The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  “I’m interested in giving you your heart’s desire, not in seeing to one of my own. If it even exists.”

  “Why?” he asked flat out.

  “Because, in spite of my hair color, I’m the golden girl. I can do no wrong. I can do this, but for years and years I was stymied by rules and assumptions that limited me. Now, not so much.

  “I always told myself that I would someday look into someone’s eyes and see if I could fill the dreams I saw behind them. Don’t fault me for trying -- fault me if I fail.”

  “Well, I’ve seen something that few people alive these days have seen -- a nuclear detonation from just two miles away. It does serve to concentrate my focus.” He chuckled. “Seattle, eh?”

  “Yes, Seattle.” Kris looked at Erica who was watching them with studied nonchalance. “This is a police mission -- they want to arrest someone. We won’t, unless he endangers us or the mission. The book on this fellow is that he’s a rapist, a sociopath, and determined to have his revenge, whatever that is.”

  “Sweet fellow,” Erica said blandly. “A rapist, eh? Maybe I’ll just cut his balls off first, and we can tell everyone that it’s an artifact of the Far Side device.”

  Kris was patient. “That’s not our mission, at least not now. We are advising them so that the Seattle police can fetch him back safely.” She looked at Kurt. “I don’t know how I can see these things so clearly, but my intuition is that it can’t be done.”

  “Surely we can repair the fusor?” Pete asked.

  “Yes, and if nothing’s too badly out of adjustment, we can open the door behind him. This fellow is a hater, Pete. Sure, it’s possible he’s shacked up with some local girl and thinks that all his troubles are behind him, and that no one could possibly come after him.”

  Kris shook her head. “He has firearms and has been plotting his revenge since third grade against the two he left holding the bag. Does that sound to you like someone who isn’t going to at least try to cover his bets? How did they deactivate a Star Gate on SG-1? They buried it. I imagine he’s going to at least do that, although how long it will take is hard to say.”

  “You are just such a breath of fresh air,” Kurt said sadly from a few feet away. “Just so sunshiny and full of good cheer. You mean that we could be taking fire from the moment the door opens?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Or he’s buried it, or worse, flooded it.”

  “You’ve got it,” Kris said cheerfully. “He took, from the emailed list of things they say went with him, a lot of what I’d call ‘cheap trade goods.’ Odds are, he’s shacked up with the daughter of someone important, and the local boss man isn’t going to be too happy that the light of his daughter’s life is being hassled by the evil bad nasties who chased him from home.

  “If he’s enlisted the locals, we tell the nice people in Seattle that that’s it -- our job there is done. The only way they’ll get him back is by killing a lot of people.”

  * * *

  “...so,” Kris concluded, “there is a risk that you won’t be able to get him back without killing a lot of people.”

  The mayor of Seattle, Hoshi Koga, a rather pretty woman of Japanese extraction, grimaced. “And what is it you’re trying to tell me?”

  “We had reached the point in Chicago where I was willing to make one more attempt to remotely send a camera through, to see if there was anything we could see. I asked the young mens’ fathers just how many lives they were willing to risk to get back people who were almost certainly dead. They never did answer.

  “You’re going to want to discuss this amongst yourselves -- just what it is that you’re willing to risk getting someone whose only crimes are alleged and while they include attempted murder, the attempt wasn’t very effective.

  “Obviously the rapes are a more serious matter -- but I understood just now that so far you haven’t found one of the women willing to admit to one of the rapes.”

  The mayor looked at the chief of police who just shrugged. “I have a lot of men who want blood. The deaths of three cops in Chicago was bad; this kid was trying to run up the score.”

  “And the rapes?”

  Paul Higgins huffed a sigh. “Honestly, I’m not sure. They are incredibly detailed accounts, you understand, including intimate details of the women involved. Neither of two of the more dramatic identifying characteristics or marks were confirmed on the named victim. In fact, we haven’t at this time, confirmed that any of the victims he named in his diary have ever seen the young man.

  “Our profiler tells us that it is entirely possible that these are fantasies. Another possibility is that he has changed the names of the victims to someone else’s, and it’s a code. If there is a list of who those fake names equate to, we haven’t found it yet. We’ve only gone through about half of what we found on his hard drive. He had all sorts of things on it, including thousands of internet porn stories about girls being raped. It’s clear he has an obsession about it.

  “All in all, we’re not afraid to spend money to catch him. Spending people? Like you, I’m not comfortable with the thought.”

  Kris smiled. “As Major Sandusky will tell you, I’m very good at ‘negative thinking.’ I do really well at figuring worst case scenarios. Look at this from another point of view.

  “This fellow is sociopath. It is likely he’s inserted himself into the local culture, and it is likely he has attached himself to a family of importance over there. He doesn’t respect women; he enjoys having power over them -- that’s what rape is all about.

  “What are the odds he’s going to be faithful for very long? What are the important daddy and mommy going to think when he starts sleeping around? What are they going to think when he starts manhandling women? If their society is more primitive than ours, at some point there is a good chance that he’s going to find himself running away from a mob of angry relatives -- quite possibly from two or more families. He’s not the sort of person who is going to be content with patting barmaids on the bottom.

