He pushed his finger in again, up to the quick at the base of his fingernail, and ignored the tingling as it sank into the surface as if into wet clay. The layer flexed back, until he had pushed a depression into it as deep as his forearm. Suddenly fearful, he released the pressure before the membrane could snap around him.
“Just do it,” he said, and threw himself at the surface.
Floyd came through. He fell in a crashing sprawl on the other side, smashing his bandaged head against cold metal flooring. All he could do, for at least a minute, was lie perfectly still as multiple pain signals hit his brain, where they were filed into pigeonholes, like letters in a sorting office. There was pain from his head, where he had hit the floor. His mouth hurt like hell—he must have bitten his tongue or the inside of his cheek, or something. There was pain from his knees and one elbow, and from the bruises on his back where he had fallen against the rails. His arm hurt where the child had pressed its shoe, holding him to the ground. But there was no shrill agony of amputation. He might have lost a finger or two, perhaps: he could believe that. But when he flexed his hands, even his fingers seemed to be more or less intact. Bruised and raw, certainly, but he could still play something, even if it had to be the maracas from now on.
He eased his head from the floor, then peeled the rest of his body into a sitting position. He looked around and found Auger sitting in a chair, slumped into it with exhaustion, but still awake.
“Floyd?” she asked. “Are you all right?”
“Copacetic,” he said, rubbing his head.
“When you went through that thing… how was it?”
Floyd spat out a bloodied tooth before answering. “It’s funny. I’m sitting here now and it seems like it was only a couple of seconds ago that we were on the other side. But to another part of me, it feels as if I haven’t seen you for half a lifetime.”
“So it happened to you,” Auger said. “The thing that never happened to me. You got it, on your first trip through.” She sounded impressed and envious at the same time.
“All I remember,” Floyd said, “is that I felt as if I was made of glass, and there was light shining through me. It was as though I was hanging in that shaft of light for the whole of eternity. I wondered if it was ever going to end. Another part of me didn’t want it to end, ever. I saw… colours, colours like I’d never imagined before. And then it was all over, and I was lying here with a pain in my mouth. You know, if you could bottle that sensation…” He managed a self-deprecating shrug. “Guess the damned thing isn’t so picky after all.”
“Did you feel a mind? More than one mind?”
“I felt very small and very delicate, like something being looked at through a microscope.”
“It was an experiment,” Auger said flatly. “No one like you has ever come through before. It was something no one had ever tried. I just didn’t expect you to have that experience on your first trip.”
“Lady, one trip through that thing is enough for me.” He looked around, taking in the complexities of the room in which he had landed. Unlike the last chamber, this one at least looked something like the underground spy lair he had been imagining. It was very large, filled with machines and equipment that he could not begin to identify. “Please tell me this is some kind of film set,” he said, steadying himself against the edge of a desk.
“It’s all real,” Auger said, strugging to her feet. “The only problem is that my friends aren’t here yet. But there’s good news, too.”
“There is?”
“The ship’s back. I just don’t understand why no one else came with it. They’d only have had to keep one seat vacant.”
Floyd dug into his mouth, extracting the last few chips of his ruined tooth. Somehow, dentistry was the least of his worries. “Did you just say ‘ship?’ ”
“That thing,” Auger said. She pointed to the central feature of the room, the thing you couldn’t miss. It was a giant glass bulb, as wide across as a house, suspended at eyelevel over a kind of pit filled with more machinery, equipment and desks. The bulb was encased in an arrangement of curving metal struts, bracing it to the walls of the chamber. On the other side from where they were standing, the bulb’s surface extended out, forming a cylindrical shaft that pushed through the wall. Where the shaft met the wall, there was a thick, intricate crusting of the same weird substance Floyd had already seen framing the censor. As he looked more closely, he realised that the crusting covered the interior walls of the chamber completely with a dense, twinkling plaque. Portions of it had been sheeted over with metal panels, but large areas were still exposed.
There was something inside the bubble. It was a dented and battered object about the size of a truck, seemingly formed from sheets of metal that had been hammered into shape by enthusiastic cavemen. It was cylindrical, with a bullet-shaped nose. It had windows and was covered with odd projections—most of them bent and mangled—and unfamiliar symbols in faded and scorched paint, and the whole thing was encased in a kind of harness, like the cradles used to load bombs into aircraft.
“It’s taken a beating getting here,” Auger commented.
“That’s a ship?” Floyd asked.
“Yes,” she said. “And don’t sound so disappointed. It happens to be my ticket out of here.”
“It looks as though it’s been around the block a few times.”
“Well, things must be getting pretty hairy for it to have accrued that much damage in one trip. I just hope it can cope with the return leg.”
“Where will it take you?” Floyd asked. “America? Russia? Somewhere I haven’t even heard of?”
“It’ll take me a long way from Paris,” Auger said evasively. “Right now that’s all you need worry about. I’ll be back in just over sixty hours, or if not me, then someone else you can trust. Whoever it is will have reinforcements—enough help to get you back to the surface in one piece.”
“Is that a promise?”
“It’s the best I can do. Right now, I don’t even know if that thing is going to hold together long enough to get me home.”
“Is there an alternative?”
“No. That ship is my only way out of here.”
“Then we’d better hope Lady Luck’s on your side.”
Floyd looked around the rest of the room, his attention skating from one unfamiliar object to the next. The many desks were all inlaid with arrays of typewriter keys, but grouped densely together, with many more keys than seemed necessary. They had cryptic codes marked on them—arrangements of letters, numbers and childish scribbles. There were many switches and controls of a kind he didn’t recognise, made of some sort of smoky, translucent material. There were flat, upright sheets of tinted glass arranged on the desks like sunshades, upon which text and illustrations—charts and diagrams—had been printed in bright, luminous inks. There were grilles and lights and slots, and racks holding oblong things that might have fitted into the slots. There were microphones on stalks—those at least he recognised—and clipboards, left strewn across some of the desks. He picked up the nearest clipboard and leafed through sheets of silky paper marked with rows and rows of gibberish, but gibberish clearly laid out according to some careful scheme, interspersed with elegant, sloping cascades of brackets and other typographic symbols. Another clipboard held pages and pages of labyrinthine, gridlike diagrams, like the street map of some insane metropolis.