The flow whipped him around. He sank in a panic and struggled to surface, holding his breath until his lungs were about to burst, then pushed up and broke through, sucking air as he twisted in the current.
He cried out with joy when he spotted Emil and Lucinda downstream. They were swimming furiously to escape being dashed against the gorge walls. Wearing shorts had made it easier for them to float. He watched as they bumped and scraped around the turn.
He struck near the same places, protecting himself as much as possible, then swam into center stream and was swept around the bend. Emil and Lucinda cried out to him. He waved back as they vanished into the mist, then was borne into the haze after them.
“Hello!” he cried.
“We’re here!” Emil shouted back.
The current quickened. Max shot over a short waterfall and around another turn. He inhaled water through his nose and gagged, wheezing and sputtering as someone grabbed his collar and pulled him up against a rock.
“Stand up,” Emil said.
Max found a handhold and touched bottom, breathing more easily. Emil and Lucinda looked frightened but relieved as they clung to the rock.
“We can get ashore,” Lucinda said, shivering in the cooling air, and Max knew that they had to get dry before exposure killed them. Lucinda looked half drowned, but seemed determined.
“Link up,” he said, taking her hand. She grabbed Emil’s hand, and Max led them out from behind the rock. The water pushed at them, but the flood’s force was weakening.
They staggered out on the narrow beach, dropped to their knees and stretched out on their stomachs. Max rolled over after a while and looked up at the gorge. “It’s not as steep here,” he said, sitting up.
“Not as high,” Lucinda said through chattering teeth. “It’s so much colder.”
Max stood up. “We have to try now. No telling how long the nights are here.” He hurried along the bank, picked a spot, dug out two steps in the wall and began to climb. The clay seemed firmer here, and was mixed with stones.
“You can dig with hands and feet!” he shouted, climbing by jutting his feet into the clay and scooping with his hands. He glanced up at the mist-shrouded top, then climbed until he could see only the clay wall in front of his face, trapped in an endless rhythm of scooping, kicking, and lifting himself higher. He slipped once and cried out, but dug in fast to stop his slide.
“What?” Emil shouted.
“Nothing,” he gasped, resting his face against the cool clay before going on.
Finally, he reached up with his right hand and touched a level area. “I’m on top!” he shouted, and pulled himself over.
He sat there and peered around in the mist. What he could see of the land sloped upstream along the gorge. There seemed to be no obstacles. He sighed with relief and waited.
Lucinda’s head popped up through the mist. Max reached down and helped her over. They waited for Emil, then pulled the boy up.
“How do you feel?” Max asked him.
“I’m fine.” He was breathing heavily. “Which way?”
“That way,” Max said. “Want to rest first?”
“No!” Emil said, staggering to his feet. “Got to go while there’s still light.”
Max led the way up the slope. The mist thickened, and rain fell gently. Their footing worsened as the slope became steeper. They dug their feet in deeply. Max fell on his face and clawed at the rain-washed clay.
“Sure this is the way?” Emil asked, helping him up.
Max said, “The gorge is at our right, and we’re heading upstream.” He peered ahead, hoping to see the place where they had come out of the cave.
The sky flashed, and he concentrated on placing his feet as firmly as possible in the slippery mud.
“Go slow!” he shouted back.
The slope seemed to rise endlessly into nowhere, and Max felt a sudden hopelessness; nothing at home had ever been this hard and uncertain, or this stupid, not even returning to Earth.
The roar of water in the gorge below grew louder as the rain increased. The sky flashed, and thunder rumbled. Max stopped to catch his breath.
“What’s wrong?” Lucinda shouted as she crawled up next to him.
He shook his head. “Hard to breathe.”
They looked back. Emil was lying face down, but he looked up suddenly and kept climbing. Max crept ahead with Lucinda at his side.
The slope leveled off, and the going became easier. They got to their feet as water washed up over the edge from the choked gorge.
Lightning flashed, and Max saw the cave. “There it is!” he shouted, and they hurried toward the opening. Max imagined the gorge overflowing into the cave, running into the column and spilling water across countless light-years. “Inside!” he ordered, suddenly afraid that something else would happen to keep them out.
