Quagmire's Gate

by Allan E Petersen

  “Did you know about the girl?”

  “No honest. Although I certainly asked myself those questions, it was still not within my security bubble to be in on it. Obviously, she was held somewhere else. I know for a fact she was not held on this Base. Clearly, General Irsthill, in his twisted mind saw her as something other than an alien from another dimension. He obviously convinced the others in his cult that she was this so called lost angel belonging to the Master of the Underworld.”

  Professor Quagmire cut in,

  “To a degree, indeed she is a lost angel. Somebody from another place is missing her and wants her sent back to where she belongs. Obviously she is somebody’s little angel.”

  This prompted Lynda to ask,

  “Speaking of which, where is she?”

  The question incited all of them to look around but because a herd of people surrounded them, it was a useless looking for somebody the size of a child.

  They made a hasty plan to scatter, search for her and after thirty minutes meet back here. Lynda wondered through the crowd looking for a little girl wearing a brown robe but could not locate her. Eventually she gave up searching in the crowd and started scanning the horizon, out into the desert toward the far mountains. She squinted and thought she might be looking at a small brown dot off in the distance. Seeing Whelan, she called him over and asked,

  “Is that her way out there?”

  He stared and then suddenly started running in that direction. She chased after him.

  The closer they got the more obvious it became that it was the girl. When she turned around to see who was running after her she held up her hand in a halting fashion. Both stopped ten feet from her. Lynda looked around and wondered why she was walking into the desert? All she saw was desert and emptiness. Surely, she must understand that they are here to help her. Perhaps not. Lynda used a soft motherly tone,

  “Don’t be afraid of us. We both want to help you.”

  Large black opaque eyes locked onto Lynda. However, Lynda could not determine if there was cognizance behind them. She was prompted to ask,

  “Do you understand me?”

  The girl nodded and Lynda continued.

  “I don’t know if you know this or not but whoever loves you and wants you back has contacted me. A deal was made that if they stopped the anti-matter leak I would make every effort to return you to them.”

  The girl nodded.

  “Well good,” said Lynda, “because of all people, I know how it feels to lose a daughter and the happiness of getting her back. You must understand that as much as I am committed to helping you, I have no idea how. I mean it would be so much easier to just give you ten dollars and say take a cab home wouldn’t it.”

  The girl nodded and Lynda thought there might have been an effort made to smile.

  “It’s not going to be that easy is it?”

  Lynda was surprised to see the girl nod. This prompted her to ask,

  “Is it? Is it really that simple?”

  Again, the girl nodded.

  By this time, the Professor had caught up to them. He heard the conversation, caught his breath and said to the little girl,

  “That’s where you are going isn’t it. You are on your way home aren’t you?”

  She nodded. Confused, Lynda again looked around. There was still nothing to see. It must be some mistake, there was no way this leads home no matter where that home might be. Seeing her confusion the Professor attempted to explain.

  “You are searching for what you perceive as a homeward direction. You see nothing and therefore believe that there is nothing. Your mind has been conditioned to automatically draw information from things it has learned. That is why it does not perceive or see anything wrong when a man walks across your field of vision as long as he is walking on something. Yet if he was walking on nothing, just air, then confusion tells you something is wrong. It is the same when you see a man walking backwards. You see it as wrong. Yet, in fact, a man can walk backwards. It is relative to how we recognize things or understand them to be. We have not been conditioned to understand where she came from or wants to return to, so we see it as wrong or no place at all.”

  The girl nodded her understanding of something that flew over Lynda’s head. However, she did get the gist of what he was saying. We do not understand where she is from. We have never poked our head out of the fish tank to look at another world.

  Surprisingly the girl did not turn to walk away but rather took steps toward the Professor. He stood rigid. Lynda thought she saw hesitation in the girl’s eyes, perhaps an apprehension to approach the human beast. It was much like a lion tamer tentatively approaching one of his lions. The lion tamer knows it is relatively safe but it is best to be alert, better to error on the side of caution. Both lion and man are an unpredictable species.

  When they were face-to-face, Lynda saw the girl reach toward him with an open hand. If there was communication between them, it was not in the audible sense. Somehow, the Professor knew what the open hand was requesting. He reached into his pocket and brought out the bell that had agitated the anti-matter. There was a strange look in his eyes. Lynda’s look was bewilderment. The girl and the Professor stared at each other and there was no doubt in Lynda’s mind that communication was traveling back and forth between them. Without sound, she was saying something to him and he was intently listening.

