Free Element 79 by Fred Hoyle Page A

sound. The music was still really coming through, but Dionysus was taking it all for himself, leaving nothing to be heard by the milling throng of people in the concourse. He took the music, every note of it, for a long time, all deep into his belly. As one glutinous note after another went inside him, it seemed to Dionysus as if he were being pumped up and up to the size of an enormous gasbag. There was a limit to what even he could do, to what any god could do. At last the limit was reached, not another single note could he manage to pack inside himself. Dionysus let the whole lot go, in a colossal burp that shook the concourse like a thunderclap. Windows were shattered, cracks appearing everywhere in walls and ceiling. People raced for the exits, convinced that planes were exploding to the left and to the right on the runways outside.
    Dionysus surveyed the wreckage and smiled to himself as he stepped through a gap in the outer wall. The evening air was warm and clear, just right for a return to Olympus. He knew what he was going to do when he got home—sleep. He also knew something else. Very definitely, he was flying the rest of his journey on foot.

Welcome to Slippage City
    It’s amazing how many people have a good idea and then foul it up. Take the theologians. When they thought up the Devil they were dead-set on the right track, but then they go off with a ridiculous notion. Imagine the Devil bothering with souls one by one, dealing with you or me on an individual basis, like a common tinker. The critical thing to remember is that the Devil thinks big, reaping his harvests by the million, like he did in the case of Slippage City.
    Suppose you wanted to start up a hell of a city. You’d probably put it in a lousy climate. Well, the Devil didn’t make that mistake. He put his City in a beautiful place, a place with a wonderful climate. There was a plain about fifty miles wide between a chain of mountains and the sea. It was a place of nearly perpetual sunshine. Yet it was no desert, quite the reverse. What happened was that every day the air moved in and out over the sea. It came in saturated with moisture during the early morning. There was always a heavy dew with a light mist. The water soaked into the fertile ground before the sun climbed high in the sky. Then, in the heat of the day, the air began to move seaward. It was now so warmed by the sun that it took a big charge of water vapor from the sea, ready to be delivered again to the land on the morrow. Because the air was always dry in the evening, the land cooled off rapidly during the night. The nights were never hot or clammy—in fact, it was mostly necessary to sleep under a couple of blankets.
    The City itself became established near the sea, toward the northern end of the plain. Here was a multitude of little hills and valleys, verdant and bird-filled. The houses of the first settlers fitted tastefully into the landscape. Ample water for the first modest needs could be piped from the mountains, or even pumped from simple wells. Crops grew abundantly in the plain, aided by the beginnings of irrigation. Because the people had no thought of profit, the food they grew was real food. The vegetables tasted like real vegetables, the fruit like real fruit, not the flashy, spray-soaked rubbish that would come a hundred years later with the ultimate transmogrification of the City. The children grew up brown and strong. There seemed an infinity of hills and valleys to be explored on horseback. At that early time, the simplest folk possessed horses, just as naturally as they possessed clothing and shelter. Later, with the march of “progress,” only the children of the very rich would be able to afford horses. Later, not even the children of the very rich would have space to play in, the apparent infinity would turn out to be no infinity at all.
    But the City grew only slowly in the beginning, because a great desert on the far side of the mountains separated it