The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

  “So, basically, you’re saying we should leave well enough alone?”

  The meeting broke up in somber silence.

  CHAPTER 23

  Weeks went by. Rick continued his medical treatments without suffering anything more than fairly mild side effects; he was sometimes tired in the morning despite having slept, or he’d get that way by mid-afternoon; occasionally he’d have bouts of light-headedness, which Dr. Geister said was fairly normal for someone with his condition.

  The guinea pigs made several more careful excursions through the Gate with no apparent issues. The spider monkey arrived and the same success was had with it.

  The crew kept themselves occupied over the first several weeks by working out the coordinates of more than three dozen remote gates that were the nearest ones to the local gate. When the news arrived that there would be a delay of perhaps as much as six months in receiving a chimpanzee to use for their studies, they decided to do a longer radar study of the Gatespace, and left the probe in the green void doing a radar scan for a period of forty-eight hours, long enough for the probe’s radar to “see” objects more than sixteen billion miles away.

  The probe said there was nothing there.

  They figured that objects floating in the Gatespace — people, vehicles, the occasional stray cow — would likely be too small to be detected at much of a distance, as would faraway remote Gates, but this meant that the Sun and all its planets were somehow not part of this weird green nowhere that had somehow become accessible to the ChroNova staff.

  They finally got the news that the chimp they’d been waiting for, whose name was Sasha, was scheduled to arrive on May 21, a little more than a week away.

  Rick decided at that point that he was through waiting and that it was time to make his move.

  CHAPTER 24

  Rick awoke to a gentle pinging sound in his ear. He was a little disoriented — it was, after all, three in the morning — but he quickly realized that the sound was his watch’s alarm going off, a small, metallic sound coming from the wrist that he habitually tucked under his head while sleeping, and he shut it off and sat up on the bed, being careful not to awaken Stef.

  He propped up the note he’d scribbled earlier — Problem at the lab, see you soon — on her key ring on the dresser, slipped into his clothes and was out of the apartment within eight minutes. He left the Jeep for Stef to get to work, and mounted his touring bike for the seven block trip to Chronova.

  The ride took more out of him than he’d anticipated. By the time he pulled into the parking lot, he felt as though he could go back to bed and sleep for days. He also found that he was a bit short of breath.

  He walked the bike the rest of the way to the ChroNova offices and started to chain it up to the rack that was located not far from the front door of the office, then had second thoughts. He walked the bike around back and down the grassy incline to a shady, treed area near a small creek that wandered through the area, and chained it to a tree. Then he returned to the front door of the ChroNova facility and let himself in. He felt as though he’d managed to find his second wind.

  It was 3:31 AM.

  CHAPTER 25

  Rick stood in the dark room, staring at the Gate. He’d kept the lights off so as not to attract any attention in case someone were to drive by.

  As he started up the HOT6, Rick noticed that the green swirl had a certain depth to it. Rick had never noticed it before; when sitting at his station in the lab, performing his duties as part of the team, with the vortex slowly revolving about forty feet away, it seemed completely two-dimensional, like a painting mounted on a slowly spinning turntable, but now that he was standing directly in front of it, on the entry platform, so close that he could lean forward and reach out his arm and his hand would be immersed in it, it seemed a thousand feet deep. It made one revolution roughly every fifteen seconds, and Rick had the oddest feeling that the damned thing was calling to him, somehow.

  Come on, Ricky-boy. Come on, jump right in, the green stuff’s fine.

  It wasn’t the Gate that was calling him.

  It was 2000. He’d be going back to when he’d been just thirty years old.

  December, 2000. He’d still be stinging from the divorce. Holly had gone home to visit her parents in August of that year and never come back.

  He took a deep breath and walked forward, into the emerald swirl.

  CHAPTER 26

  Rick found himself in a familiar place where he’d never been before.

  It was familiar because they’d sent the probe there — here — a dozen or more times. They’d sent guinea pigs, and a spider monkey. They had plans to send a chimpanzee. But instead, Rick thought, I’m the guinea pig. I’m in 2000. It’s December 15th — it’s always December 15th when we first open this Gate. It ought to be called Decemberfifteenthland.

  He turned and looked behind him. He saw ghostly outlines of the probes they had sent through, overlapping one another. It was strange. He didn’t know why they didn’t seem to be here in solid form; he didn’t care right now exactly why that was. He’d wondered over the last few months why each probe they sent didn’t run into one of the previous efforts; they were all coming through at the same time in that other — this other “when,” he corrected himself. He’d chalked it up as a mystery of science.

  What concerned Rick right now was the fact that, across the country, in an apartment in the suburbs of Washington, DC, a 30-year-old version of him was getting started with his work day, still stinging from the burn of his wife having left four months ago. She’d served him with divorce papers almost immediately, delivered by a process server hired by McMillen & Company’s corporate attorney. He hadn’t contested the divorce, and it had become final just a few weeks ago.

  Even more importantly, there was a 21-year old girl named Stefanie Padgett needed to be introduced to that 30-year-old.

