"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 materiaclass="underline"
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?"
"Um, I think we're going to take off."
And we did.
Oh, did we take off.
The planet dropped away from us. Our acceleration must have been a hundred Gs. We felt nothing. We heard nothing.
"Sam, are you registering any airspeed at all?"
"None. 'Course, that can't be."
"Maybe, if there's some kind of force field around us. Can you see a slipstream or contrail behind us?"
"Yup, you're right, there is."
Presently, the sky darkened and the curve of the planet appeared. Ahead was star-sprinkled blackness. We were in space, just like that.
"Incredible," Yuri murmured. "Absolutely…"
As distance increased, the visually-induced sensation of speed abated. We floated above the planet for a while, banking to the right. The still mammoth but slowly dwindling orange disk of the world below heaved full into the starboard ports. Then the terminator line came over the horizon and swept past. We were heading for the dark side and away from the sun.
Roland's face was transfixed with delight. His grin drew a crescent from ear to ear and he was giggling like a three-year-old child on his first merry-go-round. His Oriental eyes were narrowed to curved slits. He looked absolutely insane.
"Spaceship!" he burbled, then laughed maniacally.
"Yeah, neat," I said. "Jesus Christ, Roland, take it easy."
Everyone else was silent and awed to the very marrow.
The planet waned to a thin bright crescent and dropped away behind. Oblivious to the laws of physics as they are commonly understood, our magic disk, our spaceship, whisked us at unimaginable speeds into deep space. We were like meat on a serving dish. The planet crept to the stern, dwindling fast, and by the time I could get it on the rearview screens it had been reduced to a tiny scratch against the dark wall of night. Gone.
"Sam, can you get any kind of estimation of our speed?"
"Trying," he said. A moment went by, then he went on, "You wouldn't believe it. I can't believe it. We're accelerating so fast I can't even give you numbers. Call it umpteen million klicks per second and still accelerating."
"Carl," I said, "did your flying saucer look anything like this?"
"Nah, but I bet it went as fast."
"I'll have to try for star readings now," Sam said.
The illusion of speed was gone now that there weren't any points of reference. But even the stars, what little of them there were, seemed to be shifting like distant scenic features as we flew past. If Sam's readings were to be believed, we would be out of the local solar system and into interstellar space in a matter of a few hours, a day at the most.
"By Christ," was all Sean could say, staring out the port. "By Christ."
"Well, gang," I said, "what do you make of this?"
"If Bugs can fly," Carl wondered, "why do they run on the road?"
"Good question," I said. "But I never doubted that Bugs could do anything they wanted to do. They probably keep to the Skyway for their own good reasons. Which are… who knows?"
"The stars," Yuri said, leaning forward in his seat and looking out the front port.
The stars ahead were taking on a violet-blue cast, and in an area directly in line with our path, they were disappearing.
"We're approaching lightspeed," Yuri said. He sighed and leaned back, shaking his' head, his expression troubled. "I may be losing my mind."
"Hang on for a while," I said, but I knew what he meant. There is only so much wonderment the human mind can absorb before it just takes a cab. This journey had been one long assault on the limits of endurance.
"Anybody have any speculation?" I asked, "on where they're taking us, and why?"
"I think we've pretty much run that subject into the ground over the past month," Susan answered. "Haven't we? I mean, first we thought they were taking us to Bug jail, then back to T-Maze, then to the Roadbuilders, and now… God, who could possibly guess? What would the Roadbuilders be doing off the road?"
John said, "I think at this point we have to dispose of all the common assumptions made about the Skyway and whoever created it. None of the usual explanations ever made any sense anyway."
"Exactly," Yuri said. "It's always been taken for granted that the Skyway is an artifact of some long-vanished civilization. But just think about it. Here we have a road system that actually goes nowhere. There are no ruins of cities along it, nothing that would indicate that the road was ever used by those who built it. There were always the patrol vehicles―but now we know they're not vehicles at all but actual beings of some kind. Jake said it best, I think, when he likened them to civil servants. The Bugs were created to keep the road passable and relatively safe… for us. I've always believed that the Skyway was built for the express purpose of providing a way to bridge the fantastic distances separating the intelligent races of the universe. And for no other purpose."