The rose-colored light was coming from glass tubes which ran along the ceiling of the shaft in parallel rows. Some—about one in every three—were dark, and others sputtered fitfully, but at least half of them were still working. Neon tubing, Jake thought, amazed. How about that?
Gasher dropped down beside him. He saw Jake’s expression of surprise and grinned. “Nice, ennet? Cool in the summer, warm in the winter, and so much food that five hunnert men couldn’t eat it in five hunnert years. And do yer know the best part, squint? The very best part of the whole coozy fakement?”
Jake shook his head.
“Farkin Pubies don’t have the leastest idear the place even exists. They think there’s monsters down here. Catch a Pubie goin within twenty feet of a sewer-cap, less’n he has to!”
He threw his head back and laughed heartily. Jake didn’t join in, even though a cold voice in the back of his mind told him it might be politic to do so. He didn’t join in because he knew exactly how the Pubes felt. There were monsters under the city—trolls and boggerts and orcs. Hadn’t he been captured by just such a one?
Gasher shoved him to the left. “Garn—almost there now. Hup!”
They jogged on, their footfalls chasing them in a pack of echoes. After ten or fifteen minutes of this, Jake saw a watertight hatchway about two hundred yards ahead. As they drew closer, he could see a big valve-wheel sticking out of it. A communicator box was mounted on the wall to the right.
“I’m blown out,” Gasher gasped as they reached the door at the end of the tunnel. “Doin’s like this are too much for an inwalid like yer old pal, so they are!” He thumbed the button on the intercom and bawled: “I got im, Tick-Tock—got him as dandy as you please! Didn’t even muss ’is hair! Didn’t I tell yer I would? Trust the Gasherman, I said, for he’ll leadjer straight and true! Now open up and let us in!”
He let go of the button and looked impatiently at the door. The valve-wheel didn’t turn. Instead a flat, drawling voice came out of the intercom speaker: “What’s the password?”
Gasher frowned horribly, scratched his chin with his long, dirty nails, then lifted his eyepatch and swabbed out another clot of yellow-green goo. “Tick-Tock and his passwords!” he said to Jake. He sounded worried as well as irritated. “He’s a trig cove, but that’s takin it a deal too far if you ask me, so it is.”
He pushed the button and yelled, “Come on, Tick-Tock! If you don’t reckergnize the sound of my voice, you need a heary-aid!”
“Oh, I recognize it,” the drawling voice returned. To Jake it sounded like Jerry Reed, who played Burt Reynolds’s sidekick in Smokey and the Bandit. “But I don’t know who’s with you, do I? Or have you forgotten that the camera out there went tits-up last year? You give the password, Gasher, or you can rot out there!”