The Opening (The Universal Portals Book 1)
Page 14
“Albert!” Keira screamed when she saw him disappear into the wall. She leaned forward and peered into the opening. The infrared vision from the goggles allowed her to see clearly into the otherwise impenetrable darkness. There was a ladder going down about ten feet into a corridor. On it, Albert’s body was lying motionless.
“Albert!” she called him again as she slid down the ladder in a hurry, fearing the worst. “Albert!”
Dylan lay down on the bed out of boredom and felt asleep soon after. The helmet was a nuisance, but he could live with it. When he woke up, he glanced at his watch and gasped when he realized that it had been almost three hours since his friends had left. They should have been back by now, and he started to worry.
He got up and was about to enter the secure room when another revelation shocked and confused him. Instead of the starred sky and the mother ship’s surface, the front window only displayed a dark, metallic wall in front of the ship. He looked in disbelief to his right, through the opening left by the ramp, and a rising feeling of despair ran through his whole body. There was no mother ship’s surface, no stars, no blue lights, but an immense hangar structure. How could it be? Had the aliens come while he was sleeping? What about Albert and Keira? The image of his friends on the surface suddenly crossed his mind.
“Keira! Albert!” he anxiously called them through his helmet. “Keira! Albert!” he repeated several times, without receiving any response from them.
He took off the helmet angrily and threw it with force against the wall before rushing outside. The illumination was excellent, allowing him to see all corners of the vast structure, a place as high as a ten-story building that could comfortably hold more than twenty passenger airplanes inside it. All this space wasted with absolutely nothing inside, except him and his ship on one corner. It was discouraging; there were no visible exits, and it would take him a long time to find a way out, if there was any at all. He had never felt so frustrated and alone in his life.
“Why?” he screamed as loud as he could out of desperation as he knelt on the hangar floor, his voice reverberating across the hangar, as if mocking him. “Why? Why not show yourselves, you green, pathetic, ugly cowards? Why?” Each word was answered by his own echoed voice, which made him realize the pitiable truth of his situation, screaming to nobody but himself inside a deserted alien mother ship stationed in the middle of nowhere. Without really knowing why, he exploded into a nervous, uncontrollable laughter.
When he calmed, he walked back to the kitchen and sat at the table. The time for mourning was over, and it was time to smarten up. What would Albert do in his situation? Probably say something useless and perplexing about the wall’s dark colors in relation to the aliens’ inability to decorate with taste, he thought as he smiled at his own bad joke. Not a good start, he reprimanded himself. It was not a time for dawdling over stupid jokes. Forcing himself into a mature, sober state of mind was much harder than he expected, as his whole life he had hidden behind his jokes when confronted with the crude realities of life. Now that he needed to concentrate on serious matters, he just didn’t have the skills to do it. He bashed on the table with his fist, angry with himself, unable to think straight. Only one idea came to his mind: searching for the exits by the tedious, but proven, old-fashioned way.
He went out again and approached the wall closest to the ship. The white ship stood out like a snowball inside a black box against the dark-gray walls. The aliens truly liked extremes in coloring their ships. He wondered if Albert would find an explanation for this, too. When Dylan arrived at the wall, he stared at it and slowly started his examination. His hope was to find those minute, elusive buttons that seemed to hold the key to all things movable in these aliens’ ships. It would be a daunting task because of the extreme lengths of those walls, but he would do it properly, thoroughly, without leaving an inch unexplored, even if he had to spend several days looking for them. Either they didn’t exist or he would surely find them; nothing would be left to chance.
After just two hours, he had completed the whole perimeter, not as properly and much less thoroughly than he had initially envisioned. He found it too boring and tedious, and he was hungry again. With such a less-than-intense search, not a single button was found, of course, but he blamed his lack of energy on not having eaten suitably for the task. It was clear to him that those jelly-shaped meals the ship provided were not enough for an active adult man like himself. He would do better after another meal, no doubt, or even better, after a nice, reinvigorating after-lunch nap.
His carefully delineated plans were suddenly interrupted by the loud clangs from the opening of metallic doors that inundated the empty hangar, making him shiver. He turned around at once, his senses on maximum alert, listening carefully and concentrating on identifying the source, an almost impossible task because the sounds echoed all over the hangar.
He assessed his situation and quickly reached the only possible explanation: it seemed that the aliens had finally decided to pay him a visit. Great, he would greet them as they deserved. He ran inside the ship and grabbed his helmet. Then, he went back outside and narrowed his eyes, focusing on the lower part of the walls, ready for any movement. He didn’t wait long; a door started to slowly slide open in the wall just in front of him, a little to his right. It was show time. With his helmet on his right hand as a weapon, arm extended back, all determination, he ran toward the opening door with a battle cry that would have made proud Braveheart himself.
Keira knelt next to Albert’s body. “Albert!” she called him. “Wake up! Don’t do it again; it’s not funny anymore!” She remembered when a few days ago he had pretended being unconscious in the kitchen. “Wake up!” He was lying facedown, and she pushed him to roll him over. She gasped at his broken mask. “Wake up!” She slapped gently at his face repeatedly.
