Pinball

by Alan Seeger

  He looked back. His wife was standing behind him, slightly to his left, surrounded by the children. Her eyes were wide now, concern filling her face. “Steve… are you sure about this?” she asked.

  “I have to do this,” Steven replied. “I have to.”

  “Hurry back,” she said in a whisper. “Please.”

  “I will,” he replied, and took a single step forward.

  Chapter 7

  Disoriented. That was the word that came to mind.

  It reminded Steven a great deal of the time he had broken both legs and one of his arms in a car wreck when he was a teenager. The doctors had given him morphine for the pain, and he’d had some pretty wild hallucinations. Now everything was green and swirling, and he felt as though he were a leaf being carried on the wind, or swept along by ocean waves. Everything is green and submarine, he thought.

  He tried to look around, but it seemed as if his muscles were simply refusing to respond. The only part of his body that he could move at all was his fingers. He was reminded of when the Tin Man first showed up in The Wizard of Oz — rusted so badly he couldn’t even move.

  He gazed ahead, seeing only what chance and random motion brought into his field of view. Just as when he had looked into the vortex, he recognized all manner of things sweeping by — cars and trucks of all eras, animals of every type, even a house or two. People dressed in fashions from every conceivable time and locale tumbled past. Had they all been curious enough to walk into a vortex as he had? He saw what appeared to be a Roman Legionnaire, clutching his gladius, the Roman short sword, as if ready for a battle. Had he been swirling around inside this place for upwards of two thousand years? Did time even have any real meaning in this place?

  Steven realized that he didn’t even have the ability to grasp the rope to attempt to haul himself back out of the vortex; he figured the only way that he’d ever manage to get out was when his family finally grew impatient and decided to try to pull him out. He could see the rope trailing from around his waist and leading forward, gradually fading from sight, but in the distance he saw what appeared to be an orange rip in the swirling green, which he took to be the backside of the vortex.

  As he tumbled randomly, he suddenly noticed another glint of orange ahead of him. Another vortex? It seemed to be drawing closer. In fact…

  The orange glow seemed to swallow him, and he realized that he had tumbled right into what seemed to be another tear in the fabric of whatever this place was — if indeed it was a place at all.

  He landed head first in something white and unimaginably cold after the nothingness of the vortex.

  Snow. It was snow! He was buried head first in a gigantic snowdrift.

  He jerked to his knees and gasped for air. Although it hadn’t seemed as if breathing was necessary in the vortex, now he hungered for air like a drowning victim. He scrambled to his feet, glad that he had changed into his hiking boots.

  He looked around, realizing that he was in the middle of nowhere — literally. There was nothing but snow and ice as far as he could see. No lights, no civilization, just blowing snow and the fading light of what seemed to be an Arctic sunset.

  He knew immediately that staying here would mean freezing to death, so he made sure the rope was still secure around his waist and dove back into the vortex.

  Once again, he floated in a green hurricane of confusion, unable to guide himself. He began to wonder if his family would ever get around to attempting to haul him out of here.

  As he spun around, he watched the vortex he had just left recede in the distance, and wondered where the original one was that would lead back home. He tried to catch sight of the rope as it trailed away, but he found himself unable to focus on it.

  A pair of figures tumbled by; two men in Civil War era uniforms, one in Union blue and the other in Rebel grey. They held rifles with bayonets affixed, like statues come to life and yet still frozen. He made eye contact with the Yankee as he floated past and realized that the eyes were alive and aware. They’re lost in here, he thought, just like me. He wondered if they had stumbled upon a vortex while in the heat of battle. Perhaps they had the misfortune of having one of the green portals rip open around them.

  As he tumbled through the green space-that-wasn’t-space, he saw a myriad of things pass before his eyes. Gradually, he began to realize that he recognized some of them; a group of five World War II vintage Navy planes, torpedo bombers, which he realized must be the famous lost Flight 19 that disappeared in 1945 off the Florida coast. The planes were tumbling end over end and yet remaining in a rough formation as the entire flight passed by him.

  Steven watched as hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, vehicles, animals and more passed by him. He had been floating in the green void for days, it seemed, and the longer he remained, the more paranoid he became. He felt certain that something had happened on the other side of the vortex; perhaps another BirdBrain had emerged and killed his family, or perhaps the rope had somehow been severed. Whatever the reason, he felt coldly certain that he was destined to spend all of eternity here.

  Then, abruptly, he saw the rope that was around his waist go taut in front of him, and far off in the distance, in the direction that the rope led, he saw the now-familiar orange light. He saw the whorl edge closer and closer to him, over a period of what seemed like hours, and then all at once he found himself emerging, tumbling out onto the dry, spiky grass, surrounded by his family. He gulped the fresh air and stood weakly to his feet, clutching his wife close in a bear hug.

  “Oh, God, I thought I was trapped in there forever!” he cried, “Why did you wait so long to pull me out? Where have you been?”

  “What are you talking about?” Lynne asked incredulously. “You were only in there for ten minutes.”

