Overture (Earth Song)

by Mark Wandrey

  “Barry Gibson, biologist and lunatic,” he said and shook her hand.

  “You don’t look crazy to me,” she said as her cheeks got hot. God, I can hardly wait to see Billy again!

  “I’m going through that thing, what would you say I am?”

  “Brave,” she said, then added “and damned lucky.” He smiled at her with obvious intention and she wished Billy were there even more. Then silently chastising herself for being a hussy, she climbed the dais to get ready while Barry went to meet with Osgood and Skinner.

  The moment of truth arrived and Mindy watched as Barry climbed the Portal steps to stand next to her. “Be careful,” she said as she knelt next to the portal and adjusted her computer for a better view. This time she had added a pair of digital cameras as well. He gave her gear a quick look over as he waited for the go ahead.

  “I’ll try. I understand you’re on the list to be one of the people to come over later.”

  “I am, but the actual process is complicated.”

  “I’ll put in a good word for you,” he said with a wink. “I’d like to get to know you better.” The meaning was obvious and she looked away. Mindy wasn’t sure what to say to the handsome man. At the same time she was grasping at straws.

  “I’d appreciate a good word,” she said finally. He nodded and winked at her and she shook her head in mock chagrin.

  “We’re ready when you are, Mr. Gibson.” Mindy turned and looked at Skinner, who crossed his fingers for her to see. She also noted Mark Volant was parked in his wheelchair near the door. A half dozen of his agents lounged nearby, disinterestedly watching the goings on about them.

  Barry was made of the same mettle as the soldiers who had preceded him; when called he didn’t hesitate. The man just turned and stepped through. Mindy was now used to the purple pulse of light and ignored it to concentrate on the night sky. Men mounted the dais and began tossing crates through as the laser began communications.

  The view was quite a bit different and for a moment she was filled with despair. Off to one side was the barest hint of the more familiar star field. The tip of the Arrow constellation and a small cluster she called the Hook. The Hook was one of those groups of stars that had been giving her headaches for weeks and seeing it against an entirely new vista was enough to make her head spin. She triggered the cameras with a touch of a key again and again, then grabbed the camera to push it at a different angle and get even more pictures. At that moment a pair of men tossed a crate and caught her camera sending it flying through the portal.

  “Crap!” she said and reached for it, jerking her hand back an instant before it passed through the invisible event horizon. On the other side the camera and its light metal tripod bumped up against the back of Barry’s leg as he was talking to a soldier from Ft. Eden. The xenobiologist turned around and picked up the camera which was still hooked by its cable and tossed it back. There was a collective gasp from all the technicians and scientists assembled as the camera sailed through the Portal and landed in Mindy’s hands. One of the scientists screamed in surprise.

  Mindy was unaware of any significance to the event and went right on working until the Portal shimmered and the view on the other end disappeared. She stood up and turned around to find everyone staring at her standing there with the slightly dinged camera dangling from its cord. “Did I miss something?” she asked.

  Osgood was up late that night staring at screen after screen of data from that day. The plasma displays showed every conceivable piece of data from the seconds leading up to and following the little trick Mindy had pulled off. One such screen was looping the best recording he had. Again and again the men tossed the crate, catching the camera on its framework and tossing it through. There was a tiny power spike, almost so small it couldn’t be noticed. Barry picked up the camera and tossed it back, but this time no power spike. Osgood had cranked up the resolution on the data recordings as high as possible. At this level you could detect the electrical charge in a human neuron firing, and still it showed nothing on the return of the camera. “This does not make sense,” he said to the displays. “Maybe Rodriguez is right and the Portal on the other side is a power source as well.”

  With a couple key stokes he brought up some older footage that showed an early experiment. It was Lt. Colonel Wilson himself who stood on the other side of the Portal and held a rock. He carefully lobbed the rock at a man standing on the Earth side of the portal and it rebounded away from the invisible barrier without leaving a mark. The simultaneous instrument data showed no measurable energy phenomenon either. Cases and other objects rebounded off the Portal once the weight limit was reached. At that point the only thing that could pass through was another living person which would reinitialize both the twenty second window and the weight limit. How the hell had something passed back through? According to the men, the case that had knocked Mindy’s camera through was the last one, thereby completing the weight limit within a pound (Barry Gibson and all his equipment were weighed moments before going across to balance against the extra equipment).

  Osgood finally leaned back and took a deep breath. He was getting tired and frustrated. This event didn’t fit into what they knew about the Portal. Was it something to do with Mindy, or was it that the object passing back through was not from that other world? The latter was much more reasonable. He wanted to do some more experiments, but the time for that was past. Fourteen of the one hundred forty-four transitions were used; there was no more room to play around. He’d gotten an order from Volant only a few days ago that no more than twenty would go before the colonists would depart. The plan called for four more people to cross over, just to maintain contact with those already there. He could waste two more at his discretion. The possibilities were as frustrating as they were tantalizing.

  The replay continued to loop over and over as he brooded. That was when he caught something he’d missed. The camera as it went through the Portal was still attached to the computer by its cable. The cable passed through the Portal and to the camera with no ill effect. When it was thrown back to Mindy the cable trailed behind it and back through the Portal. “Son of a bitch!”

