The black knight bellowed something. Chris didn't understand it.
They came at last to the edge of the clearing. Without hesitation, the boy leapt into space.
Chris hesitated, not wanting to follow. Glancing back, he saw the knights charging him, their broadswords raised.
No choice.
Chris turned and ran forward toward the cliff edge.
Marek winced as he heard Chris's scream in his earpiece. The scream was loud at first, then abruptly ended with a grunt and a crashing sound.
An impact.
He stood with Kate by the trail, listening. Waiting.
They heard nothing more. Not even the crackle of static.
Nothing at all.
"Is he dead?" Kate said.
Marek didn't answer her. He walked quickly to Gomez's body, crouched down, and started searching in the mud. "Come on," he said. "Help me find that spare marker."
They searched for the next few minutes, and then Marek grabbed Gomez's hand, already turning pale gray, the muscles stiffening. He lifted her arm, feeling the coldness of her skin, and turned her torso over. The body splashed back in the mud.
That was when he noticed that Gomez had a bracelet of braided twine on her wrist. Marek hadn't noticed it before; it seemed to be part of her period costume. Of course, it was completely wrong for the period. Even a modest peasant woman would wear a bracelet of metal, or carved stone or wood, if she wore anything at all. This was a hippie-dippy modern thing.
Marek touched it curiously, and he was surprised to find it was stiff, almost like cardboard. He turned it on her wrist, looking for the latch, and a sort of lid flicked open in the braided twine, and he realized that the bracelet covered a small electronic timer, like a wristwatch.
The timer read: 36:10:37.
And it was counting backward.
He knew at once what it was. It was an elapsed counter for the machine, showing how much time they had left. They had thirty-seven hours initially, and now they had lost about fifty minutes.
We should hold on to this, he thought. He untied the bracelet from her arm, then wrapped it around his own wrist. He flipped the little lid shut.
"We've got a timer," Kate said. "But no marker."
They searched for the next five minutes. And finally, reluctantly, Marek had to admit the hard truth.
There was no marker. And without a marker, the machines would not come back.
Chris was right: they were trapped there.
36:28:04
In the control room, an alarm rang insistently. The technicians both got up from their consoles and started out of the room. Stern felt Gordon grab him firmly by the arm.
"We have to go," Gordon said. "The air's contaminated from the hydrofluoric acid. The transit pad is toxic. And the fumes will be up here, too, soon enough." He began to lead Stern out of the control room.
Stern glanced back at the screen, at the jumble of girders in smoke in the transit site. "But what if they try to come back when everybody is gone?"
"Don't worry," Gordon said. "That can't happen. The wreckage will trigger the infrared. The sensors need six feet on all sides, remember? Two meters. They don't have it. So the sensors won't let the machines come back. Not until we get all that cleared away."
"How long will it take to clear it away?"
"First, we have to exchange the air in the cave."
Gordon took Stern back to the long corridor leading to the main elevator. There were a lot of people in the corridor, all leaving. Their voices echoed in the tunnel.
"Exchange the air in the cave?" Stern said. "That's a huge volume. How long will that take?"
Gordon said, "In theory, it takes nine hours."
"In theory?"
"We've never had to do it before," Gordon said. "But we have the capacity, of course. The big fans should cut in any minute."
A few seconds later, a roaring sound filled the tunnel. Stern felt a blast of wind press his body, tug at his clothes.
"And after they exchange all the air? What then?"
"We rebuild the transit pad and wait for them to come back," Gordon said. "Just the way we were planning to do."
"And if they try to come back before you're ready for them?"
"It's not a problem, David. The machine will just refuse. It'll pop them right back to where they were. For the time being."
"So they're stranded," Stern said.
"For the moment," Gordon said. "Yes. They're stranded. And there's nothing we can do about it."
36:13:17
Chris Hughes ran to the edge of the cliff and threw himself into space, screaming, arms and legs flailing in the sunlight. He saw the Dordogne, two hundred feet below, snaking through the green countryside. It was too far to fall. He knew the river was too shallow. There was no question he would die.
But then he saw the cliff face beneath him was not sheer - there was a protruding shelf of land, twenty feet below, jutting out from the upper rim of the cliff. It was steeply angled bare rock, with a sparse cover of scrubby trees and brush.
He slammed down on the shelf, landing on his side, the impact blasting the air from his lungs. Immediately, he began rolling helplessly toward the edge. He tried to stop the roll, clutching desperately at underbrush, but it was all too weak, and it tore away in his hands. As he tumbled toward the edge, he was aware of the boy reaching for him, but Chris missed his outstretched arms. He continued to roll, his world spinning out of control. Now the boy was behind him, with a horrified look on his face. Chris knew he was going to go over the edge; he was going to fall -
With a grunt, he slammed into a tree. He felt a sharp pain in his stomach, then it streaked through his whole body. For a moment, he did not know where he was; he felt only pain. The world was greenish white. He came back to it slowly.