I sighed. 'Well…'
We threw him in. I used another mine to blow a shelf of rock to smithereens. John and the rest, who had been looking on from a distance, came over to help us carry the pieces over and cover him up. We filled the hole to about three quarters of the way, up, making a sort of sunken cairn, then kicked in what little loose dirt was handy. Everybody helped but Darla, and I didn't blame her.
And that was that. We stool around, not very eager to get back into our traveling prison. I wasn't very worried about Moore trying something, not with the Roadbugs around.
Darla was gazing off into the distance.
'If there is a heaven, I imagine it would look something like this place.'
I looked out. It was the most Earthlike planet I'd ever seen.
I could have sworn that the trees in the closest stand of timber were Douglas firs. The sky was purest blue, daubed with fleecy clouds. The air carried familiar smells, the tall grasses were kelly green, waving in a benign breeze. A clear stream flowed through a dip in the terrain to the left. A gentle hill rose from the far bank?great place for a farmhouse, nice little place indeed.
'You could find peace here,' Darla said.
I watched her for a moment. Then she came out of her daydream, gave me a strange little smile, and walked off.
Winnie and George were having a good time, chasing each other through the grass like two kids?which they were, in a way.
'We go home!' Winnie had said when asked where she thought we were being taken.
'Home!' George had echoed.
Everyone still wondered what they meant.
An hour had gone by quickly.
'Okay, everybody,' I said. 'I hate to say it, but we should probably get back aboard. The Bugs are probably getting impatient.'
Groans. But they all climbed in.
We told Ragna and Oni to come with us. They protested but finally gave in, and after running to fetch some things, they climbed aboard.
Before I did, I looked toward Moore's string of vehicles. They had been watching us enviously through the ports the whole while. Apparently, their doors had been sealed after they'd deposited the body.
'Too bad, kids,' I yelled. 'Be good and they might let you out for recess next time.'
Puzzled looks from the boys. What'd he say?
We watched it happen on a lifeless planet with a thin, clear atmosphere of carbon dioxide. Around us, endless plains of orange dirt rolled out to a featureless horizon.
We saw a Bug road crew create and spin up a cylinder.
It was about a week after the rest stop. We hadn't run out of food, but most of the good stuff had been consumed. We assumed Moore and his gang were in bad shape in that regard. We had gotten a few desperate calls.
On our arrival, we had discovered a number of Bugs moving about, towing strange equipment and generally scurrying back and forth over the road. Farther down the road, there were more gathered a few kilometers from where the portal should have been.
Our Bug trainmen pulled us over not far from the road crew. Out on the plain, something was happening. A gray shadow of a cylinder appeared, wavering at first, then stabilizing and taking on substance. The shadow darkened, becoming an inky shaft jutting into an orange sky. Gradually, the cylinder took on its familiar hue, which is to say it was no color at all except that of black velvet at midnight.
We watched, mouths agape.
Yuri, though, was excited. 'I was right! Damned if I wasn't right. They're made of pure virtual particles. The goddamn things don't even exist?'
'What do you mean?' John asked.
'I don't have the ghost of an idea how it's done, but these objects are being sustained in their existence from microsecond to microsecond. No, let me correct that. The time interval has to be vastly smaller. Perhaps the mass that makes up cylinder only exists within an increment shorter than the Planck limit, less time than it takes light to cross the diameter of a proton. But string those infinitely tiny blips of time together, and the mass takes on virtual existence. The thing of it is, anything goes within that interval. The physical laws of our continuum are null and void. You can create a new-class of matter and a new set of physical realities in there. You can do anything, as long as it's canceled out within a short enough period of time. Our universe looks the other way. It's like a student making rude faces when the teacher's back is turned and instantly becoming a model pupil when the teacher spins around to catch him at it.'
'I think I'm understanding this,' John said. 'Somewhat.'
'I won't say it's very simple,' Yuri went on. 'But what's important here is understanding that this new kind of mass may have, and probably does have, radically different gravitational characteristics. That's how the gravitational fields around a cylinder can be shaped and tailored so as not to interfere with the planet it rests on. That's how the effect zone can be so limited. And that may be how the field is cut off precisely at the level of the road surface and centimeters off the ground.'
'Pretty slick,' Sam said.
Yuri laughed. 'Yes, yes, it is.'
I said, 'Everybody's always wondered what would happen if the machinery holding up a cylinder were to fail.'
'Exactly,' Yuri said. 'And the answer is?the cylinder would simply cease to exist! They're no more than projections, like the images of a motion picture film. If you turn off the projector, they disappear.'
'But they are real, in a sense,' Roland said. 'Aren't they?'
'In a sense,' Yuri said. 'Taken one frame at a time, one infinitesimal interval, they are the stuff of nonexistence. But taken as a progression of serial events in a block of real time, they have virtual existence. Virtual?possessing qualities or being something in effect or essence, though not in actual fact.'
Zoya said, 'Congratulations, Yuri. Your theories were precisely on target.'
It wasn't grudging, but it was cool.
Yuri's smile faded. 'Thank you, Zoya. We must of course collaborate on the paper.' His expression turned grim. 'If there was only some way to get out and use our instruments.'
'Pity,' Zoya said.
'Where do you think the machinery that sustains the cylinders is located?' Liam asked Yuri.
'Most likely it's beneath the ground at the portal site. Perhaps in the roadbed itself.'
I nodded. 'Like Sam said, pretty slick.'
Eventually my gaze was drawn elsewhere. I hadn't noticed it at first, for understandable reasons, but there was a huge circular paved area off the left shoulder, connected to the road by short ramp made of Skyway material:
Our train started up again. The locomotive Bug made a sharp turn onto the ramp, dragged us to the middle of the disk and stopped. There were other disks, about half a dozen of them, spaced at even intervals up and down the road. Like this one, they were colored silver.
'Have we been shunted off to a siding?' Sam wondered.
'Yeah,' I said, 'to take on coal and water.'
There was about a ten minute wait. We looked out the starboard ports but nothing was happening out on the plain at the portal site.
Then suddenly, something very disconcerting happened.
The world began to tilt.
It wasn't us, or didn't seem to be. Everything seemed normal and it felt as if we were still level. It was the ground that appeared to drop from beneath us. Looking straight ahead, we saw sky. The ground looked to be tilted down forty-five degrees from the disk?but of course it was the disk that was tilting up.
'Strap in, everybody,' I yelled. 'Just in case.'
'Jake!' Susan screamed. 'What's happening?'
