Jimmy's folks had money and had a big pond in their backyard in the suburbs. The club set up a target on the pond and practiced throwing the rope, using a weight tied to the end so they wouldn't damage the box. Jimmy's mom saw them and asked what they were up to and they all chorused, “Target practice,” and she shook her head and went back inside. Denny and Red and Frank were most accurate, so they got the job of actually making the throw. They practiced winding the rope back in, too.
The twins borrowed their dad's fishing boat and paddled it into the bay one night and hid it under the pilings for Alaskan Way. Since the harbor was shut down, there was little traffic on the Bay or along the shore, but they did it in the evening and didn't start the outboard. They pretended they were infiltrating an enemy coast.
The next evening, Denny and Red took the windlass down and screwed it to one of the boat's seats.
After that, it was a matter of waiting.
* * * *
Since no one knew when the vortex would open, the club worked out a watch schedule. School hours were out, as was dinner time, and Jimmy could not always come into the city. They decided to have always two sentries in the boat, one of them to throw, the other to work the windlass.
In practice, they couldn't keep the schedule. There were unexpected chores at home, or school assignments. On weekends, the entire club would hang out near the pier, with binoculars and notebooks, and take turns in the boat. Once, some fishermen saw them climbing down to the water-level and warned them that it was dangerous “because of the Drainhole."
“As if we didn't know about it,” Denny commented afterward.
The hole opened up twice while they were in school and one other time during breakfast. They could hear the hooting of the klaxon all over the city and, like everyone else, they stopped what they were doing, and didn't even speak until the all-clear sounded.
Finally, it happened while they were on watch.
* * * *
It was a weekend and Red and Denny were in the boat that hour. Jimmy and the twins were above, on Alaskan Way, pretending that they knew what girls were all about. There were only a handful of pedestrians about on miscellaneous mid-day missions. Jimmy had just said that maybe they should give up the vigils, when the hooting klaxon gave them a jump and they turned and crowded the guard rail.
“Hot spit,” said Harry. “There it is!"
It was nothing more than a fog bank, but the siren was triggered by the VTS radar net, so they knew this was the real thing. The radars were seeing double again.
“It's like a lens,” Frank said, pointing. “If we could see through the fog like radar, everything in line with the vortex would look farther away."
“There they go,” said Harry.
The motorboat's outboard had started up and the craft putted out from under the pilings and toward the fog. Red was at the engine and Denny, in the bow, already had the rope coiled for throwing.
“Hope he doesn't get too close,” Jimmy said, and Frank looked at him.
“They aren't stupid.” He raised his binoculars and watched his chums’ progress.
Red put the boat just at the edge of the fog and turned it broadside. Denny stood up and whirled the rope around his head. The message box on the end flashed every time it caught the sun.
A Coast Guard power boat sped across the Bay, giving the fog a wide berth. “Get off the water!” a voice boomed at the messengers. “These waters are dangerous!"
Denny let fly and the box tumbled into the fog. The rope drifted after it, then became taut and began to unreel from the windlass.
The idlers who had been walking along Alaskan Way had come to the rail, drawn by the novelty. “What the hell are those kids up to?” Frank heard someone ask.
“They're trying to send a message to the ferry,” he told the man, with a mix of defensiveness and pride. Harry piped his agreement. Jimmy, on the other hand, remained silent and stepped away from the twins.
The windlass ran out to the end. The rope jerked and the boat began to drift into the fog.
“Oh, shit!” said Harry from the esplanade.
* * * *
Denny said later that the same thought crossed his mind. Red had kept the motor running “to maintain station,” but he was working the windlass. Denny leapt past him to seize the outboard's handle and turn them away from the vortex. He revved the motor and the boat moved slowly away from the fog, as if dragging an enormous anchor. Then it slowed to a stop and began moving backward.
“I can't wind it in!” Red cried from the windlass. “It's like the box got really, really heavy."
