At last, to Jeb Stuart Ho’s relief, they emerged from the city traffic and swung on to one of the wide straight roads that radiated out from Litz to the edge of the nothings. There was almost no traffic, apart from the occasional wheelfreak’s truck that flashed past, blazing with lights. Ho felt that he could relax a little. The Minstrel Boy had manoeuvred the car into the middle of the highway. He held it there with one limp hand.
Jeb Stuart Ho looked carefully at the Minstrel Boy. It was hard to know, apart from the tightly clenched jaws, whether he was really conscious. Even with all his training, Ho found it difficult to visualize what was going on in his mind. Ho was taken by surprise when the Minstrel Boy made a sudden move. His hand flashed down to a part of the control panel between the seats. Harsh metallic music blared from a set of speakers fitted in the back of the cab. In the confined space it made Jeb Stuart Ho’s head ring. He shouted to the Minstrel Boy.
‘Does it have to be so loud?’
The Minstrel Boy gave no indication that he had heard him. He continued to stare blankly through the windshield. Jeb Stuart Ho stretched out a hand to adjust the volume control. Without warning the Minstrel Boy slapped his hand away. He didn’t take his eyes off the road. Jeb Stuart Ho said nothing and settled back to endure it.
They were reaching the limits of the Litz generators. Circular holes filled with grey nothing started to appear in the road in front of them. The Minstrel Boy pressed the control that activated the car’s own stasis generator. He made no attempt to avoid any of the holes, but continued to hold the car steady in the very centre of the road, at just under maximum speed. The car began to bump and lurch as though its own stasis field was unable to produce an approximation of a flat surface beneath the car, but only the reading on the speedometer and the constant bucking and lurching gave any indication that they were moving at all. The razor-sharp music pounded on, and Jeb Stuart Ho began to perform the preliminary exercises to close down his mind. The Minstrel Boy’s face still showed no sign of life.
In many ways, this trip through the nothings was very similar to the lizard ride they had made to Litz. Ho’s sense of time quickly began to ebb away. He had to keep glancing at the dashboard to grasp some kind of orientation. The chronometer was little help. In many ways it increased his confusion. Sometimes the digits would flip over at a rate that made it unreadable. Other times a single figure would hang for what seemed like hours. Similar things happened to the music. It would alternately hammer frenetically and then lurch sideways in howling cadences. He was sorely tempted to seek refuge in an intermediate trance, but the constant sight of the transformed Minstrel Boy beside him kept him firmly in the material world inside the car.
It was around the point when the chronometer was telling him that they’d been in the nothings for just over four hours that things started to appear. First it was the white dog with black nose and ears. It jerked its paw at them in a hitch-hiking gesture, and then, through the rear window, Jeb Stuart Ho could see it cursing them from the distance after the Minstrel Boy had failed to stop. Next came the billboards, huge illuminated signs that appeared to stand on nothing. Floodlights blazed down on them, making it impossible to miss the slogans in strange, unreadable, alien script. Jeb Stuart Ho wondered if they were real objects or hallucinations. He was at a loss to tell. There was too much about the nothings that he didn’t know.
After seven hours they hit the road. It just appeared out of the shifting greyness, exactly under their wheels. It was a dark blue colour, and ran dead straight for as far as the eye could see. Tiny red and green marker lights lined its outer edges. Beyond them was the absolute shimmering grey. Jeb Stuart Ho held on to his mind with meticulous care. The awful music wailed on, punctuated by wrenching cast iron power chords. Nothing else moved on the road, and it seemed to have no end.
The chronometer claimed they were nine and three quarter hours out of Litz. Jeb Stuart Ho was just wondering if it was safe to give the Minstrel Boy another shot of cyclatrol, when he began to slow the car. He pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. In a strange kind of way, it seeped to Ho that the Minstrel Boy was cooperating with the plan. He reached into the glove compartment and took out the black case. He fitted a refill into the injector, pushed up the Minstrel Boy’s sleeve and pressed the release. There was a faint hiss as the cyclatrol was forced through the pores of his skin. This time he only screamed for thirty-five minute.
When he calmed down, he seemed to need no instructions. He started the engine, made the same violent gear change and continued on down the road.
The lines of lights flashed past in a continuous stream. The road was absolutely smooth. The Minstrel Boy kept the car rock steady in the middle of the road. Jeb Stuart Ho avoided looking out of the narrow window. Despite all his training, the grey shimmer of the nothings made him uneasy. It disturbed the sense of order that was so much a part of his life in the brotherhood.
Jeb Stuart Ho felt closer to the edge of his control than he had ever been during all his years of rigorous instruction. The blue road was so smooth that there was no sense of movement at all. Time seemed to stop. The lights formed themselves into solid strips of red and green. The silent staring presence of the Minstrel Boy, and the clanging music combined with all the other factors to push Jeb Stuart Ho towards a wild, twisting part of his mind that he had never experienced before. It took all his powers of discipline to resist plunging into that chaos.
Just as he was beginning to feel that his strength was about to give out, something appeared ahead. It was far down the road, but it was coming towards them, and it instantly restored the concepts of time and space. At first it was only a tiny point of light in the extreme distance, but Jeb Stuart Ho felt himself filled with an immediate sense of relief.
***
They came out of the nothings in midair. It was as though the falling sensation that had been wrenching at Billy’s stomach ever since the airship had disintegrated, was all channelled in a single direction. In a moment of panic he thought he was going to fall to his death. Then the ground rushed up and knocked the breath out of him. The drop had been less than four metres. He landed awkwardly, on hard stony ground. One of his knees twisted under him. As he tried to stand, it hurt like hell. He sank to his knees cursing.
On the second attempt, Billy managed to stay on his feet. He looked around to see where he had landed. The bare hillside wasn’t terribly impressive. It fell away at a steep angle. The bare earth was sparsely covered here and there with patches of bracken and short wiry grass. There were wide expanses of bare rock.
Billy couldn’t see very far. Everything but the immediate piece of sloping ground that he had landed on was shrouded in damp, clinging fog. His city boy, pimp clothes were totally unsuited for both the terrain and climate. Already the thin, sparkling material felt cold and clammy. He cursed again, and hugged his jacket tighter round his shoulders. It seemed that he had fallen into some very dismal place.
He wondered what had happened to the others. They had all been together in the nothings, but he had lost them when they’d dropped into the reality of the bleak hillside. According to everything Billy had experienced, they should have all emerged at the same point. He wondered if they might be on another part of the same hillside, hidden by the fog. He strained his eyes to penetrate the drifting grey blanket, but he still could see nothing.
He shivered and stamped his feet. If he didn’t do something fairly fast he would die of pneumonia. He wondered if he should go and look for them, or stay in the same place and let them find him. It was a problem. He couldn’t be absolutely sure that they had all landed near to the same spot. He was still wondering what to do, when he saw a familiar figure limping through the mist. Billy called out.