get quite hot would be kept immersed in water: this metal, I presume, would not rust, so running it through a constantly fresh supply of cold water would keep it’s temperature below danger levels. I’m not sure where the water went: perhaps it ran down inside of pipes in the walkway and came then into the dome at the bottom, I could not tell you.

In any case, we were safe and could now make our way through the other side of the factory, and from there, to some seriously dangerous business. Gary seemed to know the way, so I followed him and before long we came to a large sphere, that looked to be of totally different construction than the rest of the complex. Where the gears and cogs were made of smooth seamless metal, unpolished but untextured, and with little or no apparent mechanical workings, this pod, as it were, seemed almost hand made. Rough iron, with visible rivets, double built hinges on the single hatchway, large domed projections evenly spaced about the upper and lower domes. Stepping through the hatchway, it was clear that the pod was about a foot thick, and with the door sealed tight, Gary sealed tight a second hatch on the inside, this one without even the tiny window of the outer hatch.

He told me that the pod would be our transportation for the time being, and that it’s workings were quite unusual. After consulting his book, he pressed a button on the pedestal in the center of the pod, and water began to flow out of the floor grating. Except, it did not pool and rise and fill the pod, as I expected it to. Rather, it quickly covered the floor, and then spread up the walls, and all the way up and around us until it covered the entire interior of the pod, exept for the control pedestal, Gary, and myself.

And then he pushed forward one of the large levers on the pedestal, and the water rippled and slowly the walls seemed to grow transparent: after a minute or so, it seemed as though Gary and I stood in midair in the center of a larger chamber. I reached forwards into the air, and touched the pod wall where I knew it to be, but the only sign of it was the rippling of the air around us, in a circle spreading out until it met itself on the far side of the pod and all the water rippled around us. Gary laughed, and I took a drink.