Erin smiled. “Yes, well, take it easy. I don’t need you scaring Matt off. We’ll be meeting them all tomorrow night at their secret lair. Ordered yet?”
Monica shook her head, and they got down to the serious business of choosing lunch.
What's the Date
Richard and Kevin met at the warehouse well after dark. Kevin had brought along his pride and joy, a Meade 10” telescope with computerized equatorial mount. This piece of equipment packed more power into a two-foot-long package than any pre-20th-century astronomer had ever had access to.
“First thing we need to do is get the gate positioned above the telescope, so I can see the night sky on the other side,” Kevin said. “About three feet above the table will do. Angled down. No, facing in that direction.” Kevin motioned with his hands. Richard was using a combination scissors-lift and universal ball-mount to place the three-foot gate per Kevin’s requirements. “Great, now turn the lights off. Use a penlight to see with. Use this one with a red filter.”
“Why a red filter?” Richard asked.
“Red light doesn’t wreck your night vision.”
Once Richard had completed all the setup, he switched on the portal generator and picked up the tablet. After a few seconds of poking at dialogs, the gate faded into focus, showing a starry night. Kevin made sure his telescope pointed properly through the gate, then looked through the eyepiece. He made a couple of small adjustments and asked Richard to move the gate a little to one side. When Kevin was satisfied, he started concentrating on the view through the telescope, with occasional breaks to make notations in a book. True to his instructions, he wrote his notes by the red light of a filtered flashlight.
After about ten minutes, Kevin said, “Okay, I’m done. Gate off and lights on, please.”
Richard complied, and came back to find Kevin consulting a magazine and his notes.
Looking up from his work, Kevin turned to Richard and said, “No question. The other Earth isn’t the past. It’s present-day Earth. I compared the position of the Galilean satellites to the published positions in this month’s Sky and Telescope. Perfect match. Plus, Jupiter is in the same place in the sky, as is the moon. No way that specific configuration is going to duplicate itself, at least not since dinosaurs ruled the Earth.”
“Fine,” Richard said. “So where are all the people?”
“There were no people on Greenhouse Earth, either.”
“Yeah, two hundred degree temps will do that. So what’s the excuse here?”
“Who knows?” Kevin began packing up his telescope. “So many things could have gone wrong. Or right, depending. What we know is that Lincoln doesn’t exist on that side, there’s no pollution, and the flora and fauna look like what you’d imagine it must have been like before people.”
“Why was this so important to you?” Richard asked.
Kevin stopped packing and turned to Richard. “I trust my models. Really. But funny, at the back of my mind I had this worry that maybe this wild planet was the past and Greenhouse Earth was the future. That would be bad.” Kevin tilted his head sideways in dismissal. “But that’s not the case, so we’re not heading for an inevitable runaway greenhouse effect.”
Richard considered for a few seconds. “I’m not sure what bothers me more,” he replied, “that one out of three worlds so far has never had humans or that, on one out of two that had humans, we killed ourselves off.”
“If that’s what happened,” Kevin said. “Eventually we’ll want to jump beyond these two to find out more, but that will take a lot of infrastructure.”
“And I’m not sure we want to be the ones doing that,” Richard replied. “It’s one thing to get an early shot at the gold rush. It’s another thing to create our own SG-1, as Bill would say.”
Enter Monica
Erin ushered Monica into the warehouse. The four men sitting around a table watched them approach. A couple of partially devoured pizzas sat on the table, the aroma of pepperoni and sausage reminding Monica that she hadn’t eaten since lunch.
The tension radiating from the men was palpable, and Monica was beginning to wonder what she was getting into. This is Erin, one of my best friends. I’ve known her forever. She’s not about to sell me into slavery, so relax.
Monica decided to try to lighten the mood a bit. She piped up, “So, do you have a park you need a biologist to sign off on?”
To her surprise, everyone turned to look at Erin, who held up her hands and exclaimed, “I didn’t say anything!” One of the men, a cute but somewhat pudgy character, was choking back laughter.
