Free Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm by John C. Wright Page A

the back of the building, pounded down the stairs, grabbed her, thrown her over my shoulder Tarzan-style, and sprinted the hundred yards to safety (if that was far enough—what kind of radiation were we talking about?) in the same amount of time it had taken me to exchange one hundred words with her. Even now, I might be quick enough to circle to the basement door, leap down, Tarzan her over my shoulder, and hightail it out of the blast radius.
    Or it might be even quicker to take my squirrel gun and shoot.

2. Battle in the Basement
    With an instinct more powerful than instinct, I knew I could not shoot at the Moebius coil itself. It was a gorgeous machine. Gorgeous as the patterns on a rattlesnake, gorgeous as a forest fire leaping with wild red and billowing black. It was my ticket out of here. It was not only the gateway into other worlds; it was the escape hatch out of this one. It was the escape meant for me leading to the life meant for me.
    Therefore I had to protect it as dearly as my own life.
    But I noticed something. If I shot the cable leading to the table, this would simply cut the power. I had the key to the closet where the spare cables were kept. After the emergency, I could plug back the unharmed equipment and warm it back up.
    At the opposite wall, less than eighteen feet away, therefore about ten times closer than I needed, point-blank, was the plug box, and it was set against a concrete wall with nothing nearby, and nothing beyond it. This was not the wall facing the generator room; it was the wall beyond which was packed dirt. It was like it was designed to be shot at. Safe as a target range.
    And, heck, I really was in the mood to shoot something, and there were no science fiction fans around at the moment. And even if there had been, I could not shoot them anyway. Had to hack them to death with the antique sword. Father’s orders. So I put the rifle to my shoulder, let out my breath, held it, and…
    And just then the machine started to whistle, then to shriek.
    It sounded just like a teakettle.
    Looked like one, too. I could see the condensation of vapor already starting to form in the room around the table, and so I could tell that the air was rushing out of the room. There was a thin little point, no bigger than a pinprick in the center of the rainbow circle, and a tiny tornado cone of vapor was beginning to form, with a needle-thin tail rushing into that spot.
    Into, but not out of.
    I’ve seen science fiction movies. I knew what I was looking at. It was like getting a pinhole puncture in the hull of your spaceship. All the air at fifteen pounds per square inch tries to rush out the tiny hole. The sudden expansion of the air causes a temperature change, and that makes the water vapor condense.
    But this was not a pinhole in the hull of a spaceship. It was a pinhole in the walls of the universe. On the other side was not outer space. On the other side was — what had the Professor called it? — on the other side was the Deep of Uncreation.
    The pinhole at the dead center flared and roared and opened. Maybe I should not have, but I looked straight at it.
    Call it an orb of darkness smaller than a golf ball, an open mouth, a well, a pit, a black hole, a portal. But it was not a sphere; light and air entering any point on the circumference did not reach the far side. There was no far side. Inside, where my eyes could not focus, something was rippling like water in turmoil. Like a sailor looking out a knothole in a plank in the hull of a sinking ship, I saw the ocean of nonbeing, a vast deep, a sea of darkling chaos with no shore and no bottom.
    This weird sensation was in my eyes, it reached into my brain, and something about it made me sure I was looking at the golfball-sized knothole wrong, as if my sense perceptions were inside out. This tiny dot of nothingness was somehow bigger than the basement room it was in, bigger than the Museum, maybe bigger than the continuum.
    The edges of this tiny