Frank turned to his wife. They exchanged one more kiss. No need for words anymore. Not in a here and now that wasn’t.
He switched from brake to accelerator. As they went over the cliff he instinctively shifted into low. The slope was almost seventy degrees, but they didn’t fall. Somehow he kept control.
“Reality is sticky stuff,” Mouse told him with a sly smile.
Feeling almost jaunty, he switched on the headlights. The twin beams pierced the blackness for forty feet. Schools of small silvery fish swam into the lights, hung as if paralyzed for an instant before dashing away in fright.
Their descent seemed to continue forever. When the cliff did terminate, the end was abrupt and unexpected. The ground leveled off. A broad, flat plain stretched endlessly before them. It looked like mud and sand, but the motor home progressed across the uncertain surface without any trouble at all. Except for the small area lit by the headlights, it was pitch-black around them.
“Wow, did you guys see that?” Wendy was sitting by a big side window, staring out into the darkness.
“See what, dear?” her mother asked.
“Something big. It had teeth and fins and it looked like a neon sign!”
“Didn’t know we were that deep.” Frank spoke without turning. “You sure we’re goin’ the right way?”
“We are going the only way,” Mouse assured him.
“Pressure down here must be hundreds of pounds a square inch, or however the hell they measure that stuff.”
Whatever the pressure was, the motor home cruised along unaffected. The roof did not crack, the joints did not groan. It wouldn’t take that long, Frank knew. If their protection went, the motor home and everything within would be flattened like a tin can beneath a tank.
Other phosphorescent monstrosities gradually became visible. Things with stomachs bigger than their bodies, with heads bigger than their stomachs, all needle-sharp teeth and bright electric eyes. The motor home’s lights froze them briefly before they jerked or darted back into the eternal night that was their home.
Other creatures, infrequent but active, scuttled out of the motor home’s path, stirring up mud and silt as they fled. Once something like a fifty-foot flounder exploded out of their way, stirring up so much muck they never got a decent look at it.
Frank glanced down at the speedometer. With the accelerator pushed to the floor and no obstacles to slow their progress, they were doing slightly over a hundred miles an hour, right up near the motor home’s limit. He saw no reason for caution. There was nothing down here to run into and in Mouse they had a guide more efficient than any sonar.
Only once did she direct him to deviate momentarily from their course. As they did so he saw the plutonic glow of subsurface vents off to their left. Five-foot-long worms clustered close around whirling plumes of Earth’s breath. Bacteria clouded the water, feeding on hydrogen sulfides. It was all real, and more alien than anything they’d yet encountered.
After several days of this Frank found himself wondering if it was Mouse’s intention to circumnavigate the globe underwater. They were making excellent progress and the fuel level fell with inexplicable slowness, but their range was still finite. She assured him repeatedly that they were not driving aimlessly, but toward a definite destination.
There was no propane to cook with, but the motor home’s microwave worked fine. Assisted by the imaginative Flucca, Alicia managed to conjure up remarkably nutritious meals from their declining food stock. Only Burnfingers was unable to relax and enjoy the impossible ride. Knowing that tons of water pressed tight all around them, held back only by a thin strip of transient reality, he kept to himself and said little.
“We’re getting close,” Mouse finally said one day.
Frank was doing his stint at the wheel. Now he took a deep breath. He’d begun to despair of ever hearing those words despite her repeated reassurances.
She was crowding close, her perfume distracting him from his driving. “Turn here. No, more to the right. That’s it.”
He complied, marveling once more at how the motor home responded under what should have been not only impossible but deadly conditions.
“Now straight.”
A loud bump came from beneath and Frank’s blood went cold for an instant. Then he realized they hadn’t lost their seal of reality. It was only the sound of the front shocks adjusting as they began to ascend. He shifted back into low.
The grade was as steep as the one they’d descended when leaving Los Angeles but the motor home climbed with all the agility of a four-wheel drive. Several hours passed before Wendy let out a shout.
“Dad, turn the lights off! It’s getting light outside!”
Sure enough, the blackness through which they’d traveled for days was giving way to a velvety purple color. Soon brightly hued schools of tropical fish were swimming around them, darting for cover among rocks and coral as the motor home advanced.
Paradoxically, Frank found he was more nervous now than he’d been at any time since leaving Los Angeles They’d come a long way under unbelievable circumstances. But if anything went wrong now they could drown just as easily twenty feet beneath the surface as two miles down.
He was worrying needlessly. The motor home continued to ascend into water clear as crystal. Doubly gratifying was the fact that all the fish looked normal. They saw no mutants, no bizarre shapes, no twisted bodies. Only color and form.
They had to drive for a while before they found a break in the jagged reef. Once beyond the coral wall, the surface hung placidly only a few feet above them. The radio antenna broke through, leaving a small wake behind it as they advanced. Frank found himself driving across a gentle bottom paved with white sand.
Come on, he found himself urging the motor home. Just a little farther. Another couple hundred yards and we can breathe free again. A little longer and we’ll be there.
Be where? he asked himself. Be where, beware. He found he could smile, however grim the humor of it, now that the pressure induced by their abyssal excursion was almost gone. What strange territory had they reached after days of hard driving? Would this land prove as blasted and doomed as the Los Angeles they’d fled? Or would it be as peaceful and normal as the coral and fish surrounding them?
They began to emerge from the sea, waiting tensely as the water fell first below the level of the windshield, then past the hood, and finally to the tires. Frank drove out onto a wide crescent beach. Dry sand slowed the motor home no more than had the abyssal muck. Reality, he’d long since concluded, was a wonderful accessory to have on a long trip.
There was a gap in the line of palm trees that fringed the beach. He didn’t need Mouse to point the way. The opening revealed a paved highway two lanes wide. A faded, intermittent yellow stripe ran down the middle.
It was getting hot, but he held off activating the air-conditioning. The gas gauge was hovering perilously near empty.
Alicia rose abruptly and marched toward the door. “I’m going outside.”
He rose and caught her before she was halfway to the exit. “No way. We don’t know what’s out there.”
“It should be safe enough.” Both of them turned to Mouse. Her eyes were open wide now, lavender beacons. “We’re free of the water and back on the right reality line. Your own—or one barely distinguishable from it.”
“‘Barely’?” Frank clung to his doubts. “That’s what you said about the one we just fled.”
Flucca was standing by the door. “I’ll go first, if you like.”
