Wildside

by Steven Gould

  “Or break it off,” Clara said dryly.

  I shivered. “No—that wouldn’t do, would it?”

  “How about a proof-of-concept demo?” Rick said, leaning on the full-size shovel.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  He elaborated. “We’re wasting our time if you can’t get the tractor working.”

  “Oh—okay.”

  We had two four-by-fours left over from our old cargo sledge so we used them to lever the front end of the tractor off the ground while Marie slid a two-foot square piece of one-inch plywood under the front frame.

  I took our climbing rope and folded it four times to make a tow harness. We looped it once around the bottom frame of the gate and then led it back to two convenient holes in the forward tractor frame.

  Marie climbed up on the front end of the tractor, right behind the screwed-down bucket, and lifted one of the five-gallon water cans. I climbed into the driver’s seat.

  In anticipation, the guys stepped through the gate to get clear.

  “Why don’t you guys wait behind me?” I said.

  “Why?” said Joey.

  I swallowed. “Well, what if the tunnel caves in?”

  Clara moved immediately and the others were not far behind them. “Don’t forget your tools,” she said.

  They filed past me and I hit the ignition key. It fired right up and Marie poured water into the bucket. I eased the tractor into its lowest reverse gear and eased out the clutch. The wheels dug into the dirt floor and dragged the plywood supported front end across the floor slowly.

  The rope tightened and the bottom of the frame moved three inches. I eased up. Water was sputtering out the front of the engine. Marie was reaching for her second can of water. The frame moved forward, the top end leaning back and sliding down against the edges of the excavation. It carved dirt off the wall on its way down, then reached horizontal, dropping with a “thump” the last foot onto loose dirt.

  I hoped it wasn’t fragile. It slid easily enough, but then we ran out of water and tunnel that was wide enough at the same time. When I shut the tractor down, we’d slid it about ten feet. The tractor, without steering, had crept closer to the right-hand side of the tunnel and, without some sort of adjustment, would run into it in another ten feet of travel.

  “Well,” Rick said, “that seems to answer that question. Now what about the other question?”

  “What other question?” asked Joey.

  “Is it going to do us any good to move it? Is it going to work now that we’ve moved it? Is it going to point back at our world or someplace else? Is it going to point right back at Bestworst and his assault force?”

  Marie, Joey, and Clara nodded at his words.

  I exhaled. “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Clara said, “Turn it on.”

  I added, “Very briefly.”

  Joey winced. “We’ll have to dig out the upper sides to stand it up, damn it. Why don’t we just pull it outside first?”

  I shook my head. “There’s no reason to stand it up.”

  Clara frowned. “It may not work horizontal.”

  “One way to find out,” Rick said.

  We took the rope off the gate frame since, if it was working, it would cut it in two on activation.

  We argued about the best way to turn it on.

  Joey pointed out, “Remember that glassy stuff that was there when the gate was on? If you’re standing by the gate and you turn it on, is that what happens to your legs?”

  I stepped back from the gate frame, even though we weren’t about to turn it on.

  “Let’s use a pole,” said Marie.

  “A long one,” I said, agreeing. “Then there’s the vacuum cleaner scenario, the one where there’s nothing but space on the other side and it starts sucking everything through—we need a way to handle that.”

  “Well, we could open and shut it really fast,” said Joey.

  “I guess that’s one way.” I remembered something from a story I’d read, something in a space station—a way to shut doors in the event of meteor punctures. “We can rig it so a lot of air rushing into the gate will shut it off. All we need is a big flat piece—something that will catch the wind. If we mount it on a string and run it to a pulley, then back to the switch on the gate, air rushing that way will throw the switch back to the off position.”

  We rigged it, using a piece of Styrofoam packing that our spare propeller had been shipped in.

  While I did that, Marie and Joey went down by the creek and cut a willow sapling about fourteen feet long.

  We flipped coins, like we did for our parachute drops. Rick ‘won,’ though if he were sucked through the hole, I wondered how lucky he would feel.

