Alternities (58 page)

“Well—if you did come back from Blue, there’s some people that are going to want—” There was a sudden sizzling in the room. “Jesus Christ, sweet-son-of-Mary—”

Wallace risked twisting his head around to look. He saw the sentry staring with mouth agape at a gate that was shot through with squirming lightning-like discharges. From moment to moment it grew, spreading over the walls and ceiling and floor. Then, with a roaring, whistling sound, a minute black cavity appeared at the center of the gate, and the swirling fingers of energy suddenly leaped across the gap to where the sentry stood.

The sentry screamed, and Wallace ran. He ran out the door and down the corridor toward the stairs, bucking a strong draught, as though the gate were drawing the air from the building. As he reached the stairs, the lights went out. He looked back to see the gate swollen into a seething, crackling ball of energy a hundred feet in diameter.

It was eviscerating the heart of the building, consuming it as the maze had consumed the officer Wallace had brought through the Philadelphia gate. Already the floors above the cavity were beginning to buckle and sag, and still the roaring maw grew. Choking plaster dust filled the stairwell, and the treads danced under his feet.

By the time he reached the first floor, Wallace could feel it pulling at him, trying to drag him back into the maelstrom. The whole building was shaking, creaking, cracking, bowing inward as it tried to obey the call of the insatiable energies within it. Bits of masonry flew through the air, bits of metal glowed with inducted currents. The roaring was of a demon, a monster, caught in cataclysm.

Head ducked low, Wallace ran out of the front door of the Cambridge into a hail of glass fragments falling from a hundred windows blown inward by the drop of pressure in the atrium. Behind him the thunder of collapsing walls mixed with a screaming whistle that climbed up through the octaves until it felt as though a dentist’s drill were grinding at the inside of his skull.

He flung himself full-length on the ground a few feet short of the door to gate control and covered his head with his arms as fragments of debris rained around him. He fully expected to die.

But then the whistling disappeared into the silence of octaves beyond hearing. The roaring faded to the sound of a soft breeze and was stilled. The cracking and shifting of rubble settling replaced the crackling of the insatiable fingers of electric fire.

Slowly, Wallace lifted his head to look back. The Cambridge was gone. All that remained was a hole heaped with crumbled stone and twisted steel inadequate even to make a skeleton of the structure which had stood there just moments before.

Picking himself up off the ground, he shook bits of glass and plaster from his clothes. The gate control door swung open, and a handful of glassy-eyed Guardsmen emerged into the atrium to stare disbelievingly at the astonishing sight. Wallace walked past them and into gate control, up the runners’ chute and out through Guard country toward the Tower’s north entrance.

His torn, filthy clothing and dust-filled hair drew stares, but no one stopped him or even spoke to him until he reached the rank of turnstiles spanning the corridor at the security checkpoint. There he was hailed by a sentry, obediently still at his post despite his hunger to know what the tumult inside the Tower had meant.

“Hey, what happened in there? Was there an explosion?” the sentry called from his booth.

“No,” Wallace said, pushing through the jaws of a turnstile. “Somebody slammed a door.”

“What? Wait, where are you going?”

Wallace just kept walking toward the bright light streaming in from the street beyond.

“Home,” he said softly. “I’m going home.”

The first casualty when war comes is truth.

—Hiram Johnson

The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.

—Thomas Jefferson

Michael P. Kube-McDowell (pronounced cue-bee) has at various times called New Jersey, Indiana, and Michigan home. He holds a master’s degree in science education and was honored for teaching excellence by the 1985 White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. Mr. Kube-McDowell’s short fiction has been featured in
Analog
,
Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine
, and
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, as well as in the anthologies
After the Flames
and
Perpetual Light
. Three of his stories have been adapted as episodes of the television series
Tales from the Darkside
.

Outside of science fiction, Kube-McDowell is the author of more than 500 nonfiction articles on subjects ranging from space careers to “scientific creationism” to an award-winning four-part series on the state of American education.

Emprise
, the critically acclaimed first volume of the “Trigon Disunity” future history was a Philip K. Dick Award finalist. Mr. Kube-McDowell’s other books include
Enigma
,
Empery
, and
Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Odyssey
. He is currently at work on a new novel,
The Quiet Pools
, for The Berkley Publishing Group.