Destination Unknown Read Online Free PDF

far revived crowded close together, crammed on the platform and on the nearest stairs. Yago strained to keep away from the eerie baby and to get close to Miss Blake. Being a Jane, she’d be easy to cow.

    “Okay, are we all agreed we open the door?” 2Face asked.

    Suddenly she was taking a vote? That was weak. A leader should lead, Yago observed. But a rather larger part of his mind was taken up with controlling the claustrophobic panic that kept threatening to boil over and result in shrill screaming and wild thrashing.

    Couldn’t do that. Couldn’t panic.

    Everyone agreed to open the door. Yago suspected he was not the only one unnaturally eager to push that door open.

    2Face nodded. Jobs set down the blank-faced, wide-eyed Billy Weir and worked the lever.

    Impossible not to hold your breath. Pointless, Yago realized, but impossible to resist. The air outside could be sulfuric acid. Or there could be no air at all.

    Jobs swung the door open.

    No air rushed out of the Mayflower.

    No sulfuric acid rushed in.

    Yago breathed. Held it. Breathed again.

    Suddenly the baby began to chuckle.

    That sound, added to the tension of remaining a second longer in this space-going mausoleum, snapped something in Yago.

    “Move!” he shouted.

    He pushed past the doctor, elbowed Miss Blake aside, and all at once hung at the edge of a precipice. The shuttle’s cargo doors were open, exposing the lead-lined Mayflower capsule to eerie sunlight. It was a straight drop down the dull metal capsule, a straight drop down to a crash against the back wall of the shuttle’s cargo bay.

    Yago windmilled his arms, trying to cancel momentum. The doctor grabbed the back of his shirt but the rotten fabric tore away.

    Yago fell forward, screaming.

    Mo’Steel’s arm shot out and caught Yago’s spring-green hair. He pulled Yago back inside and sat him down with his legs dangling.

    “When you’re right on the edge like that, you don’t want to windmill, and you don’t want to go all spasmoid, you want to sit down,” Mo’Steel advised. “Use your heels, bend at the knees, move your butt back, and sit down. It’ll bruise your butt but that’s a lot better than falling.”

    “Shut up!” Yago snapped.

    Yago stared at the landscape, panting, and wondering how his body could still produce sweat, as dehydrated as he was.

    The view was overwhelming. Overwhelming. Toomuch color on the one side, too little on the other. The shuttle stood perfectly on the dividing line between the two environments.

    Yago’s first thought was that it was all an optical illusion. A picture. But he could feel the awesome depths of the gray-shade canyons to one side, and feel, too, the restless movement in the greens and golds and blues and pinks on the other side.

    He glanced up at the sky. He had to close his eyes. The sky was similarly divided, all in blue with flat-looking clouds with brown-purple edges on one side, gray on gray over the canyon.

    The survivors were all silent, staring.

    “What is it?” Errol asked.

    “Artificial,” Jobs said. “Has to be. Nothing evolves naturally like this. This can’t be the natural state of this planet.”

    Shy Hwang said, “Maybe it’s not real. Maybe . . . I mean, maybe we’re dead. Maybe we’re all dead.”

    Yago snorted in derision. “Yeah, maybe it’s heaven. Right. We flew to heaven on a magic shuttle full of dead people.”

    “The air seems breathable,” a woman said. “Of course, there’s no way to know what the nitrogen-oxygen-CO 2 ratio is, or what trace gases may be present.”

    Yago, with his junior politician’s memory for names, remembered her as Olga Gonzalez, Mo’Steel’s mother. What was her job? Something scientific, no doubt—most of the Eighty had been NASA or NASA contractors.

    “How do we get down?” 2Face asked.

    The Marine with the unsettling baby in her arms stepped forward to get a better look down. “Spot me,” she said to Mo’Steel.

    Mo’Steel