Inferno by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle Read Free Book Online

anything.” We started across the plain. A couple of hundred yards ahead of us was a hedgerow of some kind, and sounds filtered through it. The misers were rolling their rock back that way, getting good distance for another run. We followed until they reached the hedges and stopped. Then they turned to, pushing it the other way. A prim-looking bearded man in the remains of a dark suit from the 1890s shouted toward the other mob. “You threw away the good in your lives! Now pay!”
    I couldn’t stand it any longer. I grabbed a wild-eyed matron by the shoulder. She struggled to get away. “Let me go! We have to crush those wasteful—”
    “Ever manage to do it?”
    “No.”
    “Think you will this time?”
    “We might!”
    “Yeah, sure,” I said. “What would happen if you stopped rolling the rock and took a break?”
    She studied my face for signs of idiocy. “They’d cream us.”
    “Suppose you both stopped?”
    She pulled away from me and ran to put her shoulder to the boulder. The mob heaved it over a bump. She shouted back to me. “We couldn’t trust them . Even if we could . . . we can’t stop. Minos might . . .”
    “Might take it away,” I guessed. “I thought I knew that color.”
    Several of them glanced at me suspiciously. A couple of the men left the rock to advance on me.
    “Hey! Hold on! I couldn’t steal it by myself. I don’t want to.”
    They relaxed. One, a man wearing the remains of a peasant smock, said, “Many of us hae been here for unco time. Yon Queen Artemisia says when first she came, there were still facets upon’t. It must hae been a bonny sight.” He sighed wistfully.
    It might hae been, yeah. Hey, Carpentier, how long would it take to wear all the corners off a twelve-foot diamond? I turned back toward Benito. He was talking to someone on the ground.
    It was a man with both legs crushed. The rock must have rolled over him. He was still in shock, because he wasn’t screaming in pain, but he would be. Blood seeped from the jellied mess that had been his legs.
    “For pity’s sake,” he said, “pull me out of the way. Maybe they won’t get me a few times, and then I’ll be able to keep away from them—”
    He’d had it. Mind gone with his body. It was just as well. We ought to be taking him to a hospital, but why bother? He’d had it.
    “We are leaving Hell,” Benito said. “First we go down—”
    “Oh, no! I know what they do to you down there! Just move me, just a little, please?”
    I wondered where to put him. The ledge was hard and flat, baked adobe, with no cover between the cliff and the hedgerow. But we couldn’t leave him out here. I took him under the arms and dragged him over against the cliff to die in peace.
    “I thank you,” he whispered. “What’s your name?”
    “Allen Carpentier.”
    He seemed to brighten. “I had all your books.”
    “Hey! Did you?” Suddenly I liked this man.
    “Too bad I don’t have my collection. I could get your autograph on them. I had . . . all of everyone’s books. Did you ever hear of my collection? Allister Toomey?”
    “Sure.” I’d known many book collectors, and they’d all heard of Allister Toomey, to their rage and sorrow. Toomey had spent a considerable inheritance on books, all kinds of books, from double four-edges to first editions to pulp and comic books that were just getting to be worth owning. Much of what he had owned had been unique, irreplaceable. He’d kept them all in a huge barn he’d managed to hang on to somehow.
    He’d spent everything else on books: there was no money left to take care of them. They moldered in that barn. Rats and insects got to them, rain dripped through the roof. If he’d sold a few of them he’d have been able to take care of the rest. I’d known a lot of collectors, and they all had a tendency to brood over Allister Toomey.
    “I guess I don’t have to ask why you’re here.”
    “No. I was both a . . . hoarder and a waster. I lay between both groups .