The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

  “What?” said Sarah.

  “I can’t help but think that these things must occur naturally under certain conditions,” Terry continued. “Look at some of the things that we found in the Gatespace. A cow? Vehicles? That Roman soldier? How did they get in there? They didn’t have a $17 million piece of equipment that they used to open a green swirly Gate, and then decide, ‘Oh, methinks I shall walk into yon vortex and see what I see.’ So how did they get in there?”

  “That supposed to be how the Romans talked?” said Randall.

  “Nah, that was the cow.” They all laughed. “The really weird thing, though…”

  “What?” asked Randall.

  “Okay, the range of the radar scan appeared to scan out to a quarter-billion miles, right?” Terry said.

  “That’s what you told us,” Rick said.

  “And that still holds true. And yet, on the other hand, when I tried to do an echo return on a few of those negative Gates, the results were… well, let’s just say that they were puzzling.”

  “Puzzling how?” Randall asked.

  “Puzzling in that the echo return indicated that the Gates were, like, inches away from the probe. No, more like millimeters.”

  “How is that even possible?” said Sarah.

  Randall stood up and looked around the room. “I suspect that the truth is that the laws of physics as we know them simply don’t apply within the Gatespace.”

  It was silent in the room for a few moments.

  “What if…” Rick said slowly. “What if we’ve found a way to open a wormhole?”

  Sarah frowned. “I’ve heard about wormholes for years, but… well, I have a bachelor’s in Astrophysics and a master’s in Astronomy, but I still don’t really understand them.”

  “No one really does,” said Randall. “It’s one of those things that’ll drive you nuts trying to wrap your head around it. A wormhole is a nickname for a thing called an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. So far as anyone has known — till now, anyway — a wormhole is a strictly hypothetical object that is essentially a sort of shortcut through space-time.”

  Rick’s eyes grew wide. “So if you could maneuver inside there —”

  Randall smiled. “Or adjust the… the aspect of the Gate…”

  “You could travel through it to another place, another universe, possibly —” Rick responded.

  “Maybe even another time,” Terry chimed in.

  They all sat staring at one another, the enormity of it all beginning to sink in.

  The phone buzzed. “Rick, you have a call on line three,” said Elizabeth over the intercom.

  He picked up the phone. “Rick Orwell.”

  “Mr. Orwell, this is Kara at Washington University Medical Clinic,” said a woman’s pleasant voice. “Dr. Perkins is calling to share the results of your recent blood work. Is this a good time for you?”

  Rick froze for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, but I’ll need to put you on hold for just a minute.” He hit the hold button and hung up the receiver. “I need to take this in my office,” he told Randall and the others, and walked out of the room.

  CHAPTER 18

  Rick sat down heavily in his office chair. He sighed, staring into space for a moment, steeled himself, and picked up the phone.

  “Rick Harper,” he said.

  “I’ll put Dr. Perkins on the line.”

  There was hold music for just a moment, then a click.

  “Mr. Harper, hello. This is Dr. Perkins.”

  “Hello, Doc.”

  “I’m calling because I have the results of the additional blood tests that were recently performed.”

  “All right.” Rick felt his stomach tighten up.

  “Mr. Harper, I’m afraid the news is not good.”

  Rick closed his eyes and bowed his head, ready for the worst.

  “It appears that you have developed what is known as adult acute myeloid leukemia, or AML. This is a condition in which the bone marrow makes abnormal blood cells; white cells, red cells, or platelets. It’s the most common type of acute leukemia in adults, and usually gets worse quickly if it’s not treated. The abnormal blood cells can build up in the bone marrow and in the blood, and, essentially, crowd out the healthy cells. When this occurs, it can cause bleeding, and infection, and anemia. The abnormal cells can spread to other parts of the body, including the brain and spinal cord, the skin, and the gums.”

  “Sounds nasty,” Rick muttered.

  “It can be, if you ignore it,” said Dr. Perkins.

  “So what do we do?”

  “We’ll need to do a few more tests to determine the subtype of your condition, and whether it has spread to the central nervous system. We will probably want to do a bone marrow aspiration and biopsy, which is not a lot of fun, but very necessary. After that’s determined, the course of treatment will likely include one or more types of chemotherapy; depending on the length and intensity of the chemo, it may be necessary to do a bone marrow transplant to rebuild your immune system. I’ll be making a referral for you to see an oncologist…”

  They talked for a few more minutes about treatment options and appointment times, and then Rick hung up the phone.

  He was the Vice President of R&D for a company that was developing ways to manipulate time. Now it seemed as if his time was running out.

  He sat there in silence, alone with his thoughts. Ten minutes passed, then twenty.

  The door opened. It was Randall.

  “Hey, man. Everything okay?”

  Rick looked at him and said nothing.

  “Rick? What’s going on?”

  Rick sighed and indicated for him to sit down.

  Fifteen minutes later, Randall having sworn silence regarding Rick’s condition, the two men embraced for a moment; then Randall left Rick to his privacy. He sat thinking for a few more minutes, then pulled out his cell phone and dialed Stef’s number.