“It hurts,” he complained, wincing his face.
“Albert!” She smiled in relief. “Are you OK?”
Albert sat up with considerable exertion. He put his hand to his throbbing head. He had landed on his right side and it hurt like hell, but his headache was the worst of it.
“Your mask,” Keira told him, “your mask is broken.” She poked at his nose.
“What?” Albert was still confused. It seemed as if Keira were telling him something, but he couldn’t hear her. He touched his mask and found out what she was trying to say. He hadn’t realized it before, because he could breathe normally. With a quick movement, he grabbed the mask and tore it off from the helmet.
“What are you doing?” Keira asked with her eyes wide open in surprise.
He still couldn’t hear her, so he took off his helmet, too. By means of signals, he suggested her to do the same. She couldn’t understand why he wasn’t talking, but she did as he indicated.
“The helmet radios don’t work in here,” he explained as soon as she removed her helmet. “We can’t communicate with them on.”
“But, the light…” she said, confused. “I thought it was pitch-black in here. My helmet was still in infrared mode.”
Albert shrugged. “Are you sure?”
She put her helmet back on, and everything appeared in its normal colors. She had been so worried about Albert that she hadn’t noticed the light. She took her helmet off.
“I hadn’t realized they’d turned on…I must have been distracted by your fall,” she confessed.
Albert got on his feet with her help. He looked up. The door was closed again, as he had expected, or they wouldn’t have been able to breathe in there without their helmets. Keira was aware of it, too.
They were in a large, long corridor, ample and high like a gallery, well lit and with other corridors connecting to it along its length. The walls and the ceiling were flat and boring, the same ugly dark color as the rest of the ship, with no decorations whatsoever. It seemed the aliens didn’t bother with personalizing and focused only on the practica
l, cold side of things, like the military on Earth.
“It’s a maze of corridors; there must be sixty or seventy of them in here,” Keira remarked. She felt demoralized. “If we don’t even know where we should go, how can we possibly find our way in here?”
“At least we’re no longer in danger of running out of air or being scorched to death.” Albert tried to lighten the mood a little. “And best of all, there are no ladders in here.”
“Yes,” she replied, smiling, “that’s a good thing.” He was right, but they still had no idea where to go.
“Let’s go explore the corridors,” he proposed. “It’s better than doing nothing.”
“Can you walk?”
“It still hurts, but they’re only bruises,” he replied with a hint of pain on his face. “I don’t think I have anything broken. You don’t need to worry about it. Let’s go.”
They walked slowly along the corridor toward the first intersection. Albert trudged along because of his pain.
“Why do you think the door back there opened all of a sudden?” Keira asked him. “You tried for a long time unsuccessfully, and suddenly, it opened. I think that maybe the aliens opened it for us.”
“It’s possible,” Albert conceded, “but I believe I must have touched the right button combination by accident.”
“Oh!” she said in disappointment. “You’re right,” she added after briefly pondering it. “After all, they haven’t done anything for us until now.”
“We’re almost there,” he announced. The first corridor intersection was close, and even at their sluggish pace they reached it in less than a minute. They would have to choose between going forward or deviating left or right; at least, that was what they thought until they reached the intersection.
“Come on! They’re pitch-black!” Keira snapped in frustration. The left and right corridors were completely dark, and they would have to explore them with their helmets on, which meant they would not be able to communicate. “Why are they always annoying us like this?”
“For once, I think your assessment is wrong. Put away your bias about the aliens and think about it.”
“I don’t follow.” She frowned in confusion.
“Well, to me it’s as clear as this light,” Albert said wittingly. “They’re saving us time by showing us the way with the lights.”
Keira looked at the illuminated corridor, then at the dark ones. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed at last. “How stupid of me!” It was so obvious that she almost died of embarrassment. “You’re right, as always—well, almost always,” she conceded, but not without a last clarification. “And by the way, I don’t have any biases about the aliens or anyone else.”
They decided to continue along the corridor they were in, the illuminated one. They passed by several intersections, with other corridors left and right, but all of them were dark. They reached the end of the corridor, where a fork presented two options to them: left or right. Both corridors were equally illuminated, but a turn at their ends prevented them from seeing where they led. They pondered carefully their options and decided to choose their new direction as scientifically as possible.
“Let’s toss a coin,” Keira suggested.
“Right should always be right, isn’t it?” was Albert counteroffer.
Keira had no choice but to accept Albert’s crushing logic with a smile. “Then right it is.”
Having so decided, they followed the right corridor until they reached the turn they had seen before. When they turned it, they found a wall obstructing their passage.
“A dead end,” Keira stated the obvious.
“Hmm,” Albert mumbled, not entirely convinced. Why would the illuminated corridor lead them to a dead end? Had he being wrong about following the lights after all? “Let’s look for those darn buttons,” he proposed before giving up.
