The cold fingers of fog were drifting away, out of Ryan Cawdor’s brain.
The one constant thing that someone could safely say about making a matter-transfer jump was that there was no constant thing about making a jump. Sometimes there were dreams during the period of unconscious blackness, gibbering nightmares more often than sweet dreams. Sometimes there was no sensation of time passing at all. The mind closed down and then opened up again like a parched flower during a spring rain, with no awareness that anything at all had happened-except the one certainty that the complex machine, dating back nearly a hundred years, to the last days before the nuclear holocaust devastated the Earth, would definitely have taken you somewhere different. It could be a hundred miles away, or it could be ten thousand miles to another of the so-called gateways that had been built and buried in one of the chain of triple-secure military complexes known as redoubts.
The trouble with jumping was that you had no control over the destination. All the instructions had vanished during the nuking and the long winters that followed, and every living person who might once have known was long, long dead.
Most mat-trans jumps left you feeling like someone had sliced the top of your skull off, scrambled the soft tissues inside, then jammed the lid back on. It also churned up your guts like you’d been strapped under a war wag going flat out across forty miles of bad road.
