Free Little Doors by Paul di Filippo Page B

our boys’ll be doing better than working in a mill.”
    Carrying Simon, holding Peter’s hand, Andy walked to the main door of the mill. It was locked.
    “The side entrance is unsecured,” said Moloch.
    Andy went to it. Moloch had spoken true.
    Once inside, Andy locked the door. He walked to the basic oxygen furnace where Moloch had first spoken to him. It was cold.
    “You are a good and loyal listener,” said Moloch. “Give Me the boys.”
    Andy knew it was much too late to argue. He activated the motors of the cold furnace, which whined like animals whose legs were pinioned in traps. The pear-shaped vessel tilted to a point where Andy could just reach its lip.
    “Put the boys in.”
    Andy lifted first Peter, then Simon, dropping them both in, where they rolled to the canted bottom. They were curiously mute, almost sedated.
    “Leave the vessel in the charging position, and go to the blast furnace.”
    Andy did as he was told.
    “Melt some ore.”
    Andy moved quickly and efficiently. He knew that once he started the blast furnace, people would soon become alerted to the unwonted activity at the mill. Luckily the furnace caught easily, almost unnaturally so. Cans on a conveyor carried the raw ore to the top of the furnace. Soon Andy had tapped molten metal. This metal was a substance at 2,370 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1,300 degrees Centigrade. In the basic oxygen furnace, under the inrush of that life-sustaining gas, it would soar to 3,000° F, or 1,725° C.
    There came a banging on the main door. Andy wondered why the watchman didn’t just use his keys. Possibly in the confusion no one remembered. Such things happened. Possibly Moloch was preventing them.
    At the receptacle that held the boys, Andy stopped with the charge of molten iron.
    “Now?” he asked, already knowing what Moloch would say.
    “Yes.”
    Luckily it normally took less than five minutes to charge the furnace, and that was with a much larger draught.
    There was no noise from inside the kettle as Andy worked. Only a titanic inrush as of breath when the vessel was full, which Andy knew came from Moloch.
    Andy righted the vessel and lowered the oxygen lance. This was a steel tube fifty feet long and ten inches in diameter. It descended like the finger of God.
    Andy stood watching, listening to the flow of oxygen and to Moloch’s keening exaltations. Then Andy felt hands grabbing him. “Moloch,” he called aloud, “Moloch, now I know!”
    But Moloch did not answer.
     
     

 
    THE GRANGE
     
     
    “Look,” said Lucy, “the moon—”
    Edward laid down his newspaper and looked up in the sky, where his wife was pointing. A waxing crescent moon, pale as a mermaid’s face, thin as a willow whip, was visible in the translucent blue heavens, trailing the noontime sun by some twenty-five degrees.
    “Pretty,” said Edward, making to lift up his paper again.
    “Pretty?” Lucy demanded. “Is that all you have to say?”
    “What else should I say?”
    “Well, what’s it doing up there now? Isn’t that weird? I mean, look, the sun’s still up. It’s only lunchtime.”
    Edward slowly folded his newspaper into quarters, stalling for a few seconds. His mind was disordered; his fine intellect, complex as a cat’s cradle, had come completely unknotted in an instant. Lucy did this to him. Even after fifteen years of marriage, she still did this to him. All it took most times was a single utterance winging unexpectedly out of the conversational blue, or an idiosyncratic action. The day she had asked him what ocean Atlantic City fronted on.… Her puzzlement about why one had to apply the brakes when going into a curve.… The hurt incomprehension she had exhibited when she destroyed the microwave oven by trying to warm up a can of soup.…
    It was at such times that Edward found himself utterly speechless, baffled by the unfathomable workings of Lucy’s mind. She was quite clever in many ways. That much must be granted. And it wasn’t a lack of