A tall and very attractive man stepped forward. “Let’s start with introductions, then we’ll explain the situation. Afterwards, we’ll try to convince you we’re not crazy.”
Erin made introductions, then Richard played a couple of videos for Monica, without commentary. Once she’d seen them, the explanations started.
“Another dimension?” Monica asked, bewildered.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Kevin replied, “unless you mean another time dimension, in which case yes. It’s another world-line. A parallel universe. An alternate Earth. Whatever science-fiction cliché you want to use.”
“And it’s filled with animals but as far as we can tell, no people,” Bill added. “We’d like you to look at the animals and see if you can identify them and come to any conclusions. We’re especially interested in which ones will try to eat us.”
Monica looked at each of the men in turn. They appeared serious. “All right. I’m still treating this as an elaborate practical joke, but if you do manage to open a gateway to another world, I’ll reconsider. Shall we start?”
Bill grinned. Richard began the startup sequence, which by this time consisted of little more than a couple of menu selections and an OK button.
The three-foot gate blurred, then settled into a scene showing distant trees and animals. Matt handed Monica a set of binoculars and motioned towards the gate.
Monica sidled up to it like a cat investigating something unknown. After a few seconds, she put the binoculars to her eyes and began scanning the scene, muttering just loud enough to be heard, “Tapirus californicus. Tayassuida. Cervalces scotti. Holy shit. Those are supposed to be extinct!”
As she walked sideways, trying to scan the landscape, she found herself trying to peer through the gate at a steep angle. She lowered the binoculars and frowned.
Richard came over. “Here, you can rotate it. Let me.”
He took hold of the gate assembly from behind and turned it on the table. As he rotated it, Monica walked around to keep the best angle of view. Abruptly she screamed and jumped back as a large paw with very impressive claws poked through the gate. The paw withdrew and was replaced by a large feline face with very long teeth. The animal growled and started to push farther through.
Richard yelled “The fuck!” as he caught sight of it and pulled out one of the cables. The gate shut down and the feline head disappeared.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, oh fuck!” Monica backed away and yelled. “That was a smilodon!” She started hopping from foot to foot, with her fists balled, the binoculars forgotten around her neck, yelling “Shitshitshitshitshit!”
Bill watched this performance with a bemused look. He turned to Richard, who stood with his jaw hanging. “I think we may have found your soul-mate.”
Monica yelled, “Oh Jesus! What am I, the first character that gets killed so everyone learns to be more careful? Am I wearing a red fucking shirt? Shit!”
“Or mine…” Bill added, a smile slowly growing on his face.
In a few minutes, things calmed down. Richard was giving Monica a strange look, like she’d just appeared out of thin air.
Monica expounded to everyone in the room, “Okay, rule number one, we don’t open the goddam gate while we’ve got pizza in the room! Especially Meat-Lovers! By the way, Bill, you were asking about animals that would eat us? That’s one.”
Richard wordlessly offered Monica
a beer. She took it without comment, opened it against the table edge without missing a beat, and downed about half the bottle before continuing. “Okay, look. You have a bunch of what appear to be Pleistocene animals out there. The plants, as near as I can make out, are consistent with that. The climate appears to be cooler than ours. Kevin, given what you said before that it’s the same date on that side, I’d say either the climate over there has been more stable, or humans never migrated to North America, or some combination of that. Fuck!” She downed the rest of the beer.
Richard continued to stare. She turned to look at him and demanded, “What?” He turned away, blushing.
Damn, he’s cute when he’s discombobulated, she thought. And even when he’s not…
“So, is it safe to go through?” Matt asked.
“Safe? Safe? Something just tried to eat me. No!”
She stopped, took a couple of deep breaths—well aware that Richard’s eyes were bugging out—then continued. “The prevailing theory is that humans wiped out all the megafauna when they migrated to North America, either through direct hunting, competition for resources, or destruction of habitat. So those nasties aren’t invulnerable. You’re bringing guns, right? Big guns?”