  “He didn’t do well in our society, and who knows how he’d fare in a more advanced society? Odds are the punishment he’s going to face there in a year or two at most will be more severe than anything that you could give him.

  “And, for that matter, he’s bound to be considered filthy rich by local standards if they are actually like the primitive people he described. How many people in history have been murdered for their wealth? He’s going to be walking a tightrope.”

  “But he could come out smelling like a rose,” the chief of police said.

  “I understand that, like the young men in Chicago, the parents here are people of influence. I’ll repeat -- you have a case to build against him. You have writings on a computer; and you say you haven’t had any luck getting any of the women he’s alleged to have raped identified?”

  “None,” the police chief admitted.

  The mayor looked at the city prosecutor. “You’ve been silent.”

  The city prosecutor smiled wanly. “I told you before that I thought that this was a bad idea. Now you’ve hired some expensive consultants who tell you that it’s a bad idea. Hopefully they can make you listen.”

  Kurt smiled. “It’s called ‘the consultant effect.’ People in an organization can propose changes and management ignores them, preferring to get high priced consultants -- who in many cases tell them exactly the same thing. Management thinks the consultant’s ideas are the greatest thing since sliced bread, tout the consultants -- and half their own people start looking for a job where the managers aren’t idiots.”

  The mayor looked at Kris. “Normally we think of teenagers as brash, rash, eager to run, look and see. I’m not sure what to make of one who counsels caution. Tell me, Miss Boyle, just what would you do, if you were in my shoes?”

  “I’d hire the expensive consultants to seal the house; it’ll be ugly and you’ll probably need jackhammers to take it apart later, but it’ll meet the government’s security requirement
s. We’ll repair the fusor and install remote sensing equipment. Then we open the Far Side door and see what we see -- from a safe distance.

  “After that, the possibilities are like those ten moves into a chess game -- there are too many to accurately estimate what we’ll want to do, and a good part of that is, as I said, how much you want to risk... and ma’am, your high-priced consultants aren’t going to help you with that decision. We can offer options, we can offer planning -- but decisions will be yours.”

  “Unless the government decides to preempt again,” the mayor said bitterly.

  “We have asked them to send Mr. Jon Bullman from LA to supervise. I trust him more than most of those people. So far, we haven’t heard if they’ll let him come. I’ll tell you true, you should talk to your senators and congressmen -- you need a representative of the government involved and who will be privy to such a decision as was made in regards to Chicago.

  “We had ten blessed minutes warning in Chicago. If there hadn’t been a pissing contest between the mayor and the governor, it’s very possible that the cordon would have been at a mile, and hundreds of people would have been killed or injured.”

  The mayor nodded. “That’s good advice.” She turned to an aide. “See to it, Mark.”

  “Yes, Mayor.”

  “And, by the authority vested in me as mayor of the city of Seattle, I ask that you proceed with securing the premises, repairing the equipment, and the initial survey,” she told them, “as per the terms you earlier stipulated.”

  Kurt nodded, lifted a walkie-talkie and spoke into it. Then he turned to the diminutive mayor. “One last word of caution. Shortly we’ll get the contract signed and all of that. Because we believe that the matter is urgent, we aren’t requiring legal review of the terms. I am not saying you’d ever think of such a thing, but our only redress if we’re stiffed is that we would never undertake this sort of an operation, without formal review and signings by all parties -- and then cash in the bank. Like as not, I’m told, it would take at least three business days, and if there are complications, a week.”

  The mayor made a face. “No, things are just as I said. This is on my word of honor, and my word will be honored. For that matter, you could do the same to us.”

  “Except we stand or fall on our reputation,” Kris interjected, before Kurt could speak. “And shorting you would be a catastrophe. And, if we did it, we’d be cutting off our nose to spite our face, losing a great deal of money to what would certainly end in litigation. The odds are you’d win and we’d lose. No, I regret that Kurt brought this up, although I admit the necessity.”

  * * *

  The rest of the afternoon and evening was hurry up and wait. The technique that Norwich had developed consisted of placing a heavy plastic “tent” over the building, then conforming the inner layer to the outside of the house. A steel airlock arrangement was put in place in the space provided, and then specially treated foam was pumped into the space “inside” the tent.

  The tent inflated steadily and by two pm, it was ready to be cured. That was done with a device that “ignited” the mixture of powdered aluminum and iron oxide that had been spread through the volume. Over a period of ten minutes, the reaction raised the temperature of the foam to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit, which set the plastic foam in a matter of minutes.

  The airlock was opened and Kris and a young MIT graduate, Richard Shelton, went in and started working on the fusor apparatus. By six, the vacuum pump was busy and by eight, the last of the electronics had been replaced.

  The police were left on guard and everyone went back to their hotel for the rest of the evening.

  Kris ate a late dinner with Erica, Pete Sharp, and Richard Shelton. Erica had a million questions, while Pete was mostly silent. Richard was more interested in listening to stories about life on Arvala, and so Kris stuck mostly with that.

  Kris was up early the next day, and Erica, excited, woke when she did. The two young women rushed through their morning routines, and by six were in the hotel restaurant having breakfast.

