“Didn’t I say? Well, they’re the men who live most their lives underground feeding black sludge to the metal joints—miscegenates mostly and convicts and bents and cripples and others…”
“There is one in particular I’m after…”
“Eeeny meeny myny mo, catch a bugger by his toe—it’s Salustrade you’re after, aren’t you?”
“Yes, that’s his name—if he’s what you call an oilman, so much the better—he’ll be pleased to quit the city’s entrails and work for me.”
“He used to sabotage the rocketships before liftoff—some crazy conspiracies to undermine the system—or to rescue political prisoners in the Memorial Halls—that’s why he lives and works down there—a fitting punishment—never comes up for air, dear sir.” The city slicker gave a strange shrug and left the stranger. In fact, the stranger was two strangers, one inside the other, but both with the same head.
A solitary jogger appeared at the end of the street, its body bouncing along like a shiny black balloon—almost obscene. The stranger who was Siamese twins, Tristan and Clovis, still walked toward the center of the gaslit city in an area of mainly secondhand bookshops. As they were nearly knocked over by the careless jogger, they stumbled away from each other but, now being joined at the base of the two spines by the mutant gum of misbirth, they kept upright and continued their skewed way.
“Watch where you’re going!” they shouted at the vanishing shadow.
A rocket burst into flame from some other quarter of the city—another abortive launch creating a temporary firework display, outshining the feeble flickering of the night’s natural costume jewelry. As the jogger ran toward the outskirts, a mighty sword materialized in its grasp which was, in truth, a broken railing from the Lakeminster Memorial Hall.
Tristan and Clovis sat on their hips, scornful of ever finding the main entrance to the underground oilroom. They were at the foot of a spluttering fountain in one of those city squares where, during daylight, office workers munched their ill-spread sandwiches and listened obliviously to the mumbling machinery beneath their itchy feet.
Salustrade, the jogger in disguise, lately escaped from the damning darkness of the interconnecting subcity hells, careered through the last-ditch lanes of Starship City, wheeling the sword above his head. He had oiled his body over with pure black grease, kneading it into every pore of his skin and underskin. He had become a silky dark balloon and, letting out the breath from his lungs in one vigorous gasp, had spirited through a lock-and-key system from a flaw in the drainage valves (where the grill had been shattered by rogue rocket-shrapnel). He had sped through the city—at the time when the streets were empty—except for that damn two-voiced rhinocerosman who had stumbled in his way. The night had kept from Salustrade the secret of this obstacle’s identity, although he suspected it of being the matured afterbirth of a certain Ma and Pa Bintiff.
“You never found Salustrade, then?” asked another ne’erdowell.
“I never even found the oilrooms!” Clovis and Tristan answered with one voice, but two tongues.
“But you’re in the oilrooms now! Can’t you see the eccentric wheels churning fast up there on the lowest ceiling? A rocket’s about to launch from the out-city fields, beyond the back of the terraced houses, and you’ve work to do. They keep the do-gooders, ne’erdowells, and cripples down here, like the likes of you. Got a use for them all. Keep the moving parts moving—take up the vats of Flowing grease and pour. The flywheels will mesh and clog, clockwork ill-marrying clockwork, otherwise. And the rocket’s just got to go. Whoosh, bloody, whoosh! Space is our only destiny and hope.”
A listener from the days of Dan Williams and the first Captain Bintiff would have been bewildered at how times had changed and how undercover conspiracies were now the Golden Mean.
Salustrade stood beside the mighty fissure in the Earth, Long-Spike raised against the whining yellows of the dawn. A mere croak—then grinding screech—girder eroding girder—cracking, groaning double-backbones of Earth heaving against each other—sick unto the core. And from the fissure, the greatest rocket that ever left land raised its ugly hammer-head toward the breaking heavens. All the good and healthy people were on board, now gone for good, quitting the dark abandonable Earth. Salustrade shrugged and jogged back the way he had come, to release the oilers and the benders and his other stricken pals.
The gigantic rocket, of course, exploded soon after launch, creating a blinding Queen-Catherine-Wheel over Starship City, while Tristan and Clovis lay on their side and awaited inevitable rescue from a pygmy Savior who, they now prayed, would come and to whom they had given the provisional name of Salustrade. They themselves had fates to forge, destines to unspring, like greyhounds after the hare.
“If time goes backward, to poison someone you must first poison his shit.” The voice echoed in the darkness, interrupting a second voice with which it held converse of sorts.
“You know, in Heaven where God is supposed to sit on His throne, there are apprentice angels, one or two of whom are trained to slop out the public conveniences up there.”
The room was clammily, oilily dark, if room it were, and the voices tried to wriggle away from each other—but being joined now at all points on their surfaces, this was more than impossible. Clovis and Tristan had only been tenuously connected in their mutual mother’s womb. From that point onward, their jointure had grown gradually thicker, sturdier, integrally tentacled, until they felt (and, some said, looked) like an alien creature. They had originally come to Starship City, seeking Salustrade. Commissioned by one of the Bintiffs who thought that the pygmy had information worth its salt-mine, they had since discovered that he was a scullion who used to work down here in the subterranean workings of the spaceport (a spaceport which stood above at the edge of the metropolis like a township of finger-stalls). The Bintiff had not told them everything, evidently testing their communal intelligence for future, perhaps more important, missions. In any event, Salustrade had escaped from the oil rooms which were instrumental in cranking and churning the machines which in turn drove the spaceship rockets to the upper levels of both the tenable and untenable universes. But, Salustrade, in his instinctive knowledge of all possibilities and probabilities and certainties and their opposites, had seen fit not to spring those trapped in the lowest layers of the machine rooms who were thus mouldering away in the rusted metal corridors of darkness. Such were Tristan and Clovis, who kept up a desultory overlapping conversation to while away as much of the future as they could.
“If God knew we’re here, He’d surely spare a few of his apprentice angels to come and kiss us better.”
“And to clear away the excrement.”
Each time one of the voices moved, the other had to struggle to keep clear of the squelching rats that ran from his mouth to his bottom, and vice versa, and vice versa again, in a self-supplementing, if depleting, food chain. But, thankfully, the darkness hid the rats’ damning eyes.
“They say the last rocket that went up exploded above the city—and all the good and healthy and rich people on Earth-out were destroyed and rained down like living sparks upon the whole city in which they had once drunk and danced.”
“And others say it was one of those ruffians who used to work down here who tripped the switch which turned the rocketship inside out, so that all its complicated workings hung free like shameful parts—it could have done nothing else but explode in the circumstances.”
“Why did we come here, Tristan?”
“Why indeed, Clovis?”
“Because we were told to…”