Chapter 11

When Senator Herbert Whiteslaw had embarked on his recent excursion to the Middle East, it was ostensibly under the authority of the President of the United States, who asked him personally to continue the undercover work he started years ago, before the last Iraq war. The President had sent him on that first mission, too.

But on his first mission, Whiteslaw had turned traitor. He sold highly sensitive war plans to one of the region’s worst dictators. Amazingly, somebody had gotten hands on first-rate incriminating evidence against Whiteslaw. Even more amazingly, the evidence had been doctored by somebody as a tool to use against the meteoric rise of presidential contender Orville Flicker.

After Flicker’s messy demise, Whiteslaw knew that somebody knew the truth about his guilt. When the President ordered Whiteslaw back to the Middle East for further intelligence gathering, Whiteslaw assumed he was being set up. He kept his nose clean in the Middle East.

Soon enough, the grapevine was ringing with the news that a federal indictment was being prepared against Whiteslaw, and he went into hiding.

But Whiteslaw wasn’t waiting around to see what happened. His political machine was hard at work, putting together a political campaign unlike any other.

Herbert Whiteslaw was going to be President of the United States, and soon. The election was approaching. The candidates were campaigning. Senator Herbert Whiteslaw was not looming large in the consciousness of the American people. But soon he would be the only popular electable face in the race.

First he would convince the two big political parties to yank their candidates. Then he would get their endorsement—both parties, behind the same man, and he’d be a sure winner.

There would be an outcry, of course. The partisans would hate him, even the partisans in his own party. How could you be on the right side when the wrong side endorsed you, too?

Whiteslaw knew just how to handle that: he would promote himself as the one President who could really, truly, finally work through the incessant party bickering and actually get something done. That would take the wind out of their sails.

Not that he cared what anybody actually thought of him. Sincerity wasn’t his strong point. He would have promised every American a new Chevrolet if that’s what it took to get elected.

The truth was he wouldn’t need to promise anybody anything. If he was the only viable candidate, he’d be elected, simple as that.

The people who were going to make it simple, however—Jacob Fastbinder III and his American son, Jack Fast—had turned out to be an eccentric and unreliable pair.

“But we did get the job done,” Jack Fast said without concern. “We gave you exactly what you asked for—evidence of a great scandal.”

“True, but—”

“And it wasn’t exactly easy, either, Herbie,” Fast said. “Almost killed Pops.”

“I appreciate the danger it has put you in….”

“But I can’t complain. Look what we got out of the deal!” Jack pointed out the front window of the vehicle. All Whiteslaw could see through the black-tinted glass was the glimmer of frantic bolts of electricity. How did the kid see where he was going?

Maybe visiting Fastbinder wasn’t a good idea.

You couldn’t have lured Senator Herbert Whiteslaw into a cave for love nor money. But that old man Fastbinder and his punk kid had something even better. They bad the power to make Whiteslaw into the President of the United States of America, and they had the power—he hoped—to get rid of the one threat that might strike him down before he achieved the office.

So when Fastbinder summoned him to his coronation ceremony, Whiteslaw agreed to take a ride down into the earth’s crust.

It should have been an adventure, but Whiteslaw didn’t feel adventurous when they reached their destination.

“How far down are we, anyway?”

“Three-point-six miles,” said Jack Fast with a grin. “You’ll be safe. Chill, Herbie.”

“Chill?” Whiteslaw didn’t think it was funny, but the Fast kid was showing every tooth he had. “How can I chill when it’s more than a hundred degrees?”

“Aw, you’re exaggerating.” Fast looked at his watch, which seemed to be some sort of a superhero utility watch with all sorts of gizmos built in. “It’s ninety-three and the humidity’s only thirty percent.”

“I don’t care! I’m uncomfortable as hell.”

“Yeah, it’s always hot at this end of the cavern. It’s farthest from the water. At the other end is where two of the rivers come in and they keep it at exactly sixty-four degrees. But this is the only place where we can gather all the mole people for a proper ceremony.”