  When they were setting up the last of the probes and things, Erica touched Kris on the arm. “You need an RV for this, so that you don’t have to reestablish a site everywhere you go.”

  Kris laughed. “And how would we get an RV on a business jet?”

  The mayor of Seattle appeared and beckoned to Kurt and Kris, drawing them a ways away.

  “We just got a bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security. A few minutes ago there was a nuclear explosion in southern France; the thought is that it’s fusor related. It occurred at the site of a French government research lab. The initial report was that the detonation was on the small side, in the range of kilotons, not megatons.”

  Erica overheard and sighed. “The French are the world’s greatest hypocrites, talking about this and that fine and noble idea. When it comes time, though, their agents kill with impunity.”

  “Well, it seems to have taken the French government by surprise,” the mayor told her. No one in Washington knows what to think and neither do I.”

  “This is really going to upset Andie,” Kris said sadly. “The Far Side doors were the pinnacle of her heart’s desire -- although the fusor was a good idea as well. No matter whose idea the nuke was, it’s another coffin nail in the concept of travel off-world.”

  “Is it possible here?” the mayor asked, clearly worried.

  “Possible? I’d have to say yes. The critters we faced in Chicago probably used their most effective chemical and biological weapons. I’m told that we’d have been seriously ill if we were insects,” Kris told her. “But in this case, I think it’s unlikely.”

  A black Hummer pulled up and Jon Bullman got out. “You heard about France?” he asked straight away.

  “Yes,” Kurt told him.

  “The word I’m getting is that the other side slipped a package through the door after it had been open for a while. The French were monitoring the door remotely, and feeding the transmission back to an installation near Paris.

  “They said that they hadn’t seen anyone in the first hour or so, but that they were clearly in an industrial area. Maybe they didn’t see anyone, but someone saw them.

  “They had the door open about three hours, then something obscured the camera from the other side, then something heavy came through the door and then -- kablooie!”

  Kris sighed. “After Chicago, Andie broke her hand, slamming it into a rock out of frustration. She told me that she wasn’t going to tell Linda about a dream she had, but that night she was lying in the infirmary, drifting in and out of consciousness, heavily sedated.

  “She described it as a bad dream, a nightmare. She envisioned us as the Tengri. We opened the door to Arvala and started putting soldiers through. We put thousands through the door in a few hours, and then waited while they checked out the local area.

  “We killed any of the local people that we saw; we captured Arvala, we conquered the whole continent. Then we started in on the others, around the world. It was our goal to enslave the entire planet -- and there was no one who could stop us, because they didn’t have the technology to even slow us down.

  “Since then, Andie has redoubled her efforts to share technology with the Arvalans.”

  “And this has what to do with us here?” the mayor asked.

  “Well, it’s true that if we can make peaceful contact with another race, we might learn some great new technology. But if they are like the Arvalans, the temptation to just take over would be great. People like the Tengri, far from our cultural norms, would be an ever greater temptation.

  “Andie said the only rational thing to do if we find a Far Side door on Earth that’s not ours is to nuke it. Someone could be on the other side is as far ahead of us as we are the Tengri or the Arvalans -- with the morality of the Tengri. If we couldn’t bomb the door into infinity, as quickly as possible, we could lose the planet.”

  Kris looked around. “Each and every time we open a
door we are going to be faced with the temptation of exploiting a primitive culture -- or facing someone equally far ahead of us. All it would take, Andie told me, is one door open to the wrong place and we could end up kicked off of our home world.”

  “That’s a little bleak,” Kurt said.

  “A little?” the Seattle mayor said sarcastically. “What about our situation?”

  “Unknowable,” Kris said with alacrity. “Odds are that we can safely open the door. After that, the odds diminish rapidly. If I was this young man, I’d be building a great pyramid on the site. Until it was solid stone, I’d have a half-dozen men with automatic weapons on standby, and if the gate formed, they’d start shooting.

  “That would dissuade us; slow us down,” Kurt took over. “We could call up some automatic weapons that we could automate and start shooting back. At some point, they’d either bury the site or run out of bullets. Since it doesn’t sound like the other side is very high tech, their gun platforms are going to be people. We kill dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands...”

  “Thousands?” the mayor asked, startled.

  “Thousands,” Kurt told her. “Think Dr. Frankenstein, only in reverse, where the villagers fight to the death to defend the man they know from the ‘outsiders.’”

  He met the mayor’s eyes. “Eventually you could get through, but there would be no telling how many people you would have killed on the other side. If you kill a bunch of them, don’t expect a welcoming party. Instead, people will be lying in wait; shooting from cover... it would be a nightmare. You’d lose a lot of people yourself, no matter what. Dozens, maybe more.”

  “Unacceptable,” the mayor said flatly.

  “Which is why we asked earlier about how many lives you are willing to spend on this!” Kris said roughly.

  “Not a one. If there’s any resistance, I’ll order the house razed and a solid concrete cube created where the fusor is, to prevent it from being used again.”

  * * *

  The Far Side door had barely opened when the first bullets came through. Then a bundle of burning faggots, then more gunfire. Kris turned it off.