  He stood by the tractor and, just for luck, we roped him to its rear axle. The rest of us waited behind the tractor, except for me, who stood on the tractor seat so I could look through the gate.

  Rick reached out with the pole and placed it behind the switch lever. The switch pointed straight up, at the ceiling.

  Rick looked back at us and I said, “Ready when you are.”

  He pushed the pole sideways and the switch moved to the “On” position. I thought there was the slightest flicker, but all I could see through the gate was a stretch of flat dirt. Then Rick had gotten the tip of the pole around the end of the switch and moved it back to the off position. Again, there was some sort of flicker, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

  “Did it work, Charlie?” Clara asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought I saw something, but I’m not sure.”

  “There wasn’t any rush of wind,” Clara said. “The vacuum cleaner hypothesis, at least, isn’t true.”

  “Rick,” I said, “turn it back on and leave it for a moment.”

  He reached out with the pole and pushed the lever. Again, there was a flicker and this time I saw it. The bottom half of the gate frame was missing, but only on the inside diameter, ending where the milky ceramic line ran around the inside of the frame. If you only looked at the inside, it was as if it were floating about seven inches off the ground.

  I climbed slowly down off the tractor.

  “Well, Charlie?” Clara asked. I waved my right hand frantically and held my left forefinger up to my lips. She blinked and shut her mouth. I limped up past the tractor and cautiously past Rick, my eyes on the view through the gate.

  There was a slight breeze coming from the gate, typical of the pressure differences we’d often had—millibar level differentials caused by different weather systems on each side of the gate.

  Four feet from the gate I ran into something that wasn’t there.

  It was about thigh high and smooth as glass. When I ran my fingers over it, it felt exactly like the glassy dirt we’d encountered when we’d excavated the gate back in July. I leaned against it, and it didn’t budge. When I traced its outlines down to the ground, I dug down, with my fingers—the glassy surface continued into the ground. Tracing up, it rounded back toward the gate and seemed to slope down.

  I heard Rick gasp when I sat down on the rounded edge and swung one foot toward the gate.

  From his point of view it looked as if I were sitting in midair, an impossible position, like I was suspended by wires. I started to slide toward the gate, but the leg I’d left over the edge stopped me and I scrambled back before I slid farther.

  Then I heard voices from the gate.

  “Does anybody feel a breeze?” It sounded like the man from Sandia Labs—Bob Orkand.

  I motioned to Rick and the others to come forward, again holding my hand over my lips. They came and I crouched down, my hand on the invisible barrier. I leaned forward and whispered. “I hear them. Rick, you get ready to turn the gate off. Somebody else grab my legs while I peek through the gate.”

  I sat on the invisible surface, my back to the gate, and stuck a foot out. Joey grabbed it. I stuck the other out, the one with the bad knee, and Clara took hold of my ankle with both hands. I lay back
, flat, facing the ceiling, and motioned them to slide me forward. The surface of the “field” slanted down until it cleared the inside diameter of the gate frame, then dropped down, into the gate, coming at its closest within three inches of the metal surface of the frame. I let my head bend back with the curve of the invisible surface until it was hanging straight down and then held up my hand.

  They stopped letting me slide and I held my forefinger and thumb apart. They let me inch forward. My shoulders slid over the edge and I arched my back.

  My eyes dropped below the level of the gate and I saw dirt floor stretching away toward light. I arched slightly more and saw the back side of my fake gate machinery and beyond it, feet—mostly feet wearing combat boots with one pair of track shoes incongruously placed among them. There were also the plastic stocks of rifles resting on the dirt floor.

  “What’s that?“ somebody shouted, and a figure crouched and put its head low and stared at me.

  I jerked my fingers toward my feet and pulled my head up, shouting, “Shut it, Rick!” Joey and Clara hauled me back but before I could sit up, the surface under me disappeared as the gate shut down and my head and shoulders suddenly dropped three feet onto the wet dirt floor.