  CHAPTER 19

  Stef was devastated by the news initially, but by the time Rick had his next appointment one week later, things were decidedly more upbeat. Rick had received his referral to an oncologist who would be dealing with his treatment from that time forward, and while it was clear that it wasn’t going to be an easy thing to get past, the diagnosis no longer seemed like an outright death sentence.

  The oncologist’s name was Dr. William Geister, and he was a positive force in Rick’s life from the first day they met. It was an overcast, stormy Tuesday morning when Rick walked into the Medical Arts building to meet with him for the first time. Geister was silver-haired, in his mid-50s, and smiled quite a lot for someone who dealt, day in and day out, with something as insidious as cancer.

  Finally Rick came out and said the thing that was on his mind: “I just have to ask… how can you smile so much when you deal with death every single day?”

  Dr. Geister’s smile grew even wider. “Rick,” he said, “I don’t look at it as a matter of dealing with death. Everyone has to face the fact that they’ll die someday. What I try to do is find ways to kill my patient’s cancer before it can kill them, and let them live a long, full life here before they finally move on to the next one.”

  An hour later, Rick was driving home, filled with encouragement. He liked this doctor quite a lot. They had discussed some new drug therapies that they might consider as a possibility in lieu of chemotherapy.

  Rick intended to devote his full attention to his work; it was the one thing that made him not obsess over his health and the notion that his life with Stef might be cut short.

  CHAPTER 20

  Over the next several weeks, the ChroNova team learned to manipulate the parameters of the energy fields to find many other Gates within the mysterious Gatespace and connect what they had come to think of as the “local” Gate to their choice of the “remote” Gates.

  Thus far they had managed to identify nineteen of the remote Gates, although there seemed to be hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. When they “docked” the local and remo
te gate (a term they had borrowed from the space flight industry), it had the effect of allowing them to see directly into whatever lay beyond the remote Gate, pass the probe through to that location and return it.

  Rick soon realized that they must have initially been connected by sheer chance directly to a remote Gate when they he had seen hat original alien landscape with its strange flora and exotic fauna so many weeks before, and in fact the eighth remote Gate to which they were able to dock proved to be that very vista.

  The others proved quite varied, and included among them a war-torn battlefield that appeared to be from the medieval age; a village that was apparently on some other world, according to the pink hue of its sky and the multiple moons that were visible; and a location that seemed to be in deep interstellar space, All that was visible seemed to be distant starfields, and there appeared to be no nearby planets or stars.

  The sixth Gate they accessed led to what seemed to be an alleyway in a bustling modern city. It appeared to be somewhere on our Earth, probably at some point in the last couple of decades. After some judicious and stealthy late-night exploration with the probe to avoid detection by any of the local population, they determined that the Gate opened into an alcove in an alley located in the Marina District of San Francisco. The first time that they checked the date — which they did by using a high-resolution telephoto lens affixed to one of the probe’s cameras in order to read the date on a newspaper in a San Francisco Chronicle vending machine outside a nearby restaurant — it was December 15th, 2000.

  Not all of the remote Gates were persistent, they noted; some came and went in hours, minutes or even mere moments, while others seemed stable and, they dared to suggest, permanent. Terry relished the opportunity to try to figure out why that was.

  In addition, through trial and error, the team discovered that when going through the local Gate directly to another one — a docked Gate — the time and date were always identical on the other side, whereas if the probe was sent through the green — the Gatespace — the time in the other location seemed to pass, although not always at the rate they would have expected.

  As the project progressed, they developed a system of propelling the probe into the Gatespace in such a way that it would pass through the remote Gate of their choosing. In one case, they sent the probe through to the San Francisco gate and found that it was a warm spring day in May of 2033; they tried it again a few days later and nearly lost the probe under some rubble in the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. The timeline appeared to be unpredictable and chaotic. Passing through via the Gatespace proved to be unpredictable enough that the team came to a mutual decision to stick to docked gates, at least for the foreseeable future. Terry cracked a joke that their future was anything but foreseeable.

  Rick, on the other hand, became fascinated with the idea that there was a possibility of a living human being having the ability to travel through the Gate and wind up back in 2000. They had gone so far as to send a modified probe body containing a pair of guinea pigs into the green void and retrieving them, apparently with no ill effects. They had requisitioned a spider monkey from a research animal supply company, which would arrive in the next several days. Barring any issues with that test, they had further plans to obtain a chimpanzee which they would send through to 2000 San Francisco.

  Rick, however, had his own plans for a test; one which he hadn’t shared with anyone else on the ChroNova staff.

  CHAPTER 21

  Rick stared into the bathroom mirror, focusing on the stubbly face that greeted him.

  He had awakened in the middle of the night with a pounding headache. He’d gotten up and gone to the bathroom, taken some aspirin, and waited for it to kick in, to no avail.