That’s what the kid called the cavemen, mole people. Whiteslaw wasn’t looking forward to encountering them. He pictured savages, monsters. Whiteslaw liked to keep his world civilized. He fidgeted nervously on his too-hot stone seat. “Yeah, okay.”

Senator Whiteslaw was still not sure what the purpose of this crowning ceremony was. It was ludicrous, silly, even. It was out of character for Fastbinder and Fast. Why were they doing it?

“Stay put, Herbie. We’re about to begin.” With that, Jack Fast left the senator alone in the vast cavern.

The albinos arrived.

They were hideous, putrid creatures, as pale as walking cadavers. They were nude and filthy, and worst of all were their bulging heads where the eyelids had grown over their eyeballs.

They had weapons. There were spears with worked metal points, and swords of scrap metal with edges made deadly by pounding them into jagged saw teeth. Crude but doubtless effective.

The albinos came in small family groups, then in larger tribes. Whiteslaw was on a seat of honor in the center of the cavern on a carved bench atop a large stalagmite, where he was soon surrounded on all sides by the mole people.

He was helpless. Any one of them could ascend the steps behind him and rip his throat out with one of those saw-toothed swords. Even if he heard them coming he couldn’t run away—he could barely walk on his sensitive feet with their fresh new skin.

Would the albinos never stop coming? How many were there? How could there be so many? Whiteslaw tried estimating their numbers and came up with something like a thousand.

And more poured in every second.

They were haggard, road weary. Fastbinder had summoned his mole people to attend the event from miles away, and for some reason they had heeded his call, despite the danger of the journey. After all, this was a once-in-a-lifetime event: the crowning of the new king.

Jack Fast appeared on the stage, a flat slab of limestone at the opposite end of the cavern.

“Silence.”

The grunts and growls, the arguments and bickering, continued. Jack Fast gave Whiteslaw a wink across the sea of blind faces, then lifted a megaphone to his lips. “Silence!”

The sound was deafening in the chamber and the albinos quailed, some collapsing under the weight of the sound.

“You shall obey,” Fast thundered.

The albinos trembled, and Whiteslaw was fascinated by the performance. He had to remind himself again that the kid with the idiot grin was no idiot. Jack Fast knew how to work things.

So what was Fast doing now? Whiteslaw wondered. Fast had a Peavey amplifier sitting on the stone stage next to him. He spoke into his microphone, loud, but less abrasive than the megaphone. “Meet your new king.”

Fastbinder walked on stage. From the hips down he was encased in a steel framework of anodized, steel tubes and pneumatic cylinders. It was some sort of bionic thing, like the loader robots that people used in science fiction movies. But without the mechanical arms, what good was it?

Then Whiteslaw felt the footsteps vibrating the ground under his rump, and he understood. The albinos were blind—or as good as blind, according to Jack Fast. A light show or a fancy uniform wouldn’t impress the cave people since they couldn’t see it, but footsteps that shook the very rock—now that was something an ignorant mole person could understand.

Tides of fear and awe rippled through the albinos. Fastbinder stood at the edge of the rock, where the audience could feel his towering presence. “I am now your king,” he said. “Bow down and obey your king.”

According to Fast, some of the albinos could speak rudimentary English. Apparently, generations ago, these people dwelled on the earth’s surface. They had all been taught to understand some basics of the language. Many of the albinos obeyed at once.

Fastbinder spoke into the microphone, and his voice came from an amplifier on the wall in the back. “Obey your king!”

The albinos in back squealed at this display of great sorcery and prostrated themselves.

“Obey!”

This time his voice came from a speaker in the ceiling overhead. A crater appeared in the middle of the crowd of the albinos as they sought to mash themselves into the floor under the weight of the sound.

Whiteslaw was impressed. What power. What fear Fastbinder evoked from these miserable troglodytes. But the credit went to Jack Fast. He had turned his father into the new king of the Underworld with nothing more than a few loudspeakers and some cheap factory equipment.

The kid was loving it, too. His eyes were glittering in the light of a few strung-up bulbs, and his face shone with pleasure.

