"Nineteen minutes," he said quietly.

The floor of the redoubt was totally clean, with no hint that anyone might have passed that way.

The massive sec door that opened onto the rest of the complex was still closed, the green control lever in the down position. Ryan had the overwhelming certainty that his son, only eleven years old, couldn't possibly have managed to open and then close the door, which meant either that he'd somehow jumped to some other gateway or he was still there.

Ryan walked slowly up the first row of desks. They were too high for him to see over, but it suddenly occurred to him that if he climbed up He nearly passed out, swaying dangerously, overcome with vertigo.

But he could see the whole room, see Dean lying huddled in a corner, as pale as ivory and still as death.

Only eight minutes remained.

Chapter Four.

A pulse, as faint as a tiny bird's, barely fluttered against the man's index finger.

Ryan had run along the desks, his heavy combat boots splintering delicate comp keyboards. He jumped down, clumsily, the butt of the Steyr smashing a vid screen into a noisy implosion of silver and crimson sparks. A thread of dark smoke began to crawl toward the ceiling.

"Dean." He lifted the boy's head from the floor, wincing as his hand encountered a great bump on the side of Dean's skull, which happened when he fell into the other gateway chamber.

The boy's eyes were closed, and when he pushed back one of the lids, Ryan could only see bloodshot whites.

Dean's mouth was open, his breathing so shallow that it was hardly there. His skin was sallow and cold to the touch, slightly sweating.

"Come on, lad. Wake up." He chafed the limp wrists, trying to rouse Dean by slapping him hard across the cheeks. All that happened was that the marks of Ryan's hands stood out like livid scars on the boy's face.

There was a crackling sound that made Ryan spin quickly, seeing that the sparks had turned into flames and that the worm of smoke had become a great dark, curling python, wreathing toward the bright overhead lights.

Ryan glanced again at the wrist chron, having to waste a vital second or two tugging back the sleeve of his coat while still holding Dean.

Five minutes and forty seconds were left before the Last Destination option expired.

There still seemed no sign of his son reviving so Ryan stood, managing to pick him up in his arms, awkwardly fumbling for the strap of the rifle.

The comp voice boomed out from the speakers in the corner of the room, nearly making Ryan drop the boy.

"Fire in Matter-Transfer Computer Control Center. Fire in Matter-Transfer Computer Control Center. All personnel immediate evacuation. Download all comp programs onto security disks and evacuate soonest by main exit."

Simultaneously the sprinklers in the ceiling of the room began to operate.

Water poured out, stinkingly rancid, soaking Ryan and his son. The sprinkler system probably hadn't been activated for most of the century that the redoubt had stood empty, and its clotted contents had become unspeakably vile.

After less than twenty seconds, the sprinklers became clogged and stopped operating, long before they'd done anything useful to control the fire that was spreading fast through the complex, the ancient plastics catching all too easily.

The smoke roiled along the ceiling, as though it were seeking some route of escape from the control room. As it grew thicker and darker, it started to fill the whole space, dark yellow flames lapping sulkily at the desk tops.

Despite his youth, dean was a solidly built boy, and Ryan was seriously weakened by the second jump. He ducked his head beneath a wave of flame and battled on toward the gateway.

"Emergency fire crews both active and standby immediate move to matter-transfer unit. Gateway evacuation grade-one priority. B12 clearance is waived for this emergency. Serious malfunction with cont" The voice stopped dead in midword.

Ryan was halfway toward the anteroom, the stock of the rifle jolting at every step, but he couldn't stop to adjust the sung without putting his son down in the pools of stinking, green-yellow water.

The fire was racing at incredible speed, consuming everything in its path, filling the whole large room with impenetrable choking smoke.

Ryan had peeled back his sleeve, and he blinked down at the chron. It was becoming difficult to see, but it looked like he was inside four minutes.

The liquid from the sprinkler supply didn't just have a foul stench. It was also oddly thick and slimy, making every surface slippery to the touch, making the floor itself like an ice rink for Ryan and his burden.

"Can walk, Dad," mumbled a faint voice in his ear, but he ignored it.

He could hear the swelling hum from the air-conditioning, struggling to overcome the smoke. Fortunately he was now close enough to the anteroom to be able to slip inside, heeling the door half shut behind himself, gaining a little ease in both breathing and seeing.

Then the lights all went out.

For a single moment he froze in midstride, his mind racing as he considered the awful possibilities. The sprinkler and the comp-warning voice had both malfunctioned. Now the lighting was gone. How long before some key part of the mat-trans unit controls also went down?

If that happened, then he and Dean were both off on the last train to the coast.

The fire was now so intense that they had no chance at all of making it to the sec door to try to get it open. In those few static seconds, Ryan had already made the decision to shoot his son and then himself if the end was inevitable and there was no way out for them.

Better that than burning alive.

Best was making the jump out of the place before it crumbled to ashes around their ears.

"Put the lights on, Dad." The boy started to wriggle as though he wanted to be put down on the floor, but Ryan simply held him more tightly.

One foot at a time, he carefully walked across the little room, feeling the step into the gateway with the toe of his right boot. Ryan stepped up and into the chamber, stooping to lay Dean quickly down, dropping the rifle alongside him. He turned to grab for the edge of the door and slam it shut behind him, missing it first time, in the pitch darkness.

The only sound was his son, still barely conscious, whimpering at his feet, and the growing roar of flames. He could see the brightness of the fire through the half-open door of the anteroom, giving him just enough light to also make out the heavy gray armaglass door.