With Emil and Lucinda right behind him, he hurried into the cave, straining to see ahead. Lightning flashed, revealing a square entrance on the column.
“Keep close!” He went in. The curve’s strangeness flowed around him, making his skin tingle.
“We made it!” Emil shouted when the bright exit square became visible.
Max stepped out into yellow brightness. Emil and Lucinda came out and stood next to him, disappointment in their eyes as they glanced around the pale yellow expanse.
“Maybe the light changes,” Emil said, “and this is our blue-white station after all.”
Lucinda sighed. “At least it’s warm. We can dry out.”
“We’ll know that this is where we started from,” Max said, “if we find the habitat.”
“But which way?” Emil asked.
“If we walk out in ever wider circles from this column, we’ll be sure to find it,” Lucinda said. “If it’s here.”
As they stepped away from the column, they heard a high-pitched whine. They looked back and saw the column whirling. The entrances blurred.
“There it goes again,” Emil said, sitting down and covering his ears. “That thing just doesn’t want to give us a break. We’ll never know where we’re stepping through to!” He looked up at Max and shook his head in dismay, seemingly on the verge of tears.
Lucinda sat down next to her brother and put her arm around his shoulders. Max looked up at the storm inside the column. The stuff moved like something alive. The column roared for a moment, then shifted down, and the portals became visible again. The sound had not made him dizzy this time.
“We’ll keep trying,” Max said as he sat down.
Emil looked at him with irritation. “Max, if they keep spinning the column, we’ll never find our way back.”
“Calm down,” Lucinda said, rubbing her brother’s shoulders. Emil closed his eyes.
Max stood up. “I’ll check for the habitat.”
Lucinda gave him a long look of concern, unlike anything he would have expected from the irritating girl he had known. “Go after you’ve rested,” she said gently.
“It won’t take long.” He smiled, embarrassed by her attention, then marched away into the brightness, feeling for the first time in his life that he liked her, and wondered if he was fooling himself. He peered into the brightness as he walked, then stopped and looked at his timer. He had been walking for nearly twenty minutes, widening his circle while keeping the column at his right. The column was invisible now, and there was still no sign of the habitat.
He wouldn’t have to worry about returning to Earth, or anywhere else, because he might never see the habitat and his parents again. He imagined himself, Emil and Lucinda lying against a column somewhere in the vast alien transport system, too weak to move from lack of food and water, with no one to help them.
Panic shook him as he tried to think of what to do. He wanted to run into the brightness and find the habitat, but he pulled himself together, realizing that they would just have to keep trying the portals until they found the right one. He turned and sprinted back toward the column. It loomed out of the brightness. Emil and Lucinda got up as he approached, obviously glad to see him, but their expressions became downcast when he shook his head, telling them he had failed.
“We’ll try the portals in turn,” Max said, “clockwise from this one.” Emil was about to object. “Well, what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s systematic, but it doesn’t help our odds,” Emil said.
Lucinda sighed. “Splitting up might help our odds, Emil, but we might never find each other again. One of us might find the right way immediately, and not be able to tell the other two, ever.”
“I know that,” Emil replied.
“Then what’s your objection?”
Emil was silent.
“There should be a better way than trying one after another,” Max said, putting a hand on Emil’s shoulder, “but there isn’t.”
Emil frowned. “It’s not fair.”
“Why should it be?” Lucinda demanded.
“I think what he means,” Max said, “is that if this is something we’re
meant
to do, like a game, then it should make sense.”
Emil glanced at him. “Right. Whatever’s doing this isn’t making it easy for us.”
Max nodded. “We can’t help that, and we’re too far in to back out now, so let’s go.” Lucinda moved toward Emil, then glanced at Max and turned away, as if she didn’t want him to see her concern for her brother. “This one,” Max said.
