Free Inferno by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle Page A

filled his box of mud again. He ran for the gate, writing frantically.

11
    I
    was smiling as I turned. The robes I held stacked on my head, an ungainly load. “Now what?”
    Benito was staring across the swamp. “I don’t know.”
    “Ah?”
    “We cannot possibly persuade Phlegyas to take us back. I fear we must swim.” He set his own stack of robes down, shook out the top robe, and used it to tie the rest together.
    Swim? Through that ? It wasn’t the garbage that turned me off. It was the bubbling of angry people in and under the water. If we met anyone like the guy Benito had thrown back into the water . . . if we met half a dozen of them while loaded down with heavy wet stacks of robes! “Wait a minute, Benito. Let’s try something else.”
    “Lead on, then, Allen.”
    I stopped to tie my bundle as Benito had tied his. Then I turned right along Himuralibima’s Bay. The choice was deliberate: here there were windows and doors along the wall.
    I was wading thigh-deep and not liking it, but it was the only way to learn what I wanted to know. At worst I was postponing our swim. At best—“We’ve got plenty of time. You keep saying so.”
    “So we do. I wonder what you expect to find.”
    My foot brushed something soft.
    She was clearly visible beneath two feet of water: a long-boned black woman with her hair floating like seaweed around a slack face. I asked a stupid question. “Is she dead?”
    “Of course,” said Benito.
    She was curled in a fetal position. She stayed rigid as I rolled her to bring her head above water. There was no sign of decay, and no sign of life. But I felt for a pulse in her neck and found it.
    “Catatonic.” And I started to get mad. “Another catatonic. Of all the dirty things. We don’t persecute crazy people for crimes. What right do the Builders have to put crazy people in Hell?”
    “The Builders?”
    “Never mind. Of all the dirty things. Benito, can you handle two bundles for a minute?”
    He took my robes on his shoulder. He waited while I reached into the water to adjust the woman’s position.
    Catatonia. It’s a rare enough disorder, but almost incurable. You can find one or two catatonics in almost any mental hospital. They afford opportunity for endless jokes, all identical, for a catatonic will take any position you put him into and hold the pose indefinitely.
    Every intern thinks he is the first to see the possibilities. He will lead the resident catatonic to the hospital cafeteria, place him just outside the door, and leave him there with his thumb to his nose or his middle finger rigidly extended. Hilarious!
    Sometimes he gets a surprise . . .
    I had to stand on her knees to straighten her legs, but finally I got them stretched out in front of her. She was still leaning too far back, her eyes staring at infinity through a half-inch of scummy water. Still standing on her knees for leverage, I reached beneath the water, took her shoulders, and pulled her up to sitting position.
    Now she’d be able to breathe.
    . . . Sometimes he gets a surprise, your antic intern. He will have just finished adjusting the patient’s hand with thumb properly to nose, when the hand becomes a fist and the fist becomes a missile warhead. Catatonics are hideously strong. They have to be, to hold one position forever.
    And she was sitting down. She lashed straight out and tried to punch a hole through my groin. She damned near made it. I whooped and doubled over, sucking air. Sucking, as it turned out, filthy water as I rolled helplessly over into the swamp.
    I tried to uncurl. My lungs still wanted to suck water. Inch by inch, I fought my mouth to the surface, drew a lungful of sweet stinking air, and screamed.
    Benito was sloshing toward me. I gestured him back. If he dropped the robes to help me, they’d quadruple in weight!
    He stopped. I waited for the pain to ease a little, then tried to stand up. When I put weight on my legs it felt like she’d hit me again. I moved toward