Jack Fast practically started bouncing with excitement when the resistance movement showed itself. A tight knot of powerful albinos was pushing its way through the obedient subjects. Whiteslaw knew them for what they were at once. Tough guys. Bullies. Their leader was a pale-skinned bulldog. Part of his upper lip was missing, giving him a permanent sneer. He trudged to a halt before the stage, lifting his scrap-metal sword defiantly.

“No king. No obey.”

The bully’s men were on the move, moving carefully through the crowds, not pushing now as they approached either side of the stage. They were going to make an assassination attempt on Fastbinder and Fast!

Which meant—Lord in heaven! If those two got killed, Whiteslaw would never see the surface world again.

“Obey!” Fastbinder shouted, amplifying his voice into thunder.

“No!” the bully bellowed.

“Fast, look!” Whiteslaw squealed and waved wildly at the sides of the stage. The idiot kid gave him a big smile and a thumbs-up, but never even glanced to the side. There were four on one side, two on the other, and they were going to chop Fast and Fastbinder into bloody pieces and all Whiteslaw could do was watch.

The attackers came to a halt, made surprised sounds and began straggling oddly. There was something sticking to their feet. One of them bent down and grabbed at the thin rag covering the stage, only to find his hand adhere to the stuff. Then his other hand.

Jack Fast wasn’t even looking, but he gave Whiteslaw another thumbs-up, then reached for his lighter fluid.

Whiteslaw watched the attackers wad themselves up in the sticky material, which was the human equivalent of flypaper. Before long they were enmeshed. They had no understanding of their predicament, only that they were helpless and vulnerable and they hooted in terror. The bully called to his men and got grunts in return that may or may not have been words, but the bully knew his men were in trouble. All the albinos knew it.

Jack Fast spritzed four of the attackers with Kingston Charcoal Brand Lighter Fluid and announced into his microphone, “They would not obey.”

He struck a fireplace match and tossed it on the helpless attackers, who burst into a white blaze of screaming flame unlike any stack of charcoal briquettes Whiteslaw had ever fired up. The fight was brilliant and the heat wave was intense, but not as intense as the sound the victims made before they died.

The albinos shrank back, and they looked up.

Yeah. Fast said they had some vision. They couldn’t see much, but they could see his blaze, and they saw Jack Fast silhouetted in front of it with both hands raised. Even with atrophied eyeballs and a coating of skin, they saw that much!

The fire faded in seconds to an orange glow, and Fast moved across the stage, talking, keeping the people trained on him. He came to the other pair of attackers, who were just as glued together as the first group. They wriggled as he spritzed them. “They would not obey. They would not obey,” Fast intoned from the speakers mournfully, and struck another match.

The albinos watched, and Whiteslaw marveled at the brilliance, literally and figurative, of the young son of Jacob Fastbinder.

When the second white blaze diminished. Fastbinder stomped his feet, shaking the rock floor, and commanded, “Obey!”

The albino bully collapsed, whimpering in subjugation, and the others—every last one of them—followed his example.

Fastbinder seemed pleased with himself, and Herbert Whiteslaw wondered if the old kraut had any clue what just happened. Oh, sure. Jack’s stage show had firmly convinced the cave people that Fastbinder was their lord and master. None of them would ever think of disobeying him.

But Jack himself made a stronger impression. If Fastbinder was their new king of Hell, then Jack Fast was their new god of Hellfire.

The new king of Hell stepped off of the stage. The bottoms of his bionic boots landed on the bully and splattered him in every direction. The blood lust infuriated the albinos, but Fastbinder said, “No!”

Whiteslaw watched the people quivering with their need to feed. Fastbinder strode away, the crowd parting before him, and nobody moved until Fastbinder announced, “Eat.”

They ate.

Whiteslaw was as white as one of Fastbinder’s albinos, and his lightweight shirt was drenched with sweat.