  Chapter 8

  Back at the house, Steven sat on the sofa, staring into space. According to what his wife and all four kids had told him, he’d been in the vortex only ten minutes, but it seemed to him as if he’d been lost in there for at least two days. How must the Navy pilots on those torpedo bombers feel after nearly 65 years? Or the Civil War soldiers he’d seen, or the Roman? His mind reeled.

  What in the hell had he stumbled across?

  He went to his computer and Googled “dimensional vortex.” 441,000 hits, but almost all of them seemed to be about a computer game. He tried again with “dimensional portal,” and found that Google suggested “dimensional portals,” as well as “how to open a dimensional portal.” The first brought up 171,000 responses, some of which appeared to be about government projects that dealt with the subject. That was intriguing, but he decided to look at “how to open a dimensional portal” first.

  To his surprise, there were 4.3 million hits on the topic. The first link was to a web page that described using prana energy, described as “the life-force that animates our existence… the purest, most basic form of energy before it is converted into molecular structure,” to open a portal on a surface such as a wall by spending 30 minutes a day visualizing it over a period of two weeks. He rolled his eyes. Clearly, this had little to do with what was out there on the hillside.

  He looked at a few more entries, but none seemed scientifically sound, so he returned to the “dimensional portals” search and scanned through several of the links. He found several that made references to a “Project Galileo” and a “Project Pegasus,” but no definitive information was listed.

  A search for “time portal,” once again, revealed mostly video game and science fiction references. He did find a page at the Stanford University website which appeared to be a serious discussion of the possibilities of time travel, but it was far over his head. There was also a page entitled “The Time Travel Institute,” but it didn’t seem to be a serious discussion of the matter. He read that the concept of multiple universes is mentioned many times in Puranic literature, and is part of the belief system in Hinduism. He also read interviews with Carl Sagan and Kip Thorne, but found himself no closer to un
derstanding what he had experienced.

  He finally decided to go to bed. If the thing was still there in the morning, he’d decide what to do then. Perhaps it would be gone, and his decision would be made for him. At least he hadn’t seen any more Guardians, Mini- or otherwise.

  Chapter 9

  The Saturday morning sunrise, filtering through the bedroom curtains, woke Steven up. He looked at the bedside clock and discovered it was nearly 8:30 am, and he generally got up at seven, even on the weekends. He sat up and looked at his wife, who was lying on her side, wrapped in blankets like a sexy burrito. He smiled and decided to let her sleep a little longer.

  He went to the computer and checked his e-mail, then the news feeds; the national and world news from CNN.com and the local news on the state’s major newspaper’s site. No mention of strange green interdimensional portals having been sighted. Maybe he had dreamed the entire thing?

  He stepped to the living room window and saw that the deep gouge across the yard was still there. That much, at least, had been real. He drank two cups of strong coffee, and ate a piece of toast with some butter and jelly. He went back to the computer and did a few more searches for terms related to the vortex but found nothing of interest.

  In the meantime, his wife and kids had gotten up and begun to ask what his plans were. “Are you going back into that thing?” Samuel wanted to know.

  “We don’t even know if it’s still there,” he replied. He explained to them how he had been unable to move while in the vortex, and that he was at a loss as to how to propel himself around inside it. He explained again how he had more or less fallen out of the other vortex into the Arctic landscape. “If I hadn’t more or less bumped into it, I’d have never seen that there are vortexes that open into other locations, and for all I know, other times.” He explained again about the people and objects he had seen that were clearly from other periods of history. “I just wish I could find a way to maneuver inside there.”

  “Could you move your fingers at all?” his son asked.

  “Yes, but that’s about all I could do,” he replied.

  Samuel grinned. “I have an idea, Dad.”

  Chapter 10

  They got the large household fire extinguisher out of the coat closet, along with a belt. Samuel showed how they would strap the extinguisher to Steven’s back with the hose leading to his hand. “If you can point the nozzle in the opposite direction of where you want to go and then squeeze the trigger, maybe it’ll move you where you want to go,” he said.

  “Worth a try,” Steven agreed.

  They headed out to the site and found the vortex still in place. After securing the extinguisher in place, he told them to watch for the rope to move as he was propelling himself away from the portal. “It should feed out pretty quickly,” he said. “If it’s slow like it was yesterday, assume that this scheme isn’t working and go ahead and haul me back in.” They agreed and he made ready to enter the strange void again.

  Samuel pulled the locking pin on the extinguisher and Steven stepped into the portal.

  Immediately he was struck by how silent it was. The day before, he hadn’t really noticed; his mind was too amazed by all the other people and things he saw floating alongside him. Now the void seemed almost familiar.

  Okay, he thought. Time to see if this will fly. He managed to point the nozzle of the fire extinguisher toward the orange iris of the portal and gently squeezed the trigger.

  White foam began to jet out, billowing into a large cloud in a manner quite unlike it did under more normal circumstances, but it seemed to be working. He moved away from the portal at what seemed to be a reasonable pace. He squeezed harder, and it disappeared into the distance.

  How many of those gates could there be? he thought, realizing that, judging by the number and variety of the occupants of the void, there might well be hundreds, or even thousands. Maybe millions.

