Jazz had been riding only three or four minutes, had kept his speed even at maybe twenty, twenty-five miles per hour, when without warning he breached the sphere’s outer skin. For it was a sphere on this side, too, he realized as he tumbled in mid-air. The trouble was that on this side the sphere seemed parked in the throat of what looked like a crater, and the crater’s rim was three feet higher than the surrounding terrain.
The bike fell, Jazz too, managing somehow to kick himself free of the rotating machine, and both of them collided jarringly with hard earth and scattered rocks. Winded, Jazz lay there for a moment and let his senses stop reeling. Then he sat up and looked all about. And then he knew how lucky he’d been.
The dazzling white sphere was perhaps thirty feet across, and all around its perimeter, penetrating the earth and the crater walls alike to a radius of maybe seventy feet, magmass wormholes gaped everywhere. Jazz had landed between two such holes, and he knew it was only a matter of good fortune that he’d not been pitched headlong down the throat of either one of them. Their walls were glass smooth and very nearly perpendicular, and their depth entirely conjectural; once in, it would be one hell of a job to climb out again.
Jazz glanced at the sphere, turned his face away before the dazzle blinded him. A giant, illuminated golf ball plopped down in wet mortar and left to dry out. That’s what it looked like. ‘But who in hell drove it here?’ Jazz muttered to himself. ‘And why didn’t he shout “fore”?’
He stood up and checked himself over, finding only bumps and bruises. Then (and despite the fact that he felt almost compelled to stand still and simply gape at the weird world he’d entered) he went to the bike and examined it for damage. Its front forks were badly twisted and the wheel jammed immovably between them. If he had a spanner and could get the wheel off, then he might be able to straighten the forks one at a time using brute strength. But… he had no spanner.
So … what about tools in general?
He released catches on the bike’s seat and tilted it back . . . the tool compartment underneath was empty. Now the machine was doomed to lie here until it rusted. So much for transport . . .
Now Jazz gave a thought to Karl Vyotsky. The Russian was maybe one-and-a-half to two miles behind him. Forty minutes at the outside, even weighed down with equipment. The last thing Jazz wanted was still to be here when Vyotsky arrived. But he must do one more thing before he moved off.
He had a small pocket radio, a walkie-talkie that Khuv had insisted he bring with him. Now he switched it on and spoke briefly into the mouthpiece: ‘Comrade bastard Major Khuv? This is Simmons. I’m through to the other side, and I’m not going to tell you a bloody thing about how I got here or what it’s like! How does that grab you?’
No answer, not even static. Or perhaps the very faintest, far-distant hiss and crackle. Nothing that remotely constituted an answer, anyway. Jazz hadn’t really expected anything; if the others hadn’t been able to get through, why should he be different? But:
‘Hello, this is Simmons,’ he tried again. ‘Anyone out there?’ Still nothing. The radio, for all that it weighed only a pound, was now ‘dead’ weight, useless to him. ‘Balls!’ he said into the mouthpiece, and pitched it into one of the magmass holes where it slid from view.
And now . . . now it was time to take a deep breath and really have a good look at where he’d landed.
Jazz was glad then that he’d dealt with things in their correct order of priority. For the fact was he could have just stood and gaped at the world on this side of the Perchorsk Gate for a very, very long time. It was in part familiar and fascinating, in part strange and frightening, but it was all fantastic. The eye was quite baffled by contrasts which might well be compared to a surreal landscape, except that they were all too real.