by Alan Seeger
“You know what? It’s exciting, but so is this fabulous meal you’re making. Let me help you finish cooking, and then I’ll tell you all about it over dinner,” Rick said.
“That sounds like a great idea,” Stefanie agreed.
They worked together, making small talk as they prepared the meal. She finished making the salad; baby spinach leaves, a red onion, sliced up, a small can of mandarin orange wedges, a handful of dried cranberries, some feta cheese, and a sprinkle of sliced almonds over the top. He retrieved the container of homemade balsamic vinaigrette dressing from the refrigerator and set it on the table.
Two huge russet potatoes, wrapped in foil, had already been in the oven for nearly an hour. As Rick broiled the steaks, he fried up a couple of strips of bacon until they were crisp and crumbled them up. He split the potatoes and topped them with shredded mozzarella, chives, sour cream, and the bacon, and the potatoes were ready.
Rick retrieved a bottle of Nicolas Feuillatte Premier Cru from the makeshift wine cabinet he’d built under the stairs and popped the cork. Soon they both were feeling full, relaxed, and very happy, and finally Stefanie brought the conversation back to the topic of what had happened at work.
“It was just… pure serendipity, I guess, is the only way to describe it,” Rick said. “Like a once-in-a-lifetime event…” his eyes were almost misty as he recounted what had happened.
She took his hands and pulled him closer to her. “Uh-huh?”
“We’ve just built this piece of equipment, not too long ago… we call it the Multi-Phasic Field Generator. It lets the operator direct streams or fields of different kinds of energy, up to six of them at a time, so that they intersect each other.
“I had just added the sixth of six different types of energy fields to the test area… we’ve been experimenting with different combinations of things like radio frequencies, microwave radiation, various frequencies from infrared up through the visible light spectrum and into the ultraviolet range, even X-rays and Gamma rays, as well as other kinds of particles, even radioactive materials… you ought to see Terry all dressed in his protective gear when we do that,” he laughed. “He looks like a hobbit in a space suit. Anyhow… today, something amazing happened.”
Stef drew him over to the sofa and they sat down.
As they sat there, Rick’s face seemed to glow with excitement. “There was a certain combination of energies that I hit on today — I couldn’t even tell you what they were, exactly, without looking at the documentation, and it’s actually a violation of the ChroNova employee agreement for me to be telling you about this at all, but hell — I wrote the employee agreement, anyhow, and I have got to tell you about this before I explode,” he said. “It’s been bubbling up inside me all evening.”
Stef smiled and nodded. “All right, honey, don’t blow a hole in the roof, calm down. We’ve got all… night… long.” She punctuated each word with a kiss.
“It was incredible, Stef. In fact, one of the things that was so damned weird about it was that I had a dream… oh, I don’t know, it was a couple of weeks ago. Looking back, the dream was almost exactly how things happened today; if I’d been able to remember the dream more clearly, I would have gone to work the next day and tried to replicate what I had done in the dream. It would have saved me a lot of time.”
She gazed into his brown eyes, fascinated with the way the wheels turned inside his head. “Tell me more.”
He did, and then she took his hand and led him into the bedroom, ready to take his mind off his work for a little while.
~~~~~
The events of the day were still fresh in Rick’s mind, even after the amazing way that Stef had managed to blow his mind after their amazing dinner and conversation.
Once again, she was sleeping; he was more than a little jealous of the way she could just drop off to sleep, almost at a moment’s notice. He’d never been one who could do that — it always took him an hour or two to wind down after the events of any given day, with thoughts spinning around inside his head like a cloud of electrons around an atomic nucleus.
As he lay staring at the ceiling, the wonder of what he’d seen that day came rushing back to him, overwhelming him like a flood.
He’d brought up a seemingly random combination of energy fields — they weren’t actually random at all, but the result of months of trial and error experimentation. He added the final one, using the custom X-ray gun that the team had designed and had built. It had a pair of variable crystal lenses that allowed the operator to adjust the nature of the X-radiation being produced, by degrees, on a spectrum from so-called “soft” to “hard” X-rays.
As Rick adjusted the lens, narrowly focusing the beam of X-rays, he was startled to see something he’d never witnessed before: in the center of where the various fields intersected, just where the invisible beam of X-rays would be penetrating the planes of the other energy fields, there was an intense green glow, about the size of a quarter held at arm’s length. This in and of itself was not terribly unusual — they’d seen many different unusual effects over the many months that they had been working on the experiment — but what caught Rick’s eye was that within the green circle, he seemed to see motion; not a random motion such as you might see in an energy source like a flame, nor a pattern such as you might expect to find caused by the interaction of the energy sources, but movement with what seemed to be purpose — movement like that of a living creature.
Curious, Rick decided to see if he could refocus the beam to make it wider at the point where it intersected the energy planes. At first, he lost the green effect and for a gut-wrenching moment thought he wasn’t going to be able to get it back. The beam was a couple of feet across now, but the frequency must be wrong… it seemed diluted, somehow — only a sickly green circle the color of a dead leaf, with none of the visible movement he’d seen before.