“We haven’t provisioned ourselves yet,” Richard replied. “How about you give us an idea what we’ll need.”
“Okay, let’s see… We’ve got smilodons, that’s saber-toothed cats to you; dire wolves, think wolves but bigger and meaner; American lions, which are exactly what they sound like; homotheria, scimitar-toothed cats; short-faced bears; mastodons and mammoths, stag moose, giant sloths, and giant beavers.”
“Giant… beav—beavers?” Bill said. “Giant beavers? Six feet tall, and hungry for human furniture!” He started to laugh.
Monica glared at him. “Hey, just because something isn’t carnivorous doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. People have been injured by white-tail deer. Now try meeting a moose or a bison. Or imagine something even bigger that hasn’t learned to be afraid of you.”
Monica waved the empty beer bottle at the gate. “The giant sloth in particular wasn’t slow and sedentary like its modern South American cousins. It was mobile, territorial, and judging from the state of some skeletons, a bit of a scrapper. So have some respect.”
Matt got a puzzled look. “Hey, Richard or Kevin, how come we don’t have a decapitated smilodon head sitting in the middle of our floor? It was definitely on this side when you cut the power.”
Richard turned to Kevin. Kevin looked thoughtful for a moment. “First, the portal isn’t a door, like in the traditional sense. You aren’t walking through from here to there like some sci-fi wormhole. The portal is just an interface. When you push through it, you become more and more likely to be here rather than there, and at some point—probably when you’re fractionally more than halfway through—you become here even if the power cuts off. The cat was still mostly there.
“Second, the interface can’t cut stuff in half because cutting is work. It requires energy, and there’s not enough energy in the design. If you turn off the portal, things go to where they most likely are. Sort of. I think I just gave myself a headache.”
“Well, that’s a relief anyway,” Bill said. “One less thing to worry about.”
“Okay, people,” Richard called out. “Time to get organized. Monica, are you in?”
Monica tilted her head, and a grin slowly spread across her face. “Oh, depend on it. I’ve only ever seen fossils of those animals up until now. What kind of zoologist would I be if I walked away?”
Richard smiled an acknowledgment. “Excellent. So, we have to start getting supplies, including weapons. Big weapons. Also tents, sleeping bags, cook-stoves, water purification, food, axes, knives, yadda yadda yadda, and gold panning equipment. Matt isn’t made of infinite money, so we’ll have to kick in as well. Everyone keep track of what you spend, and we’ll settle accounts as soon as we are able.
“We also need a map and detailed information about whichever gold strike we decide on, and you all have to make sure you’re free for enough days to get this done.”
Monica gave Richard the hairy eyeball. “And why, pray tell, do we need tents and sleeping bags?”
“You’d prefer to sleep under the stars?” Richard asked with a grin.
“No, I’d prefer to sleep in a hotel. Preferably five-star. I’ll camp when you can plug a hair-dryer into a tree. Is there any reason we can’t just do day-trips to the panning site?”
The others exchanged glances.
“You know, I’m not sure,” Richard answered. “I just assumed it would be a long way to the site from the nearest outpost of civilization. Obviously we have to cross over when we reach the limit of where the van can go.”
Monica replied, “Here’s two words for you. Google Earth. How about we find out?”
Again there was an exchange of glances. Richard looked a little crestfallen, probably realizing that he hadn’t thought things through as well as he’d believed.
“Okay, Monica. You’ve got my attention. I guess we’re going to have to go through everything and do a re-think.”
Gates
Richard gestured at the varied collection of parts, cables, and enclosures on one of the lab tables. “Okay, I’ve got all the parts for a second portal. I’ve made a significant dent in the Physics Lab inventory.” He ran a hand through his hair and grinned. “Sure hope no one suddenly feels a need to set up a new project of their own.”
Bill looked at him with his eyebrows raised. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No, not very likely, Bill. Most people have more sense than to be here during the summer. I’ve left a note in the inventory area, where someone would find it if they were looking.”
