They went into the first car and made their way up to the front window, carefully hanging on to the seats of oblivious riders to keep the swaying of the train from knocking them over. There were no more stops between there and Penn Station, and the train was plunging along, the rails roaring beneath it. Those rails climbed gradually as the already elevated track went higher still to avoid a triple-stacked freeway. Then the rails bent away to the left in a long graceful curve, still climbing slightly; and little by little, over the low brown cityscape of Brooklyn, the towers of Manhattan rose glittering in the early sunlight—gray and crystal for the Empire State Building, silver-blue for the odd sheared-off Citibank building, and steely white fire for the scalloped tower of the Chrysler Building as it caught the Sun. The place looked magical enough in the bright morning. Nita grinned to herself, looking at the view and realizing that there was magic there. That forest of towers opened onto other worlds. One day she would open that worldgate by herself and go somewhere.
Fred stared at the towers, amazed. This is more life? More even than the place where you two live?
“Ten million lives in the city, Fred. Maybe four or five million on that island alone.”
Doesn’t it worry you, packing all that life together? What if a meteor hits it? What if there’s a starflare? If something should happen to all that life—how terrible!
Nita laughed to herself. “Doesn’t seem to worry them…” Beside her, Kit was hanging on to a seat, being rocked back and forth by the train’s speed. Very faintly Nita could hear what Kit heard and felt more strongly; the train’s aliveness, its wild rushing joy at doing what it was made to do—its dangerous pleasure in its speed, the wind it fought with, the rails it rode. Nita shook her head in happy wonder. And I wanted to see the life on other planets. There’s more life in this world than I expected.
It’s beautiful, Fred said from his vantage point just above Kit’s shoulder.
“It really is,” Nita said.
The train howled defiant joy and plunged into the darkness under the river.
*
Penn Station was thick with people when they got there, but even so it took them only a few minutes to get down to the Seventh Avenue subway station and from there up to Times Square and the shuttle to Grand Central. The shuttle ride was short and crowded. Nita and Kit and Fred were packed tight together in a corner, where they braced themselves against walls and seats and other people while the train shouted along through the echoing underground darkness.
I can’t feel the Sun, Fred said, sounding worried.
“We’re ten or twenty feet underground,” Nita said silently. “We’ll get you some Sun as soon as we get off.”
Kit looked at Fred with concern. “You’ve been twitchy ever since we went into the tunnel, haven’t you?”
Fred didn’t speak for a moment. I miss the openness, he said then. But worse, I miss the feeling of your star on me. Where I come from no one is sealed away from the surrounding emissions. He trailed off, his thoughts full of the strange hiss and crackle of interstellar radiation—subtly patterned sound, rushing and dying away and swelling up again—the Speech in yet another of its forms. Starsong, Nita thought. “You said you heard about the Book of Night with Moon,” she said. “Was that how? Your … friends, your people, they actually talk to each other over all those distances—millions of light-years?”
That’s right. Not that we use light to do it, of course. But the words, the song, they never stop. Except now. I can hardly hear anything but neutrinos…
Kit and Nita glanced at each other. “The worldgate’s inside here, Fred,” Kit said. “In back of a deli, a little store. We’ll have to be there for at least a few minutes to get Nita’s pen out.”
“We could go out first and look around,” Nita said. “We’re early—it’s only nine thirty. We don’t even have to think about anchoring the timeslide for a little bit yet.”
The subway cars screeched to a halt, doors rolled open, and the crush loosened as people piled out. Nita got off gladly, looking around for the signs pointing the way toward the upstairs Main Concourse level of Grand Central—it had been a while since she’d been there.
“You sure you know your way around in here?” Kit asked as Nita headed down a torn-up looking corridor.
“Uh-huh. It’s pretty much settled down now since they finished the construction…. I just keep looking for the old entrances out of habit C’mon.”
