Jake glanced at Roland, who shrugged and nodded. “Yes, please,” Jake said.
What happened then was so spectacular that it stunned all of them to silence…although Roland, who knew little of technology but who had spent his entire life on comfortable terms with magic, was the least wonder-struck of the four. It was not a matter of windows appearing in the compartment’s curved walls; the entire cabin—floor and ceiling as well as walls—grew milky, grew translucent, grew transparent, and then disappeared completely. Within a space of five seconds, Blaine the Mono seemed to be gone and the pilgrims seemed to be zooming through the lanes of the city with no aid or support at all. Susannah and Eddie clutched each other like small children in the path of a charging animal. Oy barked and tried to jump down the front of Jake’s shirt. Jake barely noticed; he was clutching the sides of his seat and looking from side to side, his eyes wide with amazement. His initial alarm was being replaced by amazed delight.
The furniture groupings were still here, he saw; so was the bar, the piano-harpsichord, and the ice-sculpture Blaine had created as a party-favor, but now this living-room configuration appeared to be cruising seventy feet above Lud’s rain-soaked central district. Five feet to Jake’s left, Eddie and Susannah were floating along on one of the couches; three feet to his right, Roland was sitting in a powder-blue swivel chair, his dusty, battered boots resting on nothing, flying serenely over the rubble-strewn urban waste land below.
Jake could feel the carpet beneath his moccasins, but his eyes insisted that neither the carpet nor the floor beneath it was still there. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the dark slot in the stone flank of the Cradle slowly receding in the distance.
“Eddie! Susannah! Check it out!”
Jake got to his feet, holding Oy inside his shirt, and began to walk slowly through what looked like empty space. Taking the initial step required a great deal of willpower, because his eyes told him there was nothing at all between the floating islands of furniture, but once he began to move, the undeniable feel of the floor beneath him made it easier. To Eddie and Susannah, the boy appeared to be walking on thin air while the battered, dingy buildings of the city slid by on either side.
“Don’t do that, kid,” Eddie said feebly. “You’re gonna make me sick up.” Juke lilted Oy carefully out of his shirt. “It’s okay,’ he said, and set him down. “See?”
“Oy!” the humbler agreed, but after one look between his paws at the city park currently unrolling beneath them, he attempted to crawl onto Jake’s feet and sit on his moccasins.
Jake looked forward and saw the broad gray stroke of the monorail track ahead of them, rising slowly but steadily through the buildings and disappearing into the rain. He looked down again and saw nothing but the street and floating membranes of low cloud.
“How come I can’t see the track underneath us, Blaine?” “THE IMAGES YOU SEE ARE COMPUTER-GENERATED,” Blaine replied. “THE COMPUTER ERASES THE TRACK FROM THE LOWER-QUADRANT IMAGE IN ORDER TO PRESENT A MORE PLEASING VIEW, AND ALSO TO REINFORCE THE ILLU-SION THAT THE PASSENGERS ARE FLYING.”
“It’s incredible,” Susannah murmured. Her initial fear had passed and she was looking around eagerly. “It’s like being on a flying carpet. I keep expecting the wind to blow back my hair—“
“I CAN PROVIDE THAT SENSATION, IF YOU LIKE,” Blaine said. “ALSO A LITTLE MOISTURE, WHICH WILL MATCH CUR-RENT OUTSIDE CONDITIONS. IT MIGHT NECESSITATE A CHANGE OF CLOTHES, HOWEVER.”
“That’s all right, Blaine. There’s such a thing as taking an illusion too far.” The track slipped through a tall cluster of buildings which reminded Jake a little of the Wall Street area in New York. When they cleared these, the track dipped to pass under what looked like an elevated road. That was when they saw the purple cloud, and the crowd of people fleeing before it.