He stood in the cover of bushes fifty meters away and just watched. Horses and water buffalo in Hell. Well, why not?
Since this place was somewhat like Earth, why not throw in precise details?-be sure the buffalo didn't have three horns, or its owner walk on all fours.
Might as well get that right.
And me lazy light rain fell straight down from the perpetual overcast and hit the ground, rather than going the other way around. Markham was sure that it could have been otherwise if whoever or whatever was in charge here had wanted to diddle with the specs a bit. He looked at his own hand. It was a little blue from the chill but there were five fingers and, the thumb worked all right; All the little details in place. He was wearing rough cotton pants with a draw string and the vaguely Mexican-style shirt, BO collar. He had awakened this time, after his last death in Hell-just opened his eyes and there were sodden pine trees overhead and rain falling in his face.
His clothes weren't wet yet so either the rain had just started or else he had materialized--he couldn't think of any other words for it-only moments before.
At least this time he hadn't had to go through the whole disgusting business with the Welcome Woman again. Or the elevator. This time was easier and maybe that meant something.
He had a glimmering of an idea, something about the fact that a single death got you out of
"life," whatever that had been, but apparently an infinite series of deaths still wouldn't let you escape this Hell.
Would anything? Moral heft? Spectacular brutality? Three Hail Marys and a sour fart?
Ignorance wouldn't, that was obvious. So he had to observe, learn. That meant staying out of the local cat fights and madness.
He had to maneuver, though, see how things worked without getting captured, used, recruited into the seemingly endless and pointless causes here. He remembered the legions of troops he had seen, marching off to interminable battles, fighting out of habit or .zest or vast ancient despair.
Everybody here seemed to have more street smarts than he did. Unsurprising, since he had been a cloistered physics professor, but humbling and irritating.
He started walking through the low bushes, parallel to the road but opposite to the traffic. Something in him didn't want to join that bedraggled, hollow-eyed bunch. They were listless, forlorn, hopeless. Cattle.
And if these refugees were fleeing something, it might be interesting.
Markham kept close enough to hear the grunts and occasional swearing from the road. He crossed several gullies where deep ruts cut into the red clay. He leaped over them, trying not to expose himself to view. He didn't know what these people were fleeing, or whether they were on one side or another of the rebellion Che Guevara had started. Or restarted...
He began to sweat despite the spattering rain. He was already soaked but a warm wind came from the hills above and he didn't mind. He remembered reading in Scientific American that merely being chilled didn't increase your likelihood of getting a cold. On the other hand, that might not apply to Godless microorganisms devilishly devised to keep the ecology of Hell running.
That was the problem-he had severe doubts whether what he had learned before meant anything here. He smiled without pleasure. He saw now that he had been a man who depended on knowing things, understanding, standing at the center of an orderly world. The quest to uncover some small new fragment of the underlying Mystery had propelled him blithely through Life-that first run-through, that opening scene in a play that now promised to run forever.
Hell wasn't fire and brimstone. Far worse, it was chaos.
He heard popping noises from the right, toward the road. Far away, but they had the characteristic thin spatting sound of gunfire. He stood still and listened. No shouting, just more popping and then the soft crump of an explosive.
He angled away from the road. The rain turned to a spitting mist and then stopped. He saw no one. Hell certainly wasn't overcrowded. He tried to remember if anyone had ever mentioned any boundary to Hell.
He pondered the point, trying to view the issue scientifically. At least doing that took him away from the weary present.
There was Earth-like local gravity. Ok, that meant space-time was curved.
Well, it couldn't have an indefinitely large surface-that would imply a highly curved space-time, which would appear as a crushing local gravity. Still, this could simply be an enormous world of low density, or a cut-off space-time, ingeniously adjusted to yield a local gravity of one G.
He remembered a student's joke slogan at the university, years ago: WHITE PAPER IS GOD'S WAY OF REMINDING US IT ISNT EASY TO BE GOD.
Designing any environment implied awesome powers. Presumably the Devil had abilities rivaling God's, or else there would be obvious flaws.
'"Alto!"
Startled, Markham ducked into some brushes without looking at whoever had shouted. A loud report boomed in his ears. He crouched down and saw a man come running toward him, leveling a rifle.
" 'ey! 'ey!"
Pointless to run. Crap. Caught within an hour.
He stood slowly, showing his hands. The man trotting toward him was dressed in loose cotton too and said something in rapid Spanish. Markham shrugged, indicating incomprehension, and remembered someone telling him in one of his previous lives in Hell that classical Greek and modem English were the working languages here. Well, this guy hadn't done his homework.
More Spanish. "No comprehende," Markham said. The man scowled, brushed back his ragged black hair, and poked Markham with the rifle. Markham began walking as the man directed and they wound their way up a deep arroyo.
Pines hid them. The rain had brought out the crisp scent of the pine needle mat they walked on and Markham fell into a rhythm, working his way up the clay hillside. The man jabbed at him with the rifle, apparently the major method of communication around here.
He had seen nothing but woods and small towns in Hell, and his mind turned to using that fact somehow. Maybe he could estimate the size of this place. How many people should be in Hell, anyway?
He remembered reading that the lifespan of people before the coming of agriculture had been about twenty years. Nasty, brutish and short, indeed.
Archeologists had gotten that average number from disinterred bodies, and had found universal signs of broken bones, vitamin deficiency and early arthritis.
So much for Rousseau's noble savage.
So if identifiable humans had been around for a million years or so, what percentage went to Hell? Say, about one half. He also recalled that until people were forced to invent agriculture-because the big game herds were running out-the whole planet had supported only a million or so people.
Okay, then with a lifespan of twenty years, keeping that population steady at one million people
... for a million years ... meant about fifty billion souls had shuffled off the mortal coil. If half went to Hell. and you added in another ten or so billion to cover the time since agriculture dawned, that was thirty-five billion people.
He smiled. The Earth itself would be jam-packed with such a population. Hell wasn't. That meant the place was huge, maybe ten times the surface area of earth. A giant planet.
Or else that far fewer people came here than he estimated.
Maybe, he conjectured. Hell was a by-product of organized religion. What a laugh, if theologians invented it, gave the Devil the idea!