7.a.vii.
Franklin Buck
was growing bored with his terror. Would
this, by all guesses, fatal plummet ever end?
Not all of the descent since that first drop off had been free fall. A majority to be sure, but after a while he’d
noticed a gradual leveling off, some wide corkscrewing, a few more chasm-like
drops, and even a wiggling zigzag sort of motion. The final result of all that
had been impatience.
Boredom even.
During part of
his fall the fact that he was dropping toward his death had slipped his
mind. He found himself wondering if his
lawn needed mowing and, if so, could he get by for another week or so without
doing the edging.
A new
structural element in the shaft brought Franklin ’s
attention back to his current plummeting state.
The tube’s color shifted to a bright purple and arched upward and over,
throwing Franklin into a series of
dizzying loops. His speed decreased
dramatically. Then he was poured into a
green, translucent section of tubing which traced a lazy, shallow, downward
track. He could see through the tube
wall, but there wasn’t much to see.
Concrete, pipes, and the occasional section of green, translucent, human
transport tube.
His feet
bumped against something soft and his forward progress stopped. He looked up and saw a round hatch. There was a silver lever on one side of the
hatch door and a towel rack on the other with a plush beach towel hanging from
it.
