'I have to report this.' Goodly's face was grim; heading for the Duty Officer's room, he looked even more cadaverous than usual. But as he got there the phone started cheeping.
It was David Chung at the Refuge in Romania. And when he heard Goodly's voice: 'Okay, lan, I'm home and dry. There was a spot of trouble at the airport, but finally I'm here. Nathan and Trask can ... they can come on in.'
Goodly breathed a sigh of relief, said, 'Yes, they can.'
Except -
- Where the hell were Nathan and Trask?
From deep in his mind, unbidden, it was as if some inner voice answered with a query of its own: And where will they be this time tomorrow? For that matter, where wiJJ you be, Goodly, my boy? It was his talent working, he knew, except even a precog can't see too far into the future. And sometimes, like now, he was loath to even try ...
Nathan was used to it by now, but not Trask. And after a single glance, Trask's first taste or feel of the Mobius Continuum, he doubted if he ever would be used to it. Or if he would want to be.
What do you think? Nathan asked him. For even thoughts had weight in the Mobius Continuum, and Trask 'heard' them as sharp and clear as speech in the more mundane world. Quick to catch on, he answered: When I'm a-a-able to think, then I'll let you know!
Nathan's chuckle was his only answer. But Trask was too busy sensing the Mobius Continuum all around him -absorbing or experiencing what he could of it - to feel any real resentment. And it was for him much as it had been for only a handful of human beings who had travelled here before him, so that when he was capable of thinking, he thought much the same thoughts as them; even the same as Nathan himself had thought:
I was in the Ops room, with Nathan, until we took a step - out - of there. Now we're here, on the other side of a Mobius door. Except.. . where the helJ is 'here'.'?
For 'here' lay darkness, the Primal Darkness itself, as it had existed before the universe began. It was a place of absolute negativity, not even a parallel plane of existence, because nothing existed here. At least, not under normal conditions. If there was ever a place where darkness lay upon the face of the deep, this was it. And Trask was struck by the thought: Perhaps this was where God was born, be/ore he took his first step into the universe of light. Perhaps that's how the physical universe started, when He split it off from this dark and metaphysical void. For, indeed, the Mobius Continuum was without form, and void.
To say that Trask was astonished would be to belittle the range of emotions which swept over him; indeed, and apart from that same handful of fellow voyagers, his was a new emotion, designed to fit an entirely new experience. Even the Necroscope Harry Keogh (despite that he had been first) and his Necroscope son Nathan had never felt like this. For they had understood at least something of the Mobius Continuum - they had imagined and conjured it - while Trask's mind was of the world, albeit a world in which Truth was the guide and Truth the gate.
And, if anything, that made it worse, for he understood the Truth of the Mobius Continuum: that it was apart from the world of men, and apart from all human existence and even conjecture, except in the secret minds of long-dead mathematicians and the 'magic' of mystics and metaphysicians.
And yet he was here, and he felt it!
There was no air, but neither was there any time, so that Trask didn't need to breathe. And in the absence of time, space itself was absent. These essential ingredients - these prime constituents of any ordinary universe of matter - had no existence here! Yet Trask remained intact. He didn't rupture, disintegrate and fly apart, because there was nowhere to fly to.