It finally closed with a firm, satisfying click, and Ryan flung himself onto the floor, reaching out and grabbing hold of Dean's wrist.

"We'll be all right," he shouted.

"Not another"

"Be sick and bad, but we'll live."

The smell of burning plastic seared his throat, and the smoke was making his eye water. The disks had started to glow in the ceiling and all across the floor.

"So far" he whispered.

Ryan snatched a last glance at his chron, in the light from the metal disks.

It showed that twenty-nine minutes and fifteen seconds had elapsed since the last jump.

"Close," Ryan muttered, before the darkness oozed up from the center of his brain and swallowed him.

DEAN DREAMED, but he didn't know that it was just a dream. Every last detail was etched too finely

across his brain for it to be anything but reality.

He was underground, crawling through soft warm mud. Movement was made more difficult because his legs were tied together at the ankle. No, that wasn't quite right. They weren't exactly tied together.

They were actually joined together, the flesh and bones fused into a single clumsy, flapping limb.

The boy knew that he was hunting something or somebody who was in the dark, winding tunnels around him, ahead of him, to both sides of him, above him, below him. Behind him?

Dean had been down in the ancient catacombs for all of his eternal life. Though he spoke little or no

Spanish, an old proverb came to his mind. Al vivo la hogaza, y almuerto, la mortaja .

The boy heard it very clearly, as though someone were speaking it in a lisping Catalan tongue, somewhere deep inside the vault of his skull.

"A large loaf of bread for the living, and for the dead, a shroud."

His own voice was soundless, though Dean knew that he had moved his lips.

Somewhere far ahead was the salvation of a wine-dark ocean, braking ceaselessly on a shingled shore where discarded needles lay, mountain-high.

There was a ledge on the right, where squatted an ancient man in stained frock coat and cracked knee boots, clutching a cane of polished ebony, its handle carved from silver in the shape of a lion's head.

"I disremember the source, dear boy, but it is better by far to dwell on your knees than to die on your feet. It is not so, dear boy?"

"No, Doc, it isn't."

But his mouth was filled with the warm mud, sulfurous and bitter, and Dean made no sound.

RYAN WAS ALSO LOCKED into the heart of a whirling, bright nightmare.

But it wasn't seeming like a nightmareno gibbering phantoms in dusty corridors, no terror swimming up from the deeps of some half-remembered horror.

Just a profound sense of unease.

There was a threat of violence hanging in the air, like an unspoken promise.

Ryan was walking through a large predark house, filled with wonderful paintings and ornate statues in gold and silver and bronze, horsemen spearing snarling lions and dying warriors, slipping from life, artistically posed.

The furniture was covered in large white sheets of spotless linen, and the windows were veiled in the same material, giving a strange, muted quality to the light, like wandering in an undersea cavern.

Ryan was conscious of clocks ticking in every room. One was ormolu-and-blue porcelain, topped with the placid bust of a serene Roman emperor wearing a laurel wreath. As he passed it, the clock began to chime, a high, thin, pure sound. It chimed seventeen times.

In the corners of the corniced ceilings there were huge spiderwebs, spun from fine silvery filaments that floated in the ceaseless currents of air. Jaundiced mirrors, blotched with green mold, framed in warped mahogany, distorted Ryan's face as he walked slowly by them.

There were high double doors that opened into the oppressive heat of an orangery, the leaded panes of glass smeared with moisture and golden lichen.

The sense of unease was deepening, and Ryan kept looking back over his shoulder. Lush foliage, dank with condensation, filled the enormous room, and it seemed that someone had just that moment moved out of sight, timing their disappearances to coincide perfectly with his turning.

He stepped out onto a long terrace, dotted with large stone jars, taller than a man. The sky was totally overcast, with not a trace of sun, though the yew hedges left odd, sharply angular shadows.

Ryan saw a copper statue of a child, stooped as though in fear, hands raised to ward off a blow. The name on the plinth simply read Lazarus.

There was a lake just visible at the bottom of a rolling expanse of lawn. And a domed monument, stark against the hillside beyond.

He was feeling sick, and he walked to sit on a wrought-iron bench, doubling over. He coughed and brought up a tangled mass of raw bloody meat and thin red worms.

DEAN HAD SUNK into the mud, feeling it suck him down, like soft hands that brushed against him, then clung and pulled, dragging him into the warm darkness.

It was comfortable to slip into the dark, away from all worries, no longer any need to fight against it.

The only thing stopping him was a tiny bright bead of light, like a dazzling eye, searching him out in the black sludge, homing in on him like a missile seeking its target, becoming larger and brighter.

Dean pushed his hands out, as though warding off a blow, trying to hinder the swelling light from preventing him from enjoying the bliss of restful sleep.

It felt as though someone were shaking him hard, an angry giant mutie that dwelled within the silent depths of the thick, welcoming ooze, squeezing his wet body.

RYAN HAD RUN AWAY from the bench, leaving the wriggling mess behind him on the raked gravel walk, the taste horrid in his dry mouth.

He entered the maze of dark, bitter yews, boxed around him, twenty feet high, a fear of the demiurge pursuing him, driving him deeper into the heart of the riddle.

It was beginning to snow. The large, soft white flakes settled on the trodden ground and on the hedges, on his own dark curly hair and across his broad shoulders, soaking through him.

There was painful pressure in his chest, across his temples, behind his eyes, holding him from the rest he desperately wanted, probing at his nape, squeezing his wet body.