“Cut it loose, cut it loose!” Denny's pants were wet and he hoped everyone would think it was from the water. He reached overboard to splash water on himself and felt a really strong current. The vortex was sucking in water and air and—pretty soon—him and Red. Overhead, the twisting magnetic fields were confusing the birds’ directional senses and they were circling endlessly around the drainhole.
Then the whole windlass tore loose from the seat where they had screwed it in. It whipped overboard, hit the water, and skipped twice before it slithered at the end of the rope into the fog.
Red went over with it.
* * * *
“He got tangled in the rope,” Denny told the twins while they waited for their parents to come get them from Coast Guard custody. “He was gone before I knew it. There was nothing I coulda done, guys.” They were all crying and snuffling, sucked down by reality from their science fantasy, no less than Red had been sucked in by the vortex.
“He'll be with Steve now,” Harry said. “He loved his brother."
“Yeah,” said Frank, fingering his binoculars. “Denny, I was watching. Red didn't get tangled in the rope. He held on to it and didn't let go."
* * * *
Jennifer Doonerbeck
Early morning, chilly, going on toward autumn. A few fishing boats are tied up to the wharves along Alaskan Way, and the waves slap against hulls, pilings, palisades. Gulls laugh. A distant motorboat near the marina buzzes like a lawnmower. The lighting is indirect; a reluctant sun lingers behind the mountains.
Two joggers appear, side by side, their running shoes clapping nearly in time. Strangers, they have met by chance and have fallen in together on their run, and now they pace each other. An older man walking briskly past them in the other direction wonders if they are sisters. They are much of a type, similar in build and age and dress; young, but past the first rush of it; firm muscles and dirty-straw hair tied back with elastic sweat bands; braving the chill in gym shorts and halter tops. The fishermen breaking fast in a dockside café watch in frank admiration.
The breeze had been off the Bay, cool and with the bite of salt in it. Now it shifts, and a land breeze whispers out over the water. Flags snap and turn. A windsock at the end of one of the docks swings about. Gulls shear off with loud complaint. The breakfasting fishermen, swinging like windsocks themselves, shift their gaze toward the Bay. The joggers halt and stand with chests heaving and with sweat dripping off their brows. One—she is by a fraction the taller of the two—rests a hand on a piling. They, too, study the Bay.
For a moment, an anxious silence: The scene is frozen. The fishermen hold their coffee mugs or silverware half-raised. The joggers gaze into the chuckling water to judge the run of the waves. Even the gulls coast on the soft winds with unmoving wings.
But ... no siren wails, and everyone relaxes, as if they had been suspended on strings now suddenly cut. Fishermen and waitresses chatter, and china and silverware clink. The cook hollers something from the back and the men laugh. The joggers bend into their cooling-down stretches, as if they have only just now remembered to do them.
The three fishermen sitting near the front of the café glance toward the empty piers that lend Alaskan Way its abandoned look. The ferries dock out past Alki Point these days and most commercial shipping and recreational boating put in elsewhere as well. The bearded man, the middle of the three, remembers
how he and Pete Jurgowitz, the Hyak's mate, used to sail the bay together as kids, but the thought is only reflex, the tear of memory remains unstarted, and he does not speak of it to his friends.
On his right sits a solid young man with hard muscles. He wishes that the drainhole would at least open and close on a regular schedule—"like that geyser thing out in Yellowstone.” The previous week it had not opened at all, but the week before that it had stayed open for several days, disturbing currents and winds all the way out into the Sound. “No one knew jack when Hyak happened,” he says, “but now with the buoys marking the place an’ the radars watching for that ‘pair of slacks'..."
“Parallax,” says the bearded man, who watches the Discovery channel.
“...Anyone gets sucked in now,” the younger man insists, “they wanna get sucked in, or they're just plain stupid."
The third man's attention has been drawn back to the joggers, whose lithe and graceful motions he greatly admires. He asks the waitress the name of the woman in the tan shorts, but the waitress, suspecting carnal thoughts on his part, pretends ignorance. But she herself spares a glance at the younger woman and remembers when she too possessed such a body.