“Good idea,” she said while approaching the wall. As Dylan had found out already, it was a tiresome, frustrating job looking for tiny buttons on those big walls. “Why do they have to be so microscopic? Do the aliens have superhuman vision or what?”
“That’s one for which I don’t have a logical explanation,” Albert conceded. “Either you’re right and the aliens have superpowers or there’s some odd explanation behind their size.”
“I found them!” she exclaimed triumphantly. “Aha! Let’s see what’s behind those walls.”
She touched the buttons immediately, and the clanging sounds of rotating metallic gears greeted them. After a few seconds, a very loud bang, as if something big had fallen into position, was followed by the sliding of the wall doors, growing a gap slowly between them. Albert realized that these doors had to be extremely heavy, not only because of their considerable size, but also because their thickness was more than a foot wide, like a bank-vault door. He assumed they were protecting something extremely valuable.
When the doors were about a foot apart, they heard a frightening cry coming toward them that froze the blood in their veins. They instinctively walked closer to each other, looking for mutual protection, and prepared for the worst.
As they were looking through the gap, they experienced the utmost fear that soon faded into absolute confusion, followed by startling surprise and, finally, by extreme happiness when a familiar figure materialized in front of them.
“Dylan? It’s really you?” Keira managed to ask.
On hearing those words, Dylan, helmet in hand, arm extended back, all determination, stopped in his tracks as if he had seen a ghost. “Keira! Albert!” he exclaimed in surprise. He couldn’t believe his eyes; they were alive, and there, with him again. He lowered his arm and dropped the helmet on the floor. Then, without a pause, he threw himself into Keira’s arms, tears in his eyes, happier than if they had been returned to Earth.
“Hey!” Albert protested after a while. “What’s with all that hugging?”
“Yeah, all that hugging, it’s bothersome,” Keira played along as she wiped her tears away.
Dylan didn’t care at all. He was grinning broadly, staring at them, still trying to convince himself they were there. “I thought I’d lost you forever,” he said finally. “Where have you been?”
“We were—” Albert started talking when Keira interrupted him.
“It’s a long story. I’m thirsty and hungry; let’s go to the ship and talk over a meal,” she proposed. “I imagine you’ll have some story to tell, too.”
“Yeah, you bet,” he lied. “I’ve barely survived life-and-death conditions, but thanks to my composure and—”
Keira interrupted him. “Composure, of course. I’ve seen your composure, with all the running and screaming,” she said mockingly. “And the helmet was a nice touch.”
“Let’s not dawdle anymore,” Dylan said, switching the embarrassing subject, taking her by the arm and pulling her toward the ship, back into the hangar. Suddenly, Albert unexpectedly grabbed them from behind, pulling them backward again.
“Wait!” he said in an alarming tone.
“Wait what?” Dylan complained. “I’ve been there for a while. It’s not dangerous at all.”
“It could be, if we’re not able to get out of there again,” Albert explained. “Did you find any exit while you were in there?”
“Well…no.” Dylan knew he hadn’t searched for one as thoroughly as he should have, but Albert had a point.
“That’s what I thought,” Albert replied. “Listen. Why the ship would want us outside and made us roam all over this big ship’s surface, searching for another way in, if it was coming down here anyway? It would’ve been simpler just to keep us inside it and bring us along, like Dylan did. Unless, of course, the ship was headed to a place where we shouldn’t be. Why?” he asked them. “It’s not a scary place; it’s big, empty and has plenty of breathable air, and the small ship would provide us water and food for a long time.”
“Yes, that’s what I believe. If not, I’d be really surprised.” Just then, as if wanting to prove Albert’s point, the doors started to close again until they shut the gap completely.
“And if there was any doubt…” Keira whispered.
“Let’s test it,” Dylan suggested. “Let me go inside again, and I’ll try to open these doors from there. If I’m not back in a few minutes, just open them for me again.”
“OK, that’s a good plan,” Albert agreed.
They opened the doors, and Dylan went back inside the hangar alone. They waited for the doors to shut, and Dylan started his search. This time, he was methodical and careful, but could not find any way to open them back. After a few minutes, his friends opened the doors, and he huddled up with them in the corridor.
“You were right,” Dylan told Albert. “The doors can’t be opened from the hangar. If we can’t go back to the ship, what can we do? Should one of us stay here always to open the doors?”
“There’s another section of the ship we haven’t explored yet,” Keira informed him. “We found other corridors, and one of them was promising. We still don’t know where it leads.”
“Really?” Now Dylan was curious. “Did you meet the aliens? How did you enter the ship?”
“Answering your first question,” Keira said, “no, we haven’t found anyone, and your second question, well, that’s part of our story. We’ll tell you later when we find out if we’re right. Let’s go explore the rest, but first, let me go to the ship for a cup of water and something to eat, and I need to go to the bathroom, too. Wait for me here and open the doors for me in a few minutes!” she yelled as she left for the small ship in a hurry.