Nothing happened at first. Everything seemed to hang in silence, waiting. Then something began to move. I heard the scraping of stone against stone, and just beneath the golden tip of the pyramid a row of panels fell away. Thick iron spokes extended outward just below us, and the entire tip of the pyramid began to rotate.
“Hold on!” I yelled to Quinn. There wasn’t much to hold on to, but we clung to the face of the golden illuminatus as it gained speed, rotating faster and faster.
Eight iron spokes had grown from beneath the pyramid tip, like the eight legs of a spider. From the end of each spoke a pair of pods appeared that revolved around each other. It was the Tilt-A-Whirl I’d seen when I first entered the park. The little pairs of pods spun and dipped, weaving in and out of one another like the blades of an eggbeater.
“We have to get into one of those pods!” I shouted over the thrumming of the ride.
“They’re too far away!” Quinn shouted back. “We’ll never make it!”
“Who hung fifty feet over Six Flags to get his stupid hat? Come on!” I pulled him off the golden face of the pyramid tip, and we dropped onto a black iron arm of the spinning ride.
We had to get to the end of the arm and drop into one of the spinning pods. But as we shimmied farther out on the stem, centrifugal force threatened to hurl us off. I turned around and eased my way toward the end of the spoke feet first, hugging the cold metal as tightly as I could. Quinn did the same, and we inched our way out, the world spinning madly around us. The desert was a blur below us. There was nothing else in the world now but me, Quinn, and the ride.
I felt the pulses of wind from the two spinning pods at the end of the spoke and heard the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh as they beat past, sounding like the blades of a propeller. They chased each other in circles, hanging beneath the arm to which we clung.
Now the ride wasn’t just spinning, it was wobbling as well, like an off-balance top, making me feel drunk and giddy.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.
The only way to make it into one of the pods below was to jump. If we jumped a second too late, we’d fall to our deaths. If we jumped a second too soon, we’d be hit by a pod and squashed like bugs on a windshield.
Timing was everything. I tried to match my breathing to the spinning of the pods, locking my vision in one place, ignoring the vertigo, and concentrating on the jump.
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh.
“We’re gonna die!” wailed Quinn. “Oh, God, we’re gonna die!”
“Shut up! You sound like me!”
Even as I overcame my fears, terror had attacked Quinn with a vengeance. It was so foreign to him that he didn’t know how to control it. It practically paralyzed him. I knew I’d have to jump first, then talk him down. I took one more moment to estimate the length of the fall. I’d only get one shot at this.
I jumped and instantly panicked. I was falling too far. I had missed. . . . But then my view of the pyramid base below was eclipsed by the pod, and I landed inside.
Up above, Quinn still clung to the arm of the ride, his cheek firmly pressed against the cold steel like a gecko clinging to a branch.
“Jump!”
“It’s too fast!”
“Just jump!”
“I’ll fall!”
“You can make it!”
He locked his eyes on the spinning pod, let loose a battle cry, and sprang from the arm of the ride. He missed the pod. His body slid down its slick black hull, but his arm caught the edge like a hanger hook. I grabbed him by his arm, but I lost my grip. Then I got a grip on his hair, holding it just long enough to grab his shirt with my other hand. It began to tear, but by then I had hooked a finger in a loop on the back of his jeans. He grabbed the edge of the pod and finally flipped himself in.
“Are we done?” he asked. “Can we go home now?”
Now that we were inside the pod, it began to change, as I knew it would. I felt the fracturing of metal as our pod tore free from the ride, but we didn’t fall. We soared. The nose of the pod elongated. A dome grew over our heads, and the cabin expanded. An instrument panel sprang out in front of us as our little bench divided, becoming two separate seats, molded to fit the contours of our bodies. The instrument panel looked nothing like that of the Japanese Zero. The entire thing was a computer screen filled with holographic buttons and gauges that all seemed to be labeled in some language like Pig Klingon.
“I know this!” said Quinn. “This is the spaceship on the cover of a CD I have—Nuclear Galaxy’s Greatest Hits!”
“Great. How do you fly it?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that there’s also a picture of the ship blowing up on the back cover.”
I looked up from the strange control panel to the view-port that stretched not only in front of us, but over our heads as well, giving us a 360-degree view. The sky was dark violet, sparking with electricity; and there were clouds, although they really didn’t look like clouds. They looked more like tangled, leathery tree limbs, stretching in an endless purple web all around us. Electrical impulses shot along the knotted, ropelike clouds into the violet distance.
“It looks like a nebula,” I told Quinn. “A space cloud.”
He looked at me sharply. “I know what a nebula is.” Then he saw something that shut his attitude down cold. “Bad news!”
I stared ahead. A massive object was hurtling directly at us. It was a moment before I recognized what it was.
“If we’re in space,” asked Quinn, “what’s that doing here?”