  CHAPTER 27

  Rick had planned ahead. He’d managed, over a period of weeks, to collect a wad of $20, $50 and $100 bills that were printed before the 2006 redesign. They weren’t all dated prior to 2001, but Rick figured that didn’t matter too much; no one was going to look that closely at them. So long as Ben Franklin wasn’t oversized and off to one side, no one would notice if they were dated in the early 2000s.

  It was still pre-dawn when he arrived. He set his watch to a nearby bank’s display clock and waited.

  Shortly after 7 AM, he walked down the street to a coffee shop and bought a light breakfast; a Danish and coffee with sweetener. He sat thinking the whole thing through as he ate. He’d tried to dress in a way that wouldn’t call attention to himself; had he succeeded? He guessed he had; the counter girl hadn’t given him a second glance. He supposed that men’s fashion hadn’t changed all that much since 2001. He’d deliberately left his powered down smartphone in his desk drawer at ChroNova; carrying it would definitely call attention to him. He had no valid data sources to connect to in 2001, and besides, he didn’t have an account here. Not 45-year-old him, anyway.

  Finishing his coffee, he thought to himself, Time to get this show on the road.

  He went outside and hailed a cab, and told the driver to take him to UC Berkeley.

  CHAPTER 28

  Meanwhile, in 2016, Stefanie’s alarm went off. She opened her eyes and looked around, wondering where Rick was.

  “Rick?” she called. “Ricky?”

  She padded into the kitchen, wearing only one of Rick’s tee shirts. Dark blue, it bore the message KEEP CALM AND HAIL A TARDIS. The linoleum was cool on her bare feet.

  “Hmm.”

  She went back into the bedroom and noticed Rick’s note on the dresser. She couldn’t remember him having ever had to go in to the office during the night, but it didn’t worry her. She would call him later. She went into the bathroom, stripped off the tee-shirt and stepped into the shower.

  CHAPTER 29

  During the 16-mile cab ride, Rick sorted out the finer points of his plan.

&nbs
p; As they crossed over the Oakland Bay Bridge, he had a firm idea of what he planned to do.

  In December of 2000, Stefanie Ann Padgett would be 21 years old and in the first months of her senior year as a Comparative Literature major at UC Berkeley.

  Rick planned to bump into her and change the course of her life.

  CHAPTER 30

  Randall Orwell arrived at ChroNova at 7:53 AM. He unlocked the front door, flipped on the lights in the reception area, and then went into his office to prepare for the day’s schedule.

  At 7:58, Terry arrived and went to the lab to set up for the day. Opening the door, he started to flip the lights on and stopped, staring at the HOT6, its green swirl glowing in the darkened room.

  He turned on the lights, crossed to his console, picked up the phone and buzzed Randall.

  “Randall.”

  “Hey, it’s Terry. Uhm… did you come in here and start up the HOT6?”

  “No,” Randall said, a note of concern in his voice. “I’ll be right there.”

  Eleven seconds later, he walked into the lab.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Randall asked.

  “I have no idea. I came in here to do setup and it was already up and running. It’s kinda wild looking in the dark.”

  “You didn’t leave it running last night?”

  “Hell, no. We’ve been over and over about what could happen if a fly went through the portal and bit a horse on the ass in the wrong place and time. I make sure that it’s shut down every single night, without exception.”

  They looked at each other. Randall picked up the phone and buzzed Rick.

  No answer.

  CHAPTER 31

  Stef had taken the Jeep to work, stopping along the way to buy a venti vanilla latte to help her get through until after her first and only class of the day.

  By the time her class began at 10 AM, she was puzzled. She hadn’t heard from Rick all morning, which was very unusual; by this time he generally had texted her at least twice. She tried texting him just before class began, then became swept up in the process of teaching eleven freshman students the fine art of writing an essay.

  CHAPTER 32

  The cab dropped Rick off at the corner of Bancroft Way and Telegraph Avenue, near the UC Berkeley administration building. He stood staring at the various structures, unsure of where to start. He’d known, of course, that the campus would be large. He was not unfamiliar with major universities, having attended a few himself, but now that he was here, all the plans that he had pieced together over the last several weeks seemed woefully inadequate.

  How the hell was he going to find her? There were something like 30,000 students at this school, and the campus covered more than 150 acres. He’d been an idiot to think that he could just show up here and walk up to her. A needle in a haystack? More like trying to find a single needle in a 150-acre farm filled with haystacks.

  But wait…

  A memory came to Rick’s mind, sudden, unbidden. It was a story that Stef had told many times when they were hanging out with friends; a story about an event that had occurred while she was going to school on this very campus. It had to do with a particularly memorable evening when she and several of her sorority sisters had been in attendance at a beer drinking competition that was being held at a bar which was a favorite of UC Berkeley students. The two students that they were rooting for (both male) both wound up being disqualified, one because he slammed his beer mug down on the counter with a little too much enthusiasm and shattered it, and the other because, after downing his ninth straight mug of brew, he turned his head to grin at his girlfriend who was cheering him on and suddenly spewed a stream of what Stef described as “used beer,” her nose wrinkled in feigned disgust, all over her blouse.

  The story itself was inconsequential.

