They were surrounded by an intense brightness that went beyond light or heat. Olmy grimaced and grinned at once, relishing the sensation. He had sent partials to die before and had never known what their sensations were like. Now, he would experience it directly—

And the original Olmy would still never know.

"The monitors will last a fraction of a second in the plasma front itself," he explained to Lanier. "We'll spend the briefest moment inside a star. . . .”

Lanier, without pain, without much fear, faced directly north and looked into the heart of the furnace rushing down on them at six thousand kilometers per second.

There was not even time to savor the sensation.

On the flawship, perilously close to the ravening plasma, Lanier closed his eyes and told himself, again and again, that he had carried out his responsibilities and accompanied his charge to the very last.

Still clutching the clavicle, bag strapped to her shoulder, Patricia fell from an altitude of five or six meters into water.

She was not even wet. She lay in the bottom of the floating traction bubble, stunned. The water—a river or canal—carried her several dozen meters from the gate. She looked to one side to see where she was.

That was just as well. An intense, blue-white plume flowed from the gate and blasted the water behind into steam, covering everything with a thick white cloud. Fortunately for her, and for everything within a few hundred meters, the gate was fused permanently shut within millionths of a second.

She lay back in the bubble, partly blinded, with one hand over her eyes, and drifted for several more minutes until she grounded against a sand bar. Her sight had recovered well enough by then.

Standing, she surveyed the territory, heart pounding.

She was on the shore of a broad straight canal, the sluggish water a deep muddy brown. The bank was lined with tall green reeds. The sky was an intense, pale blue, cloudless—and the sun was very bright.

With some qualms, she shut off the traction bubble and took a deep breath. The air was sweet, clean and warm.

She was heavier than she had been since leaving Timbl. This time, she had no floater belt to buoy her up. The gravity was uncomfortable.

But this was undeniably Earth, and she was not in a nuclear wasteland. In fact, the scenery was hauntingly familiar. She had seen it all before. . . in the Bible classes Rita had insisted she take as a child.

Shading her eyes, Patricia looked to the west.

Across the canal and on a plateau were brilliant plaster-white pyramids, kilometers away but sharp in the clear desert air. She felt a moment of excitement.

It was Egypt. She could travel from Egypt—that would be a minor problem. She could get home from here.