  Now it was four in the morning, and he had been utterly unable to go back to sleep, even after trying to reading for nearly an hour. One thought kept haunting him:

  What if he were able to use this wormhole, this Gatespace, to somehow change his own past — go back and somehow manipulate events, surreptitiously — so that he met Stefanie at an earlier age, and thereby gained a number of additional years to spend with her?

  2016 minus 2000, he calculated… make that sixteen additional years.

  CHAPTER 22

  Shortly after discovering the fact that the Gate had the potential of permitting objects, organisms and possibly even humans to travel through it to times and places in the past, the team met to discuss the possible ramifications of doing so.

  In a session that began at eight o’clock in the morning and went on well into the night, they hammered out what were later they referred to as “Three Simple Rules For Gatejumping.”

  Rule #1: No commercial GateJumping. The HOT6 and its successor machines and/or derivative technologies, if any, are never to be licensed for use in a commercial setting, i.e. for sightseeing trips to the past. There is simply too great a risk of issues arising.

  Rule #2: No interaction with the past. See rule #1. Any interaction, however slight, has the potential to change history.

  Rule #3: Be careful to maintain observer status only. Again, see rule #1. If you must visit the past, remember that you were not present when these events originally occurred. Your presence could have unintended consequences.

  Rick was not completely in agreement with these regulations; he pointed out that it was entirely possible that their visits could already be part of past history without the knowledge or realization of the people who were “native” to that time, so to speak, and that history might simply not permit changes to be made to events for which an established history already existed.

  “For example,” Rick had explained, “take the case of Adolf Hitler.” There were groans and jeers from the group. Hitler was always the go-to case whenever time paradoxes had been discussed for the last half century; now here they were discussing them, not as a theoretical what-if, but as an actual means of preventing possible issues.

  “Really? You’re gonna Godwin the discussion?” said Terry.

  Godwin's Law is an adage, primarily used to refer to discussions on internet forums, that says that the longer a topic is discussed, the greater the probability that someone will make an analogy that involves Hitler or the Nazis.

  “We all know what has been discussed in the past, right?” Rick continued, ignoring Terry’s comment.

  “Not really. That’s not something I pay much attention to,” said Sarah.

  “Okay,” said Rick. “Let me recap. Hitler was born in 1889 in Austria-Hungary. In his early twenties, he served near the front lines during World War I. In the early 1920s, he became active in German politics, and he and his followers pulled off the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, for which he wound up doing six months in prison. Even after doing time ‘in the joint,’ he still managed to resume his political career, eventually becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1933. From there, as I am sure you all know, he became a complete dictator and ordered the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, which led to all-out war around the globe; World War II, in which somewhere between fifty and eighty-five million people died.” The room was silent.

  “We know that no one was there who was willing to take baby Adolf from the midwife’s arms and smother him before he could grow up, or was able to make sure a shell landed in the right trench during his time as a soldier, or pull out a Luger outside the Burgerbraukeller and put a double-tap in his brain, the way you are supposed to put down all monsters,” he said, “but what if there had been? What if someone had been there? What if one of us had been there?”

  He looked each of the 24 team members who were present in the eye, one by one. “What if we could save all those innocent lives by killing Hitler while he was still a nobody, before he’d ever had the chance to become a somebody?”

  There was silence for a moment. Then Randall spoke up.

  “You make some good points, my friend,” he said quietly. “The thing is, we just don’t know. We don’t know what consequences our actions m
ight have.

  “Maybe we can’t change what has already happened. That’s one possibility. Perhaps recorded history already includes the fact that one of us went back and tried to prevent these terrible events, and failed, and it’s just that nobody knew about it. If that’s the case, we’re in no danger of unforeseen consequences.

  “But what if that’s not the case? What if we go back to 1923 and slip inside the beer hall and, in the midst of all the confusion, one of us shoots Hitler in the brain. Poof, no Nazi Germany. No Second World War. No Holocaust. Perhaps no war with Japan, no Hiroshima, no Nagasaki. No nukes, period, because there’s no pressure to develop a terrible weapon to defeat the Axis.” He paused. “But wait.”

  Everyone stared at Randall, hanging on his every word. But what?

  “Suppose that in the absence of Hitler, someone with much the same ideologies but a more polished exterior took over, say, Goebbels, or Himmler. No scary, screaming, maniacal guy with a funny haircut and a little square mustache; instead, someone who stood and promised the nation prosperity in the wake of the terrible depression that had originated in America. And suppose that, motivated by this kinder, gentler Führer in ways that Hitler never could have done through his tactics of fear and intimidation, the scientists of Germany worked harder, and for longer hours, out of their love for him, while our scientists over at the Manhattan Project didn’t have the push to save the world from the scary screaming man with the wild eyes — in fact, maybe the Manhattan Project never came to be at all — and in 1945, instead of two Japanese cities vanishing in flashes of light, it was New York and Washington that disappeared in nuclear fire?”

  Nothing was said for a long moment. Then Terry spoke.