“They do enjoy their chow,” Fast said, escorting the senator down the steps and into a small side chamber, which was covered with a fabric door with clear plastic windows. When Senator Whiteslaw felt the air-conditioned air he nearly fainted with relief. Fast nudged him into a folding director’s chair and waved at a wheeled catering cart. Inside was a mountain of ice and bottles of water.

Whiteslaw snatched one of the bottles and drained it in four great gulps. He didn’t even mind the painful bout of brain freeze that came and went as a result, just grabbed another one.

“Good?” Fast asked.

“Best water I ever tasted.”

“It’s from a rare desert spring in New Mexico,” Jacob Fastbinder announced happily. “I recently purchased zee bottling plant and zee store that sells it.”

“Good investment,” Whiteslaw said when he finished his third bottle. “I’m gonna have nightmares about those cave people for the rest of my life. Is this where you people live?”

Jack sprawled in a chair. “You kidding me, Herbie? This is just a sort of green room, for you to relax in after the show. I think it’s time we took you on the tour.”

Whiteslaw became distressed at the thought of leaving the air-conditioning. “Can’t I stay here until it’s time to leave?”

Jack laughed. “You came all the way down, you gotta see the city, Herbie! First, though, some lunch?” Jack pulled a deli tray of cold cuts out of the refrigerated cart.

Whiteslaw shook his head and plucked his soggy shirt from his chest. “What’s so important about my being here?”

“We wanted to make a demonstration,” Fastbinder said matter-of-factly. “Not just for the cave people, but for your benefit, too.”

“After all, Herbie, the next President of the United States needs to know what kind of an ally he’ll be getting if he decides to be friendly with the Federation of United Subsurface Tribes,” Jack said.

“And what kind of enemy he’ll have on his hands if he decides not to stay friendly,” Fastbinder added. “That is zee reason for bringing you here.”

“Well, I am certainly impressed.”

“You are being disingenuous. Come on, Senator Herbie.”

There was a rear exit, leading to a golf cart, which wasn’t air-conditioned. Whiteslaw couldn’t stifle a groan.

“You’ll be perfectly comfortable in just a few minutes,” Fastbinder promised. He drove the cart between a pair of boulders and down a long, rocky incline, and Whiteslaw felt the temperature grow more bearable by the second.

“It’s twenty-five degrees cooler at the city level,” Jack Fast said. “There it is.”

Whiteslaw no longer noticed the temperature as he took in the “city,” where hundreds of cave people were returning to their work. They chopped doors and windows and rooms out of the rock. There was a turbine whining against a far wall, and a generator sprouted electrical cables that snaked across the ceiling. The generator powered a web of lights attached to the cavern’s roof.

“See the water? That’s what makes this place work,” Fast said, waving at two black sockets in the distant wall. Rivers emerged from both mouths and quickly merged into one strong current.

“The rivers come from way up, and they channel lots of air down with them,” Fast explained. “They keep the city cool all the time. The channels are partially dry, at least this time of the year, and the river eroded a natural deep channel in the center, so you’ve got easy walking all the way up.”

“They give us access to zee world above. One goes east, one goes northeast. Add to that river from zee southwest, which led Jack here in zee first place.” Fastbinder nodded to the third river, the largest of them all, which cascaded from an ugly black pit in the wall and piled on top of the water from the other rivers.

Whiteslaw was lost in his admiration when the explosion came. Shattered rock poured from the roof above the river and slammed into the water. Whiteslaw shouted.

“It’s cool,” Jack said.

“We’re being attacked!” Whiteslaw blurted.

“It is only zee afternoon blasting,” Fastbinder said. “We’re damming zee water. See?”

Whiteslaw watched the strong river flow widen as the shattered rock continued tumbling into it. He was shaking too hard to ask why.

“See, the rivers bring us stuff,” Fast explained. “The dam is being built like a big shallow sieve to catch shipments and seafood.”

“Any fish bigger than zee bluegill will find itself stuck here for us to harvest as we see fit,” Fastbinder said. “Zee mole people see the new abundance of food as a gift from zee God Emperor Fastbinder.”