She led them up a flight of stairs into the lower Grand Central concourse—all beige tiles, gray floor, signs pointing to fifty different trains, and small stores packed together. “The deli’s down there,” she said as she went, waving a hand at a crowd of hurrying people and the wide hall past them. “We go up here.” And another flight of stairs, wider and prettier, let them out on the upper concourse, a huge stretch of cream-colored marble under a great blue dome painted with constellations and starred with lights.
They headed across the marble floor, up a short ramp, and out one of many brassy yellow doors, onto the street. Immediately the three of them were assailed by noise, exhaust fumes, people hurrying in all directions, a flood of cabs and buses and cars. But there was also sunlight, and Kit and Nita stood against the wall by the Grand Central doors, letting Fred soak it up and get his composure back. He did so totally oblivious to the six men and three jackhammers working just across the street behind a barrier of sawhorses and orange plastic cones. That’s much better, he said.
“It was a lot quieter inside, though,” Kit said, and Nita was inclined to agree with him. The rattling clamor of the jackhammers was climbing down her ears into her bones and making her teeth jitter. The men, two burly ones and one skinny one, all three broad-shouldered and tan, all in helmets and jeans and boots, appeared to be trying to dig to China. One of them hopped down into the excavation for a moment to check its progress, and vanished up to his neck. Then the hammering started again. “How can they stand it?” Nita muttered.
Stand what? It’s lovely out here. Fred danced about a little in the air, brightening out of invisibility for a few moments and looking like a long-lived remnant of a fireworks display.
“Fred, dial it back!” Kit said silently. “If somebody sees you—“
They didn’t see me in the field the other day, Fred replied, though Artificer knows they looked.
“Probably the Learjet distracted them. Fred, come on, tone it down a little,” Nita said. “Let’s go back inside and do what we have to. Then we can set the timeslide and have fun in the city for the rest of the day.”
They went back inside and down the stairs again, accompanied by the quiet inward sound of Fred’s grumbling. There was no trouble finding the little deli where the worldgate was situated, down past the end of the food hall, and Nita and Kit paused outside. “You have everything ready?” Nita said.
“All in here.” Kit tapped his head. “The spells are all set except for one or two syllables—it’s like dialing almost all of a phone number. When I call for you, just come on back. All we need is for the supplies to be in range of the spell; there’s nothing special that has to be done with them. Fred, you stay with Nita.”
As you say.
They went in. Nita lingered by the front counter, staring at dill pickles and sandwich makings, trying to look normal while she waited for Kit to call her. Fred hung over her shoulder, looking with great interest at bologna and salami and mayonnaise and cream cheese. You people certainly have enough ways to internalize energy, he said. Is there really that much difference between one brand of matter and another?
“Well, wasn’t there any difference when you were a black hole? Didn’t a rock, say, taste different from a ray of light, when you soaked one or the other up?”
Now that you mention it, yes. But appreciating differences like that was something you had to work at for a long time. I wouldn’t expect someone as young as you to—
“Nita,” Kit’s thought came abruptly. “We’ve got trouble. It’s not here.”
“What? It has to be!”
“Nope. It’s gone.”
“Girlie,” said the man behind the deli counter in a no-nonsense growl, “you gonna buy anything?”
“Uh,” Nita said, and by reflex more than anything else picked up a can of soda from the nearby cooler and fished around in her pocket for the change. “Kit—” she called.
“Coming.”
Nita paid for the soda. Kit joined her, carrying a small bag of potato chips, which he paid for in turn. Together they went back out into the corridor, and Kit knelt down by the window of a store across the way, a window full of shiny cutlery. He got his wizards’ manual out of his pack and began going through the pages in a hurry. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I even checked this morning to make sure there hadn’t been any change in the worldgate status. It said, right here, ‘patent and operative.’“
“Were the spells all right?”