  What was important was the fact that Rick had heard the story often enough to recite it practically word-for-word, including the name of the bar — The Bear’s Lair — and the fact that she mentioned that it was where she and her friends hung out practically every Friday night.

  As his mind wrapped itself around these facts, Rick realized that today — not today in 2016, but today, December 15th, 2000 — was a Friday.

  It was early yet, but Rick knew where Stef would be in about thirteen hours.

  CHAPTER 33

  At about 10:30, Stefanie’s phone rang, and she saw that the call was coming from ChroNova. She expected to hear Rick’s voice when she answered, saying that his cell phone was dead, but instead it was Randall. No, she hadn’t heard from Rick all morning, she explained; he was gone before she woke up. Wasn’t he at the office? He’d left her a note saying that he’d had to go in early.

  She detected the note of concern that was in Randall’s voice, and it now crept into hers.

  “Randall, where do you think he is?” she asked. “He hasn’t called me or anything, and that’s not like him.”

  “I don’t know,” Randall said. It didn’t come naturally to him to lie. “I’ll let you know if we hear from him.”

  He hung up the phone and looked at Terry.

  “I think Rick’s in 2000,” he said, shaking his head.

  The two men stared at each other, not knowing what to do next.

  CHAPTER 34

  Rick asked directions to the campus library and spent the morning reading back issues of some of the nation’s major newspapers; the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle. Their editorial pages were all full of dire predictions on how the nation and the world were in dire straits. Rick smiled at the sixteen-year old newspapers. Nothing ever changes, he thought.

  The predominant news story of the past week concerned the Supreme Court decision halting the Florida presidential recount, effectively giving that state, and the Presidency, to George W. Bush in the 2000 election.

  At noon, Rick left the library and walked to a Subway restaurant a few blocks away which he had seen during the cab ride in. He sat thinking while he ate, and finally decided that there was nothing more he could do until it was time to go to the bar.

  Rick returned to the library, found a copy of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, and read it, feeling wonderfully ironic, until the library closed at 5 PM. He walked down to Bongo Burger, which one of the librarians had recommended as a good place to eat and which was located just a few blocks away.

  After he ate, he had planned to walk around the campus for an hour or so before heading for the Bear’s Lair. As he walked north on Telegraph Avenue and crossed Bancroft, approaching Sproul Plaza, he heard, softly at first, the rhythmic sound of hand percussion. Bongo drums, finger cymbals, tambourines… as he approached, he realized that there was a group of forty or fifty students sitting in a huge drum circle, sharing time together, just enjoying the opportunity to play.

  More people were standing near, nodding and moving to the rhythm. He allowed himself to stand there and enjoy the scene for a few minutes before he began to feel a little self-conscious and decided to move along. They might have taken him for a faculty member, but he decided not to take any chances.

  The Bear’s Lair was not far away, and he decided to go in a bit early, sit in the back and nurse a beer and simply wait for her to walk through the door before he made another move. What if she didn’t show? He dismissed the thought from his mind. She would show up. She had to.

  He walked in and saw that it was dollar beer night. He ordered a longneck Budweiser and found a seat at a table in the rear of the place, but with a clear view of the front door. Then he waited.

  CHAPTER 35

  To say Stefanie was worried was a grand understatement. It was nine o’clock at night; in the fourteen months that they’d been together, Rick had never failed to come home, or call. He treated her far better than any of her previous boyfriends. She was genuinely happy, and she was sure he was as well. Yet she’d had no word whatsoever from him since finding the note he’d left her that morning.

  Randall had been little
help; he’d said that Rick had not showed up to work that morning; she’d called back twice more during the course of the day, but Randall continued to insist that Rick wasn’t there, and that he had no idea where he could be, feebly assuring her not to worry about him. “I’m sure he has good reasons for not being in touch,” he’d told her. She had her doubts. There was something in Randall’s voice that told her he was hiding something.

  So where was Rick? Was there someone else? She’d seen no signs that he was cheating on her. Then why was her stomach in knots?

  She lay on the bed and stared at her phone, willing it to ring, with no success.

  ~~~~~

  Randall sat at his desk long after everyone else except Terry had gone for the day. He had broken out a bottle of twelve-year-old Glenlivet and was on his second scotch on the rocks.

  Terry stubbornly sat at his station in the lab, staring at the Gate, half expecting to see Rick emerge from it at any moment.

  His intercom buzzed. “Anything?” Randall asked.

  “No, not at all. Should we go in and try to find him?”

  “Where would we begin to look? He could be anywhere,” Randall said. “San Francisco is a huge city. He could have boarded a plane, or a train, and gone anywhere across the country, or around the world, for that matter. No, he’ll come out when he’s ready… or he won’t come out at all.”

  CHAPTER 36

  It was nearly ten o’clock and Rick was on his second longneck when the door opened and a group of five young girls walked in, laughing and talking. At first he didn’t recognize her; he wasn’t used to seeing her toss her head back and laugh so loudly. At 36, she was more sedate and demure in her actions. At 21, her hair was longer — nearly to her waist — and she wore more makeup, but the girl — the young girl, he thought to himself — that he was staring at was definitely Stefanie Padgett. He looked away before anyone could notice and take him for a dirty old man.