“I’m also working on making special containerized transport barges,” Fast enthused. “No steering needed. Just load your stuff, toss them into the river source near the surface and it’ll make its way here. Automatic speedy delivery.”

The older man was frowning as he started the golf cart again. “And too risky. I predict our cargo will be damaged beyond use.”

“Hey, Pops, you said I could give it a try.”

“And you may. Then you will see zee results and can set about building me barges that can be controlled. I don’t care if they will be too slow.”

“You wait, Pops. My transport pods are gonna work.”

“We shall see.”

After a disgruntled silence, Jack got his verve back and waved at the roof.

“See all that wiring? We’ve got fixtures for a thousand floodlights just in phase one,” Jack Fast said. “Our shopping trips have only netted us a couple hundred so far, but when we’re fully operational it will be bright as day in here. The electrical grid also powers our machine shop.”

Fast steered the little cart through a narrow gap in the rock, and Whiteslaw found himself looking down a sheer drop, just inches from the cart’s balloon tires.

“Relax, I’m a safe driver,” Fast said. “This is where we make stuff.”

“Those are people,” Whiteslaw said, as he realized he was looking at regular human beings. They were dressed in normal human clothes, and they looked up at the cart with stricken, but normal, human eyes.

“I wasn’t about to try to train the mole dudes to work sheet metal,” Fast explained. “Mechanics, heating and ventilation engineers, electrical guys, refrigeration guys. Even got a few plumbers. It’s gonna take a lot of work to get this city up to our standards, you know. This bunch we nabbed mostly from a nearby subterranean construction project.”

“And that’s not even half of them,” Fastbinder said. “Let us show you other grottos.”

It turned out that there was a series of grottos— stone pits with concave walls. The senator was startled when the words Grotto Number Two—Best Food In Earth appeared in buzzing blue neon letters. In the dismal cavern it looked utterly foreign.

“We made an experimental expedition to the surface one night last month. Those morons brought down a sign maker by mistake,” Fast said with a pleasant shrug. “So I thought, what the hell?”

The blue letters flickered, then blazed to life again as Whiteslaw peered down into the catering operation. There were stone tables and stone coolers with heavy plastic sheeting for doors, and everywhere was fervent activity. It could have been the kitchen of any big-city hotel.

“There’s our dumbwaiters,” Fast said. “That’s how we get stuff in and out.” Whiteslaw saw albinos on the edge of the grotto putting supplies into small baskets, then lowering them on booms to waiting kitchen staff below. The basket chains were small gauge. Fast explained that the winches were fitted with governors that were activated if the load was more than forty pounds. “Nobody is gonna get out that way.”

It dawned on Whiteslaw now that the grotto dwellers were imprisoned in their workplaces. The dark windows in the rock walls had to be where they slept.

“How do you keep them motivated?” Whiteslaw asked wonderingly as a man in a chef’s hat gave Fastbinder a subservient smile and gestured at the meal he was preparing.

“That is Horst. He makes lousy sauerbraten,” Fastbinder explained quietly, but smiled and waved back. “Jack, we need a cook who makes good German food.”

“Adding it to the list,” Jack said, tapping on the keys of his PDA with one hand as he steered the golf cart along the edge of the grottos with the other.

Whiteslaw couldn’t help but notice that his question had been ignored.

The words Central Processing blinked on in orange neon, but the grotto’s handful of inhabitants were just sitting around. They were taking turns at a single computer terminal.

“Our next big excursion, we’re gonna get lots of PCs,” Fast said. “I want my own intelligence center to keep watch on the outside world.”

Whiteslaw stuttered. “You’re go-going to let them go on-line? They’ll call for help!”

Fast grinned. “Maybe. But I’ll know about it. And if they do, well…”

Whiteslaw waited. “Well what?”

Fast grinned. Fastbinder nodded, and they drove away from the grottos to the cafeteria. It was the albinos’ cafeteria.

“See that guy?” Fast asked. How could Whiteslaw not see the man dangling over the gathering lunchtime crowd? The obese man was held teasingly high over the albinos by a pair of chains. “See the lights? See the cameras?”

