He ignored it; ignored, in fact, everything but the critical task at hand: watching and waiting for the moment when the world he sought came into view.
He took another step, and another: his feet sank into the opalescent surface beneath him, swallowing him up to his ankles before launching him forward with a vertiginous sensation of negative gravity. The air around him suddenly filled with coruscating streams of tiny, almost microscopic particles, glittering like gold dust as they moved in undulating, ever-changing patterns.
All the while, Pendergast watched and waited as the worlds beyond the tunnel of light flickered in and out, one after another, diaphanous as dreams.
Then he saw the universe he wanted—and plunged into it.
First, there was intense blackness, replaced by a brilliant white. Pendergast found himself lying on the ground, unable to remember for a moment where he was, what had happened, or even who he was. The feeling of disorientation quickly passed and he climbed to his feet, scanning the landscape around him. He might have been unconscious for a minute, or for an hour; it was impossible to be sure. His watch—a manual-wind Philippe Dufour—had not fared well in the journey: both the minute and small second hands had apparently spun so quickly that they melted into the guilloche of the dial. As he turned around, examining his surroundings, he nearly lost his footing. Regaining his balance, he realized that the gravity in this place was less than that of Earth—significantly less.
He was standing on what could have been a plain of salt, except for the fact that it was blinding white—and smooth as silk. He took a short step forward, shielding his eyes. As his foot met the ground again, a small cloud of crystals—like glittering snowflakes—rose up and fell back. The sky was salmon pink, grading upward into black. Wisps of strangely shaped clouds seemed to crawl, rather than drift, across. Gingerly, he took a breath: the air had an unpleasant, oleaginous texture, and it smelled strongly of burnt rubber.
He was standing in what appeared to be a shallow volcanic crater. The walls of the crater were dead black, rising abruptly from the white floor. Above its jagged rim, a sun hung low in the sky, smaller than Earth’s and a dusky red. Next to and just above it stood another sun, smaller still, this one greenish-blue: a double star system. And above it all was a black empyrean, torn by tongues of livid lightning, as if a tremendous battle filled the sky: but there was no thunder, and the bolts of energy did not wink out immediately, but rather dispersed outward slowly, morphing into tangled shapes like drops of ink on blotting paper. Dotting the plains around him were crystallized pillars of salt, twisted back upon themselves like corkscrews. They reminded him of Lot’s wife. Here and there the pitiless white of the salt bed was relieved by the green forms of spiky bushes. Except they weren’t bushes at all, but some sort of animal, moving slowly, hunching along like inchworms.
He shook his head, trying to clear his mind. A few hundred yards away, he saw movement: a pack of animals had spotted him and were loping over. He drew his Les Baer and gave it a quick examination to make sure it had survived the journey intact. The approaching animals had insectoid heads, not unlike the monstrous thing in Savannah, with bulbous compound eyes and tubelike mouthparts, covered in a leathery brown skin that pulsated with engorged vessels. They spread out like a pack of wolves and began closing in.
Pendergast realized he was being hunted.
He hoped they were intelligent animals: intelligent enough, at least, to be afraid of him. He let them trot close enough to come into range, and then flicked on his laser sights, carefully centered the dot on the chest of the leader, and squeezed off a round. The animal bucked backward in a spray of blood, tumbling up into the air and spinning lazily end over end, leaving a twisted contrail of crimson behind it in the low gravity.
That the creature could be shot was, at least, a reassuring development.
The other creatures immediately bolted, tearing off at tremendous speed and vanishing over the rim of the crater. He went over and looked down at the dead animal, which had hit the ground about ten yards away—the blood on this planet was even redder than his, he thought grimly. He turned the grotesque beast over with his toe. It had eight legs: that would account for the rippling way in which it moved. It looked more insecta than animalia. Perhaps, in the alternate universe, this was a world where insects had evolved into the niches occupied by mammals on Earth.
As if on cue, he felt, more than heard, a vibration; and moments later a vast cloud of insects came streaming over the horizon, millions of them, forming weird, ever-shifting shapes as they flew, until they almost blotted out the sky above him. Just as quickly they passed, surging toward the far side of the crater—but not before several had dropped to the ground around Pendergast’s feet. Kneeling, he saw they were identical to those he’d seen flying out of the portal.