'Son, do you think ...' Trask began, and squirmed a little in his chair. He hated to obfuscate and liked all things clear-cut. Perhaps it was his talent working in reverse. '- I mean, in his time your father took quite a few people with him along the Mobius route. But it's something strange to me, an experience I can never know . .. Isn't it?'
'It's still strange to me, too,' Nathan answered. 'And yet attractive, maybe even addictive. Do you want to try it?'
'I ... I don't know.' Trask began to shake his head, then stopped and nodded. 'Yes, I want to try it. This could well be my one and only chance.'
'And do you trust me?'
This time there was no hesitation. 'Yes, of course I do. You know I do.'
Nathan shrugged and smiled again. 'So be it,' he said.
And so it would be ...
Nathan slept, but Trask was too excited to do anything but sit at his desk, shuffle paper and try to keep his mind off what was coming next, in just a few hours' time. For to dwell upon it ... he knew he'd get no work done at all! Trask had been in a good many strange places and had done a good many strange things - the strangest! - but this was to venture into a place where only a handful of men had ever been, one which shouldn't even exist, except in the fevered dreams of theoretical physicists or abstruse mathematicians. The Mobius Continuum! Only let him think of it ... off he would go again, into crazy dreams and fancies of his own. But only fancies, because there was no imagining how it would really be.
In the end, he pushed the paperwork aside and went to the Ops room. This was to be the stepping-off point for Romania. It was empty now, but in about three more hours ...
They would all be here, E-Branch in its entirety, or with the sole (the soul?) exception of Anna Marie English, eco-path, who for some months now had been working with the kids in the Romanian Refuge, and at the same time making the way ready for Nathan. Even the Minister Responsible would be here, because this was something he'd never seen, either.
But Ben Trask had seen it, even before Nathan:
That time at Harry Keogh's place not far from Bonnyrigg, his 'last refuge' on Earth, when the Necroscope had reached the end of his time in this world. Trask had seen Harry in his Wamphyri mode - had witnessed something of a vampire's weird metamorphosis - and sometimes he nightmared about it still. But as for the Mobius Continuum: that was something you didn't see, unless you were the one who conjured it. But you could see it in use, certainly.
Remembering the way Harry had looked that night when the Branch burned his house, Trask shivered again. Jesus! The Wamphyri overlords of Nathan's world - or of Starside at least - were like that? He knew that they were, of course; indeed, that they were worse than that. For Harry had fought the evil within himself all the way down the line, and according to Nathan even into Starside itself. But the Wamphyri: they gave free rein to their passions, their lusts, their evils. They were evil incarnate.
As so often before, one last picture of Harry Keogh came floating to the surface of Trask's memory. It was a scene from that same, sad, terrifying time when the Necroscope had almost but not quite succumbed to his vampirism:
An esper called Geoffrey Paxton - a treacherous telepathic dog who should never have been inducted into E-Branch in the first place - had tried to kill Harry, tried to shoot him with a crossbow. Failing, he had fallen prey to Harry, and almost to the creature within him.