“Please form a single-file line and move in an orderly fashion back down the entrance ramp.” Warn them of the turmoil below. “Please bear in mind that everyone under us in the city felt that tremor too, so things might be a little chaotic down there.”
Fine, that will keep them from being shocked—but won’t they get completely freaked if they see the goddamn natives in an uproar? Panic is contagious. How to keep them from catching it—or causing it? Of course. Appeal to their pride. “The people below will be scared, and we’re scared—but let’s not let other people’s fear panic us. Show them tourists can handle a crisis just as well as Conners. Now let’s move, quickly.”
He jumped down and made his way through the crowd to the exit ramp. He started ushering the people down, and found himself pleasantly surprised at how cooperative they all were. He spotted a young woman who looked levelheaded toward the head of the line and took her by the arm. What was her name? Deborah, that was it. “Listen, Deborah,” he said. “We’ll need to keep the whole crowd together until we get back to the hotel. Hold them at the entrance to the main concourse while I take up the rear.”
If we get that far. Lucian knew full well what a quake could do to the underground tunnel-and-dome system that made up Central City. A collapse, a major pressure breach, a jammed lock, and they would be trapped. He thrust the thought from his mind. Just get them down below.
He never even noticed he had managed to make himself forget the main problem:
Earth was gone.
Dianne Steiger flinched back from the madness. The sky flared up in a field of unseeable whiteness that swept toward and over her and then vanished, taking the sky with it. Her ship lurched drunkenly and pinwheeled wildly—tumbling, pitching, yawing, tumbling end over end. Fighting the errant controls, she managed to stabilize the Rat on one, two, three axes. Stable again. She stared in shock at what was, and what was not. The stars and the slender crescent Moon beyond had been swallowed up in that whiteness that was there and then gone. Stars, but not the stars of Earth, sprawled across the sky once again. Only Earth and the ugly bulk of NaPurHab, now several kilometers distant, remained of the familiar Universe.
Until the blue-whiteness snapped into being and lunged toward her once more.
But no, it was not whiteness, but nothingness. For a split second, her eyes decided it was utter black, but that was wrong too. There was not even black to see. Unless it was a blinding white, or a fog leaping for her mind through the viewport. Whatever it was, it flashed over the ship once again. This time her ship held attitude. The Universe, or at least a universe, snapped into existence in front of her. Again, it was not a sky she had ever seen. No Moon, no High New York, none of the familiar constellations.
At least there were stars and a proper sky. She checked her stern cameras. Below and behind her, the fat crescent of dayside Earth was suddenly night, barely visible but for the gleaming of starlight. Was the Sun gone? Before she had time to wonder how such a thing could be, the new sky vanished into a new world of that black/white nothingness. An unseen fist slapped at her ship and the Pack Rat fell off its axes again, tumbling madly. Even as she brought the nose steady, yet another new sky appeared. And the whiteness, and the mad tumbling. Then a true sky. And then it happened again, the whole nightmare cycle.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The sky outside the ship thundered in silence, exploding, vanishing, destroying itself, renewing itself over and over. Dianne’s hindbrain told her such violence should have been deafening, should have made a noise that would rattle the ship apart—but the cold vacuum of space kept all sound at bay, and the nightmare outside her ship was reeling past in utter quiet.
But no, the quiet was not that absolute. With every pulse from nothingness to sky, with every pulse back again to the solidity of the tangible Universe, she thought she heard and felt a low rippling boom shudder through the ship, almost too low to hear.
That gave her hope that she had gone mad. For there could be no sound in space. Could there? But was she in any normal version of space?
She realized belatedly that every alarm on the Pack Rat’s control board was lit up and screaming. Dianne dared not move her hands from the control yoke long enough to shut them off. Outside the viewport was an insane pinwheel of white, red and blue-white stars. No, not stars: suns, close enough for their disks to be visible, close enough to be blindingly bright. She checked the rear monitor to see Earth in strange colors, lit by the light of stars it had never been meant to see.
Acting more by instinct than logic, Dianne fired the Pack Rat’s nose jets to back away from the churning madness of the sky, a few hundred meters back toward the imagined safety of Earth.
Damn it! There was something seriously wrong with the nose jets. They seemed to have been badly damaged in the first jolt, and tended to tumble her toward portside. Dianne held on and leaned into the port jets, and managed to back off in a more or less straight line. Her nose yawed over a bit, but this time she let the Rat have its head, let her tumble a bit. She might need her reaction gas later. The wall of white appeared again. With the Pack Rat’s nose looking to one side when it appeared, this time she saw the edge of the nothingness, a knife-sharp boundary between the nothing and normal space. It suddenly struck her that perhaps the nothingness was stationary, and it was she herself that was moving, falling into a series of holes in space that opened before her.
Herself, and NaPurHab, and the Earth, falling into the holes. HolyJesusChrist. The Earth.
A new hole yawned wide. New stars snapped back into being on the other side. And then another hole appeared before them. On the other side of this one, Earth, the hab and the Pack Rat hovered under an impossible hell-red plane, a throbbing scarlet landscape stretching overhead to infinity in all directions. Regular markings that resembled lines of latitude and longitude scored the surface. Dianne could feel the star heat burning on her face. But this could be no star. Its surface was not gaseous and moving, but distinct, solid, concrete.
But then a new hole opened and that vision vanished as well.
Dianne held the control yoke in a death grip and prayed that she was going insane. Her own personal madness was far preferable to a universe that could indulge in such lunacy.
The sky was falling. Gerald MacDougal lay faceup on the ground, his hands clawed into the earth, hanging on for dear life, watching it coming down.
The sky was blue, noonday bright, in the middle of the night. And not true daylight, but a deep blue skycolor he had never seen before. How could that possibly be?