Calandrx wiped his mouth on Berx’s sleeve.
“I’m tempted to say — but my words would ruin it for your eyes.” He handed Erx one of his ancient wooden matches. “Hold this…”
Then he pointed out at Hunter, who was still trying to maneuver his way to his starting point. People were throwing expended food packs and empty wine flasks at him now.
“When he leaves, strike the match.”
Before Erx could reply, the countdown commenced. Speaking slowly, sensually, the Emperor’s stunning daughter, Xara, began counting back from ten. Her sultry voice did the impossible. It quieted the crowd instantly.
When she spoke the word zero, it oozed off her lips. Then the starting beam blinked.
In one motion, the wheels on Hunter’s flying machine lifted off the ground and he hit his throttle.
There was a bright flash — and before the twelve other racers even moved, Hunter was already gone, leaving only a thin trail of smoke behind him.
15
The real trouble started for Hunter right after he hit the first transdimensional screen.
Up until that point, the flight had been just like his trip around the planet a week before. His throttles were pushed right to the max, as Calandrx had suggested. The sensation was one of going extremely fast, but with zero blurring or head trips. He could see everything on the ground in perfect focus, clear and crisp — it was just dropping off behind him very, very quickly.
But at the same time, it seemed to him like no time had elapsed since he’d rocketed out of the stadium. In some ways he was still back there, maybe just a billionth of a trillionth of a micrometer past the starting beam. He was here, but he was also still leaving there. It would seem impossible — and yet there was a perfectly good explanation for it. For as Hunter would eventually come to find out, whenever he pushed his machine’s throttle to maximum power, he ceased traveling in regular time — and began traveling in an entirely different piece of time and space. That’s why everything seemed to be happening all at once.
That’s why he was going so fast.
And that’s why it was hard to gauge exactly how much regular time had elapsed before he hit the first blue screen.
Once out of Big Bright City, the terranium earth below him had turned uniform, pastoral, even dazzling in some places. Lush forests, gently rolling hills covered with flora, the most incidental canals and lakes shimmering in aqua blue — indeed, everything seemed to be a shade of either yellow, green, or blue. As he made his way west, there were no clouds, and certainly no bad weather. Only once did he turn around to see if anyone was behind him, but there was no one in sight.
When the first screen appeared, it came up fast and unexpected, as advertised. He’d just passed over a very wide canal that seemed to cut the upper half of the western continent in two. Flying at about two miles high, one moment the sky ahead of him was clear; the next, it was replaced by a massive cloud of bluish mist with numerous lightning bolts running through it. Hunter hit the screen not a microsecond after seeing it. He was nearly blinded by the impact; it knocked him so far back in his seat, his crash helmet snapped off and slammed into the back of the canopy. His entire flying machine began shaking violently.
All the things he’d tightened down before the race were coming loose again — he could hear them. For several terrifying seconds he could see nothing but the panicky blurs of his panel lights bouncing madly before his eyes.
He instinctively grabbed his control column with both hands and held it as rigid as possible. It took a while, but the vibrations finally died down and the aircraft bucked its way back to flying straight and true.
His crash helmet bounced back down onto his lap and he hastily shoved it onto his head. Finally his vision cleared and he was able to see where he was.
At first it seemed like he was still flying over the heartland of the western continent — except now it was night. But something was very different here. The darkness was evenly scattered everywhere, and everything had a thin neon glow around it. This was not the Earth’s surface he was seeing below him now; this was a ghostly image of where he’d just come from. Not so much a mirror dimension, but an X-ray of one. He could even see through things. Even his flying machine seemed to be only partially there.
Even stranger was the sensation that he was actually moving inside a tiny bubble. The Earth, the sky, the stars — it was as if he could reach out and touch them with his fingertips.
Very strange.
Very claustrophobic.
Welcome to the thirteenth dimension.
But it got even more bizarre. The interior of his cockpit had been transformed, too. Many of his control panel’s readout screens were gone, to be replaced by stacks of weapon-targeting systems, gun triggers, and bomb-release levers. Hunter made the mistake of looking down at these things for more than a moment — it was purely on impulse. When he looked up again, he saw a huge ball of fire coming right at him.
He was somehow able to yank his craft to the left just before the faux meteorite streaked by him. The violent maneuver saved him, but also caused the flying machine to go out of control. Suddenly he was nose down, spinning uncontrollably. The machine began shaking all over again.
This might be called a stall, he thought.
The distorted image of the distorted surface of the Earth was racing up to meet him. Hunter tried to yank back on the control column, but it did no good. He was still spiraling down toward the ground at very high speed. He had to think quickly; he was getting dizzy and felt close to blacking out. His hand wavered over the throttle for a moment. Calandrx had told him not to touch the power levels once he was airborne, as all kinds of unpredictable things might result. But Hunter was falling even faster now, and his incredibly powerful propulsion system was hurling him earthward that much quicker.
That’s when a strange thought hit him: Was there really this much gravity here in Dreamland?
Maybe.
But maybe not…
Hunter blinked his eyes once — and suddenly he was flying straight and level again. Control of his flying machine instantly returned to him. It had been some kind of an illusion, a mind trick of the type Calandrx had warned him about. He pulled up on the stick, just making sure it was real. Then he was looking up at the green-starred sky again.
That was a close one.
But now the surface of the Earth began to drop away even quicker than before. Hunter realized he was suddenly approaching space — or what looked like space. His instrument panel went mad. He could see numbers flashing by in Supertime speed just outside his cockpit glass. He was suddenly flying through a field of small gray moons — some were about five hundred feet across, some were smaller, all showing what appeared to be impact craters. But these moons were also swinging wildly, as if each one were dangling from some unseen string. Two were looming right up ahead of him now. Hunter had to ask himself a question: Should I go under, over, or between the two moons? But while he was considering his options, the two globes suddenly erupted in an explosion of red light. Hunter was startled. These things seemed to be headed right for him. But were they Z beams? Real ones?
He yanked the flying machine to the left just as the barrage went by him. In a flash he pulled on the control column and corkscrewed back up to his previous position. A second barrage was coming right at him. Another twist, another dive; the lethal-looking beams went right by his cockpit, so close he could feel their heat. Or so he imagined.