  The girl abruptly turned and walked away but stopped twenty feet later. Regardless of the distance, it was clear to Lynda that there was still nothing here, still surrounded by open desert. Lynda wondered if the alien world might be above, hovering to swoop down and snatch her up. Instinctively she lifted her eyes to scan an empty clear sky. There was still nothing to be seen anywhere.

  Looking back down to the girl, Lynda noticed that she was holding the bell out in front of her in a rather exaggerated manner. Clearly the girl wanted to make sure that the Professor saw what she was about to do. With a flick of her wrist, she rang the bell.

  There was no doubt in the Professor’s mind that the vibration of the bell had started what his astonished eyes saw. Lynda’s jaw dropped and a gasp escaped from Whelan. In front of the girl was a wave action much like when seeing heat coming off a hot road. Some of the Professor’s parables about fish in the tank had rubbed off and she understood that she was looking at the beginning of a temporal distortion. She was a fish looking at a disturbance in the surface of the tank, a disturbance at the limits of her world.

  As if the disturbance was not enough, the door not open wide enough, she rang the bell again. This time the wave action seemed agitated and formed a circle in front of her. She looked hard into the eyes of the Professor and produced what might have been a smile although it was hard to tell with such a small rigid slit of a mouth. Lynda expected her to wave goodbye or produce whatever gesture they might use for indicating a friendly departure but it was not to be. Instead, she pointed to the Professor and again Lynda got the impression she was communicating with him.

  Then the Professor slowly walked toward the girl and Lynda knew where he was going. She knew he was about to stick his intelligent head out of the fish tank and jump into another world. Just as she was reconciling her sadness to see him go, she also struggled with her pleasure at the same time. For as much as she did not want him to leave, she also understood that it was his quest. It was his great desire to leave a fish tank that had not been kind to him. She heard him muttering,

  “My gate is finally open. My gate.”

  Visions of all the scientists at Roads End desperately struggling to discover the key to the gate came to her. The complicated formulas and equations the lost scientists at the institution struggled with were useless attempts to discover a dimensional gate. The key to it all was the simplicity of a bell’s resonance. Great minds that nobody save them could understand tried to formulate a complex solution to something as simple as a cheap tin bell hanging above a Doctor’s door. Professor Quagmire knew the reason Hatcher had los
t his arm so quickly at her office was the interaction of the bells resonance. That was why he wanted to come to Deep Lab 6, to find the key to his gate, the key to a much kinder world.

  As he approached the girl, she took a step backwards into the temporal warp and she too started to shimmer. To Lynda’s surprise, the Professor stopped at the distortion and did not attempt to enter with her. She wondered why? Was this not supposed to be his gateway to a sympathetic world? Of all the terrible things he had seen in these past few hours, had he seen something in humanity that made him want to stay in this world?

  Lynda saw that the distortion surrounding the girl was fading and like sinking into water, she was sinking back into her own world. With the distortion now a foot across, the girl was out of sight. Lynda then saw something come flying out of the hole. It was not until he caught it and heard the chime of the bell that she understood what it was. Then, as quickly as the blink of an eye, the dimensional gate snapped shut.

  Lynda saw the Professor hang his head low and stare at the bell in his hand. He closed his hand on it and returned to her. When all three walked back to what was left of the compound, she asked him,

  “So what was all that about?”

  He was noncommittal in his reply, rather saddened.

  “She went home.”

  “Yea, I could see that. I thought you wanted to go with her. Wasn’t that the purpose of coming here in the first place, to find the key to this dimensional gate thing of yours?”

  “Yes it was. However for numerous reasons, going with the girl now would be out of the question.”

  “Yeah, name one reason.”

  “I have more work to do.”

  As they approached the edge of the crowd still milling near the crater, Lynda asked,

  “I don’t suppose you would care to tell me what that work might be would you?”

  He really did not want to. However, he realized that none of this was possible without her help. Accepting the fact that Doctor Lynda Gray was not an enemy, one of the few people outside of Roads End that he trusted, he relented. Sticking to lay terminology, he said,

  “It’s that fish tank thing again. Have you ever seen a fish jump out of a fish tank and flop around on the table?”

  “Certainly, many times.”

  “Let’s assume that it jumped out because it was inquisitive enough to explore another world, another existence. When he jumped out and landed on the table what do you think happened to it?”

  She understood that it would die. Perhaps that was his meaning. It was okay to take a quick peek at that strange new world but not okay to rashly jump into it.

