«Ready, Richard?»

«Ready, sir.»

The hand came down and closed the master switch. There was a long moment in which Blade began to wonder if somewhere in those infinitely complex guts of the computer a circuit had failed and nothing was going to happen. Then he felt the chair shudder under him and begin to sink. It sank and sank, down into a black shaft, until Lord Leighton and J were only tiny white faces looking down an immensely deep shaft at him, then still farther down until they were gone and there was nothing above him, around him, or below him except blackness.

Now the blackness faded to gray, to silver, to a searing blue, and he found himself still in the chair, but now the chair stood in the middle of a vast yellow sandy desert, with a raw blue sky overhead. It was perched on some sort of metal rack, and looking down he saw that the rack itself rested on two parallel metal rails that stretched away only a few inches above the sand to the distant horizon.

He had just long enough to absorb all the details, then the chair began to move with a sibilant moan, building speed rapidly, the sand flashing past, the wind tearing in an oddly painless fashion at his body. He felt the acceleration building, and knew that he was racing across the desert at a speed that would soon take him through the sound barrier. In fact, he saw it looming up on the horizon ahead of him, clearly indicated by neon letters-Sound Barrier. He passed through it in total silence, but with a sensation of having been hurled at tremendous speed through a miles-thick wall of jellied soup.

Then all at once there was a sharp and audible jolt, two, three-and the hurtling chair suddenly whipped forward with a tremendous bang and flung him out into space. He was conscious of spreading out hands and feet to stabilize himself as he tumbled wildly through a sky that was no longer blue but gray, then once again black, feeling the tumbling ease, feeling himself flatten out as though he were swimming, still moving forward, endlessly forward, through the blackness.