The woman in tan is Jennifer Doonerbeck, a graduate student at the University. She is not conventionally pretty, but it's all in the presentation. She gives no thought to men's interest when she dresses, and it is this artlessness that becomes the greater art. The color of her jogging outfit is very nearly the tone of her suntan, and the third fisherman has discovered that when he squints his eyes a little she seems to be naked.
“Why are those men over there squinting like that?” Jennifer asks her companion.
The taller woman unbends from her stretches and glances at the café. “Sailors all get that look about them. The chop flashes from the sunlight, so they squint to cut down the glare.” The explanation satisfies both the teller and the told, and the fishermen would have agreed red-faced had they overheard. It is not, in any event, a matter of great moment. Jennifer finds her companion staring out once more silently at the Bay and asks who she once knew.
It is not a question that needs an explanation. It seems as if all Seattle is known by who they once knew. Hello, glad to meet you, who did you know on the Hyak? Jennifer has heard of strangers pretending to such acquaintances, as if they want to have been touched by the tragedy, and feel a loss at having had no loss. It strikes her as a bit of theft to steal a bereavement to which they are not entitled.
The taller woman, whose name is Mack of all unlikely things—it is short for Mackenzie, and that is bad enough—admits to losing a colleague and a neighbor's boy, thus pulling rank on Jennifer, who has lost only a cousin.
“Do you think we're safe here?” Jennifer is watching the ring of buoys that delimit the danger zone. They are welded together by a rigid framework and are anchored to the floor of the bay so that they will not be drawn into the drainhole when it opens. A chain-link fence has been installed to prevent future tragedies like that high-school science club.
Mack is not sure, but thinks there is some reason why the anomaly can form only over water. Something to do with fluid motion, of which her jogging had been an example. “It used to be the Bermuda Triangle, you know,” she says, repeating a tidbit of folk wisdom fast becoming consensual reality.
Jennifer has heard about the Bermuda connection, but she does not understand how a hole could cross the whole country without creating an Arkansas Triangle or an Wyoming Triangle or whatever along its path. Or did it travel through the Earth like a tunneling mole?
“My cousin grew up on a farm out near Spokane,” Jennifer says, and Mack listens politely because that is what one does when a chance companion mentions her Hyak loss. “She was nice and we had fun when my folks took me out there in the summer, but I always thought she was like, you know, a dork?” Nil nisi bonum, the Romans had once said, but they hadn't had cousins from Spokane. “When she grew up and moved here to the city, she was always calling me and I was always making excuses and blowing her off, so I'm sorry now I was so rude to her."
Mack thinks that the Hyak has been the cause of more confessions than a hundred priests and a tent revival, but she is not about to withhold absolution. A native of Manhattan driven by ambition to abide a while in the Northwest, she does not tell Jennifer that from her point of view Seattle and Spokane are equally hick, and “the City” refers to one City alone on all the earth. “You didn't have an obligation to her,” she tells the other woman.
“No,” Jennifer says, “but I sorta wish I'd had.” And that remark, more than anything Jennifer has said up till now, strikes Mack in the heart.
The fishermen have left the café and walk toward the pier where their boat is one of the few still mooring there. One calls a polite greeting and the joggers wave back. Jennifer notices the tight buns one of them boasts. Mack pays them no attention.
Mack's colleague had not been especially close to her, not even in the hypothetical way that Jennifer's cousin might have been. His office had been a few doors from hers, high up in one of Seattle's tallest buildings. They had worked together on a couple of projects and he had flirted with her a few times, but the dalliance had offered her no career advantage and she had not responded. The neighbor's boy, Dale, was another matter. He had been kind of sweet—young enough for a puppy-love crush on the “neighbor lady,” and just old enough to make it flattering. His mother was a homebody, but seeing afterward how the woman had been emptied entirely of life, Mack wondered whether she herself, had she been a breeder, could have produced a boy half so engaging as Dale. But if she knew her own strengths, Mack knew her own weaknesses, too; and “mother” had never been her métier. Now she wondered whether she was diminished in some manner because she could never suffer a loss so keen as her neighbor had.
