by Ryan Lohner
Chapman announced from behind them, “Welcome to Krell.”
Chapter Eight
Matt stepped closer to the window, getting a full view of the city all around him. The first thing he noticed was that the buildings tended to be pyramid-shaped, though narrower than the ones in Egypt. It was like a whole city of the Transamerica Building. Flying vehicles raced by, too fast to make out details, though all the way down on the ground he could still see roads, and, at least from what he could tell at the tremendous distance, what seemed to be normal cars moving at what seemed a snail’s pace in comparison. His eyes were glued to the sight for quite some time, or at least it seemed that way, and when at last he was able to tear himself away he found Jane and Jim right next to him. They looked at each other in complete awe. There was nothing any of them could say. This all seemed impossible, yet there it was, right in front of them, and Matt was certainly not going to be the one to deny it.
The spell was broken by Pren’s voice. “Yeah, take as long as you want. Just stare at it. That’s the kind of thing you’re up against. You people don’t stand a chance.”
“Pren!” Chapman barked out the word in an angrier tone than he’d ever showed before. That came as quite a surprise and Matt found himself looking at the man with new eyes: this was someone whose feathers weren’t ruffled easily, but he still had a breaking point. Chapman visibly forced himself to calm down before continuing, that scar showing miniscule movements in his mouth. “That’s enough. I would advise you to try not speaking at all for a while.” He sounded perfectly calm, but the tone of his words carried a great weight. On top of that, the look he gave was terrifying enough without being the subject of it, and Matt couldn’t imagine being in Pren’s shoes at the moment.
Pren nodded his head, for once looking like the very picture of sincere obedience. But Matt saw him rolling his eyes as Chapman turned to face them again; however, that rat face was able to resist that glare, he was clearly going to be a big problem no matter how this turned out. For his part, Chapman ignored the unruly subordinate and said to the three kids, “To answer what I’m pretty sure is your first question: this is not another planet. It’s the same as your Earth, just a different Earth. They have the same history and occupy the same point in space. It’s just that they exist in different dimensions. I don’t expect you’ll quite grasp the concept; our own scientists have just barely begun to truly understand it. To use a spectacularly crude term that doesn’t come close to covering the true nature of the situation, it’s next door to your own dimension, making trips across the gap relatively easy.” He grinned a bit at the simplistic explanation.
Jim cut in. “Oh yeah, we’ve made a ton of books and movies about this kind of thing. Don’t worry, we get the concept.”
Chapman’s expression was almost worth the embarrassment Matt was feeling from being acquainted with someone who’d say that. Though he couldn’t look at it for long or he would burst out laughing and make things worse. Then Pren took care of that for him. Chapman turned on him with just a glare, and he promptly shut up.
“As I was saying,” he continued with a sharp look at Jim, though thankfully not as severe as the one Pren had gotten, “this is the city of Krell, one of our largest industrial centers. It’s places like this that make our whole society possible. And it’s the place where our top scientists were tasked with finding a way to get to other universes. As it turns out, the walls, for lack of a better term, between our dimensions are unusually thin here, and we were worried about what was on the other side, as I’m sure you would be in our place.”
Now it was Reeves who butted in. “So imagine our surprise when it turned out you were centuries behind us. And rather ripe for the picking, if you ask me.” His face took on a leer that Matt did not like looking at. Every new word out of these peoples’ mouths had him feeling less optimistic about their situation, no matter how reasonable their leader appeared to be.
Chapman simply went on, “Not quite the way I would have put it, but essentially correct.” Pren’s reaction was rather amusing, clearly upset that this other person was allowed to get away with an interruption but not him, but still afraid to speak up about it, so he had to just seethe silently. “Like I said, as far as we’ve been able to tell, we seem to have the same history as you. But we just have more of it, if that makes any sense to you. About five hundred years’ worth. My guess would be if you could travel forward that far in your own world, it would look a lot like this. It’s a rare gift to see, really.”
By now, Matt was long past feeling real surprise about any of this. In fact, what he felt more than anything was tired. It had been late at night when he left his house, and despite it being broad daylight outside, his internal clock was still running on Eastern Standard Time. And as soon as that thought hit him, so, too, did the urge to yawn. He fought it as hard as he could, wanting very much to avoid anything that could make this even worse, but nature would not be denied and it slipped out. And of course, this had the inevitable effect of making Jane and Jim do it, too. A curse on human psychology, he thought.
This was apparently the last straw for Pren, as even with Chapman’s threat fresh in everyone’s minds he said, “Oh, so we’re boring you? Maybe you’d like to see something else, like our high security prison cells? Trust me, that’ll keep you awake for a while.”
Chapman looked about to say something else to his unruly subordinate, but then he simply squeezed the bridge of his nose and let it go. “I apologize. I didn’t consider the time that we picked you up from. Naturally you’ll be needing some sleep. If you’ll follow me, please.” He walked down the hall, and the three of them were pushed along after him.
