Now the real race began. We had to beat the wreckage of the interceptor to the cylinders, get through the aperture before the horrendous implosion that would happen as the mass of the wreck was torn atom-from-atom by the portal's tidal claws. The wreck was veering outward now. There was a chance it could move far enough out to miss hitting the right lead cylinder directly, make a wide looping geodesic before it spiraled into the zone of destruction, before it flashed to filaments of plasma falling into the ultracondensed mass of the cylinders. The delay might be only a fraction of a second, but it might be enough.
It was all happening within seconds, but to me the flow of things was gummed up into a languid slow motion. Endlessly, the wreckage wheeled in the icy night, the sweep of its head-beams like some haunted lighthouse on an arctic shore. I looked for the guide lane, the white lines marking the safe corridor through the aperture, but couldn't see them. Red lights blared from the instrument panel.
"Jake? Jake, what's happening?" Sam's voice was faint, far away.
The guide lane was suddenly under me and we weren't dead center. Our left wheels were over the white line. I corrected sharply, thinking this was the end, we've had it, you just don't do this and live, and then felt the car rising on its right wheels as greedy fingers of force closed over us. We were up on two wheels, the car riding diagonally to the roadbed… and somehow in those few fractions of a second I reacted unthinkingly, wheeling hard right and tramping on the accelerator….
And then time jarred back to normal flow and it was wham! back on four wheels, shooting down the dark corridor of the safe lane, the cylinders black-on-black beside us, and then a brilliant flash that blinded me, followed by an explosion of sound as we hit air and the car's engine shouted in my ears. I saw light, pure and golden and warm; then my pupils contracted and the field of vision split into an upper band of light blue and a lower one of blue-green. Someone was leaning over my shoulder, and I felt hands over my hands on the wheel.
"Jake, slow down!"
Darla was helping me steer. I braked, trying not to panic-stop to avoid skidding. I was half-blind now but could see the road, a strip of black over blue-green. The Skyway was suspended over water and there were no guard rails. A few seconds later and I could see that the elevation was minimal. We were on a causeway crossing shallow water.
But our speed was still fantastic. Land ahead, an island or a reef, coming up fast. The road looked like it ended there, but I wasn't sure. I could see other vehicles parked on the island. I mashed down on the brake and the tires wailed like hellhounds, the back end floating from side to side. We began to drift toward the shoulder and I let up on the brake to straighten out, then started pumping the pedal, but the shore was coming at us fast. I quit pumping and stood on the brake, the sounds of the tires splitting my ears, the sky, sea, and land heaving around us. Darla was no help now ― I was fighting her as well as the wheel. I pushed her back and took over, my vision nowhere near normal but adequate in the bright sunlight. We were down to a mere 150 miles per hour, but the shore of the island was upon us. We shot past a wide beach, still on the Skyway, and blurred through a narrow strip of land until we reached the opposite shore and another beach. The road picked up the causeway again and headed out to sea.
Not far from the beach the road began a gradual dip until it sank beneath the deep water beyond the breakers.
My stiffened body was perpendicular to the brake pedal, and I braced myself by pulling backward on the steering wheel. The back end was fishtailing but I didn't countersteer, couldn't, counting on the mysterious force to set us aright. It did, and with a final screaming chorus from the tires we skidded to a stop a few meters from the gentle waves washing across the width of the roadway.
Nobody moved for a long while. I sat there letting warm sunlight soothe my face, not feeling much of anything else. I was numb, my arms like dead things in my lap, my body limp and useless. From outside came the strange croaking cries of seabirds and the sound of water lapping against the sinking road.
Presently, someone moaned. Susan. I made an effort and looked over the back of the seat. Susan was down there somewhere, as was Winnie. Darla was sitting up looking dazed, relieved, glad to be alive, amazed to be alive, and totally exhausted, all at once. Our eyes met and a flicker of a smile crossed her lips. Then she closed her eyes and tilted her head back. Roland and John began to pick themselves up from the floor-decking. It took time.
We sat there for a good while longer until I felt a throb of feeling return and a tiny bit of strength begin to trickle back.
Then I put my hands back on the wheel. It took time to get the car into reverse, but I finally figured it out, backed up, turned around, and headed back to land.
No one spoke.
The island was packed with vehicles of every kind, parked and waiting. We reached the end of the beach and I hung a right, going off-road over sand and scrubby rust-colored beach grass, threading through the crowd of parked vehicles. Beings of every sort were represented here, none of which I'd ever seen before. There were humans here too, sitting in their buggies with doors open or standing in groups outside, smoking cigarettes, talking. Others were picnicking on the sand. Somewhere underneath the blanket of fatigue that covered me I was surprised to see them, but didn't dwell on the implications. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something. I could guess what it was, but I didn't give much thought to that either. I kept driving around. The island was narrow but long and crescent-shaped, little more than a sandbar dotted with some suitably odd vegetation, clumps of scraggly brush that looked like land-colonizing seaweed, and a few tall shaggy trees with dull red foliage. There wasn't much else to the place. No other land was in sight.
Near one end of the island, which I arbitrarily designated as north, another spur of the Skyway came in over the causeway from the northwest. It crossed the island diagonally and plunged beneath the waterline as well, its junction with the Goliath spur submerged farther out. Traffic from the ingress point was substantial, backed up along the causeway for half a klick or so. If we had ingressed here, at our speed… well, no use to dwell on that either.
Things got congested up there, so I turned around and went back, hugging the western shore until we found a spot that was relatively free of traffic, vehicles, and people, a little knoll above the beach topped with a lone tall tree. Before stopping we passed a middle-aged man in an electric-blue jumpsuit standing by his roadster, smoking, looking at us curiously. As I drove by he tapped his nose with an index finger, signing that the air was okay here. Thank you. I rolled down the window and Goliath's syrupy stuff whooshed out and let in tangy salt air and sea smells, very Earthlike. From long experience I could tell by the sound of the rushing air that there wasn't any pressure differential to worry about. The atmosphere was fairly heavy here too. I've had a touch of the bends once or twice, and I should have checked it out first, if I could have found the readouts. But I was dreaming along, not caring, barely there at all. I stopped the car at the edge of the gentle slope down to the beach, put it in neutral and jerked up on the hand brake. I didn't shut the engine off. Then I opened the door. Took me time to get my legs moving ― pure homemade jelly. Then I got out, staggered down the hill to the flat, and sank to my knees. I fell forward and stretched out in the warm sand.