The first rung broke with his full weight, dropping him half into the water again, and his hands scraped painfully along the rust. But he pulled himself up once more, planting his instep on the nub of the broken rung; it held. Reaching the top, he turned back to call instructions: “Keep your feet to the side.” Snake came up now, then Urson. Another rung gave under the big man’s bare foot when he was halfway up. As he sagged backward, then caught himself, the rivets of the ladder tugged another inch out from the stone. But they held. Iimmi joined them on the broad ridge of concrete that walled the river. Together now on the wharf, they turned to the city.
Ruin stretched before them. The buildings on the waterfront looked as though they had been flung from the sky and broken on the street, rather than built there. Girders twisted through plaster, needling to rusted points.
They stepped down into the street and walked a narrow avenue between piles of debris from two taller buildings. After a few blocks, the building walls were canyon height. “How are you going to go about looking for the Temple?” Urson asked.
“Maybe we can climb up and take a look from the top of one of these buildings,” Geo suggested. They raised their eyes and saw that the sky was thick with yellow clouds. Where it broke, twilight seeped.
They turned toward a random building. A slab of metal had torn away from the wall. They stepped through into a high, hollow room. Dim light came from white tubes about the wall. Only a quarter of them were lit; one was flickering. In the center of the room hung a metal sign:
NEW EDISON ELECTRIC COMPANY
Beneath it, in smaller letters:
“LIGHT DOWN THE AGES”
Great cylinders, four or five times the height of a man, humped over the floor under pipes, wires, and catwalks. The four made their way along one walk toward a spiral staircase that wound up to the next floor.
“Listen!” Urson suddenly said.
“What is it?” Geo asked.
One of the huge cylinders was buzzing.
“That one.” Urson pointed. They listened, then continued. As they mounted the staircase, the great room turned about them, sinking. At last they stepped up into a dark corridor. A red light glowed at the end:
EXIT
Doors outlined themselves along the hall in the red haze. Geo picked one and opened it. Natural light fell on them. They entered a room in which the outer wall had been torn away. The floor broke off irregularly over thrusting girders.
“What happened here?” Urson asked.
“See,” Iimmi explained. “That highway must have crashed into the wall and knocked it away.”
A twenty-foot ribbon of road veered into the room at an insane angle. The railing was twisted but the stalks of streetlights were still intact along the edge.
“Do you think we could climb that?” asked Geo. “It doesn’t look too steep.”
“For what?” Urson wanted to know.
“To get someplace high enough to see if there’s anything around that looks like a temple.”
“Oh,” said Urson in a reconciled voice.
As they started across the floor toward the highway, Geo suddenly called, “Run!” As they leaped onto the slanted sheet of concrete, a crack opened in the flooring over which they had just walked. Cement and tile broke away and crashed to the street, three stories down. The section of road on which they perched now wavered up and down a good three feet. As it came to rest, Geo breathed again and glanced down to the street. A cloud of plaster settled.
“That way is up,” Urson reminded him, and they started. In general the walk was in good shape. Occasional sections of railing had twisted away, but the road itself mounted surely between the buildings on either side of them through advancing sunset.
It branched before them and they went left. It branched again, and again they avoided the right-hand road. A sign half the length of a three-masted ship hung lopsidedly above them on a building to one side:
WMTH
THE HUB OF
WORLD NEWS,
COMMUNICATION,
& ENTERTAINMENT
As they rounded the corner of the building, Snake suddenly stopped and put his hand to his head.
“What is it?” asked Geo.
Snake took a step backward. Then he pointed to WMTH.
It…hurts…
“What hurts?” asked Geo.
Snake pointed to the building again.
“Is there someone in there thinking too loud?”
Thinking…machine…Snake said. Radio…
“A radio is a thinking machine, and there’s one in there that’s hurting your head?” interpreted Geo tentatively, and with a question mark.
Snake nodded.
“Yes what?” asked Urson.
“Yes, there’s a radio in there and it’s hurting him,” said Geo.
“How come the one he showed us before didn’t hurt him?” Urson wanted to know.
Iimmi looked up at the imposing housing of WMTH. “Maybe this one’s a lot bigger.”
“Look,” Geo said to Snake. “You stay here, and if we see anything, we’ll come back and report, all right?”
“Maybe he can get through it,” Urson said.
Snake looked up at WMTH, bit his lip, and suddenly started forward, resolutely. After ten steps he put his hands to his head and staggered backward. Geo and Iimmi ran forward to help him. When they got back beyond the effects of WMTH, Snake’s face looked drained and pale.
“You stay here,” Geo said. “We’ll be back. Don’t worry.”
“Maybe it stops later on,” Urson said, “and if he ran forward, he could get out the other side. It may just stop after a hundred feet or so.”
“Why so anxious?” asked Geo.
“The jewels,” said Urson. “Who’s going to get us out of trouble if we should meet up with anything else?”
They were silent then. Their shadows over the pavement faded as the yellow tinge of the sky fell before blue. “I guess it’s up to Snake,” Geo said. “Do you think you can make it?”
Snake paused, then shook his head.
Geo said to the others: “Come on.”
A click — and lights flickered all along the edges of the road. Almost a third of the lights still worked and now flared along both sides of the rising ramp, closing with the distance through the twilight.
“Come on,” Geo said again.
The lights wheeled double and triple shadows about them on the road as they reached the next turnoff that led to a still higher ramp. Geo looked back. Snake, miniature and dimmed by distance, sat on the railing, his feet on the lower rung, one pair of arms folded, one pair of elbows on his knees above a puddle of shadow.
“I hope someone is keeping track of where we’re going,” Geo said a few hundred yards on.
“I can get us back to New Edison,” said Iimmi. “If it’ll do any good,” he added.
“Just keep track of the turns,” said Geo.
“I’m keeping,” Iimmi assured him.
“By the time we get to the top of whatever we’re trying to get to the top of,” rumbled Urson, “we won’t be able to see anything. It’ll be too dark.”
“Then let’s hurry,” Geo admonished.
Sunset smeared one side of the towers with copper while blue shadows slipped down the other. Smaller walkways led to the buildings around them. By way of a plastic-hooded stair, they mounted another eighty feet to a broader highway where, stepping out, they could look down on the necklace of light they had just left. New Edison and WMTH still towered behind them. There was an even taller building before them. They had cleared the lower roofs.