The Prophet of Queens

by Glenn Kleier

  The cop went livid. Stepping forward, he bent down and stuck a thick finger in Max’s face.

  “I’ve had my fill a you, asshole,” he snarled. “Not another word.”

  He turned the finger on Ariel. “You got a smart answer for me, too, doll?”

  Her pulse rocketed and she stammered, “R-r-research.”

  “Yeah, I can see. What kind a research?”

  The clock ticked to 1:58, and the cop walked around behind her, pressing close.

  Her head swirled, and she blurted something that popped to mind out of nowhere.

  “The effects of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds.”

  She stiffened to feel rough hands on her back. And when the hands slid down to her waistband and hips, she gasped, panicking. A long-buried trauma welled up in her like lava, the room spun, grew dark, and she slid from her chair.

  The next she knew, Ariel was lying on the couch in the living room, a pillow under her head, Tia, Stan, and Max hovering. She bolted upright, and Tia grabbed her shoulders to assure, “It’s okay, mi corazón, the cops are gone. You passed out.”

  Stan offered water, and Ariel pushed it away. “The wormhole.”

  Max grinned. “We carried you out of the tent just in time.”

  Stan added, “The second we crossed the Horizon, Newton started howling. Couldn’t have cut it any closer.”

  She sank back, dizzy. “What did they want?”

  Tia said, “The truck that chased us this morning? The assholes filed a complaint. Said we ran them off the road and left the scene. Lucky we weren’t arrested, but there’ll be a court hearing.”

  The thought of facing those brutes in court made Ariel feel faint again. She said in disbelief, “The police took their side?”

  “If they didn’t before,” Tia said, “they do now. They know we’re former TPC. They think we’re out here on a research grant, wasting taxpayer money.”

  Stan laughed. “Studying marigolds.”

  Max wasn’t laughing. “The bastards made us miss the run.”

  Chapter 46

  Wednesday, October 10, 9:54 am, Talawanda

  The team picked up where they’d left off yesterday before the disruption. As the morning run approached, Max stood next to the space in the tent reserved for the vortex, a sawed-off rake handle in his grip like a golf club. Affixed to the other end was a video camera, wire trailing up through his hands and over to a laptop on the table, a live image of the tent floor on its screen.

  The plan was for Max to introduce the camera into the hole via the pole, and let the wire carry a signal back to reveal what was inside. If the transmission failed, hopefully the camera’s memory card would record details for replay upon removal.

  There was concern, however, about Max wielding the cumbersome polecam. His last brush with the vortex had cost him the shepherd’s staff, if not some fingers. And to ensure he kept his focus, they positioned the laptop so he couldn’t see its screen. Stan would be his eyes, presuming the camera furnished a picture. But there was no doubt among them any longer, they were dealing with a wormhole. The burning question now, a wormhole to where?

  Tia asked, “What are the odds the plant material Max snagged isn’t terrestrial? Has to be.”

  Stan replied, “Not necessarily. If the other side is extraterrestrial, and its physics and environment closely reflect ours, it’s possible plant life there evolved along a similar path.”

  To Ariel’s surprise, Max said, “I’m with Tia. I say the wormhole is a portal to somewhere here on Earth. I cite Occam’s Razor.”

  Occam’s Razor. A principle of problem-solving also known as The Law of Parsimony. In effect, it said, Answers must be drawn from known data—and the simpler, the better. Applying the Razor to the wormhole, Earth was the only place known to have plant life, therefore the most logical outlet for the portal. Ariel had great esteem for The Razor. She’d first come across it as a freshman in high school. Over time, its keen edge had helped sever her fetters to her Faith. And once again, she found Occam persuasive.

  Max could hardly contain himself. “A traversable wormhole is a Star Trek beam-me-up-Scotty,” he said. “Imagine teleporting to the moon, the planets, and beyond—assuming wormholes can be enlarged enough for human passage.”

  “Even if we could fit inside it,” Tia said, “we’ve no idea what effect traveling through a wormhole would have on us.”

  Ariel noted, “It didn’t seem to harm that plant material.”

  “Cellulose isn’t flesh,” Tia replied. “No telling what it would do to human tissue and brains.”