  “Ow, ow, ow!” I said.

  “You okay?” Clara asked.

  I sat up, brushing mud out of my hair. “Yeah. My knee hurts and I think I pulled something in my neck, but I’m okay.”

  “What did you see?” asked Clara.

  “Our friends in the military.”

  Her face fell. “Then the gate still points at them…”

  I laughed. “No. Near as I can tell, the gate on that side has moved exactly as far as it has on this side.

  “We just need to move it farther and we’re out of here.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “WE DON’T WANT TO CUT ANYBODY IN HALF.”

  By late afternoon, the gate was outside the hangar.

  We had to move cubic yards of dirt. We had to demolish the fieldstone doorframe where the tunnel opened into the hangar. We had to lever the front end of the tractor around by brute force every time we stopped to ‘steer’ so the back end of the tractor wouldn’t plow into the sides of the tunnel.

  We had one cave-in, a partial collapse of the ceiling over the back half of the gate frame, which scared us badly, but after carefully uncovering it, we went on, stopping every so often to peer anxiously overhead.

  Once in the hangar proper with the planes parked outside, we moved faster. With the hangar doors wide-open, we didn’t have to worry so much about steering. With digging no longer necessary, more people could haul water for the tractor, so the pauses between hauling the gate were fewer.

  That’s probably what did it.

  The tractor died a noble death. With shorter breaks to cool off, some part not adequately reached by our ad hoc cooling system expanded beyond tolerances and there was a harsh clanging sound and the entire tractor shuddered and stopped. When I tried the starter there was a horrible grinding sound as the starter motor tried to engage an unmoving flywheel.

  As we stood around the tractor in the late afternoon sunlight, we looked like something out of a German expressionist film, covered in dirt except where rivulets of sweat had carved through the grime.

  “Is this far enough?” Joey asked.

  I shrugged. “I doubt it. They’ve almost certainly got sentries out—possibly to the property line. We don’t want to walk right back into their hands after all this work to avoid them.”

  “How do we move it, then?” asked Marie.

  I smiled. “How strong do you feel?”

  Fortunately our little tank trailer was down to a third full, perhaps two hundred gallons of fuel—about twelve hundred pounds of deadweight rather than the thirty-six hundred pounds more it would be full. Still, it took us until late in the evening to get it off the frame of its four-wheeled trailer and gently to the ground.

  The swelling in my knee lessened during the night. I wrapped it with two Ace bandages and gritted my teeth.

  In the early morning light, we mounted four ten-foot tree trunks, six inches in diameter, lengthwise across the trailer frame and lashed onto the frame with climbing rope.

  We raised the gate frame off the ground four inches at a time, using four-by-fours to lever it up, blocking it up with stacks of cut two-by-four blocks ripped from the inner wall of the hangar and chopped up. The gate lifted easily enough with two people each on the long end of two four-by-fours. The other two would block it, then we’d reposition the fulcrums at the other end and do it again, three inches at a time. Repeat as needed until the gate was precariously balanced on piles of block about three feet off the ground, four inches above the modified height of our trailer.

  “Careful!” I said, as we eased the trailer underneath. “Don’t knock it down again!”

  “Relax, Charlie,” said Clara. “You sound like your old man.” She glanced at me with a sly smile.

  I muttered, “Clara, you’re a lot of trouble.”

  Clara laughed.

  Rick said darkly, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Clara laughed harder.

  We eased the gate frame down, a block at a time. When the weight came down on the tree trunk crossbeams they creaked and bent but held. We put the thick side of the frame, the part with the switch arm, closer in to the trailer, to center the mass. It seemed to be balanced.

  I lifted the trailer tongue and pulled, pushing with my good leg. The thing didn’t budge. Clara, Joey, and Rick joined me and we pulled as best we could, all of us crowded in to get ahold of it. I felt it roll slightly, but when we stopped pulling, it rolled back into the depression formed by the wheels.