  Because more of his exemplary mind for the abnormal was rubbing off on her, she realized the other problem the fish now faced. It took brave initiative to explore another world with little or no preparation, rather rashly taking hold of the opportunity and jumping. As it floundered on the table next to the tank and it struggled to breath, it might have realized the folly of his curiosity. The fish could not return to his own safe world. It cannot jump back into the tank. It might see his friends on the other side of the glass but from this side, the barrier between him and his world was impenetrable.

  As they continued toward the crowd, she said,

  “So it’s back to Roads End to figure out how to survive in this other dimension you and the others are trying to escape to then is it?”

  He did not reply. She continued,

  “That’s why you didn’t go with the girl just now. You knew you would die in that world didn’t you.”

  “Yes. I wanted to but she warned me of the danger. Now that I have the key it’s just a matter of going back to my associates and figure out that little set back.”

  “Do you think you can solve it?”

  His answer was reassuring to a woman who wanted nothing but the best for him.

  “Yes.”

  “Did the girl tell you how?”

  “Yes. Although I am not sure I understood it all.”

  Lynda said,

  “It seems to me that understanding is important before taking a blind leap of faith headlong into a world you know nothing about.”

  “Yes but then you have to ask yourself if the risk is worth it. It is a risk I will gladly take.”

  As they stood at the edge of the great abyss staring deep into what was proven without any doubt to be the gates of hell, Lynda filled with compassion for him and said,

  “You really don’t have to return there you know. I can vouch for your cognizance and help you continue your investigation in a lab better equipped for that sort of research.”

  “Thank you but no. All the equipment I need is in the collective minds of my friends back there. We have worked together too long and hard for me to abandon them to that hell of drugs they force on us.”

  Suddenly a great surge of sympathy sprang into her. She felt the pain of their comatose world of mind numbing drugs. Clearly, Professor Quagmire was in control of his faculties and exhibiting loyalty to his fellow inmates. She said,

  “I couldn’t help but get the feeling the girl was communicating something else to you.”

  “Yes but again most of it was not clear, at least for now. One thing for sure was the feeling that when I ring the bell, they would hear it. Stir the water and we shall look into it. Perhaps she planted thoughts in my mind or maybe I just missed what she was saying I don’t know.”

  He patted his pocket and a slight tingling was heard. She did not hear him whisper,

  “Together we shall prevail.”

  Lynda looked deep into the crater and shuttered. It did not seem natural to look into a hole and not see the bottom. She felt she was looking down the shear sides of a giant pipe. The walls were straight, smooth and going down forever. She asked the Professor,

  “Do you believe it goes clean through to the other side of the world?”

  His answer was quick but not assuring.

  “Without a doubt and it does not stop there. The anti-matter would have continued to eat a destructive path throughout the universe if it hadn’t been stopped.”

  “How do you suppose they stopped it?”

  “We might never know. That is how far behind we are to their understanding of the universe. I think they turned it off as easily as we might change the channel on a radio station.”

  To Lynda there was no way to understand any of it. Thoughts of complicated theories and unknown worlds or whatever they were, drifted through her confused mind. She asked,

  “Do you suppose the world will survive a hole of this size? I mean, what do you think are the consequences of this experiment gone wrong?”

  “Nothing. The world is a living organism that can easily survive a small injury like this. It is akin to poking a needle through an orange. Eventually, and by that I mean perhaps in a hundred years, maybe two, the positive matter will win the battle of the neutralized anti-matter invasion and eventually close up the hole. I suspect we will see many years of magma leaks and volcanic eruptions as the cauterized perimeters breaks down but eventually it will seal. Perhaps within five hundred years if there are still people on this delicate little orb, there will be no sign of this hole at all.”

  As Lynda was attempting to come to terms with his prediction, she heard a very familiar voice on the other side of the crowd barking orders to the clustered people.

  “Back! Everyone get back at least fifty yards. Let’s get with the program here folks, get back before somebody falls in.”

  As the crowd got thinner and the voice louder, she saw that it was Joseph Mann. He was running back and forth like a busy shepherd boy trying desperately to keep his flock away from the precipice. As he managed to persuade some to retreat from the edge, somebody somewhere else stepped forward for a peek. He dutifully ran toward them with the same warning and equal futility.

  “Get back before you fall in!”

  It was like trying to stop water from running through a sieve.

  He looked over and saw Lynd
a standing beside somebody he had never seen before and approached them. He grinned and said,

  “It’s good to see you Doctor, the last I heard you were down in the lab when the explosion occurred. Did everybody get out safely?”

  A dark shroud came over her and Joseph recognized that there was death involved. Hesitantly he asked,

  “Whelan Christianson, what happed to my partner?”