Then he adjusted the crystal so that it emphasized the “soft” X-ray spectrum, and suddenly there it was: a six-foot wide circle like a window of emerald glass, but with a slight swirling effect, as though he was looking into a slowly spinning whirlpool.
Rick was puzzled — he still wasn’t seeing the active movement that he’d seen earlier. The window appeared to be empty. Then he realized that there was movement, but it was blurry, like the view through a telescope that needed to be focused.
Focus.
Rick adjusted the four adjustment controls of the X-ray gun, hoping that he would —
Then his heart was in his throat, and his breath caught in his chest. There in the green circle, in crystalline focus, was a landscape. It was exotic. It was filled with vegetation — trees, wildflowers — and there were animals.
They were like no animals Rick had ever seen.
They seemed to be cats — big cats — if lions had six legs and reptilian, leathery skin. These creatures struck Rick as being the offspring of a sabre-toothed tiger and a crocodile — once again, if either of those creatures had six legs.
There were small birdlike creatures flying above them, as well, looking like tiny pterosaurs the size of seagulls. As one of these swooped down, apparently in an effort to grab some unseen smaller creature, one of the croc-cats leapt up and snatched it out of mid-air, devouring it whole.
Holy shit.
Rick hit the com button on his protective suit and said, to whoever happened to be listening, “You guys need to see this — now.”
CHAPTER 9
Amazement. Wonder. Speculation.
All these things and more were the topic of practically every conversation that took place in and around the ChroNova facility for the next three weeks or so.
Then Rick had an experience that served to alter his focus somewhat.
He was sitting on the exam table at the doctor’s office on a Wednesday afternoon, having dutifully made an appointment for the physical that all ChroNova employees were required to have every two years.
He’d been poked and prodded. His ears, eyes, and throat had been peere
d into and his blood taken. This doctor was pretty damned thorough. Then he had sat there, waiting patiently, while tests were run.
He glanced at his watch. It was almost 5 PM. He took out his cell to call Stef and let her know that he’d be late getting home, but discovered that its battery was dead. He gave a half-smile, looking at the laminated sign on the wall that asked patients to turn off their phones. Guess they mean it, he smiled to himself.
Just then the nurse that had gone over his medical history with him stuck her head into the room. “Mr. Harper?” she said. “Dr. Perkins will be right in. Sorry for the wait.” Somehow he thought she looked much more serious than she had less than an hour before.
Two minutes passed. The door opened and the doctor walked back into the small exam room. He was a slender man of 55, one of half a dozen doctors on staff at the small clinic, with sandy blonde hair, a greying beard, and rimless glasses.
“Mr. Harper,” he said. “I’m so sorry for keeping you waiting so long.”
“That’s not a problem, Doc,” Rick said.
“Well,” Dr. Perkins replied thoughtfully, “the reason it took a little longer than normal was that there were a couple of your blood tests that I had to go back and look at again, because there were some… irregularities with the results.”
There was something about the way he said the word that sent a chill running up Rick’s spine. “What kind of irregularities?” he asked.
“Now, there’s no reason to panic just yet,” Dr. Perkins said, “and I’m going to send Melinda in to take another tube of blood from you before you go, so that we can send that out to an independent lab to see if they get similar results.” He paused before continuing, “But according to the changes I’m seeing in the white cells in today’s blood sample, it looks as though you may have developed some form of leukemia.”
Rick’s breath caught in his throat. His pulse was pounding in his ears.
The doctor was saying something to him, but he couldn’t understand the words. He felt as if the doctor had punched him in the gut, had landed a haymaker to his jaw. He had a fleeting thought that this had to be some sort of violation of his Hippocratic Oath. The phrase hypocritical oath flickered through his mind and he had to suppress a sudden and utterly ridiculous urge to laugh.
“I’m sorry — what did you say?” Rick managed to say.
“I was just asking, what do you do for a living? Do you work with any hazardous chemicals or other materials?”
Rick let out a small gasp. “Radiation. I work in a lab that deals with all sorts of different kinds of radiation.”
The doctor was silent for a moment. Then he said, “That could very well have had an influence on this. But let’s not freak out about it just yet; like I said, I’ll send Melinda back in to take one more tube of blood, and we’ll send it out and see what that shows. And if it winds up being bad news, then the good thing is it appears that we’ve probably caught it reasonably early, so we have an excellent chance of successful treatment.”
Rick nodded. He sat waiting for a few more minutes as the nurse came and took another blood sample, then he said his goodbyes and headed home.
On the way, he made the decision not to say anything to Stef until he knew more about what was going to happen. And he definitely wasn’t saying anything to Randall just yet, either.
CHAPTER 10
The evening had passed without Stef asking Rick about the details of his physical. He wasn’t sure whether she’d forgotten he had one or not, but that was a sleeping dog that he was glad to allow to lie until the cows came home, to mate two overused clichés. They had a pleasant dinner and watched a movie together — something that didn’t require too much focus to keep the plot straight — without the topic coming up.