Matt again considered that these guys might be mostly bad news, but at least their leader seemed like a decent person. At least it gave him some hope to hold on to, which he found himself needing more and more.
They soon left that giant window behind and went back into the building’s interior, where there was again little to distinguish one area from another. The place was like a maze, and Matt soon had to give up trying to remember all the turns they made in their trip through it. For a while no one spoke, and the silence slowly built up his sense of paranoia until he had to say something. “So what happens to us now?” It seemed an innocuous enough question, and by this point he was at least reasonably sure that Chapman wasn’t the kind of person who would punish him for asking it.
The man shook his head. “I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to tell you. You should just know that right now we’re taking you to a place where you’ll be able to sleep as long as you need, and by the time you wake, who knows? I may have already gotten a response to the report I’m going to send in, which I can tell you is going to say that I think you’re harmless, and even if you told someone else about all this, it would pose no threat.” He shot a brief smile back at them, which Matt actually did find quite reassuring.
Jane replied, “So this is all going to be okay?”
Chapman turned fully to face them, while somehow continuing to navigate his path expertly. It seemed like he’d regularly gone down these halls. “I don’t want to make any promises. Some people here are more paranoid than me. But I will do all I can to see that you won’t be harmed.”
Pren whispered from behind them, “And hey, if it doesn’t work out, we get to hang out some more.”
Matt scowled as he struggled to hold on to those good feelings.
* * *
At last they arrived at a small room that appeared to be completely bare, until Chapman pressed his hand to the wall in three different spots, and a cot came out under each one. “Just so you know, the room is monitored. When you’re all refreshed, use this.” He pressed the wall next to the door, and it rotated to reveal a green button, though rather than pressing it, he stroked the side. “I’ve just set it to alert me. Hopefully I’ll have some good news for you by the time you use it.” Then he left, and a process the reverse of the one that had showed them the wo
rld outside took place, pieces of the wall emerging and filling in the door until they were completely enclosed, with no visible seam at all. Oddly enough, there was still a dim light, with no apparent source.
Jim broke the ice. “Well, I don’t know about you two, but I’m starting to feel better about this.”
Jane scoffed. “I still absolutely blame you.”
Jim sat on one of the cots. “Seriously, you can’t say this thing couldn’t have gone a lot worse. I mean, we could have been thrown in some creepy dungeon to starve.”
Jane moved to stand over him. “And what exactly makes you think that isn’t just what’s going on here? That button might not even do anything. Maybe the guy didn’t want to deal with us at all, so he threw us in here and now he’s going to just forget about us.”
At that, Matt had to step in. “Come on, let’s try to stay positive here. I agree with Jim. Chapman seems like about the best we could have hoped for, considering.”
Jane spun to face him. “And what are we considering, exactly? What is actually going on here? Okay, it’s another dimension. Weird, but I’m pretty much over it by now. So, who are these guys? What do we know about them? Did you notice how he told us all kinds of stuff about this place, but nothing about himself or the other guys?”
Matt sat down, too as he said, “Well, there’s nothing we can really do about it now. I know how my parents would handle something like this – you don’t worry unless you have a real reason to. So that’s what I’m going to do.” He neglected to mention that they never had been in a situation like this, and he was just making a guess from their usual work. Come to think of it, he was starting to think he owed them an apology for his skepticism when they wrote about things like this. But the truth was, he could feel himself melting down inside, and if that feeling got to the surface, he might never be able to stop it. So for now, he would cling to that idea of his parents’ for all it was worth. “And that was a real yawn out there, and I do really need some sleep.” He yawned again. “See? So that’s what I’m going to do.”
Jane huffed to herself. “Fine. So I guess it’s just me and the idiot here—”
Jim interrupted. “Hey, leave me out of this. I’ve been trying to get some sleep all this time, and you’re not helping.”
With that, it seemed they’d exhausted all that any of them wanted to say for a moment, so they all took to the beds.
* * *
Matt was woken up by a loud banging. In the dim light, thankfully easy to adjust to, he saw Jane and Jim do the same; apparently, despite what she’d said, Jane had succumbed to nature’s requirements eventually. The wall began to open and Matt briefly hoped it was Chapman coming to free them, but the door from before didn’t open. Instead it was just a small hole at eye level, just big enough to see the face of the man standing there. It was Pren.
“You know, before the boss kept interrupting me, there were a couple other things I wanted to tell you,” he said as they wandered over. “Just to see the looks on your faces. Because let me tell you, it’s not good news.”
Chapter Nine
Jim pounded a fist into his other hand. “Why don’t you come in here and say some of that stuff?”
Pren laughed, though at a low volume. It seemed he was worried about being overheard. “Oh please. You think I’m scared of you? I’ve gone through training. What do you have?”
Matt frowned. Something about the statement came across as odd; the generic word “training” used as if it explained everything. Sure, the context made it pretty clear what he was talking about, but it still didn’t sound quite right from a guy like this, who clearly loved bullying the few people below him he could find. But whatever the issue was, it couldn’t do them any good right now, so he kept quiet as Jim smiled and said, “I make a good tackle. So I figure if I can do it quick enough, whatever fancy fighting you know won’t help at all.”