Bill shrugged, then gestured to another table, with its own collection of equipment. “I’ve got the people-sized gates here.” He pointed to two elliptical metal hoops, six feet on the long axis. “It’ll be a tight fit for you, but not bad for us normal mortals.”
“Elliptical gates? Are you sure that’ll work?”
“Kevin said it would, although I guess we’ll have to test it.”
Bill walked over to the table and gestured to a diagram. “I haven’t been able to make the truck-sized gate, though. Problems with parts, not enough room in the fabrication area to lay it out, and I’m not sure how I’d get it out of there. It should be designed so it can be disassembled, but I just don’t have the tools for that. I’m thinking maybe after our first trip, when we have some funds, I can either hire it out or rent some equipment and do it in the warehouse.”
“Yeah, one step at a time. Hey, where’s the Faraday cage on the back?” Richard pointed to one of the gates.
“Turned out to be unnecessary for gating to the other Earths. Another of Kevin’s suggestions. I tried the medium one after I removed the cage, and it connected fine.” Bill looked at his feet and chuckled. “About three seconds after turning it on, I remembered Monica’s experience with the smilodon, and turned it off real quick. Which is why I haven’t tested the big ones yet. I’d like some backup around for that.”
Richard laughed. “Well, you ain’t wrong.”
“Anyway, not having the cage saves some weight and some material. I’ve mounted some light metal plate on the back of the gates to brace them. They don’t have a lot of structural strength on their own.”
Bill hesitated for a moment, then turned to face Richard. “Hey, Richard, I’ve been thinking. What should we call the other side? Earth Two?” Bill paused for a moment, then said in a too-casual tone, “How about Wildside?”
Richard made a pfft sound. “Even if I hadn’t already read that book, I’d be suspicious of you, Bill. How about just Otherside?”
“Lame,” Bill replied. “Derivative without being witty.”
The argument continued while they loaded up the van.
Trying Out the Pole-Cam
We know of no strategies for reducing the power of major volcanic eru
ptions. Even science fiction cannot produce a credible mechanism for averting a super-eruption.
– From a 2005 report by the Geological Society of London
Matt held the door for Erin, and they entered the warehouse. They found Bill holding a pole in the air and waving it around slowly. Matt walked over and examined the pole in detail.
It appeared to be one of those extendable fiberglass poles used for trimming tree branches. At the end of the pole, Bill had removed the usual saw and branch-clipper. In their place, he had mounted the original eight-inch gate, still sporting the nine symbols, but without the cage.
He had mounted a camera in front of the gate, pointing into it. Cables ran down the pole to the portal generator box and to a monitor. The monitor showed an ever-changing scene of the other Earth as seen through the gate, as Bill waved the pole around.
“Hey, that’s pretty cool, Bill,” Matt said. “And smilodon-proof. Monica will appreciate that.”
Matt noticed that Bill’s expression brightened at the mention of Monica. Uh oh. If I had a spidey sense, it would be going off.
Bill nodded at the pole. “Yeah, thanks. I kind of MacGyvered it together. I took the cage off the back and put a back-plate on, like with the larger gates. It’s cut down the weight and power requirements. The pole-cam is easier to handle now.”
Bill continued after a pause, “Listen, Richard and I were discussing things last night, and we’ve come up with a name for the other Earth. Richard shot down pretty much everything I came up with—”
“I can imagine,” Matt said.
“—so we ended up with Outland by default.”
“Works for me,” Erin said. “As long as it’s also Goldland.”
“So, on to business,” Bill said. He leaned the pole carefully against a shelving unit and turned off the portal generator box. “We’ve got this pole-cam for scoping out the situation on the other side. We’ve got the three-foot gate. We’ve got a couple of larger six-foot gates. We’ve got spare parts—you’re welcome—and a generator. In a pinch, the equipment can run off the vehicle through an inverter, which we also have.”
Outland (World-Lines Book 1) Page 7