“Just a feeling,” said Eric, making one last check of the controls and imparting final instructions to the young engineer who would take command in his absence. “I’ve had funny feelings before and I’ve always come out better for acting on them.” He smiled then and took Lisa’s hand.
“It will vanish along with ourselves, wife.” He started to lead her toward the GATE.
Behind him the young engineer’s wife moved to stand next to her husband. “Good-bye, Mr. Abbott, Lisa. And thank you.”
She had tears in her eyes, though they were not shed on behalf of Eric’s departure. She was going back to the home she’d considered lost forever.
And he? Where was he going? To oblivion or to Paradise? Well, Paradise would be nice but not necessary. He would settle for a home.
Something stood between him and the main control console. There was no expression on the pale, ghostly face as it stared directly at Eric. Something exceptional passed between human and alien in that instant. Something that was more than a communication between manufacturer and manufactured. It was a cry for help, an angry order, a wash of curiosity, an appeal to a part of Eric that he hadn’t suspected existed, all homogenized and blended together in a single powerful mental rush.
The Syrax had materialized three meters out of position. It took a giant step toward Eric on ropy, flexible legs. A few of the decolonials screamed.
A long-fingered hand stabbed toward Eric’s back. The Syrax had planned to appear directly behind Eric. At the critical moment Eric and Lisa had stepped toward the GATE. Wordlessly the alien tried to recover.
It was not fast enough, not quick enough. His face as blank as that of his erstwhile master, Eric pulled Lisa tight to him and jumped in concert with Jeeter through the Gate, at once ignoring appeals, orders, queries, and everything else the Syrax had thrown at him in that single vast mind-filling stream of consciousness.
Gone. Quite gone.
The alien paused before the humming GATE, centimeters short of its target. Its long, boneless fingers drew back. It could not reach across the lens of the galaxy. It might follow and control, but a glance showed that the necessary sequence no longer flashed on the control console, and the operation of the GATE was foreign to its complex mind. Nor was it immune to human weapons, and surely the construct Eric Abbott had those aplenty wherever he now stood.
Behind the control console the young engineer stared in fascination at the alien, his wife's fingers digging unnoticed into his shoulder. He touched a button as he’d been instructed to do. A few wisps of smoke rose from the console and that cracked the calm. As he hurriedly moved away, the smoke dissipated. But something inside the console had melted. He could not have said what it was. Among them all, only Eric Abbott could have explained, and Eric Abbott had been transposed.
The steady hum of the GATE softened. Around the room gauges slipped and readouts shrank. The GATE was not destroyed, nor had it been powered down, but it would not be working for at least a few days. A few key circuits had been blown, and one bit of coordinating information obliterated.
How much of this the Syrax knew, how much it guessed, none of them could say, but there were those who swore the alien exhaled deeply before it vanished as silently and unexpectedly as it had arrived.
Conversation in the room resumed. Whatever had happened there before the GATE was now past, and they remembered their new futures. The young engineer who’d been left in command moved toward the airlock. Word was given to unseal. Weapons were put aside.
“Hello,” he said to the startled officer on the other side of the opening. Soldiers tried to see past the engineer, into the Terminus. “We’re ready to give ourselves up.”
The spearhead of the security assault team rushed into the Terminus, followed by a small army of engineers and technicians wearing anxious expressions. GATE instruments were examined hurriedly. Everything was found to be in order and untampered with save for a small portion of the GATE master’s console and data bank.
Very soon after, the high brass arrived, led by Karl Rasmusson and the sari-clad Dhurapati Ponnani. She headed straight for the GATE master’s station and the little knot of engineers and scientists examining its interior.
“They did a lot of complex reprogramming,” one of them informed her, “but we can’t say for sure what it consisted of because the memory’s been cremated.”
“I can tell you.” All eyes turned to the plump blonde woman standing close by. “My name’s Greta Kinsolving. I was a programmer on Eden. I was told to explain certain things, but only to a direct representative of Colligatarch Authority.”
Ponnani straightened. “You can talk to me, then.”
“You must be Dr. Ponnani, the one we heard over the intercom.” Ponnani nodded curtly. “It was all part of the plan, Doctor.”
“What plan, young woman? Eric Abbott’s plan?”
Kinsolving shook her head. “The plan all of us decided on.” She gestured back toward the GATE. “Many went through, you see. He found another world for those who still dreamed. I’m not a dreamer. I wanted to come back.” There were whispered rumblings from those decolonials still in the chamber, and Ponnani sensed a hostility WOSA’s publicists were going to be hard pressed to try to contain.
That was not her major concern of the moment, however.
“I don’t follow you, young woman. Are you saying Abbott sent some of the people from Eden over to Garden?”
“No. I said he found another world for them. Not Garden. They called it Paradise.”
“That’s insane,” she announced firmly. The other scientists, though, were listening raptly to the story.
“Abbott said otherwise. He told us it was part of the knowledge the Syrax had stored inside his head. He chose it from their catalog of surveyed worlds.”
“My God,” muttered the man next to Ponnani, “he had access to that kind of information?”
“That’s what he told us.”
Ponnani was tight-lipped. “Gone, if true. All gone. No wonder the Syrax was so desperate to regain control of him. They must have been terrified that we’d succeed without them.”
“He was tired of all of it,” Kinsolving told them. “He was tired of you, and tired of the Syrax. I think he just wanted someplace quiet where he could live with his wife.”
“Wife?” Oh yes, she reminded herself, the artison Lure Tambor series four.
“All we need are the coordinates,” said one of the scientists working on the damaged console. His eyes were alive with excitement. “We can reprogram the GATE, send representatives through to make peace with this Abbott. We can have two-way communication, contact with a third new colony!”
Kinsolving smiled sadly at him. “He doesn't want to have contact with Earth. Neither do the people who went with him. All they want is to be left alone, to have a chance at the life they were promised. The rest of us wished them all luck. A lot of my friends went. I have three brothers and a sister in Oslo who I want to see. That’s why I didn’t go with them.
“Only Mr. Abbott knew the coordinates, and he programmed the GATE himself. Maybe a few others, like Jeeter Sa-Nos-Tee, knew it also, but they’ve all gone now. Nobody you can reach knows where Paradise is or how to sight in on its sun.”
“You could be one of the richest women on Earth,” one of the scientists began, “if you could tell us—”
“I can’t,” she interrupted him. “No one can. And I don’t want to be one of the richest women on Earth.” There were tears in her eyes. “All I want is to see my family again, and I’m going to!” With dignity she added, “Mr. Abbott said you all wanted more than we did.”
Ponnani watched as the woman moved toward the open airlock and disappeared into the Departure Lounge. She offered a few suggestions to the crew working on the control console until her eye was caught by a man standing just out of field range of the GATE.