  He jumped up and trotted from his trailer out into the evening air. It was still cool, usually a good sign for New York this time of year. The frenzied activity around Portal City continued nonstop. He was suddenly reminded that a huge asteroid was coming to kill the Earth. It felt like a cold splash of water after his hours of pure scientific daydreaming.

  Osgood made the short walk to the Portal dome and let himself in. The pair of NSA agents nodded without bothering to check his ID. The dome was almost dark; the need for round the clock research was past. With only eight days left, their research and others were being stored on high-density discs and packed away to go across with the colonists. There were boxes of other discs containing vast amounts of knowledge. They only weighed a fraction of an ounce each yet contained two terabytes of data and were packed a hundred per box. He hadn’t seen much about the other materials gathered in the warehouse nearby but he did know that those twenty-five boxes with their five thousand terabytes of data came close to representing the sum total of mankind’s knowledge.

  Osgood made his way to the main video monitoring system, a huge data bank for ultra-high resolution recording. Because of the camera’s limitations, it had never been able to capture good images through the active Portal. But when it came to taking pictures of the Portal device itself and what went on inside the dome, the images were superb. He intended to analyze the incident as closely as possible, and that was when he noticed he wasn’t alone.

  “Good evening, Dr. Osgood.” It was a woman, easily in her seventies but still good-looking. Her complexion was light with the sort of spots one gets from spending untold hours out under the sun. He guessed her hair was once red, now a dignified silver, nearly waist length and pulled back into an intricately knotted pony tail. Her arms were crossed under her breasts and she wore a faded lab coat that'd seen
better days. He knew he hadn't seen her on the team before and wished he had. She was quite attractive. And still, somehow also familiar, in an odd way.

  “Good evening yourself, working the late shift?”

  “No, my work is long done; I'm just here to fix something. And get another look at the Portal.”

  “Fascinating piece of alien technology,” he agreed and they both turned to regard it. “Say, what team do you work with?”

  “I'm a sort of xenogeologist.” She turned to regard him with a wry grin. “I've also dabbled in astronomy, from time to time.”

  “Ah! We have an astronomer helping out on the project. Mindy Patoy, maybe you've heard of her?”

  “We're acquainted, in a roundabout sort of way.”

  “Great. She's having a hard time on her part of the project; maybe you'd be interested in helping?”

  “I don't think so. Sorry, professional courtesy and all.”

  “I see. Well, be sure to check out with the guard when you leave. Security is getting lax inside the compound.” She nodded and turned back to the Portal so he moved toward the recording equipment, then stopped. “Sorry, I didn't get your name.”

  “You can call me Melinda.”

  Osgood smiled at her and went to his equipment. In a few minutes, he was going over the film of the incident over and over, the image resolution well over twenty megapix and almost infinitely manipulatable. It must have been a half hour later when he noticed a glow coming from the direction of the Portal.

  She was standing on the top of the dais facing the glowing holographic Portal. Osgood was about to open his mouth when she reached out and touched the glowing surface. Where she touched it, the surface flashed purple. Osgood’s jaw dropped as the aged woman touched four more places, each time receiving more purple flashes.

  He finally recovered himself enough to step back to the video console. A single button activated the recorders as she reached out a final time to touch the Portal. The icon she touched seemed to stick to her sun-weathered finger as she slid it along the ethereal surface up one side then down the other, trailing purple light all the way. The graceful movement completed, the entire circle of the portal pulsed green and inside it resolved into an image of another world.

  “Oh, shit,” Osgood gasped. She hadn't stepped through the Portal and it was still active. And the world most definitely was not the same. There was no arboreal forest, no grassy area, no Ft. Eden. Oh shit, for sure. The Portal showed an area that made Osgood think of a Mayan ruin, only Mayans didn't make doors that wide or that short. And they didn't put strangely speckled glass windows in their dwellings. And they didn't have Portals in their ruins. The sky was just visible over the building directly in front of the Portal. It was as blue as you could imagine blue could be, but not in an earthly way.

  “Farewell,” the woman said, “it was nice seeing you again,” And she stepped through. Osgood ran up the steps to the Portal entrance and almost slipped and fell through. It was afternoon on the other side and bright sunlight lit the side. The sun had an orange tinge to it. No, not Mayan.

  On the other side, she cast off the worn lab coat revealing a form fitting black jumpsuit, gold piping running up the outside of legs and arms. She smiled peacefully, then nodded to Osgood before the Portal closed. The stunned doctor walked back to a desk and picked up the phone. He dialed a number by memory.

  “Yeah,” answered a sleepy, yet alert Volant.

  “Wake everyone up and get them in here, something just happened.”

  As

  he waited for the others, Osgood went back up the dais steps until the Portal appeared. With a trembling finger he touched the icons in roughly the same location as the woman had. He got no flashes of purple light, or green for that matter. Osgood scratched his chin as he also noted that none of the little marker lights indicating uses had changed either. The first of the scientists and technicians began to rush in and he walked back down the steps. “I should have just gone to bed.” he said.

