Inferno by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle Read Free Book Online Page A

. . I suppose it’s fair enough. I wish I’d taken . . . one or another of those offers. But what could I sell?”
    I nodded and turned away. He continued talking, to himself now. “Not the complete Analog collection. Not the Alice in Wonderland . It was autographed. Autographed!”
    Good-bye, Allister Toomey, who’d died twice now. I waited with Benito until the mob swarmed past with their bouncing boulder, then we ran across.
    CRACK!
    We found a hole in the hedgerow and scrambled through.
    There was only a narrow ledge beyond the hedgerow, then a cliff. Thick mists hid the bottom, but it was a long way down. There didn’t look to be any way over it.
    We walked along for miles. There were other groups behind the hedgerow (CRACK!) all shouting and screaming (CRACK!) in various languages.
    Then the sounds changed. Machinery, rivet guns, hammers ringing, the sounds of workmen and their tools.
    Tools! We’d need tools for the glider. I began to run ahead.
    A
    tremendous chunk of the ledge had collapsed, and the chasm ran right across, from the cliff on the downhill side to the base of the cliff towering above. A stream ran through it, and it had cut the gorge even deeper. Far below we could see people working frantically on a dam.
    Another group was just as frantically tearing it down.
    At our level there was a similar contest. One group was trying to build a bridge across the gorge, and another worked to disassemble it. Fifty yards in either direction were more bridge builders and destroyers. It seemed like a lot of wasted effort.
    I looked at Benito, but he only shrugged. “I have never been to this part before. I do not think Dante came here either.”
    The group just in front of us were steelworkers, slapping together I beams, girders, plates, anything they could manage, fastening them with hot rivets and hammers. A small forge blazed away to heat rivets. I looked at all the work without comprehension—until I saw Barbara Hannover.
    Suddenly it came to me. I’d known Barbara a long time. She wasn’t cruel, and she didn’t hate people, but she loved wildlife more. Whatever anyone proposed, a new bridge, a new freeway, housing development, mine, power plant, oil well, or wheat-field, she had a million reasons why you couldn’t do it. I honestly think she’d have let all the Kansas wheat fields go back to prairie and buffalo if she could have thought of a way to manage it.
    Add to her fanatic streak a Harvard Law School degree and one of the sharpest brains in the country, and it was easy to see why lovers of progress shuddered when she took an interest in what they were doing.
    And naturally she was tearing the bridge down. I had an idea and looked closer at the construction workers. If Barbara was in this part of Infernoland, Pete couldn’t be far away.
    And there he was, bucking rivets. Pete and Barbara had been married for a while. A short while. Just as she couldn’t see a housing tract without wanting eviction writs and bulldozers, he couldn’t see a nice place on the trail without wanting to improve it with a log cabin. I’d gone hiking with him once. The whole fifty miles was one long development plan, with ideas for improving the trail, building hostels, constructing artificial beaver dams, putting in handrails where the climb was steep . . . I almost killed him before we got back to the car.
    “It makes sense,” I told Benito. “Artistically. The way anything else down here makes sense. Pete and Barbara were both fanatics.”
    Neither of them had noticed me. I couldn’t see how steel-working tools would help anyway. But upstream was a wooden trestle bridge, with a group just finishing it while another tried to get at it with saws.
    I looked at the saws and lusted. With a saw and nothing else we could build a glider. Other things would be useful, but they were easier to make than a saw would be. I had to have one.
    The funny thing was that they used each other’s tools. One guy would be hammering