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as up there!"
He jagged a finger at the filmy blue sky. A few yellow puffball clouds coasted
by lazily. Looking up into it reminded Markham of the open simplicities of
childhood.
"Nein! Field equations are clear."
"Not so. Your third derivative term -"
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"One haff to interpret the intergral convergence -"
"You look for God in equations!"
"Vee haff proved that in Hell, time radiates from a non-temporal center, nicht
wahr?" He scowled at Thales.
The Greek replied, "A possibility, yes. But the center may be God, or may be
Devil - cannot tell from physics, not yet. We need more data."
Markham said wonderingly, "Then we can figure this out, if we just reason
together..."
Both men looked at Markham with pity. "So that is vat you denk?" Einstein
said. "Nein!"
Markham sputtered, "But, but - "
"Nein, you are coming for harder task," Einstein said gently. "Hier there are
real problems. Come, we must get down to the truly difficult werk."
Markham smiled. Russell and the wasp-woman had paid a price to put him here,
and yet he had reached no plateau of the spirit. The whirl of Hell would go
on, revealing new levels, and he would go with it.
But what could be the real problems? If Einstein hadn't solved them...
Somewhere, he drought he heard the keening, malicious laugh of the angel.
Altos. And a low bass one, as if from Satan himself.
What if, Markham thought, they were two faces of the same coin?
SPRINGS ETERNAL
David Drake
Copyright (c) 1987 by David Drake
"Here we have hope," said Sulla to Sulla's Luck who lounged across the table
from him. Either of the two could have been the other's mirror image, except
that Sulla's Luck wore a peculiar smile. "As they do not anywhere in this -
cosmos - except for this Pompeii we have founded."
"They have the hope we bring them, my Lucius," said Sulla's Luck in a tone too
mild to be an objection. His thumb and forefinger pinched powder from the heap
on the low table, raised it in the air, and brushed it off again.
Illumination from the roof opening of the adjacent reception court entered
Sulla's Office through a latticework door. The light of Paradise was usually a
murky red from piercing the clouds which covered even this place that could
almost be home - but now, for an instant, a shaft of clear light pierced the
sky to scatter from the decorative pond in the center of the court.
The powder drifted down, as white and pure as an infant's soul.
"Hope," repeated Sulla's Luck.
Sulla stood up, a motion that began abruptly but hitched as the ghost of a
pain reminded him of the gout he once had. He thought that agony was over, now
- here, wherever here might be. Still, the memory hid somewhere in Sulla's
mind or in the muscles themselves; and it seemed to recur whenever long
absence had let him hope that it was gone forever.
Sulla walked to the window that opened onto the garden of his house and threw
back the shutter. He favored his right foot, even though the twinge was gone
and there had not been any real pain anyway. Behind him, he heard his Luck
rise from the opposite couch, but the mirror figure did not join him at the
window for the moment.
The plants in the walled garden grew well, though they tended to flower less
fully than they should - than they would have in the sunlight and breezes of
the real Pompeii. In the sky. Paradise struggled with the lowering clouds and
won through as nothing brighter than a baleful orange.
"Nearly perfect," said the man who was Dictator here, as he had been Dictator
of Rome before he chose to abdicate and then a private citizen. "That I could
found this town in this cosmos was your doing, my Luck."
"It's unusual in the Underworld," said Sulla's Luck, fingering the trophy that
bung on the wall above boxes of scrolled accounts, "for the parameters of
existence to seem as familiar to men as they do here on Adam's Isle.
Elsewhere, they may be quite different."
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The trophy was a bronze plate two inches thick. A bullet was imbedded in the
bronze, a coppered-steel Jacket over a steel core. It had been shot from a
weapon at velocities enormously greater than could have been achieved by a
slinger in one of Sulla's armies in life, but the plate was thick enough to
stop the missile and hold it in the center of an inch-wide crater in the
softer metal.
Pompeian fishermen had cut the plate from the breast of a huge creature which
actually flew, buoyed up by light gas in its belly, until it drifted across
the shore of this place. Then, acted on by physics similar to those of the
upper world, the huge mass of metal had crashed to utter ruin.
Sulla's Luck traced with an index finger the motto engraved on the plate: All
hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Dante had reported accurately, though of course he did not understand. Even
now.
"They're happy, don't you think?" said the Dictator in a tone of harsh demand,
though he did not turn his eyes from the window. He had not painted his garden
walls with hunting scenes or foliage to expand the apparent space for
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