“Take over,” he shouted at Bill. “Go as fast as you can, then I take over again.” Turn and turn about it took them less than three minutes to saw all the way through the pipe. Litvok slipped the saw back into his clothes and picked up the hammer. “Get ready,” he said, spitting on his hands and then taking a mighty swing at the pipe.
Two blows did it; the top part of the severed pipe bent out of alignment with the bottom, and from the opening began to pour an endless stream of linked green frankfurters. Litvok grabbed the end of the chain and threw it over Bill’s shoulder, then began to coil loops of the things over his shoulders and arms, higher and higher. They reached the level of Bill’s eyes and he could read the white lettering stamped all over their grass-green forms. CHLORA-FILLIES they read, and THERE’S SUNSHINE IN EVERY LINK! and THE EQUINE WURST OF DISTINCTION, and TRY OUR DOBBIN-BURGERS NEXT TIME!
“Enough … ” Bill groaned, staggering under the weight. Litvok snapped the chain and began twining them over his own shoulders, when the flow of shiny green forms suddenly ceased. He pulled the last links from the pipe and pushed out the door.
“The alarm went, they’re onto us. Get out fast before the cops get herel” He whistled shrilly, and the lookouts came running to join them. They fled, Bill stumbling under the weight of the wursts, in a nightmare race through tunnels, down stairs, ladders, and oily tubes, until they reached a dusty, deserted area where the dim lights were few and far between. Litvok pried a manhole up from the floor, and they dropped down one by one, to crawl through a cable and tube tunnel between levels. Schmutzig and Sporco came last to pick up the sausages that fell from Bill’s aching back. Finally, through a pried-out grill, they reached their coal-black destination, and Bill collapsed onto the rubble-covered floor. With cries of greed the others stripped Bill of his cargo, and within a minute a fire was crackling in a metal wastebasket and the green redhots were toasting on a rack.
The delicious smell of roasting chlorophyll roused Bill, and he looked around with interest. By the flickering firelight he saw that they were in an immense chamber that vanished into the gloom in all directions. Thick pillars supported the ceiling and the city above, while between them loomed immense piles and heaps of all sizes. The old man, Sporco, walked over to the nearest heap and wrenched something free. When he returned Bill could see that he had sheets of paper that he began to feed one by one into the fire. One of the sheets fell near Bill and he saw, before he stuffed it into the flames, that it was a government form of some kind, yellow with age.
Though Bill had never enjoyed Chlora-fillies, he relished them now. Appetite was the sauce, and the burning paper added a new taste tang. They washed the sausages down with rusty water from a pail kept under a permanent drip from a pipe and feasted like kings. This is the good life, Bill thought, pulling another filly from the fire and blowing on it, good food, good drink, good companions. A free man.
Litvok and the old one were already asleep on beds of crumpled paper when the other man, Schmutzig, sidled over to Bill.
“Have you found my ID card?” he asked in a hoarse whisper, and Bill realized the man was mad. The flames reflected eerily from the cracked lenses of his glasses, and Bill could see that they had silver frames and must have once been very expensive. Around Schmutzig’s neck, half hidden by his ragged beard, was the cracked remains of a collar and the tom shard of a once fine cravat.
“No I haven’t seen your ID card,” Bill said, “in fact I haven’t seen mine since the first sergeant took it away from me and forgot to give it back.” Bill began to feel song for himself again, and the foul frankfurters were sitting like lead in his stomach. Schmutzig ignored his answer, immersed as he was in his own far more interesting monomania.