'Oh?'
'Yes. That in death - even the true death - the Wamphyri are just as loathsome as in life or in undeath!'
'How ... how do we go about it?' The caver spokesman's voice shook a little.
Trask shrugged. 'You came close to answering that one yourself just a few minutes ago. Reach up, jump, and let the Gate do the rest. It will take you in, pass you through.'
'Which will take . .. how long?'
'We're not sure,' said Anna Marie.
And Nathan told her, 'If you go first we can help you.'
She moved between him and Trask; they lifted her up; she held up her arms and was taken effortlessly from them. And as she slid into the white glare, they heard her gasp, drawn out almost interminably as she disappeared. Trask followed immediately, so that as Anna Marie's feet passed into the glare, he was already jumping and reaching out after her.
'Quickly!' Nathan told Chung and the cavers. 'Let's all go through together.' The cavers jumped almost as a man, and as a man were taken up. And Nathan and Chung were last.
But as the others had disappeared into the sphere of white light, so Nathan had remembered one who wasn't here. And also, he remembered his own Misha: the misery she must be experiencing, not knowing what had become of him. No need for Zek to go through that. Quickly he reached out for her, and made contact in the moment before he felt the Gate sucking at him. Then ... it was the work of that single moment to pass on the information: that Ben Trask was on his way to Starside. But Zek's answering mental cry - of denial, astonishment, pain - was shut off even as she issued it...
After the initial suction, that first weird tug-o'-war between gravity and the Gate's attraction, the feeling of being drawn up, of the defeat of gravity itself, disappeared completely. It was simply a drifting sensation, but of drifting upwards, like a swimmer surfacing after a pe.
Looking up - or ahead? - Nathan and Chung could see the others as in a shaft of white light, seemingly floating there, unsupported. Anna Marie was in front, followed by Trask, then the cavers in a triangular formation. And they were all looking down or back at Nathan and Chung.
In its way, Trask thought, it's as strange as the Mobius Continuum: the weightlessness . .. the sensation of emptiness ... the effortless mobility. But now, instead of moving from place to place, we're moving between worlds!
Unlike the Mobius Continuum, however, such thoughts
had no weight at all. This place was real enough; no metaphysical continuum this but a physical reality, the crossover between parallel universes. And where the Mobius Continuum might have been that Element in which God said: 'Let There Be Light', this might well be the Light itself. A misty light, white as snow but of an even temperature, so that the cold of the cavern was soon left far behind.