Armorer panted. "Sec lock's activated. Take a missile to break it open."

Ryan stopped by them. "Thing's started." he said. "See the mist through the glass. Look at the ceiling disks starting to glow."

"Quiet," Mildred called. "Dean's shouting."

"Dad, please Dadhelpme"

"He's going," Trader warned.

"Shut up," Ryan snapped. He pressed his mouth close to the ice-cold, brown-and-white armaglass,

shouting as loudly as he possibly could. "Dean! Lie down flat for the jump. Now! I'll come after you. Hear me? Stay where you end up, and I'll come after you." He drew a breath and tried again. "Dean! Wait and I'll come." Krysty touched him gently on the shoulder, but he shrugged her off. "Wait and"

"He's gone, lover."

"Gone?"

"I regret that it is true, old friend." Doc patted him on the arm.

Ryan took a step away, trying to keep himself together. The sudden disappearance of his son had been

truly devastating. It was as though he'd been walking through a summer meadow and found himself flat

on his back, looking up at the sun with a bullet in his spine. No warning. Gradually all of his fighting skills and senses came seeping back to him. "Right," he said, glancing at his wrist chron. "It's inside the half hour, so he should simply have jumped directly back to Maine. I'll use the LD control and try to follow him. Long as he hasn't wandered away from the gateway, then we can both jump back here."

"You'll feel like death," Trader cautioned.

"Sure. But we'll still be alive, and we'll all be together again."

Krysty touched him on the arm. "What if you don't get back here within thirty minutes, lover?"

"Then I'll come and find Fireblast! 'Course. We don't know where we are right now."

"Set a meeting place," J.B. suggested. "We'll wait here in the redoubt for for let's say twelve hours from

now." Both men checked their chrons. "You and Dean haven't shown, then we'll go out and find where

we are."

Mildred had been thinking deeply about the logistics of it. "If we're right, you'll be in Maine. Don't yet know where we are. So, we should set a meeting place and time that we can all likely get to."

Krysty looked again at the chron. "Time's speeding by," he said worriedly.

"Maui bridge over the Sippi at Memphis," Trader suggested. "Four weeks from today at noon."

"Agreed. Four weeks from today, noon at the big bridge at Memphis."

Krysty put her arms around Ryan, holding him tightly. She kissed him on the cheek, whispering in his ear. "Come back safe, lover. I don't have anything if I don't have you."

He kissed her on the lips, returning the hug. "Same for me, lover."

Ryan shook everyone's hand, looked at his chron. "Twenty-seven minutes since our jump. Four minutes since Dean went."

"What if the lad didn't hear your warning, comes around back in Maine and has the intuitive sense to

simply press the Last Destination code on the door? That would bring him back here anytime in the next half hour."

Ryan looked at Doc. "So?"

"I don't believe that you can use the Last Destination code twice."

"Meaning I'd be stranded in Maine?"

The old man nodded. "It is indeed a sorry thing to be lost, so very far away from all your friends and loved ones, Ryan."

"I know it. But we still got us a date and a place if things go wrong."

There was nothing more to be said.

With a final glance around, Ryan tugged at the door of the chamber. For a single piercing moment he

thought that it wasn't going to open. The time would quickly elapse for a jump after the boy. Dean would

be totally alone and lost.

He tried the door again, and this time the sec lock clicked open. Ryan stepped inside and pulled the heavy armaglass door closed behind him.

The last thing he saw was Krysty Wroth, her emerald eyes brimming with unshed tears.

Ryan sat, laying the rifle at his side and tucking the SIG-Sauer snugly into its holster. He rested his back

against the brown-and-white wall and closed his eye.

He struggled to compose himself for the second jump in thirty minutes, knowing from previous experience that this wasn't going to be a pleasurable experience.

The silvery disks above his head and by his feet began to glow, and the ghostly wraiths of white mist gathered near the top of the gateway.

But Ryan saw none of that. He was preoccupied with the sickening swirl within his brain that told him the jump was irreversibly on its way.

THE WALLS OF THE CHAMBER were a dark gray, the same color of the mat-trans unit up in Acadia National Park that they'd only just left.

Ryan fought against the nausea, swallowing hard, sliding down to lie on his back to try to recover more quickly. He knew that time was now the remorseless enemy, ticking away the speedy seconds and minutes until he would no longer be able to use the Last Destination control on the coded console by the door.

The headache was ferocious, spreading from his nape, erupting like agonizing molten lava over the top of his skull, behind both eyes. Despite the pain and sickness, Ryan was able to make the clinical observation that his missing eye hurt just as much as his good eye.

He could actually smell or taste the rancid bitterness of vomit, but he couldn't face trying to find out where it was. Or whose it was.

Squinting, Ryan could see that the door of the chamber was closed, which it would have to have been for the mat-trans unit to have functioned at all.

He also saw that the chamber was empty.

Dean wasn't there.

"Two possibilities," he whispered, conscious of how dry his mouth was and how wonderful a mouthful of crystal-clear spring water would be.

The first possibility was that Dean had ended up somewhere else. The second was that he'd been there a little earlier but had already left.

A third thought occurred to Ryan; perhaps he'd jumped to a different gateway himself, to one that happened, by grim coincidence, to have the same color of armaglass walls as the redoubt in Maine.

Three possibilities, but only one possible course of actionto get up on his feet and go and see if he could find his son outside the unit.

Standing up was a major accomplishment.

Ryan managed it only with the aid of the Steyr SSG-70, climbing up it, leaning his shoulder against the cold armaglass.

Only when he was finally upright did he dare risk a glance at his wrist chron.

"Fireblast!" To his horror he saw that fourteen minutes had already elapsed since he had commenced the jump from the other redoubt.

If Dean wasn't close by outside, then it was going to mean tracking him down, then a dangerous trip

overland to meet up with the others.

Ryan lurched to the door, pushing at it and nearly falling as it opened easily. He looked at the control panel, as though there might be some clue as to what had happened in the past few minutes. But the numbers and letters, in their recessed boxes, stared blankly back at him.

The anteroom was also empty.

"Dean." It sounded about as loud as a mouse farting behind a brick wall.

Ryan, feeling a little better, stepped out of the chamber and tried again.

"Dean! You there?"

The only sound was the whirring of the huge banks of control consoles, each linked to the hidden master

computer. Ryan stood a moment in the small room, licking his dry lips, pausing longer to wipe his

sweating palms down the legs of his pants.

There was a feeling of cool fresh air, which had probably resulted from their own entry into the redoubt, only a couple of hours ago.

Ryan sniffed, trying to catch some scent of his only child. But there was nothing.

"Dean! It's me, son."

With an effort he slung the Steyr over his shoulder and drew the SIG-Sauer, stepping out into the control

area.

At a first glance, it was totally deserted, except for the chattering machines and the flickering lights.

Ryan looked again to check the time.