Breakthrough. James Axler
he froze in disbelief.
It was a guided missile more than one hundred feet long.
The startling image reminded him of a vid he’d seen as a graduate student. It had shown a single ant struggling to carry an impossibly huge beetle carcass back to the nest. That vid had to have been at least twenty-five years old when he’d viewed it; the last ant and beetle had long since departed this reality.
As Dr. Huth stood there immobilized, gasping for breath, some of the mob dipped into the latrine buckets they’d brought along and splattered him with handfuls of bloody excrement—evidence of yet another failure of science to solve the global food crisis.
The ingenious whitecoats of FIVE had genetically tailored a bacterium whose internal processes could turn igneous rock into something edible. But when the pseudo-fast-food product was consumed regularly, its mineral components built up in the human body, giving rise to a range of alarming physical symptoms, including bloody stools and psychopathic behavior. Despite the known side effects, FIVE dispensed Beefie Cheesies and Tater Cheesies by the truckload to placate the Gloomtowners. The discarded plastifoil wrappers swirled ankle deep around the feet of the mob.
A fresh hail of stones cut Dr. Huth’s cheeks, forehead, and neck. He knew he had to keep moving or be stoned to death. His long legs quaking from the effort, he broke the missile’s inertia, but managed just a few more steps before collapsing under the weight of the nose cone, which pinned him to the street, crushing the air from his lungs and making him pass out.
Merciful oblivion lasted only a heartbeat.
Dr. Huth awoke with a gasp, his burden gone. He flew upward in a metal mesh cage, his wrists shackled together with two feet of chain. Looking up from his manacles, he realized he hadn’t completely escaped the missile. It now stood upright, its riveted skin gliding past him in a white blur as the elevator rose.
He also sensed he wasn’t alone in the cage.
Dr. Huth whipped around, and in so doing came face-to-face with the human from the parallel world, the man he had ordered brought back to Earth for examination and interrogation. This was the same tall, rangy savage who had somehow managed to escape not just FIVE’s custody, but its reality, as well, and in so doing had created untold havoc and destruction.
The one-eyed man stared back at him with malice. A scar from a knife slash, like a crudely drawn lightning bolt, divided his left brow and cheek above and below the black eye patch he wore. Black curling hair fell almost to his shoulders. A leather sheath strapped above his left boot carried a huge knife. In his right hand he held an equally massive chromed wrench.
Though he called himself Ryan Cawdor, FIVE’s media consultants had renamed him “Shadow Man,” and turned him into a symbol of hope for the starving masses. His birthplace on the parallel Earth was Deathlands, the heavily nuked, former United States of America.
“Why have you come back here?” Dr. Huth said. Behind Cawdor, a half-dozen children—filthy, hollow eyed, swollen bellied—clung like monkeys to the outside of the rising elevator cage. Huth ignored their bony little outstretched hands and demanded, “Where are you taking me?”
Shadow Man didn’t answer either question. He held something inside his mouth, a round shape that bulged against the dark stubble of his cheek.
When the gantry elevator stopped, once again Dr. Huth faced the tip of the missile. He was relieved to see that there was no door in the side of the nose cone, and therefore no possible way he could be placed inside.
Shadow Man spun him, and with a forearm crushing against the front of his throat, pinned his back to the nose cone. Cawdor then grabbed the manacle chain and jerked it up, forcing Huth’s arms above his head. Though the scientist struggled, the one-eyed man easily controlled him. Cawdor fitted a bolt through a chain link, threaded it into a matching hole in the nose cone and, using the chromed spanner, quickly torqued it down.
As Cawdor retreated a step, Dr. Huth bawled, “Why are you doing this to me?”
Shadow Man smiled and curled back his lips. Between his front teeth he held a human eyeball with a sky-blue iris. Its color and size perfectly matched his good right eye, as well it should have. Dr. Huth had had the eye genetically reconfigured to fit him, a replacement for the one Cawdor had lost to a knife slash years ago. The gift had been intended as an awe-inspiring demonstration of the biotechnological power of this reality, and of how cooperation with FIVE was rewarded.
When the scientist started to speak, Cawdor lunged forward, slamming a forearm back across his windpipe. Shadow Man took the severed eyeball from his own mouth and shoved it between Dr. Huth’s teeth. His lips clamped shut by a callused palm, Huth could do nothing but whimper as the savage wound turns of duct tape around his head, sealing the eyeball inside.
While the scientist 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