The Day After Judgement Read Online Free PDF Page A

intelligible to
     the eye at all. The installation was perfectly circular and surrounded by a moat which, impossibly for Death Valley, appeared
     to be filled with black but genuine water, from which a fog bank was constantly trying to rise, only to be dissipated in the
     bone-dry air. The construction itself was a broad wall, almost a circular city, a good fifteen miles in diameter. It was broken
     irregularly by towers and other structures, some of them looking remarkably like mosques. This shell glowed fiercely, like
     red-hot iron, and a spectrograph showed that this was exactly what it was.
    Inside, the ground was terraced, like a lunar crater. At ground level was a flat plain, dotted with tiny rectangular markings
     in no discernible pattern; these, too, the spectrograph said, were red-hot iron. What seemed to be another moat, blood-red
     and as broad as a river, encircled the next terrace at the foot of the cliff where it began, and this, even more impossibly,
     was bordered by a dense circular forest. The forest was as broad as the river, but thinned eventually to a ring of what appeared
     to be the original sand, equally broad.
    In a lunar crater, the foothills of the central peak would have begun about here, but in the pictures, instead, the terrain
     plunged into a colossal black pit. The river cut through the forest and the desert at one point and roared over the side in
     a vast waterwall, compounding the darkness with mist which the camera had been unable to penetrate.
    ‘What was that you were saying about building a fortress overnight, Buelg?’ the General said. ‘“No human agency could?”’
    ‘No human agency was involved,’ Šatvje said in a hoarse whisper. He turned to the aide who had brought the pictures, an absurdly
     young lieutenant colonel with a blond crew cut, white face and shaking hands. ‘Are there any close-ups?’
    ‘Yes, Doctor. There was an automatic camera under the plane that took a film of the approach run. Here is one of the best
     shots.’
    The picture showed what appeared to be a towering gate in the best medieval style. Hundreds of shadowy figures crowded the
     barbican, of which three, just above the gateway itself, had been looking up at the plane and were shockingly clear. They
     looked like gigantic naked women, with ropy hair all awry, and the wide-staring eyes of insane rage.
    ‘I thought so.’ Šatvje said.
    ‘You recognize them?’ Buelg asked incredulously.
    ‘No, but I know their names: Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone,’ Šatvje said. ‘And it’s a good thing that there’s at least one
     person among us with a European education. I presume that our
distrait
friend the navigator is a Catholic, which does just as well in this context. In any event, he was quite right: this is Dis,
     the fortress surrounding Nether Hell. I think we must now assume that all the rest of the Earth is contiguous with Upper Hell,
     not only in metaphor but in fact.’
    ‘It’s a good thing,’ Buelg said acidly, ‘that there’s at least one person among us with a good grip on his sanity. The last
     thing we need now is a relapse into superstition.’
    ‘If you blow up that photograph, I think you’ll find that the hair on those women actually consists of live snakes. Isn’t
     that so, Colonel?’
    ‘Well… Doctor, it… it certainly looks like it.’
    ‘Of course. Those are the Furies who guard the gates of Dis. They are the keepers of the Gorgon Medusa, which, thank God,
     isn’t in the picture. The moat is the River Styx; the first terrace inside contains the burning tombs of the Heresiarchs, and
     on the next you have the River Phlegethon, the Wood of the Suicides, and the Abominable Sand. A rain of fire is supposed to
     fall continually on the sand, but I suppose that’s invisible in Death Valley sunlight or maybe even superfluous. We can’t
     see what’s down below, but presumably that too will be exactly as Dante described it. The crowd along the barbican is