Then the road fell. They cried out, they scrambled; suddenly there was cracked concrete around them, and they had fallen. Above them was a jagged width of blue sky between the remaining edges of the road.
"My foot"s caught," Petra cried out.
Arkor was beside her, tugging on the concrete slab that held her.
"Hold on a second," Jon said. He grabbed a free metal strut that still vibrated in the rubble, and jammed it between the slab and the beam it lay on. Using the wreck of an I-beam for a fulcrum, he pried it up.
"There, slip your foot out."
Petra rolled away. "Is the bone broken?" he asked. "I got a friend of mine out of a mine accident that way, once." He let the slab fall again. (And for a moment he stopped, thinking, I knew what to do. I wasn"t clumsy, I knew....)
Petra rubbed her ankle. "No," she said. "I just got my ankle wedged in that crevice, and the concrete fell on top." She stood up, now, picking up the notebook. "Ow," she said. "That hurts."
Arkor held her arm. "Can you walk?"
"With difficulty," Petra said, taking another step and clamping her teeth.
"Alter says to stand on your other foot and shake your injured one around to get the circulation back," Arkor told her.
Petra gritted teeth, and stepped again. "A little better," she said.
"I"m scared. This really hurts. This may be a body that looks like mine, but it hurts, and it hurts like mine." Suddenly she looked off into the city. "Oh h.e.l.l," she said. "He"s in there. Let"s go."
They went forward again, this time under the road. The sidewalks, deserted and graying, slipped past. They pa.s.sed a shopping section; teeth of broken gla.s.s gaped in the frames of store windows. Above, two roads veered and crossed, making a black, extended swastika on a patch of white clouds.
Then a sudden rumbling.
Silence.
They stopped.
Now a crash, thunderous and protracted. An odor of dust reached them.
"He"s there," Arkor said.
"Yes," said Jon.
"I can...."
Then the City exploded. There was one instant of very real agony for Jon as the pavement beneath his feet shot up at him, and he reached his mind out as a shard of concrete knocked in his face (all the time crying, _No, no, I"ve just become Jon Koshar, I"m not supposed to_ ... as a lost Prince had cried out half a year and half a universe away) and at the same time, _There...._
Petra got a chance to see the face of the building beside them rip off a foot before the air blast tore the notebook from her hands, and at the same time she welled her thoughts from behind the bone confines of her skull. _There...._
And Arkor"s thoughts (he never saw the explosion because he blinked just then) tore out through his eyelids as fragmented steel tore into them.
_There...._
It was cold, it was black. For a moment they saw with a spectrum that reached from the star-wide waves of novas to the micro-micron skittering of neutrinos. And it was black, and completely cold. A rarefied breeze of ionized hydrogen (approximately two particles per cubic rod) floated over half a light year. Once, a herd of pale photons dashed through them from a deflected glare on some dying sun a trillion eons past. Other than that, there was silence, save for the hum of one lone galaxy, eternities away. They hovered, frozen, staring into nothing, above, below, behind, contemplating what they had seen.
Then, the green of beetles" wings, and they flailed into the blood of sensation from the blackness, whirled into red flame the color of polished carbuncle, smoothly through the nerves and into the brain; then, before the blue smoke, burning blue through the lightning seared axion of their corporate organisms, they were snared within the heat and electric imminency of a web of silver fire.
CHAPTER XII
In the laboratory tower of Toron, the transparent bubble above the receiving stage brightened. In shimmering haze on the platform, the transparent figures solidified. Then Alter and Tel slipped beneath the rail on the stage and dropped down to the floor (Alter still wore the hospital robe and the cast on her left arm) while Arkor, Jon, and Petra used the metal stairway to descend. A battery of relays snapped somewhere and the scarlet heads of forty-nine switches by the window snapped to off. The globe faded.
"A bit more explanation," Petra was saying. "Hey, kids, keep quiet."
"Well, as far as the Lord of the Flames goes, on Earth anyway, it"s more or less trivial and irrelevant," said Arkor. "You"re still right. This war is in Toromon, not outside it."
"My curiosity is still peaked," Jon said. "So give."
"From what I gathered while I saw scanning the minds of those two who came out of the generator building with the Lord of the Flames (I should say the host of the Lord of the Flames), there"s a tribe behind the barrier which resembles more or less what man might have been forty or fifty thousand years ago. Physically they"re squat, thick-boned, and have the elements of a social system. Mentally they"re pretty thick and squat too. The Lord of the Flames got into one of them just about when he was at age four. Then he gave the kid about sixty thousand years worth of technical information. So he began building all sorts of goodies, forcing his people to help him, using some equipment from a ruined city that dates from pre-Great Fire times behind the barrier.
That"s how the generators and the anti-aircraft guns got constructed."
"Our war is still going on," Jon said.
"Well, the Lord of the Flames is no longer with us," said Petra. "We"ve chased it to the other end of the universe. Now that we"ve removed what external reason there was for the war, we"ve got to think about the internal ones."
"What are you going to do immediately about the kids?" Jon asked.
"I think the best thing for them to do is to go off to my estate for a little while," Petra said.
"It"s on an island, isn"t it?" Tel asked.
"That"s right," Petra said.
"Gee, Alter. Now I can teach you how to fish, and we"ll be right by the sea."
"What about Uske?" Arkor asked. "You can either walk into his room and interrupt an obscene dream he"s having, and present your case and be arrested for treason, or you can leave well enough alone at this point and wait till the opportunity comes to do something constructive."
Suddenly Jon grinned. "Hey, you say he"s asleep?" He turned and bounded for the door.
"What are you going to do?" Petra called.
Jon looked at Arkor. "Read my mind," he said.
Then Arkor laughed.
In his bedroom, Uske rolled over through a silken rustle, opened one eye, and thought he heard a sound.
"Hey, stupid," someone whispered.
Uske reached out of bed and pressed the night light. A dim orange glow did not quite fill half the room.
"Now don"t get panicky," continued the voice. "You"re dreaming."