  Max shrugged. “Even if the hole limits us to inanimate objects, the applications are mind-blowing. Only a matter of time before science brings down operational costs, then, boom, a revolution in commercial transport. A whole new global industry. UPS will be all over this. The post office. The military. It’ll be huge. And we’re at the forefront.”

  Ariel hadn’t considered those aspects. In the next few minutes, they could be exploring a strange new world, boldly going where none had before. Or, visiting some distant, Earthly locale in a new and transformational means of travel. The prospects were indeed mind-blowing.

  Newton’s barks refocused them, and in moments the vortex formed and opened its dark eye once more. Max adjusted his grip and raised the polecam like Ahab confronting his whale.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  They were, and he turned and slowly advanced the camera toward the hole. The others huddled around the laptop, Ariel girding for an alien world as the camera crept into jet-black void.

  Not Ahab, she thought with a shudder. Dante.

  The lens broke the event horizon, the image went haywire, and she jumped. But the camera quickly crossed the plane, and the picture settled to black again. Still, Ariel could detect nothing in the darkness, and feared they’d lost signal.

  “A-OK so far,” Stan said, monitoring the transmission.

  Ariel leaned in tighter to him and Tia, feeling their tension.

  “Talk to me,” Max begged, flying blind.

  “Nothing yet,” Stan said. “We should’ve added a spotlight. If we don’t see something soon, I’ll switch to night vision.”

  Max had plenty of pole left, pressing ahead. Suddenly Ariel could make out patches of lighter shadow and hints of bizarre shapes all around, unrecognizable.

  Stan told Max, “We’re starting to get something.”

  Tia’s voice went hoarse. “What’s that?”

  Ariel saw, too. Looming straight ahead, a slim, tapering, forking structure extending up toward the camera from lower left to upper right. Gray, eerie. The camera headed straight for it, and just as Stan gave warning, the image jarred and went out of focus.

  “What’d I hit?” Max cried.

  “Don’t know,” Stan said. “Shift right, I’ll switch to night vision.”

  Max did, and the image changed over to ghostly green. He pushed on, and the path cleared. More forking shapes floated into view here and there in the murk. Ariel gasped to see them give rise to what looked to be an unearthly forest of little, pale palm trees.

  “My God,” Stan said. “An alien world, all right.”

  “What? What?” Max pleaded.

  Tia replied, “A network of branches bearing tiny parasols.”

  Max hooted with glee.

  The camera brushed past the last of the thicket out into open space, and stopped. Ariel tore away from the screen to see Max straining at the limits of the pole, but she couldn’t resist the surreal landscape, sucked back in. Appearing now was a panorama of gloom pierced by a dozen narrow, parallel shafts of bright green light. The shafts cascaded steeply downward, right-to-left. Beyond were mere suggestions of shapes. Gauzy, indiscernible.

  Tia described the scene to Max, asking, “Give us some angles.”

  He obliged, image arcing upward into black, only to jar again.

  “Another obstacle,” he grunted, tacking right, directly into the light. The lens flared
and bloomed, and Ariel blinked. Stan corrected the iris remotely, and Ariel winced at swaths of brilliance.

  “Talk to me,” Max said.

  “Rays of light,” Tia told him. “Keep angling.”

  The camera tilted down, and Ariel saw the light bathe what looked to be farmland viewed from a distance. A cultivated field of concentric, oblong rows, radiating out.

  And it struck her. That’s not what this is…

  Max grunted again, struggling to hold position. “Running outta steam,” he admitted, brow glistening. “One last look.”

  He leveled the pole and swung the camera around like stirring a sideways pot of cosmic soup, hands scant inches from the rim.

  “Careful,” Ariel told him.

  The camera swiveled left and the screen went dark once more. Stan searched for focus, finally centering on distant objects. Ariel could pick out faint outlines and shapes, edges too straight and uniform to be natural. And at last, she put it together.

  So did Stan and Tia, all three inhaling as one.

  Ariel whispered, “We’re inside a room somewhere.”

  “What?” Max gasped, withdrawing the pole, setting it aside on a sterile receiving cloth. With the vortex still churning, he rushed to join the others, shaking cramps from his fingers.

