Luigi smiled slowly at Lanyon, relaxing perceptibly, then leaned forward and pulled a crumpled bundle of paper out of his hip pocket. Carefully his big workman's fingers pried the pages open, and he spread out a battered map of the city, streets ringed crudely with penciled circles, marked into a series of zones.
The interpreter pulled up a chair and pointed to the map. "We take you," he said to Lanyon after he and Luigi had muttered softly to each other. "But, er, you know-" he made a gesture around the eyes, placing the tips of his fingers together over the bridge of his nose.
"Blindfold?" Lanyon suggested.
"Si, blindfold." The interpreter smiled, then elaborated slowly. "And blindfold afterward, you understand? All blindfold."
Lanyon nodded. Luigi was watching narrowly, sizing him up.
"Looks as if they're happy," Lanyon said to Patricia.
"How can they take us, though?" she asked.
Lanyon shrugged. "Cellars, basements, underground tunnels. An old city like Genoa must be honeycombed with secret passageways. I suppose this monastery had one down to the city for the benefit of the monks on Saturday night in the bad old days. They've been moving some pretty big stuff in so I should think we're in luck. The only problem is how to get into the base itself once we reach the downtown section of the city. We'll just have to pray we'll be able to pick up transport somewhere. There isn't a hope of our covering even five yards out in the open on our own."
He watched the big Italian tracing a route on the map, then spoke to the interpreter.
"Tell me, is his wife O.K.? She was in the church."
When the interpreter nodded, he added: "Tell Luigi I'm sorry about the shooting in here."
The interpreter grinned, began to chuckle to himself.
"That's O.K.," he said. "More for us, eh?"
Single file, Luigi leading with the interpreter, followed by Lanyon and Patricia, the third man in the rear, they entered the passageway running down from the monastery.
This had been cut straight through the soft chalk of the cliff, and ran for about a mile, linking together three churches with the monastery. Six feet high and about a yard across, it was just wide enough for the trolley, but the effort of moving it uphill must have been enormous. How far below the surface they were Lanyon found it difficult to estimate. They emerged into the crypt of the nearest church and for the first time could hear the wind drumming past overhead, its deep all-pervading whine singing through the angles in the shattered ruins. Then the tunnel sank belowground again and the sounds were lost.
Gradually Lanyon noticed that the air had begun to come to life in the passageway. Odd shifts of wind edged past, periodically sudden gusts of grit billowed into their faces, and Luigi would stop and switch off his torch. However, it was obvious he was more afraid of the military authorities than of the wind.
"What speed is it now?" Lanyon asked the interpreter as they crouched down during one of the pauses, waiting for Luigi to return from reconnoitering ahead.
"Three hundred kilometers," the man replied. "Maybe more."
Lanyon jerked a finger upward. "What about Genoa? People all right?"
The interpreter laughed shortly. He spread his hands out sideways in a quick movement. "All phht," he said. "Gone with the wind. Everything blown down. Luigi save things-radios, jukeboxes, you know, TV's. All for tomorrow."
Lanyon smiled to himself at the man's naïveté and superoptimism in assuming that when the wind subsided their stock of TV sets and washing machines would make easily negotiable currency. About the only thing that would be of any immediate use was the printing press. After this holocaust the reassembling bureaucracies of the world would have their presses working night and day churning out paper to fill the vacuum left by the wind.
The second church had collapsed into its crypt and a detour supported by small girders had been driven through the piles of masonry. Now the wind filled the tunnel, blowing straight through at a steady 10 or 15 miles per hour. They had reached the midtown section of the city and the passageway took advantage of the old city wall, running along beside it for half a mile as it curved down into the center of modern Genoa toward the harbor. The floor was slick with moisture and twice he and Patricia slipped onto their hands.
The passageway opened out into the middle of a maze of tomblike vaults, abandoned wine cellars somewhere off the main square. Ancient stairways, deep dips worn down their centers, spiraled away to upper galleries. Luigi pulled out his map and he and the interpreter began to confer, pointing in various directions around them.
Lanyon went over to them. He indicated the vaulted ceiling, and said: "Why don't we get up to the street, see if we can spot a military transport?"
Luigi shook his head siowly with a grim smile, and spoke to the interpreter, who took Lanyon's arm and led him up a ramp to the gallery above. They climbed a further staircase, leaving Patricia and two men in a small circle of light far below, then moved along a ledge across the massive blocks of the city wall. Ahead of them was a foot-wide arrow slit. The interpreter gestured Lanyon over to it and he craned up and saw that a thick piece of perspex had been fitted into the hole, affording a view over the entire city.
Directly below were the ragged remains of some building which had collapsed, exposing this section of the city wail. The rectangular outlines of the foundations suggested that it had been a multistoried office block, but almost nothing of it was left.
Beyond it Genoa stretched toward the sea a mile away.
To Lanyon it appeared to be undergoing a massive artillery bombardment. On all sides the remains of houses and shops were collapsing, exploding in clouds of debris and rubble that vanished in a few seconds, swept out toward the sea on the endless conveyor of the air stream. The scene reminded Lanyon of World War II Berlin, a vast desert of gutted ruins, isolated walls that ran up five or six stories, buildings stripped to their steel superstructures, streets that had vanished under the piles of masonry, leaving a dead land as shapeless and amorphous as a slag heap.
To the southwest, half a mile away, an enormous blur of spray hung over the port area, for once obscuring the ceiling of red-brown dust that had covered them for the last week. Lanyon could just make out the square roofs of the naval base, revealed now that the intervening buildings had come down, but the pens themselves were too low to be visible.
The interpreter called to him, and left the window and made his way down to the others below. Suddenly Lanyon began to doubt whether they could possibly reach the pens. It was plain that no surface transport was moving around, and the tunnels would never extend as far as the dock area, let alone below the boundary of the base.
Patricia was watching him anxiously and he gave her an encouraging smile. Together they moved after Luigi as he climbed down a narrow spiral stairway that led off one of the side tunnels. Here the stonework was of more recent origin. The steps were less worn, and a hand rail of extruded piping had been fitted. Lanyon was wondering where the stairway led when Luigi reached a door at the bottom and wrenched it back.
Immediately a gust of foul air drove up into their faces.
They had entered the sewers. Hands shielding their mouths, they stepped out of the stairway into a narrow stone landing that overlooked the sewer, a long cavern 15 feet in diameter that wound away from them. It had almost run dry, but a narrow stream of fluid a few inches deep trickled along the bottom of the course, its surface rippled by the air driving across it.
Flashing his torch, Luigi examined the roof and the arching semicircle of damp brickwork, dented here and there by the impact of the buildings collapsing above. They began to move along the ledge. A hundred yards ahead they crossed a small bridge that took them through a narrow archway into a parallel sewer, which divided and curved westward toward the harbor. Smaller branch sewers joined it, but most of the way they were able to stay on the ledge, only twice having to get down into the course itself to surmount an obstruction.