Whiteslaw did indeed see the lights and the wall-mounted video cameras. Jack did something on his PDA and the lights brightened on the prisoner. Small red indicators showed that the cameras were now working. The chain clanked as the prisoner descended.

“Big-screen monitors in all the grottos,” Jack shouted over the joyous grunts and growls of the albinos. “Everybody gets to watch what happens to prisoners who don’t behave themselves.”

‘This is an effective method of motivation.” Fastbinder beamed. “You agree?”

“Yes,” Whiteslaw said. “Can we go now?”

“No. See who is zee main course?”

Whiteslaw realized that he knew the entree personally, as did any American who paid attention to the gamut of elected federal officials. Cecil Luigi was a six-term senator and chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee. Luigi and Whiteslaw were bitter political opponents. The feud had become personal. If there was anyone who would fight hard to oppose Whiteslaw’s rise to the presidency, it would be Senator Luigi.

Luigi recognized Whiteslaw, too, as his corpulent, nude torso descended on the clanking chain connected to manacles on his ankles. The Ways and Means chairman pleaded loudly, “Whiteslaw, please have mercy!”

Fast thumbed his PDA and the chain clanked to a halt. He looked expectantly at Senator Herbert Whiteslaw.

“You want to give him mercy, Herbie?”

“It’s not in my nature,” Whiteslaw said with a mixture of revulsion and elation.

Jack grinned. Fastbinder clapped the senator on the back. The Ways and Means chairman descended again, until he was within reach of the lunchtime crowd, which was still famished, by all appearances. The half-dozen rebels at the coronation ceremony hadn’t been enough meat to satiate a thousand hungry mole people, after all.

They had tea on the veranda. Fastbinder spent fifteen minutes relating his struggles to teach the albinos the art of rock breaking and how, after a week or so, they learned it well enough to hollow out the massive granite boulder that was now the palace of the king.

“I don’t get it, Jacob,” the senator asked finally. “It’s fantastic, sure, but what’s the point of all this? What’s in it for you?” Whiteslaw sneered at the filthy albinos working below them. “They’re just ingrates. They’re useless.” Fastbinder was wearing a tight smile. “On the contrary, they are very much up to zee tasks I need them to do. They are loyal to myself and Jack. They will do whatever I ask, even march to their deaths. This advantage you will not enjoy as President. Even when you are President you will be struggling, day after day, to legitimize your hold on power, and you will be compromising with the other wielders of power. But see, I have already attained a status that is all-powerful, eh?”

Whiteslaw had to concede the point “Still…”

“And as for the albinos, they are my muscle and my workers, but soon I will have a population of civilized human beings large enough to satisfy my social needs. Loyalists, I mean.”

“I see,” Whiteslaw said.

“I see you are beginning to see. The reach of my power is not yet known in geographic terms, but the albinos have legends of their previous generations exploring as far as the land of permanent snow, and as far east as the sea, and as far south as the sea.”

“What south sea are you talking about, exactly?” Whiteslaw asked.

Fastbinder shrugged. “A mystery. Probably the Gulf of Mexico. Regardless, it is a vast territory.”

It was indeed vast. It was the entire North American continent. After their stiff and polite replies, and during the first few hours of the journey back to the surface, Whiteslaw thought about it. He tried to put it out of his mind, but he had forgotten to bring any magazines or books. His mind kept pondering what Fast- binder had said. Could it be true? Was the belowground population really that big?

Jack cocked his head, staring into the mirror of the near-black windows of the interior of Jack’s Earth Drill. JED rolled along smoothly, with the heavily shielded lightning flashes and the muffled noise of frying rock giving its occupants a distant perspective to the violent activity outside.

“Lots of ways my dad could help you out,” Jack was saying. “His albino army will be able to go just about anywhere, including most of the places the U.S. government thought were its best-kept secrets. Anybody gets in your way, we’ll be able to get at them and, you know, take them out of your way. Trouble is, my dad doesn’t think you’ll be able to do much in return.”