Later, after a long, hot shower that helped to relax the muscles that had been tight from the stress of worry, Rick lay staring at the ceiling listening to Stefanie’s soft breathing, the doctor’s words seeming to echo in his mind:
Leukemia.
Shit.
He decided that he would try to focus on his work until circumstances dictated that he do otherwise.
As it turned out, that was easy to do; things at work got even more interesting the very next day.
CHAPTER 11
Randall Orwell, Terry Cambridge, Rick Harper and an operations crew of eleven other ChroNova employees were in the newly constructed command center. A mere twenty-two days had passed since Rick’s breakthrough using the MPFG.
Rick’s careful documentation had allowed them to successfully reproduce the results of the experiment a number of times since the initial breakthrough. Randall was floored at the idea that they had managed to discover the means to produce these “time tunnels,” as they were now referring to the green vortexes, a clear reference to the 1960s era science fiction TV show. He had been happy just to develop the means to flex time slightly at this point in the program.
They had determined that the potentially harmful types of energy that the equipment utilized were somehow neutralized when they were combined to create the green vortex; there was nothing being emitted that would have any real effect on the human body. Where were the X-rays? The Gamma rays? None of them knew for sure, though there was some speculation that the big green swirl somehow absorbed it all. At any rate, in the last week, a decision had been made that the use of protective gear would be optional, and most of the crew didn’t bother to wear the suits any more.
Now they were all working together to attempt to figure out just what it was — or, more accurately, when and where it was — that was on the other side. Based on the exotic fauna, it was clearly not Earth — or perhaps more accurately, it was not our Earth. But where was it, really? Another planet, elsewhere in our universe? An alternate Earth, in a different dimension, a different universe? Something else entirely? They still didn’t know. What was clear was that the vortexes were more than simply images or “windows” — they were portals; they were tunnels. They were passageways to somewhere else… possibly somewhen else.
The probe that the team had constructed under Terry’s tutelage and supervision contained a live feed video camera with audio, a seismograph, a thermometer, and a radiation detection device, similar to a Geiger counter, but designed to detect not only ionizing radiation but the entire electromagnetic spectrum from the low end of the range — radio waves — upwards through microwaves, Terahertz radiation, infrared, the visible light spectrum, ultraviolet, X-rays and Gamma rays as well. It also contained a high-precision clock designed to record the time and date down to the same billionth of a second accuracy that they used in the main lab, as well as distance radar designed to detect solid objects surrounding the probe.
The probe was designed to transmit the data it collected in a live stream through four types of connections simultaneously: Wi-Max, 4G cellular, UHF and shortwave radio. The team figured that with these four redundant communication systems, they had a pretty decent chance of collecting at least some data that would help them figure out just where the portal led.
The team acknowledged Terry as the engineering savant that made the probe’s amazing capabilities possible. A graduate of MIT, he held master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from that esteemed school.
He had managed, in just three weeks’ time, to assemble a compact package the size of a student’s backpack which contained all of the components necessary to make the probe functional. Some were off-the-shelf and some he had designed and built from scratch, but they were all interconnected and funneled the collected data into a unified report that was then sent back to ChroNova using the four methods of transmission.
Today the focus of their work was to attempt to send a probe through the portal created by the MPFG. Terry fired up the equipment and initiated each of the six energy fields.
As the final field generator came online, Rick’s sharp eye immediately noticed a distinct difference in the appearance of the whirlpool. Rather than the tra
nsparent green window into the lush jungle scene that had greeted them each time they had set up the experiment over the last ten days, today the vortex showed a very different scene; it was like looking into empty space, if space were green; they could see many different types of objects that seemed to be floating by the portal — vehicles both old and new, all sorts of animals, even houses. There were even people tumbling by, dressed in clothing from every time and locale imaginable.
Rick and Randall looked at each other in puzzlement and shock. They were confused because of the sudden change in results compared to the last ten days’ data, but they were also astounded at the nature of this new view into… whatever it was they were looking at.
A review of the settings on the equipment, which was now termed the Harper-Orwell Temporal Unit-6, or HOT6 (jokingly pronounced like Hot Sex) — Rick said the T should stand for Terry, since he built the thing — after the six energy fields that were in use, revealed that the parameters of two of the settings were set slightly lower than they had previously been.
Rather than adjusting the settings, the team made a mutual decision to use the probe to explore this mysterious space beyond the vortex.
Rick and Randall stood in front of the green whirlpool, staring into it. It floated in the air, suspended in the center of the six generator nodes of the HOT6.
Randall glanced toward Rick and muttered, “It’s a gateway.”
Rick grinned and responded, “Yeah. But a gateway to what?”
CHAPTER 12
31-year-old Terence Cambridge was the son of a house painter and an artist from Ontario. He often remarked that this taught him to appreciate both the practical and the beautiful sides of life.
He began searching for comets with a home built 10-inch reflecting telescope when he was just twelve years old. Terry never managed to discover a new comet, but he enjoyed the chase.