  Ariel’s fingers ached, too, having clenched the seat of her chair the entire time.

  “Rewind, let me see,” Max cried, leaning over them.

  Ariel felt a warm hand on her shoulder, brawny musk filling her head. Stan cued the video, and once again they traveled through the rabbit hole into the strange, gray-green jungle. In light of what she now knew, Ariel viewed it differently.

  Max’s hand tightened on her, and he muttered, “Holy crap.”

  The more he saw, the tighter his grip. As the video neared the end and the geometric shapes appeared in the gloom again, Stan froze the image, enhanced the resolution, and zoomed in.

  Max’s fingers became a vise, and he breathed, “You’re right, a room. With a long table. And what’s that at the back? A computer monitor and chair?”

  No question the wormhole linked to a place of human habitation. Terrestrial, surely, though as Stan noted, “We can’t rule out a parallel universe.”

  Stan rewound and replayed, slowing the video to a crawl, manipulating the controls for added clarity. The eerie forest of parasols materialized once more as the camera drifted through, and when the image shook from a collision, Stan stated the now-obvious. “Our obstruction is a houseplant, and the hole opens directly behind it. We’re in someone’s home.”

  Tia and Ariel agreed.

  They continued the odyssey, and Tia added, “Past the plant on the right, a window. Venetian blinds, closed.”

  The camera tilted down, and Ariel noted, “A hardwood floor with a braided-rag throw rug, like my Nana used to make.”

  As the view leveled, Stan enhanced the brightness and resolution, and Max said, “A TV. And to its left, a bookshelf.”

  The view shifted further left, and Stan froze the image, calling everyone’s attention to a dark shadow at the bottom of the screen.

  “A couch.”

  It seemed so. The video rolled on, view elevating to take in the rest of the room. A long room. Stan worked the controls to focus on the far end of the table, more items apparent now.

  “Next to the computer monitor,” Max said, “a printer. Papers, books, odds and ends. Got to be something there with a name or address or phone number.”

  Tia said, “By the looks of the clutter, the occupant’s a man, and lucky for us he’s not home. Probably at work at 10:00 AM on a Wednesday.”

  “Unless the vortex scared him off,” Stan suggested.

  “I doubt he can even see it, that plant’s a thick screen.”

  Max nodded. “He’s still around. All that stuff we threw in there, somebody cleaned it up.” He grinned. “In any event, we’ve got our moon landing. All we need now is to figure out where Tranquility Base is, and it’s ticker-tape time.”

  Tranquility Base—the site on the moon where Apollo 11 landed.

  “How do we contact him?” Ariel asked. “Leave him a note with our phone number?”

  Max shook his head. “We do that, he’ll turn us in for unlawful entry. He may not see the vortex, but he damned-well saw the stuff we dumped on his floor. We’re gonna need his cooperation for our press conference.”

  He stared at the frozen image on the laptop. “Any clues to where this is?”

  Blank looks. But Tia thought to ask, “Does the video have a soundtrack?”

  Stan replayed, upping the volume, and Ariel heard muffled horn honks, the bustle of traffic, a siren. Wherever it was, it was urban.

  “Nice work, Tia,” Max said. “Now, what city?”

  Chapter 47

  Wednesday, October 10, noon, Talawanda

  “Tell us about this press conference of yours,” Tia asked Max as the team caucused in the living room. He grinned and set his sandwich on the coffee table, tilting back in his chair.

  “You’re gonna love it,” he told her. “Assuming this guy exists in our world, which I’m certain he does, and assuming we get his support, which I’m certain we will, we’ll send notices to the major news media—especially TV. We’ll promise them the biggest story since Apollo 11. And with our connections to TPC, we’ll have no trouble getting their attention.

  “On the day of our conference, each media sends us two news teams. Ariel and I meet the first set of teams here at the farm, you and Stan meet the second set at the guy’s home, wherever that turns out to be. Then just before the run begins, we do live simulcasts from both locations.”

