Smart enough to know what I'm going to be doing before too long! But underneath the leering response to my question, I caught the touch of a mind that was quicker and keener than it had been before. I could feel it somehow—as if Rez's mind were turned up a notch, running at top speed.
I can feel it too. His big black eyes stared into mine, surprised.
We were on our way.
We decided to wait several weeks before trying our fourth trip through the gates, and also took the precaution of leaving town before anyone saw us in our new bodies. We drove to a different gate in another city. We made our fourth passage there and then continued traveling for two more weeks, making one more passage on that trip.
Before finally returning home, we stopped at one of the gates in North Houston. As usual, we were making the trip late at night. At the moment, I was female and Rita was male, but we planned to go through one more time so we could arrive home as we had left—as Lee and Rita.
Only this time, for the first time, we both felt sure we would be able to maintain our mental focus and stay inside the gate for a few seconds.
We took the now familiar step into the green mist. As I sent my questing thoughts out, I did not know what to expect, but almost instantly I felt my first faint impression of something alien. At first it felt as nebulous and unreal as the green mist still surrounding me—a directionless sense of some irritation in the mind pulling at my consciousness, the way a sore tooth keeps nagging at your attention until you probe it with your tongue. There was nothing particular in the sensation that was frightening, except that it was so obviously alien.
A dim echo of something that might have been amusement or maybe only infinite condescension ran through my mind. Another concept went hurling through my brain—a vague image of a scientist taking measurements and writing up a report, satisfied with the research so far. I seemed to see an infinite ladder stretching up into a vast sky, and I felt a strong sense that the human race had moved somehow from the ground unto the first rung of that ladder.
That was all. The sense of an alien presence in vanished. I had barely touched the alien mind and I was sure it had not noticed us at all.
Pop! I staggered out again into the cold night air as Lee, and Rita emerged wonderfully female. Both of us were grinning from ear to ear, and not only because we were safely through. We had succeeded in staying inside the gate for a few moments. It meant we really could play a part in finding out more about the Gate Master—and about the fate of Russell and Donna and all the other untold thousands of humans who'd gone into the gates and vanished. Were they waiting for us inside the gates? Or were they being stored somewhere, like rolls of coins, not useful for much, but still too valuable to discard? Were they transported somewhere to populate a new planet, or re-populate an old one? Or did they die, their bodies dissolved by the gates and the atoms scattered to the far winds of the universe?
Rita and I were determined to find out. As Messler had warned us, the hunt for the entities inside the gate was becoming addictive.
The night wind was cold. Rita hurried over to collect our clothes from where we'd left them piled in front of the gate. I stood and stared up at the stars spread in a band of light across the vast Texas sky, feeling my anger growing. How dare this cold, alien intelligence play with us as if we were mice in a cage? What was the point of all the struggles and suffering and growth of humanity over thousands of years? Was the human race going to end as nothing but a footnote in some alien study on the responses of inferior races to the gate technology?
Rita sensed my mood without either of us speaking a word. She came up to my side and put her arms around me, squeezing my shoulders. I took her in my arms and we held each other tight, sharing our warmth, our bodies speaking in a language older than time.
After awhile, we released each other and started putting our clothes back on. Rita frowned, searching her memories, and started to talk aloud about what we'd sensed inside the gate this time. “The Gate Master thinks of us as less than animals. I suspect all the criminals and degenerates who have entered the gates have simply winked out of existence. The entity would consider it was doing us a favor to get rid of them for us. But the ones who made it through the first time ... they were different."
“Russ was different, too,” I interrupted. It was unbelievable that a genius like Russ would have failed to make it through even once when so many thousands had succeeded.
“Exactly,” Rita said. “The very fact that he didn't make it through when by every criteria we know of he should have makes me certain that he and Donna were transported somewhere else."
A chill of anticipation sliced through me at the thought. As long as the gates remained on earth, we were immortal. There would be plenty of time to explore, learn about the entity—and find our friends.
I remembered Don striding into the gate when it first appeared, unafraid and ready for adventure. I understood that feeling now. Perhaps we were only an experiment to the aliens, but with the help of their gates, we were going to grow and evolve until we staked our own claim on that river of stars high above my head.
Rita and I exchanged determined looks. We would keep walking through that gate as long as it took to find our lovers again. One day, the gate would show us the way.
THE END
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The Sex Gates Page 29