  He felt a tug at his waist and realized that he had reached the end of his rope, literally. In order to explore any further, he’d have to give up the security that the lifeline provided, but that would necessitate another return to his “home” portal, as he was unable to untie it himself.

  He began to negotiate the turn toward home, when he felt the snugness of the rope around his waist suddenly go slack, and as he finished the turn toward the portal, he saw the rope seem to slither away, retreating into the shimmering orange light. He was relieved that he had the ability to move around using the fire extinguisher; apparently, when his family had started to pull him back out of the portal, his carefully tied Boy Scout knot had come loose. Guess I didn’t remember the knot as well as I thought I did, he thought, and began to glide back in the direction of the portal.

  He thought that he had only been in the void for twenty minutes or so when he arrived back at the vortex, but when he guided himself into it, he discovered that it was dark and a crescent moon was rising in the east. His family was nowhere to be found.

  He unbuckled the extinguisher, lowered it to the ground, and began walking toward home.

  When he arrived and walked in to the living room, his family greeted him with relieved expressions on their faces, crowding around him, hugging him and smothering him with kisses. “What’s going on?” he asked, confused. “I was only gone for about twenty minutes… but why is it already dark?”

  Lynne looked at him with wide eyes. “Honey…?” she said.

  He looked at her expression and knew something strange was going on. “What is it?”

  “You were gone for two weeks. We waited about ten minutes, like the first time, and went to pull you out, and when the rope came out with you not on the other end,” she began to bawl like a baby, “we all thought you were gone forever. We didn’t know what to do!”

  He sat on the sofa once again, astonished. Clearly the flow of time in the void not only was different than in the regular world, but it varied in its flow as well.

  It would take some very careful planning to figure out what to do next.

  Chapter 11

  Not only was Steven confronted with a bizarre situation to contend with, but two more weeks of his work time was now gone. He sat at the computer and told the tale as best he could reconstruct it, but knew that it was more important to try to crack the mystery of the portal than to worry about writing a novel. If he could successfully document the events that had occurred, he might be able to get some scientists involved. In fact, he wondered if he shouldn’t call someone from one of the major universities to come and examine the portal, as well as wondering why no one else had noticed its existence. Of course, it was pretty much in the middle of nowhere, in rural Montana, for God’s sake, but still, it was only few miles from one of the main highways. You would think that someone would have seen the green glow in the distance in the middle of the night. It was fairly bright, and light planes flew in and out of the area all the time at the little airfield.

  It must just mean that I’m the one who’s destined to deal with this thing, he thought.

  Over the next week or so he worked on ideas as to how he could maneuver around in the void. Everything he came up with ended up presenting more problems than it solved. Samuel suggested that he could use a jetpack such as had been tested a number of times over the years. He began to research these devices and found that a number of different attempts had been made to create a usable unit, beginning with the Germans in World War II. The German unit used Schmidt pulse jet tubes; later versions used compressed gases of various sorts such as nitrogen or hydrogen peroxide. He ultimately determined that none of the jetpacks designed to work in Earth gravity would be suitable as they had far too much power; something more along the lines of what astronauts use to maneuver in zero-G would be more practical, but as he had no connections at NASA, obtaining such a unit was quite beyond the realm of possibility.

  In the end, it turned out that the solution was both simple and, in its own way, rather elegant. Steven went to the local electronics supply deale
r and bought a case of canned compressed air — the type that is used to clean inside computer cases.

  On a cold and clear mid-December morning, they made the trek up the hill to the site of the portal (he had been checking it daily to make sure it was still there as well as to see if there was any change in its status) and, equipped with a backpack full of food and eight extra cans of air, a can rubber banded to each wrist plus a can in each hand, Steven stepped into the portal without the benefit of a rope tether, praying silently that this was not the last time he would ever see his family.

  Chapter 12

  The disorientation was not so severe now. Perhaps I’m getting used to this place… if it is a place, Steven thought. He even thought he had a little more control of his muscles. Yes, it was true, he could bend his elbows, if only slightly. That would help with his maneuverability, though. He knew there was no way he could retrieve additional cans of air out of his backpack, but the extras attached to his wrist would be accessible. He had read that when the astronauts used their jetpacks in space, it took only tiny jets of propellant to move them around; he hoped to find that this was also the case here, so that he could make one can of air go a long way. Only one way to find out, he thought, and squeezed a brief burst of air from the can in his right hand.

  There was a rather satisfying pushing sensation and he moved away from the portal, making a mental note of the specific items that seemed to be clustered around it: a black and white Holstein cow, an abandoned rowboat and some fishing tackle which he assumed had spilled out of the boat when it entered the portal.

  He watched the vortex’s orange glow fade as it receded into the distance, and he used the jets of air to turn himself so that he could see in the direction he was traveling. Soon he saw another vortex nearby and glided toward it. I’m getting the hang of this, he thought. He slowed himself as he approached and peered into it, trying to determine whether it was the wintry hell he’d stumbled upon the first time he’d entered the void. Instead, he saw verdant green pastures and thick forests. He guided himself toward it head first and emerged in…