“Well—”

“I mean, whatever we need, we take. No problems.”

“I can keep you from being harassed by the military,” Whiteslaw said, trying to sound confident. Jack was tedious company.

“Well, that’s a so-what in my dad’s book. The military’s doing its best already and they’re getting squat for it,” Jack pointed out “You know we’ve only been down here a couple of months. Just think how much stronger we’ll be when we consolidate, bring more albinos into the fold.”

Whiteslaw felt ice in his veins.

“We’re not sure how many there are, mind you,” Jack added nonchalantly. “Maybe a thousand more. Maybe ten thousand.”

“Impossible!”

Jack clammed up for a short while, then turned off the tunnel into a side tunnel and brought the mole to a quick stop. Outside the black glass the frenetic sizzle of lightning vanished. The mole rocked gently forward, then back.

Jack raised the shaded glass, and they looked out into a cavern too big for the headlights to see across. The mole had emerged nose first from the cavern wall, and as they nodded gently, Whiteslaw looked down in horror at the cavern floor far below.

“It’s safe—I welded an anchor on the fly so we wouldn’t drop,” Jack said. “See ’em down there?”

Whiteslaw saw people down there. More albinos, but different. It was hard to tell what was different because they were scurrying around in a blind panic.

Well, no, the senator thought, not a blind panic at all. “They have eyes,” he observed. “Exposed eyes.”

“Cool, huh? I stumbled across them accidentally on one of my trips. Saw the big open place show up on my mapping system and I checked it out and here they were. There’s a couple hundred of them, and I’m God to them now. Watch.” He maneuvered a searchlight on the exterior, revealing a ten-foot high drawing of a toothy worm with lightning coming out of it. It had the head of a man.

The drawing was done in blood. Underneath the drawing was the name of the god, in very crude but antique-looking letters.

The wall read, “Jack.”

“I told them my name,” the kid admitted sheepishly. “They think I’m the greatest. Always making me offerings, see?”

A trio of men emerged from the terrified mob, leading one of their tribe on a leash. They led the prisoner into a stream of water that fell from the ceiling far above. The caked mud sluiced off, revealing a female albino.

“They give you women?” Whiteslaw asked incredulously.

“Yeah, and these are some hot cave-babes. Way nicer looking than the blind ones down below. And when you’re a god they do anything you tell ’em. Want one?”

Whiteslaw thought about it, then decided finally, “I’d have no place to keep it.”

Jack shrugged and announced on the loudspeaker, “Hey, people, I shall return in less than one sleep.”

They backed out of the cavern and continued on their journey to the surface in silence. Whiteslaw found the image of the cave girl stuck in his head. Once she was showered, she had turned out to be a porcelain-skinned, pink-eyed young beauty. She had gazed up at the earth drill with a mixture of adoration and excitement, eager to be of service to her god—or any other deities he hung around with.

“So, anyway, I just found them. Haven’t even told Pops yet,” Jack explained. “The point is this—think how many I might find if I start really looking. Couple hundred here, couple thousand there. The population adds up fast that way, Herbie.”

“Will you tell your father about any of them?” Whiteslaw asked, just for something to talk about.

“Maybe. Maybe not. Pops is being kind of a wet blanket these days. Keeps giving me the cold shoulder cause I haven’t solved the assassins problem yet.”

“The assassins can be dealt with,” Whiteslaw said, as if they were of no consequence. “You’ve done spectacular work as far as I’m concerned.”

“Very upstanding of you to say so.”

“You’re welcome. You know, Jack, your father has been tremendously useful, but it’s pretty obvious that you’re the real brains of this outfit. Without you, Fastbinder wouldn’t keep his hold on the albinos. He couldn’t execute raids of the surface. All his accomplishments are really because of you.”

Jack beamed. “I got news for you, Herbie. Without me, my dad couldn’t even get out of his cave! Only I can make JED work.”

“You’re really the king of the Underworld, Jack,” Whiteslaw observed.

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Jack Fast said.