Kit glared up at Nita, and she was instantly sorry she’d asked. “The spells were fine,” Kit said. “But they got caught like that first one I did, when you came along. Oh, damn…” He trailed off, and Nita edged around beside him to look at the page. “Something’s changed,” Kit said, and indeed the page didn’t look as it had when Nita had checked it herself in her own manual the night before. The listings for the other Manhattan worldgates were the same—the One World Trade Center gate was listed as “under construction”, as it would be for some years until the Freedom Tower construction was much further along, and the Rockefeller Center gate as “closed for routine maintenance.” But under the Grand Central gate listing was a small red box that said in boldface type, Claudication temporarily dislocated due to unscheduled spatial interruption, followed by a string of numbers and symbols in the Speech, a description of the gate’s new location. Kit glanced up at the roof, through which the sound of jackhammers could plainly be heard. “The construction,” he said. “It must have screwed up the worldgate’s interruption of space somehow.”
Nita was puzzling over the symbols for the new location. “Isn’t that term there the one for height above the ground?” she asked.
“Uh-huh. Look at it, it must be sixty, seventy stories straight up from here.” Kit slapped the book shut in great annoyance, shoved it back in his backpack. “Now what do we do?”
We go back outside? Fred asked, very hopefully.
It seemed the best suggestion. The three of them walked out again, and Fred bobbed and danced some more in the sunlight while Nita and Kit walked slowly east along Forty-second Street, toward the Park Avenue overpass. “Dislocated,” Kit muttered. “And who knows how long it’ll take to come undislocated? A perfectly good piece of time wasted.”
Nita stopped and turned, looking up into the air and trying to estimate where the deli lay under the Grand Central complex. She picked a spot that seemed about right, let her eye travel up and up, sixty, maybe seventy stories. “Kit,” she said. “Kit! Look what’s seventy stories high, and right next door.”
Kit looked. Dark blue and silver, with its big stylized globe logo on one side, the MetLife Building reared its oblong self up at least seventy stories high, right there—not only right behind Grand Central, but part of it. “Yeah,” Kit said, his voice still heavy with annoyance. “So?”
“So you remember that shield spell you showed me? The one that makes the air solid? If you change the quantities in the spell a little, you can use it for something else. To walk on, even. You just keep the air hard.”
She couldn’t keep from grinning. Kit stared at Nita as if she’d gone crazy. “Are you suggesting that we walk out to the worldgate and—” He laughed. “How are we going to get up there?”
“There’s a helipad on top of the building,” Nita said. “They closed it down a long time ago after there was an accident, but the elevator still goes up to the old waiting room at the top. If we can get up there, we can get out to the gate.”
Kit stared at her. “What, by talking the air solid? If you’re gonna do that spell, you’re going to walk on it first! I saw that spell; it’s not that easy.”
“I practiced it some – it’s related to the shield spell.” She frowned at his slightly reluctant look. “Come on, Kit, you want to waste the timeslide? It’s almost ten now! It’ll probably be years before these guys are finished digging. Let’s do it!”
“They’ll never let us up there,” Kit said with conviction.
“Oh yes, they will! They won’t have a choice, because Fred’ll make a diversion for us. We don’t even need anything as big as a Learjet this time. How about it, Fred?”
Fred looked at them reluctantly. I must admit I have been feeling an urge to burp…
Kit still looked uncertain. “And when we get up there,” he said, “all those stories up, and looking as if we’re walking on nothing—what if somebody sees us?”
Nita laughed. “Who’re they going to tell? And who’s going to believe them?”
Kit nodded and then began to grin slowly, too. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah! Let’s go, it’s getting late.”
Back they went into Grand Central, straight across the main concourse this time and up one of the six escalators that led up to the lobby of the MetLife Building. They paused just outside the revolving doors at the end of the escalators. The MetLife lobby was a big place, pillared and walled and paved in dark granite, echoing with the sound of people hurrying in and out of the station. They went up the escalator to the next floor, and Nita pointed off to one side, indicating an elevator bank. One elevator had a small sign standing by it: EXPRESS-48-56-ROOF. Also standing by it was a bored-looking uniformed security guard.
“That’s it,” Nita said.
