...Ray had gone. He saw a glinting sparkle which might have been her board, turning end over end through the Air; but of the girl herself there was no sign.

He felt a stab of concern — an awful, unfamiliar sense of waste — but the feeling was drowned by a flood of triumph. By luck or skill, or both, he had survived. He was still on his board, still in the race, and still determined to win.

But there was still something wrong. He was drifting downward through the hexagonal array of lines. He corrected his line of flight, pushed himself hard along the Magfield — but again there came that damnable drift downward. He felt confused, disoriented, as if his instincts were betraying him.

...No, he realized slowly; his instincts, his skill, were fine. He was holding his line. The vortex lines themselves were drifting upward, toward the Crust.

He was a City boy, but he knew what that meant.

The Mantle was expelling its rotational momentum. Glitch.

Suddenly, for the first time, he felt lost, vulnerable, alone in the sky. He couldn't help but cry out, longing to be back in the remote wooden womb of Parz.

He forced himself to concentrate. He wasn't in any direct danger yet. With luck, and skill, he could still get through this.

Still he pushed across the sky, keeping in line with the drifting vortex lines. But now he slowed a little, glancing around. He was virtually alone now; of the hundred starters in the race, perhaps thirty were still on their boards, paralleling his path through the Air. Of the rest — of the marshals — there was no sign. The City still hung in the Air like a dusty lantern, solid and unperturbed.

The vortex lines were drifting faster. They looked tangled, untidy. Looking more closely he saw instabilities searing along the lines from both upflux and downflux; the huge, complex waveforms passed through each other, seeming to drag and reinforce each other.

He looked over his shoulder at the far upflux. There the Air glowed yellow, empty. No vortex lines at all.

Now purple light flooded up through the Air, sudden, shocking, so that his board cast a shadow over his legs and arms. He leaned over his board, glanced down.

The Quantum Sea had exploded, right under the City; a neutrino fount rose steadily toward Parz, like an immense fist.

Resentment flooded Cris. No, he thought. Not today. Not on my day...

The Magfield surged again, ramming upward into his board with force and immediacy.

I was winning! Oh, I was winning!

—

Like a fragment of food swimming toward its own consumption, the crude wooden cylinder with its precious cargo of people and animals labored toward the unblemished mouth of the Ur-human artifact.