He faced the black opening, glanced back at them and went in, following the right-hand S-curve. Something complex happened in these passages, cutting short the light-years between star systems. It seemed that he should feel more than he did. A quick walk through a tunnel, a tingling of the skin, and a sense of the dark flowing around him just didn’t seem to be enough to mark the vast distances that were being bridged. It had taken human beings decades to go from Earth to the nearest star and back, yet he was moving to far more distant points in minutes.
How could any human being ever hope to understand such an advanced technology? Was that why he and his companions had been lured into the system, to get lost and have to find their way back? Was it part of the game to make them wonder if they had been lured out or had gone out of curiosity? The fact that aliens actually existed startled him. To imagine them was one thing, but to face them was something else. Suddenly he wanted to meet an alien, to confront the beings who had taken him and his companions from their home.
“What’s wrong?” Emil asked in a shaking voice. “Why’d you stop?”
“I was thinking.” Max moved forward again. The exit appeared as a faint outline up ahead. He came to it and stepped out into what seemed to be another rocky tunnel.
“Well, this isn’t it,” Lucinda said at his right.
“Let’s see what’s out here,” Max said, moving ahead.
Pale daylight filtered into the tunnel. Max and Lucinda came to the mouth and looked out. At their left, a rising yellow sun burned through mists over a dark blue ocean. The horizon startled Max; he was not used to seeing horizons. The ocean was calm, its gentle waves rolling in lazily.
Lucinda grabbed his arm before he could step out. “We almost got killed last time,” she said, holding on, but the wonder of the landscape drew him.
“Seems safe enough. Aren’t you curious? Emil?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe we should go back and try the next portal,” Lucinda said, still holding his arm. “Emil is hurt.”
“I’m all right,” Emil answered behind them. “Let’s take a look.”
She was silent, but let go of Max’s arm. “You can wait here,” he said.
“I’ll come,” she replied.
Max stepped out on the rock-strewn ground and led the way to the gray sands of the beach, under an open sky again far away from the habitat’s protected space. Here, as in the flooding gorge, the sky went up forever, and could contain anything. The thin cover of atmosphere was not made to protect him. Planetary atmospheres shielded living things that had adapted to their conditions. Max wondered what levels of solar radiation were getting through and if the air was really fit to breathe.
“It’s like some of the images of Earth,” he said, finding it hard to believe that there could be any danger here.
“Even Earth would be better than being lost,” Lucinda muttered. “I know we were supposed to be looking forward to going back, but I wasn’t.”
Surprised, Max stopped and looked at her. “But you seemed so sure of yourself,” he said. “About everything,” he added.
She stared down at her feet “I have to be that way. My mother—well, everyone knows how competent our Navigator is. No child of Linda ten Eyck could ever be less. It helped me to act the way people expected me to. I didn’t really have to compete. But what’ll I be on Earth? There are millions of kids there—we’ll just get lost in the crowd.”
He had not expected this from her. He wanted to say something that would reassure her, then wondered what it would take to reassure him. At last he said, “We’ll be the ones who found this alien transport system. That ought to count for something.”
She smiled, then looked anxiously after Emil, who had wandered down to the water. “If we get home, she said, taking Max’s hand. As they walked toward Emil, the younger boy turned around and frowned, looking puzzled by their handholding.
The waves seemed to whisper more loudly as the yellow sun rose higher, warming their faces, and Max wondered again if they were getting too much radiation. The damp, salty air smelled of vegetation and rotting fish.
“Look!” Lucinda shouted.
To the left of the yellow sun, a bright point was rising. Max realized that it was a second sun, a blue dwarf climbing the sky after its companion. “Another double star!” he said in wonder.
“Double stars are common,” Emil said. “There may even be a third star here.”
“I’d like to see that,” Max said excitedly.
Emil was watching his sister carefully, as if expecting an explanation for her friendlier treatment of Max.
“I wonder what life there is in this ocean,” she said.
Max sat down on the sand and hugged his knees. Emil and Lucinda sat down next to him.
The ocean made him feel peaceful, and he imagined schools of exotic fish rushing through the deeps, whales navigating like great ships through vast underwater canyons, giant crabs walking across submerged plains. He glanced at Lucinda questioningly.