  May 14

  Mindy rolled over and looked at her alarm clock. Three thirty A.M., and she didn’t know what woke her up. It didn’t help that Osgood and his boys questioned her for nine hours on what happened to her camera. She’d known in her mind that the Portal was one way but it was just a natural response to catch the camera when it was tossed back to her. The scientists obviously thought otherwise and grilled her for hours.

  So why am I awake at oh, dark early in the morning? She wondered as she got up. She put a hand on her stomach as it gave a grumble. Lately, she had been having indigestion often. “Must be the cheap food they’re feeding us,” she mumbled as she got up and padded across her bedroom naked. To avoid an incident with Harold, she pulled on her worn robe before going out in the main room. There she fired up the aged Mr. Coffee and sat at the table while it worked. She’d noticed as she filled the filter that they were low on coffee, and then remembered Harold told her the supply people who gave them their groceries said no coffee was available.

  As she sat listening to the gurgling machine, she realized how close the end really was. They hadn’t had fresh fruit for days, and items like coffee were disappearing. The global supply chain is disintegrating. As a customs broker in Portland, she was acutely aware of how most items in stores arrived only a day or two before they were purchased. The news was full of stories of businesses complaining about missing employees and random crimes. The smell of coffee drifted to her nostrils. “God, I wonder what South America must be like?” she said as she thought of where the coffee came from.

  Thinking of random crimes made her realize what day it was. May 14th was the day the results of the national lottery were to be released. She stared down into her empty cup as she thought about the hundreds of thousands who would get a letter telling them they would survive. None of them were really going to live, not one. It was the biggest lie in history. The biggest murder plot in history. The coffee machine gurgled and hissed to a stop and she gratefully filled her cup. It tasted good even though it was a no-name brand. The knowledge that a thing was now rare always made it taste better.

  “Couldn’t sleep?” asked Harold from the door to his bedroom. He wore the same faded green bathrobe he’d brought from Seattle and a pair of pink fuzzy bunny slippers Mindy had first seen him wear almost twenty years ago. She looked at the tattered floppy pink ears and shook her head. Harold just shrugged and headed for the coffee pot.

  “Something woke me up, couldn’t figure what it was.”

  “Probably sirens or gun shots,” he suggested with a yawn.

  “You’d think I’d be used to that by now.”

  “Going to get a lot worse once all those little telegrams are delivered today.”

  “I was just thinking that myself. All those people are going to think they will survive.”

  “Don’t forget the ones who won’t get selected. They could give up right then and there.” She nodded her head and sipped the coffee. It was having the desired effect and settling her upset stomach.

  “Tummy troubles again?”

  “It’s nothing, really.”

  “Still, you should see the doctor.” One of the advantages of working for the Portal project, if you could call anything about their condition an advantage, was that there was a doctor on staff at all times. One of the few times she saw Harold smile was when he commented that they finally had universal health care.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said and went back to her coffee. Just then the building went dark. So did the rest of the city.

  “Another damn power loss,” Harold said and Mindy could hear him rummaging for their flashlight. A second later it flashed to life and she got up to help him light the candles.

  After the first blackout last week, they requested and got a box of taper candles. She’d lived in some primitive areas while working as a radio astronomer and knew how to survive. They cut the long tapers in half and stashed them in handy locations with packs of matches. That was three p
ower outages ago. In a few minutes, all the candles were lit and they were finishing their coffee.

  When the coffee was gone, Mindy went into her room and came out dressed. She picked up the flashlight and headed for the door. “Where you going?” Harold wondered out loud.

  “I think I’m going to go up to the roof and enjoy the dark,” she said.

  “I’m there,” he said and hurried to get dressed. Together, they headed to the roof.

  “Halt, who goes there?” called someone when they opened the roof door.

  “Mindy Patoy and Harold Binder,” she said, sounding as annoyed as she felt.

  “What are you doing up here?” asked the guard, who had, by then, found them with a bright flashlight beam.

  “We’re astronomers; I thought it might be nice to look at the sky.”

  “Very well, you may proceed.”

  “Oh gee willakers, thanks Officer Friendly!” Harold scoffed.

  The flashlight went out and two friends worked their way out into the center of the roof, away from the service shack and antennas. The apartment building was only twenty-nine stories but still taller than most of those around it so it afforded a fine view. There was no light to speak of, telling them it was a wide-spread power outage. A waxing three-quarters moon provided the only real light, just enough to see cables and other rooftop hazards.

  “Oh shit, look at it,” Harold said, his dim outline pointing at the eastern sky. She followed his arm and there it was, shining like a silvery snowball trailing frost across the sky. Lebowski was the size of a dime and growing every day. “The luminosity from that metal makes it look ten times bigger than it is.”

  “It’s big enough,” Mindy whispered, as if the asteroid could hear them. She pulled her gaze away from the shining killer and across the sky. “I can see Orion’s Belt,” she said and pointed. “There’s Gemini, and over there’s Sagittarius.” She looked at the constellations, one after another, and enjoyed the nostalgic feelings they gave her. She could almost remember the shack she’d called home in Mexico, or the dormitory at Arecibo.