  “Clara,” I said. “Get your horse.”

  Using cargo-restraining straps from the Maule, Clara rigged a chest strap on Impossible, running it through a loop high on each of her stirrup straps and joining together again eight feet behind the horse.

  We went with five ropes tied to the trailer tongue. The center one went to Impossible’s chest strap and the other four to simple loops of cargo strap for two-footed beasts of burden.

  Clara had to lead Impossible, who was very doubtful about the whole process. “It won’t be as efficient as a harness collar. The harder he pulls, the more the strap will interfere with his breathing. But he should still be able to pull harder than four of us.”

  Marie, Joey, Rick, and I all slung the straps across our chests. “You call it, Clara.”

  She clucked her tongue and pulled on Impossible’s reins. He stepped out, but the moment the slack was out of the rope and he felt the chest strap, he tossed his head and half reared. The rest of us leaned into the straps and I felt the trailer move, rolling easier now that we could just pull and not worry about our grip on the tongue. Impossible felt some of the weight come off his chest and he started moving, too. Clara talked to him constantly, a stream of praise and encouragement.

  We stuck to our mowed runway, turning north onto zero-one-five, the runway that cut back past the hill the tunnel was in. We chose that direction because it led to the most open land, sans streams and gullies. There were the inevitable bison wallows, but these could be avoided.

  “How far are we going?” Clara asked.

  All the way, I hope. I felt my ears turn red and looked down at the ground, pulling steadily against the strap. I looked up after a second and saw that Clara was blushing, too. “We’ll just have to see,” I said.

  Rick started coughing, covering his mouth with his hand.

  Clara glared at him and he coughed harder. I could see the corners of his mouth turning up behind his hand.

  We reached the end of the mowed runway and I called for a break. We dropped where we were, sitting in the grass and gasping for air. Clara loosened Impossible’s girth and fed him a horse cookie.

  “How far do you think we’ve come?” Clara asked, looking around.

  I limped over to the trailer and retrieved my shotgun before l
ooking back at our control tower, which stuck up over the edge of the hill. “Well, I’d say we’re just short of where the house is on the other side—about where I park my pickup.”

  “That’s all?” said Joey. “All this work and we’re still in their laps?”

  Marie touched his arm and Joey shook her hand off. “If Charlie hadn’t cut the damn tractor apart, we could be pulling it with that!”

  I ignored him, but Clara snapped back, “If Charlie hadn’t shut the gate, we’d really be in their laps now.”

  Rick snorted. “Defending Charlie, Clara? Don’t you think he can take care of himself?”

  Marie threw her arms up. “Asshole! She’s always defending you, even after you betrayed her!”

  Clara squeezed her eyes shut and tilted her head back. “Stop it, Marie. It’s not worth it.” A tear squeezed out the corner of her eye and I wanted to reach out to her, but something kept me still, flinching away from all of them.

  Rick got angrier. “Give me a break! We should have left the gate hidden and toughed it out on the other side! Then we wouldn’t be stuck here, would we?”

  Marie turned white. “No, we’d be in a cell someplace. You want to be locked up by those guys? I don’t go for guys in uniform, but I could see where you might! Or maybe Bestworst is the attraction.”

  Rick eyed Marie. “Better a man in a uniform than a man with a bottle.”

  Joey said, “You asshole!” and stepped toward Rick, his hand held back to punch.

  I squeezed the trigger on my shotgun, discharging a perfectly good round of buckshot into the air. Everybody jumped, flinching toward their weapons. They looked at me, standing there, looking at them, my face frozen, my mind raging.

  I turned and limped away.

  “Where are you going, Charlie?” Marie asked.

  I didn’t answer, I didn’t stop, and I didn’t look back.

  I was in the control tower, my foot propped up on the windowsill, a chemical cold pack strapped to my knee.

  I felt someone try to open the trapdoor, but I’d moved the bench so its legs sat on the hatch and kept anyone from opening it from below. Then they knocked.