“So if we can just get him away from there…”
“It’s not that simple.” She pointed down at the end of the hall between two more banks of elevators. Another guard sat behind a large semicircular desk, watching a row of TV monitors. “They’ve got cameras all over the place. We’ve got to get that guy out of there, too. Fred, if you’re going to do something, do it right between them. Out in front of that desk.”
Well, Fred said, sounding interested, let’s see, let’s see… He damped his light down and floated off toward the elevators, looking like an unusually large speck of dust, nothing more. The dust mote stopped just between the desk and the elevator guard, hung in midair, and concentrated so fiercely that Nita and Kit could both feel it thirty feet away.
T-hup!
BANG!
“That’ll get their attention,” Kit muttered. It did; both the guards started at the noise, began looking around for the source of it—then both went very very slowly over to examine the large barrel cactus in a brass pot that had suddenly appeared in the middle of the shiny floor.
“Now,” Kit said, and took off toward the elevator with Nita close behind. Both the guards had their backs turned, and Nita, passing them, saw the elevator keys hanging off one guard’s belt. “Fred,” she said silently, “can you grab those real fast, the way you grabbed my pen? Don’t swallow them!”
I might make that mistake once, Fred said, but not twice. As they slipped into the elevator Fred paused by the guard’s belt, and the keys vanished without so much as a jingle. He sailed in to them. How was that?
“Great. Quick, Nita, close the door!”
She punched one of the elevator buttons and the doors slid shut; the keys appeared again, and Kit caught them in midair before they fell. “It’s always one of these round ones, like they use on coin phones,” he said, going through the keys. “Fred, I didn’t know you could make live things!”
I didn’t know either, Fred said, sounding unsettled, and I’m not sure I like it!
“Here we go,” Kit said, and put one key into the elevator lock, turning it to RUN, and then pressed the button marked 56-58-ROOF. The elevator took off in a hurry.
Nita swallowed repeatedly to pop her ears. “Aren’t you going to have to change the spells a little to compensate for the gate being up high now?
” she said after a moment.
“A little. You just put in the new height coordinate. Oops!”
The elevator began to slow down quickly, and Nita’s stomach churned for a moment. She and Kit both pressed themselves against the sides of the elevator, so they wouldn’t be immediately visible to anyone who might happen to be standing right outside the door. But when the doors slid open, no one was there. They peered out and saw a long carpeted corridor with a plate-glass door at one end. Through it nothing was visible but a wide, long, empty space, the one-time two-level restaurant and club now dark, its windows covered, everything else gutted to the bare concrete walls.
“What about these keys?” Nita said.
“Leave ‘em in the elevator lock,” Kit said. “That way the guard downstairs’ll just think he left them there. If they discover they’re missing, they’ll start looking for whoever took them.”
“Yeah, but how’ll we get down when we’re done?”
“We’ll walk on air,” Kit said, his voice teasing. Nita rolled her eyes at the ceiling. “Look, let’s just get out of here first, okay? Which way do we go to get up to the helipad level?”
“Left. Look, there’s the stairs. Fred? That way — ”
They slipped out of the elevator just as it chimed and its doors shut again—probably the guard had called it from downstairs. The corridor off to the left was featureless except for one door at its very end. ROOF ACCESS, the door said in large red letters. Nita tried the knob, then let her hand fall in exasperation. “Locked. Crap!”
“Well, wait a moment,” Kit said, and tried the knob himself. “You don’t really want to be locked, do you?” he said aloud in the Speech, very quietly. Again Nita was amazed by how natural the wizards’ language sounded when you heard it, and how nice it was to hear—as if, after being lost in a foreign country for a long time, someone should suddenly speak warmly to you in English. “You must’ve been locked for days now,” Kit went on, his voice friendly and persuasive, not casting a spell, just talking—though in the Speech, the two were often dangerously close. “ It must be pretty dull, no one using you, no one paying any attention. Now we need to use you at least a couple of times this morning, so we thought we’d ask—”