  His eyes went distant. “Picture it. All over the world, TV’s showing split screens. Screen left, a simple country yard—no tent, just the tree and TPC tower in the background. Screen right, the living room of a home in some far-away place. Then eerie noises, and suddenly a vortex materializes on both screens out of thin air. Black holes open, and just when everyone fears the worst, Stan and I play pitch-and-catch through the vortex with a baseball, miles apart.”

  Ariel smiled. A stunning, P. T. Barnum-style demonstration of a traversable wormhole, Max as master of ceremonies, of course. No doubt it would rock the world.

  Or, as he put it, “Straight from the Dark Ages to the moon.”

  Assuming, that is, the team could identify where in the world the home was located. If, indeed, it was located in their world.

  For the two o’clock run, Max added a small spotlight to the polecam. He hoped to target the room’s bookcase and desk to shed light on a mailing label or other means of identification. Again, for safety’s sake, he couldn’t see the screen, Stan to be his eyes.

  Soon Newton began to bark, Max switched on the spotlight and hefted the pole, and when at last the hole opened, he worked the camera through the plant far as the event horizon allowed.

  Instantly Ariel saw on screen the bookcase illuminated against the wall near the TV. Much clearer than previous, though most contents were obscured by the arm of the couch. In the bluish glow of the spotlight, she saw DVDs, books, magazines. Stan zoomed the camera in, magnifying items on the top shelf. Ariel was excited to make out the cover of a Popular Science.

  Stan reported to Max, “Videos, books, magazines with English titles. Appears we’re in the U.S. or Canada. No address visible yet.”

  Tia suggested, “Get to the desk before your arms tire.”

  Max grunted, “It would be a damn sight easier if I just broke the plane with my hands. We know it’s terrestrial over there.”

  “What if it’s a different dimension, and you contaminate it?” Tia said. “Stick to protocol.”

  Max grumbled and swung the pole to the left, fighting branches of the plant. Finally, the desk lurched into view, light exposing items on its surface. Stan zoomed-in tight as possible, calling out to Max, “Back of a flat-screen monitor, a keyboard. Digital clock. Books, papers, pens. Coffee mug, tape dispenser, stapler, stack of
mail. Bag of Cheetos, candy wrappers…”

  They examined every visible inch of surface without shedding further clues on their mystery. Time up, Max withdrew the pole, panting, “Those magazines on the shelf? The mail on the desk? One’s bound to show an address. How do we get to them?”

  That night after dinner, they sat with sketchpads, mulling ideas for a better bead on the room. Not as simple as Ariel had expected. Even the most powerful zoom lens couldn’t compensate for obtuse angles, see around corners, or read things lying flat and backwards. Nor was adding an extension to the pole the answer. Strong as he was, Max had struggled the last run.

  They considered a smaller camera and lighter pole, but that presented a different problem. Cantilever sag: the natural give in a pole when extended horizontally. The greater the distance, the greater the sag. Given the vortex opened less than seventeen inches, even the best graphite composite pole—plus camera, light, and cable—would need to arc so high to reach its targets, trying to compensate for the sag risked contact with both top and bottom of the rim. Like a fly fisherman trying to land a trout through a porthole. A lethal porthole.

  Exploring alternatives, they sketched out contraptions supported by shoulder harnesses, wires, and counterweights. They looked at adding landing gear on the pole tip to bear the load once it reached a surface. All too unwieldy and impractical.

  At length, they took a break, and Ariel ferried table scraps to Newton. When she returned, she saw the team reassembled with arms folded, faces grim.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  Stan said, “We’ve got good news and bad.”

  She sat slowly, asking for the good first.

  “I got a match on the plant cellulose Max snagged,” Stan said. “Earthly origins all right. Schefflera actinophylla. A common umbrella tree.”

  “And the bad?”

  “TPC had a glitch during the last run. A quench in the e-mags at the thirty-seven-mile marker. Operations are on hold for repairs.”

  Quench. Not an uncommon occurrence in cyclotron colliders, caused by a section of electromagnets failing for some reason. Loss of cryogenic coolant, for example. If severe, it could result in an explosion. But with the fail-safes TPC had in place, Ariel trusted that wasn’t the case, and they’d be looking at only a minor setback.