His sight became a kaleidoscope of blurry images while his head whirled even faster, on the verge of bursting from the unbearable pain.
The cold breeze blew over his face, and he immediately felt a bit better. What am I doing in the street? Oh, yes, Gill remembered, I want to check again if it’s empty. Of course it’s empty; there’s no one in the whole neighborhood. But is this real, or am I dreaming? After a brief reflection, he finally concluded that he must have fallen asleep; the street was just an image stored in his memory. He had to stop thinking and take a good nap. He was so tired…
A sharp pain pierced his right ankle as he missed the last stair of his dome, stepping into the void. The shock felt like an electric shower, making him open his eyes—this time for good. How did I get here? he asked himself, dumbfounded.
After he reached the middle of the street, Gill walked toward a big intersection where a razog storehouse once functioned. He was still dazed, but he could see a brown air-jet hovering at a distance, with its rooftop folded. A big black ball balanced precariously on the tip of a thin telescopic arm, extended outside the vehicle.
The distance decreased rapidly, and he couldn’t understand the surprising reason why, all of a sudden, his feet—remarkably docile until that day—were carrying him to the intersection without the slightest request from him to do so. When he looked closely at the black ball, he found the answer, the fear pouring into his bones like the frozen waters of the Eger: a radial inductor! Like a powerful magnet, the ball ordered every unshielded Antyran to fall asleep and run to it…
The tarjis had captured the Shindam’s strongest weapons and deployed them on the backstreets of the city. Was there any way to oppose them? At the very thought of resisting the induction, he felt the urge to throw up. The merciless ball was pulling him faster and faster, controlling his motor functions with deadly determination.
“Stop right now!” he shouted at his disobedient feet. They hesitated for a moment, but then they inexorably resumed walking toward his doom.
Each time he tried to fight the induction, a wave of pain and nausea blurred his eyes; the closer he got to the air-jet, the stronger the torture became. The city blocks seemed deserted, with no one else rushing to fall into the trap.
When he reached about three hundred feet from the vehicle, he saw the nearby initiates moving to capture him—one of them holding an induction necklace in his hand. The agents wore helmets and armored vests to shield their spinal nerves from the evil sphere.
Gill knew that the time had come to use the Sigian weapon, even though he had to betray its secrets. Despite the paralyzing grip, he managed to turn his head and pull one space rectangle right behind his tail. Unfortunately, he couldn’t step inside it, his feet ruthlessly dragging him forward. Writhing in the grip of despair, he tried to twist and grab the distortion to pull himself inside it, but his stiffened body didn’t cooperate, either.
Hanging on his last drop of determination, Gill clenched his teeth, groaned… and stopped his right foot in the air! For a brief moment, he dared to hope that he could walk backward, but the opposition didn’t last long; his treacherous feet resumed their march toward the evil gathering.
Anyone else would have yielded—a few days ago, he would have done the same, no doubt. Today, however, was quite a different day, and the very thought of betraying the Sigians was giving Gill the power to quell the fear raging inside his body. He felt the transformation growing inside his kyi like a storm surge, rewriting his neural connections and turning him into a cold-blooded fighter. He was amazed how quickly he got over the shock of paralysis and how easily he could wake his sense of smell, in spite of the torture inflicted by the inductor.
In the little time left before they would catch him, he had to find the hidden path,51 at the end of which he would be alive with the bracelet on his arm—he had to smell it by all costs…
He breathed deeply, and to his surprise, he immediately smelled the way out. As usual, the key lay in the grid: he looked back over his shoulder to pull one rectangle from behind, and then he turned his head slowly, careful not to lose it. As soon as he dropped it in front of his traitorous feet, his next step, although toward the agents, leaped him fifty feet backward!
Obviously, his little trick didn’t escape unnoticed… For a brief moment, the agents stopped, paralyzed by fear.
After Gill made a second jump, they reluctantly rushed to catch him. Unfortunately for them, after a few more jumps, the induction became so weak that he turned his back to the air-jet and started to run down the street, pulling the space at his feet to hasten his escape.
The induction suddenly disappeared, and the reason was all too obvious, even without looking back: the air-jet had joined the pursuit! The worst thing was, of course, that the agents had raised the alarm!
Gill was running on a large avenue. His speed was the fastest of any living creature in the Antyran world, even though he still had to learn how to adjust his steps with the grid distortion. He couldn’t jump fifty feet on every step, but he managed to do it often enough to pass 120 miles per hour.
After he ran undisturbed for about a mile, he started to hope they had lost his tracks—but then he heard the hoarse buzz of some charged turbines. He couldn’t turn his head to see what was happening, but he recognized the sound of a pack of magneto-jets, their fusion reactors heated far beyond the limits of decency.
Every minute, more and more vehicles darted from the side streets to join the chase. Before long, a wild horde of tarjis and agents sped after his tail.
Slowly but surely, their turbines devoured the space between them on the empty boulevard—the perfect playground for insanely fast rides. Some overly excited tarjis pulled out their portable inductors, even though they were not nearly close enough to paralyze him and had to steer their jets with only one hand, in an already dangerous chase.
As he dashed madly along the boulevard, Gill stalked the moment when his pursuers were close enough to have little time for reaction, hoping that their driving was reckless enough to push them into his trap. Suddenly, without warning and seemingly in gross violation of the inertia laws, he turned to the left on a narrow street near the orange dome of a distribution center.
The raging roars of the reversed thrusters and the deafening blasts that ripped the tranquility of the abandoned neighborhood left no doubt about what happened. Several jets collided violently when the first tarjis banked sharply in a futile attempt to go after him, and the rest of the pack crashed into them at full speed.
The tarjis’ problem became obvious; if they ever held the naïve opinion that the chase would be easy, they were in for a nasty surprise. Gill was running with the average speed of a normal Antyran, but the bracelet allowed him to jump great distances through the “shortcuts” of the space continuum. The magneto-jets, on the other tail, were traveling at over 130 miles per hour, and they obviously had to handle different inertia and centrifugal forces than the archivist. And because the tarjis drove their vehicles with their own hands,52 no artificial intelligence could save them from collisions.
Four fusion-core blasts53 shook the city windows as far as the main square. The greenish boulevard was excavated down to nine feet deep, the remains of the vehicles and the moulan statues from the walkways being blown over the neighborhood or stuck in the nearby dome walls that had survived the explosions.
The rest of the magneto-jets were immediately disabled by their danger alarms, leaving the surviving tarjis in the unenviable situation of chasing Gillabrian on foot. Some started to run on the side street where the archivist had disappeared, even though their efforts to catch him became ridiculous.