left but gritty road rolling underneath us, a circle of light leading us farther into a strange dark night.
'Extremely sharp left turn ahead,' the computer told me. It was, but I made it.
'Estimate ETA to aperture,' I instructed.
'ETA three minutes thirty-two seconds, at present speed. Stand by to bear to extreme right at next intersection.'
Ahead the road branched off at weird angles. The extreme right was almost too sharp a turn to make without slowing down. But you can't slow down in the middle of a portal, so I juiced up the rollers, swung the control bars hard to the right, and prayed. We almost tipped over.
'Sam, we have to get our speed up.' I figured I had cnough time here to increase speed slowly enough to avoid surging, which made a vehicle unstable when in the grip of extreme tidal forces.
'Almost, almost, almost,' Sam breathed as he continued to punch madly at the keyboard.
So I drove on through the streets of the dark city.
Then came a hand on my shoulder, unexpected, improbable, a calm hand, and a calm voice, saying, 'Jake.'
I knew who it was. For some reason I wasn't surprised. 'Yuri,' I said, without looking back.
'Think of it, Jake,' he said. 'Each corner here a gateway to different eras of the history of the universe.'
'You think of it, Yuri. I'm busy.'
'Of course. But you'll be needing the Substratum again.'
'Sure could use it.'
The rig lurched as something smacked into us from the rear.
'Jesus,' I said, 'he's gone completely nuts. Trying to kill us all.'
Moore's buggy gave the rig a further nudge, backed off, then smashed into the back end. The trailer gave a shudder, slid out a bit, then swung back into line.
'Sharp left ahead,' the computer said phlegmatically. 'Very dangerous under present circumstances.' It could have been giving a weather report.
'Not just yet, Jake,' Yuri told me gently.
'No?'
'GOT IT!' Sam shouted as the main engine kicked in.
I surged, preferring to take the awful risk rather than let Moore keep trying to knock us into a cylinder. But I lost the gamble. Something took hold of the rig, lifted us right off the road…
… then had second thoughts and let us drop. Part of the trailer landed outside the safe lane, and the cab set down at a forty-five-degree angle to the trailer. I fought at the controls as every safety servo in the rig struggled to straighten us out. The rear of the trailer floated up again like a paper in the wind, set gently back down, this time within the guide lane, but jackknifing to the right. I wrenched the control bars to correct. The trailer wafted back into line, then rebounded to the left, which I corrected for as well.
The rig was squirming now like a snake wriggling our of an old skin. It wouldn't stop. Every correcting maneuver seemed to generate an unexpected new counterforce, offsetting and negating the correction. It seemed there was nothing I could do to make the rig stop swaying, swerving, shaking, buffeting this way and that, nothing I could think of doing that I hadn't already done.
'You have missed the left turn,' the computer informed me.
We were not going back to Terran Maze. We would never go back.
'He's coming alongside!' Sam shouted, looking out the port to the left.
I couldn't see, but felt Moore banging his armored buggy against the rig as he edged his way toward the front. There must have been at least some space to squeeze through an the side. I had no control over the rig, and couldn't make a move against him.
'He's not in the safe lane!' Sam said. 'He's-'
Then I saw Moore's rig as it rose from the road, lifted by an unseen gravitational hand. And for just the barest instant, I saw Moore's face through the small front port of his doomed vehicle. He looked right at me, and his ghastly smile chilled me to the core.
I'll see you in Hell.
Then the vehicle was gone.
'Cover your eyes!'
Strange thing to say to a starrigger while he's operating his vehicle, but I knew why. The atoms of Moore's vehicle, after being torn one from another, would make a few orbits about a cylinder before being sucked into it, and would in the process release synchrotron radiation, along with a lot of light.
The flash didn't blind me, but it left sparkling dots chasing each other in front of my eyes. Perhaps that's why I didn't see that the road made a sharp right up ahead. The computer saw it, tried to warn me, too late. Sam leaped out of his chair and tried to take the controls.
Too late. We were out of the safe lane, off the road completely, but still on the ground. Giant fists batted at us, and invisible forces pushed and pulled at us. I became increasingly amazed that we were still alive, still traveling. I was still in my truck, my rig. My senses were heightened now, here in these last moments of my existence. I was still where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do, what I had always wanted to do. Sam was with me, and we'd had a good run.
Then Yuri said to me, 'You're about to make history, Jake. In a very real sense.'
Suddenly the rig was airborne, rising into the dark sculpted spaces of the portal like some ungainly; impossible aircraft on its first and last flight, hurtling through the darkness toward a hole in the sky-a hole with blurred edges, and as it loomed near, about to suck us up, I remarked to no one in particular that it looked like an aperture-the hole in space that a portal creates. And it did, it did look like an aperture; I made a mental note to someday look into the mystery of what an aperture would be doing this far off the road's surface, as they were usually lower down, like right off the road, so vehicles could drive into them. I was thinking this as the rig somehow, miraculously, straightened out and entered the aperture in a more or less head-on manner.
And then there was nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.
28
Nothing. Which I thought rather impossible, so I filled the void with something. 'Let there be anything,' I said.
And lo. Yuri beside me. 'Consider the following events as happening in no time at all,' he said.
'Hey, I'm easy,' I said.
He laughed. 'I've known you for only a short while, Jake, but I can say that you're one of the most remarkable individuals I've ever met.'
'Everyone tells me that.'
'As well they should. Shall we go?'
'Where? There doesn't seem to be anyplace to go around here. Fact is, there doesn't seem to be…' I put an arm around his shoulders. 'Hey, Yuri, old buddy, listen. You're not going to tell me that you're the Ghost of Christmas Past or something, are you?'
He hesitated for a moment. 'Dickens? Dickens. I'm rather weak in English literature, I'm afraid.'
'Now, I've always loved Dostoevsky. I can quote you chapter and verse of The Possessed.'
'I've never read him.'
I was shocked. 'And you call yourself educated?'
'Hardly. The universe must be protected from scientists with literary pretensions.'
'Well, you've done your duty, Yuri, old pal. Now. What did you have in mind?'
'Let's walk, Jake.'
'On what? I don't see- Oh.' I felt a floor underneath my boots. Smooth, a little slippery, as if freshly waxed. I looked. There was a bit of a gloss to it.
We walked. As we did, I got the impression of a huge interior space surrounding us. A vast hall, dark, its features black-on-black, unseen, yet somehow felt. The roof soared kilometers above. Our footsteps echoed.
