tried not to strangle on the mouthful, the monkey children rattled the cage’s mesh, mocking his predicament by inflating their cheeks with air and bulging and crossing their eyes.
From the foot of the gantry, the rhythmic chanting of the Gloomtowners resumed. Shaking and pushing the structure, the mob rolled the gantry away from the missile. Huth’s feet slipped off the edge of the platform’s floor, and his full weight dropped onto his upraised wrists. His muffled shriek of pain was followed by a raucous cheer from below. As he dangled from the nose cone, as the gantry continued to retreat from the launch pad, the elevator started its rapid descent. Ryan Cawdor and the monkey children dropped from view, abandoning the scientist to his fate.
Which he now realized was a twenty-second-century version of crucifixion.
He was being punished for his contributions to a better way of life, to freedom from hunger and illness, the eternal banes of humankind. He had offered his world the salvation of science and in return…
A terrible rumbling came from below.
It grew louder and louder, and as it did, the vibration set his guts shimmying and made the trapped eyeball quiver between his tongue and the roof of his mouth. With a blast of flesh-melting heat, and the deafening bellow of wide-open rocket motors, the missile leaped upward. The jolt of liftoff caused the eye to slip back into his throat, blocking his airway. Huth had no choice; he gulped it down whole.
As the missile climbed and climbed, engines roaring, his body buffeted against the missile, his arms felt as if they were about to tear free of his shoulder sockets and the swallowed eye rolled around in the pit of his belly like a cannonball.
DR. HUTH AWAKENED on his hands and knees, retching. The violent spasms seemed to start from the soles of his feet, rippling through all the muscles of his body, building a terrible momentum that peaked as they reached his throat. He dry-heaved, over and over. Long strands of bile trailed from his lips into the powdery red dirt beneath his face.
When the convulsions finally subsided, he slumped onto his side. Disoriented and confused, Huth clung like a drowning man to his only clear memory. Moments ago, he had been in the Totality Concept’s trans-reality laboratory. He had been there when the missile he had already sent across to Shadow World, a missile meant to put a recon satellite in orbit, had nosed instead back to his Earth, back through the shimmering lips of the passageway, its gigantic rocket motors thundering.
How that singular horror had come to pass, he had no way of knowing, but certainly the goal of firing the missile back through the corridor had been to destroy the connection between parallel worlds. Given the fuel capacity of the missile, and the fuel’s volatility, there was every reason to expect the strategy had worked.
Huth had a much less distinct recollection of being sucked through the reality portal in the backwash from the rocket’s exhaust, like a dry leaf caught in a whirlwind. That memory was jumbled with a nightmare of horrible punishment and death. Thinking about it made his mind wheel violently, so he forced himself to stop and pushed up on an elbow.
He was surrounded by an open space that stretched unbroken to the horizon in all directions. The sudden absence of physical boundaries, of human-scale walls and ceilings, filled him with heart-pounding panic, but he resisted the urge to bury his head under his arms.
Above him, the dome of the cloudless sky was still tinged with the rose-pink of dawn. The sparkling air felt strangely light in his lungs, and so dry it tickled inside his nostrils. He sat near the edge of a broad, flat table of rock the color of dried blood, elevated above the surrounding plain by several hundred feet.
The mobile missile gantry was nowhere in sight. Also missing were the five explorers who had preceded him through the passage. If this was Deathlands, and he had no reason to doubt that it wasn’t, he had been deposited in a different spot, perhaps near the original landing site, perhaps not. Huth could only surmise that either the missile’s full-power reentry into the passage or its subsequent explosion at the heart of the Totality Concept complex had distorted the shape of the reality corridor, shifting its terminus at this end.
Huth rose stiffly to his feet and took stock of himself. The left sleeve of his lab coat was fire-blackened from cuff to elbow, but he wasn’t bleeding anywhere and he had no apparent broken bones. He patted his pocket and was relieved to find the instruments he’d slipped into it moments before the disaster. Both the microcomputer, which was the size of a playing card, and an equally small electron microscope seemed to have made the journey intact. The other scientific tool he’d brought along he carried locked away in his brain, and that was the Twenty-five Theories, which linked all human knowledge. With just these three artifacts, he was confident that he could reconstruct most of the advanced technology of his Earth.
Though the timing of the crossing had been accidental, Huth had been on the verge of departing his reality, with or without FIVE’s approval. The most recent computer projections gave nine-to-one odds that the predicted mass die-off of humanity would occur within the next three months. Based on past experience with the CEOs, he couldn’t be one hundred percent certain that they would let him use his own invention to escape. That decision had been taken out of FIVE’s hands, and thanks to what he carried in his pocket and brain, Huth was in a position to become the most powerful man in the history of either Earth—as he saw it, a combination of Leonardo da Vinci, John D. Rockefeller and Joseph Stalin.
Huth stepped to the edge of the deeply rilled, red rock mesa. There were more mesas in the distance on the other side of a wide desert plain, and far behind those table rocks loomed a range of snowcapped mountains. Bisecting the plain were remnants of a prenukecaust highway, a ribbon-straight ghost of four-lane interstate. Lying across the old highway at odd intervals were great, tilted slabs—the fractured remains of fallen overpasses. At the horizon line to the northwest, the sun glared off something shiny. A body of water, perhaps. If the passageway’s terminus hadn’t shifted very far, it occurred to him that it might even be the remains of the Great Salt Lake.
As he continued to scan the landscape below, Huth saw white smoke rising in a thin column in the dead still air, indicating a human presence, if not a settlement of some sort, not more than ten miles away.
The scientist let out a whoop and celebrated his good fortune by dancing an ungainly jig. Then he carefully boulder hopped down a steep chute that led to the foot of the mesa, and once there, immediately headed across the plain for the ancient roadway.
Up close there wasn’t much left of it.
Caustic rains had reduced the asphalt to sand, and had badly pocked the concrete layer beneath. Small, delicate white flowers with bright yellow centers grew here and there along the edge of the highway, sprouting from depressions where water and nutrients accumulated.
Huth picked one of the little daisies and gingerly nibbled at the white petals. Their explosive bitterness made him gasp. He spit them out with a curse, then groaned as the vile taste set him to dry-heaving again.
Pale and shaken, he trudged on toward the distant smoke plume. The only sounds were the scrape of his shoe soles on the asphalt sand and the wheeze of his breathing. The day’s building heat made sweat ooze from his forehead. In the flat, shimmering distance lay the first of the dropped overpasses; he made slow but steady progress toward the jumble of concrete slabs.
When Huth first caught wind of the rank, feral odor, he didn’t know what to make of it, except that it wasn’t coming from him. As he continued walking, the smell got worse. Much worse. Only when the pack of robbers started popping up on either side of the ruined road did he understand the meaning of the noxious stench, and by then it was too late to run.
The dirt-caked, tangle-bearded bandits had