It was a day for hypotheticals. Cousins hypothetically helped. Children hypothetically born. Joggers hypothetically stripped naked. Vortexes hypothetically forming over land. In theory, that last would never happen. But in theory, Mack could still run after the three fishermen and have them all, each and severally, upon their coiled nets. It would not have been the most comfortable experience, fishnets being what they are, and the fishermen would have known some disappointment that it had not been Jennifer to jump their bones. Still, it shows the limits of theory, because it just wasn't going to happen. A drainhole over dry land would remain theoretically impossible right up until the moment it happened. Then the brainiacs would punch some buttons on their computers and come up with a new theory.
* * * *
ATN Puget Sound motors out from Harbor Island, where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has built its new facilities. The Vortex is neither oceanic nor atmospheric, but NOAA has somehow inherited ownership. The barge, borrowed from the Coast Guard, carries on it a vehicle a little like the Mars Rovers. Mack and Jennifer point it out to each other and speculate on its purpose.
A woman standing on the barge sees them and waves. The vehicle is called the Odysseus and the plan is to place it in the water and allow the Vortex, when it next opens, to suck it through to the Other Side while it sends data back through a miles-long umbilical of the lightest and strongest fullerene-tube optical cable. Every scientist in the world had begged a space on the platform for an instrument or experiment. Had all requests been granted, Odysseus would have shamed the Queen Mary II.
But with no clear notion of the environment awaiting it, the instrument package has been designed to roll, fly, and float, to withstand vacuum and pressure and heat and cold and heavy accelerations and hard radiation and, like any device manufactured to such contradictory specifications, it does none of these things well. Dr. Whistler—she is the woman standing on the barge—does not expect Odysseus to survive for long. She does not know if the umbilical will be long enough to reach the Other Side. She is not even sure that there is an Other Side. But she hopes for something, for a reading, for even a single picture. She is not so optimistic
as to expect an answer, but it is her fondest dream to learn that there is an answer.
The diesels on a fishing boat power up, belching a cloud of black smoke, and the buff young man with the tight buns casts off. The boat gives wide berth to the buoys marking the locus of the Vortex. It isn't open, but there is no telling when it might. Jennifer recognizes them and waves, jumping up and down with a vivacity that five years of corporate ladder-climbing has sucked from the heart of her companion. The fishing boat toots its horn for Jennifer, but Mack is still gazing into the depths of the Bay, thinking about the boy, Dale.
“Dawn was theirs,” she quotes, “and sunset and the colours of the earth."
Jennifer turns and says, Hunh? She was an English major, but does not recognize the line.
These hearts were woven of human joys and care,
Washed marvelously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset and the colours of the earth.
Copyright © 2006 Michael F. Flynn
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* * *
AFTER I STOPPED SCREAMING
by Pamela Sargent
Pamela Sargent is a past winner of the Locus Award and the winner of a Nebula for the novelette, “Danny Goes to Mars” (Asimov's SF, October 1992). Pam has also been a finalist for the Hugo and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. Her most recent publications include the short fiction collection Thumbprints (Golden Gryphon, 2004) and the anthology Conqueror Fantastic (DAW, 2004). She is now at work on a young adult novel for Tor Books. The author's last story for us, “Amphibians,” appeared in our June 1995 issue. After far too long an absence, she returns to our pages to examine the motivation of a certain big ape and to look into what happened...
The blonde in the big ape's hand. Long before you had Rita Hayworth on that bed in a negligée or Marilyn standing over that grate with her skirt billowing up, there were all those pictures and posters and billboards of me, the blonde in the big ape's hand.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2006 Page 16