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I stopped a woman, a beautiful buxom wench of twenty-five— all the adult female Brew addicts, I later found, were pretty and well-shaped and looked youthful—and I said, “What happened?”
“Ah, the fool Scrambler put too much Brew in the hole,” she replied, smiling. “Anybody could see what’d happen. But he wouldn’t listen to us, and his own buddies are as scrambled as he is, thanks to Mahrud.”
When she uttered that name, she made that sign. These people, no matter how lightly and irreverently they behaved in other matters, were always respectful toward their god Mahrud.
I was confused. “He? Who?” I said, inelegantly.
“He haw?” she brayed and my body turned cold as I thought she was referring to Polivinosel. But she was merely mocking the form of my question. “The Scrambled Men, of course, Baldy.” Looking keenly at me in a single sweep that began at my feet and ended at the top of my head, she added, “If it weren’t for that, I’d think you hadn’t tasted the Brew yet.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. I looked upward, because she had pointed in that direction. But I couldn’t see anything except the clear sky and the huge distorted moon.
I didn’t want to continue my questioning and expose myself as such a newcomer. I left the woman and, with Alice, followed the crowd back. Their destination was the end of the creek, a newly blasted hole which showed me in a glance how the dry bed had so suddenly come into existence. Somebody has carved it out with a series of the tremendous blasts we’d heard. A man brushed by me. His legs pumped energetically, his body was bent forward, and one arm was crooked behind his back. His right hand clutched the matted hair on his chest. Jammed sideways on his head was one of those plumed cocked hats you see the big brass of men’s lodges wear during parades. A belt around his otherwise naked waist supported a sheathed sword. High-heeled cowboy boots completed his garb. He frowned deeply and carried, in the hand behind his back, a large map.
He paid no attention but plowed ahead.
“General!”
Still he wouldn’t turn his head.
“Boss. Chief. Hey, you!”
He looked up. “Winkled tupponies?” he queried.
“Huh?”
Alice said, “Close your mouth before your plate falls out, and come along.”
We got to the excavations edge before the crowd became too thick to penetrate. It was about thirty feet across and sloped steeply down to the center, which was about twenty feet deep. Exactly in the middle reared an enormous, blackened, and burning plant. Talk about Jack and your beanstalk. This was a cornstalk, ears, leaves, and all, and it was at least fifty feet high. It leaned perilously and would, if touched with a finger, fall flaming to the ground. Right on top of us, too, if it happened to be toppling our way. Its roots were as exposed as the plumbing of a half-demolished tenement.
The dirt had been flung away from the roots and piled up around the hole to complete the craterlike appearance of the excavation. It looked as if a meteor had plowed into the ground.
That’s what I thought at first glance. Then I saw from the way the dirt scattered that the meteor must have come up from below.
There was no time to think through the full implication of what I saw, for the huge cornstalk began its long-delayed fall. I was busy, along with everybody else, in ru
Despite the heat contained in the hole, the Scrambled Men swarmed in and began working with shovels and picks upon the western wall. Their leader, the man with the admirals hat, stood in their middle and held the map before him with both hands, while he frowned blackly at it. Every once in a while he’d summon a subordinate with a lordly gesture, point out something on the map, and then designate a spot for him to use his shovel.
“Olderen croakish richbags” he commanded.
“Eniatipac nom, iuo, iuo,” chanted the subordinate.
But the digging turned up nothing they were looking for. And the people standing on the lip of the crater—like the big city crowds that watch steam-shovel excavating—hooted and howled and shouted unheeded advice at the Scrambled Men. They passed bottles of Brew back and forth and had a good time, though I thought some of their helpful hints to the workers were definitely in bad taste.
“Shimsham the rodtammed shipshuts!” he howled.
“Rerheuf niem, lohwaj!” his men shouted.
“Frammistab the wormbattened frigatebarns!”
The result of all this was that everybody quit digging except for one man. He was dressed in a plug hat and two dozen slave bracelets. He dropped a seed of some sort within a six-foot-deep hole cut almost horizontally into the bank. He filled this with dirt, tamped it, then drove a thin wire down through the soil. Another man, wearing harlequin spectacles in which the glass had been knocked out, and a spiked Prussian officer’s helmet from the First World War, withdrew the wire and poured a cascade of Brew from a huge vase. The thirsty soil gulped it eagerly.
There was silence as the Scrambled Men and the spectators intently watched the ceremony. Suddenly a woman on the excavations edge shouted, “He’s putting in too much again! Stop the fool!”
The Napoleon looked up fiercely and reprimanded, “Fornicoot the onus squeered.”
Immediately, the ground rumbled, the earth shook, the crust quivered. Something was about to pop, and it was going to pop loud!
“Run for the hills! This time he’s really done it!”
I didn’t know what he’d done, but it didn’t seem a time to be standing around asking questions.
We ran up the slope and out onto the meadow and across it. When we were halfway to the road, I overcame the contagious panic long enough to risk a glance over my shoulder. And I saw it.
You’ve heard of explosions flowering? Well, this was the first time I had ever seen the reverse—a colossal sunflower exploding, energized and accelerated fantastically in its growth by an overdose of that incredible stimulant, the Brew. It attained the size of a Sequoia within a split-second, its stalk and head blasting the earth in a hurry to get out. It was reaching high into the sky and burning, because of the tremendous energy poured out in its growth.
And then, its lower parts having been denied a grip because its foundations had been thrust aside, it was toppling, toppling, a flaming tower of destruction.
Alice and I got out of the way. But we barely made it and, for a second, I was sure that that titanic blazing hulk would smash us like beetles beneath a hard leather heel.
It went whoosh! And then karoomp! And we fell forward, stu
Alice screamed. “Oh, God, Dan! It hurts!”
I knew that, for I had been burned too in that region. I think our expedition would have come to a bad end right then and there, for we needed immediate medical attention and would have had to go back to HQ to get it. These primitives had evidently forgotten all knowledge of up-to-date healing. True enough—but they had forgotten because they no longer needed the knowledge. Attracted by our pitiful plight, two men, before I could object, had thrown the contents of two buckets over our backs.
Nevertheless, I was going to protest angrily at this horse-play while we were in such agony. But before I could say anything, I no longer felt pain.
I couldn’t see what was happening to me, but I could see Alices reaction. Her back was toward me, and she had quit whimpering.