“Hello?” he said. He sat up again. His head still hurt, and the water running down his back had filled a puddle in his shirt that now ran down his jeans. He jumped up, shaking it out of his legs. He grimaced at the pain that shot through the back of his eyes, shook his head, and blinked, then looked around.
“It’s a cave, I guess. I’ve fallen into a cave.” This was reasonable enough, and comforted him as an explanation, though of course he couldn’t for the life of him figure out what cave or where or why. He’d never been in a cave, though he’d seen them on TV. For now, though, he was happy to be able to say where he was at all.
“A cave. Definitely a cave. Okay. Good.”
Now what?
He craned his neck and looked up from where he’d fallen. Up and up and up and up and up, he could see at the very top a tiny patch of cold gray sky. Daylight. He’d been lying here a long time.
“Drip...drip...drip....”
Foul smelling water dripped down the tangle of torn vines and branches that must have stopped his fall.
“Lucky, huh?” he said in a cheerful voice, and winced again at the pain in his head. Then he remembered the Dog. He looked around. “Dog,” he said. “You there?” He gave a hopeful whistle. “Here, boy. Here, boy.” And he blinked again as his eyes got accustomed to the dim light.
He could see the source of that light now, at the end of a long tunnel. He had to squat down to look into it, the passage was so short and narrow—just big enough for a small boy to crawl through.
Snotty shrugged, got down on his hands and knees, and crawled.
The tunnel was shorter than it looked. As Snotty crawled, the light got brighter and golder, and he felt a little of its warmth. There were some ferns growing across the tunnel’s outside face, blocking it. He pushed them out of the way, and the sun blazed inside. Snotty, startled, would have jumped backward, except he was hemmed in. To go forward, he had to scrabble and dig at the sides of the tunnel. After about ten minutes’ effort, he widened it just enough so that he could wiggle through. On the other side, he straightened up and dusted himself off.
The first thing he noticed was the Silence. The sounds of the great city Megalopolis had completely disappeared. In place of them were the singing of birds and the rustling of leaves in a breeze. Except for these, it all was pretty quiet. Certainly quieter than anything Snotty was used to.
This made him nervous.
Trying to get his bearings, he saw he stood on a green hillside. This was covered with soft grass and wildflowers of white and purple and yellow—a much different landscape than the one he was used to. His eyes narrowed suspiciously as he looked around. The mountain he’d crawled out of was at his back, and this was taller than the hills rolling away from him on three sides. At their foot was a long broad plain that spread out until it reached an even taller mountain range, far away.
“Great,” Snotty sighed. “Nature. Swell.”
Snotty knew Nature when he saw it, of course, having learned about mountains and rivers and oceans and those kinds of things in his school’s lone science class—at least, until he stopped going. Nature hadn’t interested him much. He couldn’t see the use of it.25
“Still, it’s something new, right?” he said to himself, cheering up. “Maybe it’ll be a laugh. An adventure, anyway.” At that thought, Snotty’s little red eyes gleamed. He liked adventures, no matter what kind. And this was one of the nicest things about him—although it’s true there wasn’t much in the way of competition.
So, set for adventure, Snotty checked out the landscape.
The rolling hills themselves he dismissed. “Boring,” he commented briefly, looking skeptically at their tufts of green and bursts of flower. Near their bottom, though, was a more rugged bit, gray and brown and rocky.
“That looks kind of interesting,” he admitted to himself.
He couldn’t quite make out what happened past that, even though he squinted and shaded his eyes against an unfamiliar sun. There seemed to be a band of dark green, maybe a strip of trees or something, then beyond that a mix of green and brown and black. There were a lot of bright red and black things moving around there—from up here they looked like beetles. But he didn’t worry about that now. Just past that, though, was something more interesting: a camp, or a fairground, covered with lots of tents and flags, all red and purple and gold and emerald green.
Snotty liked that. Tents meant people, and people meant business opportunities. Automatically, Snotty began to wonder which of his stories might play the best with an adult audience here. And he went on considering the view.
Beyond the camp was a yellow desert that spread out around the multicolored tents until it stopped at another row of foothills, which in their turn rose up into the farthest-off range of green and brown and white mountains. Down the sides of these mountains ran a tangle of creeks, streams, and rivers—water of all kinds—that either ran into a larger river below or stopped at the edge of the vast glowing desert.
Snotty wasn’t much interested in any of that.
One thing did catch his eye: a triangular and pure white peak that stood up behind the mountains on the far horizon, the tallest and farthest and grandest of them all. As Snotty looked at this impressive sight, his mouth half open, a cloud rose up behind it and covered it in shadow. There was a far off rumble of thunder. “Hmm,” he said. “That’s the tallest thing there is around here.” Snotty was impressed, as he always was with anything the biggest, the tallest, or the most grand. All Megalopolitans were like that, actually.
“But what I really need is some action,” Snotty thought to himself. (All Megalopolitans liked action, too.) “And I’m not getting much of that just standing here, am I? So...”
Without worrying too much about what he would do when he got wherever it was, he started down the hill. It was, after all, the only way ahead.
As he walked, though, he started to feel lonely. Now, Snotty was not used to feeling lonely, though he had always been very much alone, and so he didn’t at first recognize this for what it was. “Head for those tents, that’s my best bet,” he thought, making his way down the boulder-strewn hill. “Bound to be money in a place like that.” As he went on, he considered what story he would tell the people he met about who he was and what he was doing there. These were obviously people who liked Nature, he thought with a grimace, so he tailored it to what he thought Nature-loving people would like. “My uncle, who’s a marine biologist...no, marine, that’s the ocean, right? My uncle, who’s a BOTANIST, brought me...what do they call it? Camping, right. He brought me camping. And I got lost...and my uncle will be so worried...and he’ll really want to reward anyone who takes care of me till he comes...” As he went on automatically spinning a new story to himself, he became aware of a vague pain in his chest. “Must’ve hurt myself when I fell,” he reasoned, trying to ignore it. But as he went on, the pain got sharper and harsher. Soon it hurt so much that he had to stop and catch his breath.
This was Loneliness. But Snotty didn’t recognize
