Sukie was already up into a crouch, starting to move clumsily toward the chamber door, her mouth working. Odd words broke through the mind-scrambled barrier. “Havesorry HopesisterDoc sorr”
Ryan noticed that there was a small pool of liquid where the woman had been sitting, but that made no sense at all to him. “Don’t” he said.
Or thought he said.
Now the familiar black waters of the jump were sucking him down into their whirling center. The last thing Ryan saw was a dark figure, oddly opaque, cross his line of sight. There was the impression of the armaglass door opening and a hideous screaming, roaring noise that filled the universe.
Then the blackness became absolute.
Chapter Six
A darkness beyond any darkness, a cold beyond any cold.
The being that was known as Ryan Cawdor was reduced to a whirling speck of nothing, sucked into an infinite blackness and left there. He was deserted and alone, trapped either as a single neutron, in the sighing chasms that lie beyond the farthest limits of space and time, or as a molecule of matter, caught forever in the depths of his own body.
But part of his mind was still functioning, wrestling with the hideous dilemma of what had happened.
There was the obvious possibility that he had died during the malfunctioned jump, and that what he felt now was simply the endless doom of eternity.
But he was still sentient.
Unusually for the madness within madness that lay at the heart of a jump, he could remember what had happened in those last glassy moments.
Doc’s friend, Sukie Smith, had lost her nerve and changed her mind, deciding that she wouldn’t remain within the silvered armaglass walls of the chamber, but leaving it so late that the jump was already well under way.
Ryan could visualize the door swinging open, just as the shutters clamped shut on his brain.
But had it closed again?
Like a crazed stop-action vid, Ryan seemed to see and feel an infinity of images a bleak moorland and cold steel in his hand and galloping hooves and the bristling of coarse hemp drawn tight around his throat; the pitching yards of an old predark ship and the bucking of yards, ratlines snapping in the teeth of a gale, the long fall to the heaving ocean, dark green, wind-tossed; a vast construction of stone and iron, like a giant’s web, echoing and soundless, the liquid cement closing over him, silent and final.
Back again to space.
Ryan wanted to scream, but he had no mouth and could not.
For Jak Lauren, the jump meant listening forever and a day to a heartbreaking sound of a woman weeping and a small baby endlessly crying.
Mildred saw only fire and smoke, and was sick to her stomach at the overwhelming odor of roasted human flesh.
Dean was floating along vast passages, where the roots of unthinkable trees penetrated and twisted and turned in the stygian blackness. He was holding his breath, knowing that to suck in the darkness would be to lose his soul.
Abe was deeply unconscious, the electrical activity within his brain slowed so much that it was almost flat-lining.
J.B. stood completely motionless in the center of a whirling machine of polished steel and oiled brass.
Cogs and wheels rotated and meshed within fractions of an inch of his helpless, naked body.
To move was to die.
Krysty saw colors that had no name and came from beyond her world, colors that had weight, sound and texture, colors that surrounded her.
Doc wept tears that washed about him, salt and warm, slowly but inexorably filling the oblate spheroid of armored crystal that he realized was to be his tomb through all the ceaseless millennial of forever.
Trader found that someone had scraped all of the gray-pink sludge of his brain from the inside of his skull, leaving it squeaky-clean, like polished ivory.
But, particularly, that hadn’t stopped him from thinking.
And it hadn’t stopped him from being very frightened.
Chapter Seven
Ryan opened his eye and closed it again, immediately.
The sensation of vision, no matter how blurred and out of focus, was enough to bring on a gripping bout of boiling sickness. He swallowed hard, tasting the acid bitterness of bile at the back of his throat. He kept very still and took ten counted, spaced, slow breaths. His right hand reached down for the butt of the SIG-Sauer.
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