Matt held his hands out. “Jim, stop it.” Turning to Pren he said, “Okay, look. You came here to tell us something, so just say it.”
The man flashed a grin that made his face look even more rat-like. “If you insist. So, you got the big speech before about how this is not your universe, right? Well, what the boss man didn’t tell you is that it’s very, very bad to spend too long outside your own universe. I’ll admit, I don’t really get how it works, but the gist is, from the moment you came here, you started dying. It’s a slow process, very subtle, but after about a week, you’ll start coughing up blood, spasming, having your eyes burst … it’s a bad way to go. Those first test subjects sent through to your world …” he shuddered. “I was part of the second team through. Not a pretty sight, let me tell you. We didn’t waste any time getting back.”
Matt thought his heart had fallen to his feet when he was first caught, but this was so much worse. “Well, we’ll be out of here by then, right? I mean, Chapman said he’d be reporting about us and come back with the decision.”
Pren replied, “Yeah, he did say that. Trouble is, sometimes it takes a little while longer to get an answer back from the guys in charge than at other times. I don’t know what they do in there, but I’ve suspected for a while they just kick back and relax a lot of the time. Who cares about us on the ground when they’ve got their cushy lives?” He paused and gritted his teeth, then seemed to realize what he was doing and just stared at them again. “In the meantime, why don’t you worry about it? Well, see you.”
As he turned to leave, Jane shouted, “Wait! There has to be some way out of this. I mean, you guys go to our world, right? You can’t just always keep swapping out every few days, can you?”
Pren turned back and said, “Well, if you insist.” He lifted his sleeve all the way up his arm. Near his shoulder, a square piece of skin was raised up, looking similar to a tuberculosis tine test, though about an inch on all sides. “That’s the reaction to an injection you can take. It’s called Neserene, little robots that keep your body stable, or something like that. I wasn’t really paying attention when the lab guys explained it. These days we’re not allowed to go through until it shows up. That’s the only way to survive.” He started turning away again, then stopped and turned back. “Or I suppose you could just be born here.”
That was another statement that just felt weird, and even for Pren, gratuitous. Plus, there was just something in his tone that made Matt say, “What do you mean?”
He did that quiet laugh again. “Oh, it was a big story. When the corridors were first invented, this one couple went through it. The woman was a scientist on the project and she snuck her husband and their baby in late at night, stole three shots of Neserene, and went through. Of course, some of our guys were sent through after them. They came back saying all three were dead. Nothing from the baby, though. They said it had just fallen in a river and was carried off. I always thought it seemed a little fishy. So hey, maybe one of you is that baby. Or not. Have fun with that.” And then he left for good, still laughing.
The three of them just stared at each other for a few seconds before Jim said, “He could have at least shut the wall.”
Matt appreciated the attempt to cheer them up, but it didn’t work. “He might have just been lying about the whole thing, right?”
Jane looked at her feet. “So where did that thing on his arm come from, then?” When she looked up, the dull light barely glinted off fresh tears.
Jim spoke up again. “You never know. It might be you, Matt.”
As unexpected as some of Pren’s statements had been, this was even more so and Matt looked at him sharply. “Excuse me?”
Jim held up his hands. “Hey, any kind of hope seems like a good idea right now. You haven’t said anything, so I never brought it up. I figured it might be a sore subject. But once word started getting around about your parents, I looked them up and found out you were adopted.”
Just when he thought this situation couldn’t get any worse. Matt felt his fists balling with the memories of how many times this sort of conversation
had gone very badly. But no, he couldn’t let that color what was going on now, with the only two people he could count on, in literally, the whole world. He replied, as calmly as he could, “So what’s your point?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Maybe you’re the baby from the story.”
Jane snorted, in a quite unladylike way. “Really, Jim? Just when I think I know how big an idiot you are.”
Jim’s tone lowered to something more serious. “Oh, I know the odds on it. Maybe the story’s not even true, and the guy was just saying it to screw with us some more. But this is what I’m doing, okay? I’m going to grab at anything, because … because I need to.”
Matt was surprised to realize that by now, Jim’s face was as shiny as Jane’s had been.
Matt was at a loss for words. He hadn’t spared a thought for how this might be affecting Jim, thanks to still being angry with him for getting them all out there in the woods. “Jim … I’m sorry. We’re all in this together now, so whatever you need to do to get through this is fine by me.”
Jane put a hand on his shoulder. “Me, too. I’m sorry.”
Jim wiped his face. “Oh, don’t go turning this into a big love fest on my account. It’s still me, guys. You can be mad at me if you want.”
Matt replied, “Well, I’m not.”
Jane just smiled and shook her head.
Jim stood a little straighter. “Well, glad we got that all sorted out.”
Matt had to agree; the last thing they needed now were problems within the group, and somehow he was feeling much more relaxed having that inevitable conversation over with.