by J Boyd Long
“There’s a shovel out there at the garden,” Tocho said, pointing to an overgrown plot. “If you’ll grab that, I’ll get started locating the spot where I buried the box.”
Quentin started off towards the modest garden, which, despite being in desperate need of weeding, was overflowing with squash and tomatoes, among other things. He had his doubts about what they were going to find in a box that had been buried for several years. Florida was mostly a swamp, and wet dirt was not known for preserving things. Hopefully they could get by without some of the parts if it proved necessary. He located the shovel and turned to watch Tocho.
Tocho backed up to the corner of the house, aligned himself with a tree stump on the other side of the yard, and began pacing. After seven steps he stopped, turned to the right, and aligned himself with a massive pine tree, and began pacing again.
“Come stand right here,” he called to Eissa. “Right on this spot.”
Eissa dutifully complied, and Tocho walked to the other side of the house. Again, he put his back to the wall, aligned himself with a tree, and began pacing. Then he turned and aligned himself with Eissa.
“Are you in the exact spot I put you?” he called.
“Yes, I’m right where you put me,” Eissa sighed. “Could you have made this any more like a pirate searching for his buried treasure, Blackbeard?”
Tocho ignored her sarcasm and began pacing towards her. His lips moved as he stepped off the distance, and when he stopped again, he pointed down.
“Right here,” he announced. “Quentin, if you’ll begin digging right here, you should find a box about three feet down.”
“That’s a pretty elaborate scheme for hiding the box of parts,” Quentin said.
“Oh, this box just has the map in it,” Tocho said with a straight face. “The map tells us where the box with the parts in it is buried.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Eissa moaned. “This is going to take a month.”
Bob slapped his knee, doubling over with laughter. “Oh, you are so easy,” he gasped. “I love it.”
“So, there isn’t a second box?” Eissa asked doubtfully.
“No, I’m just messing with you,” Tocho grinned. “This is the box of parts.”
Quentin began digging. His back muscles began to burn almost immediately from the unfamiliar strain, but he was too embarrassed to ask for help. He gritted his teeth and kept going. The dirt moved easily enough, but it was heavy, due to the water content. Sweat began to run down his face in rivers, as the pile of dirt got taller.
“Huh,” Tocho grunted after a few minutes. “You should have hit it by now.”
Quentin stopped digging and stood upright, his back screaming in pain, and armed the sweat off his face. His heart was pounding erratically, and he was grateful for the excuse to rest. Tocho took a step back and looked around. He returned to the edge of the house, checking the alignment on his previous calculation. Suddenly his face lit up in a smile, and he jogged back over to them.
“I got it,” he said. “I lined up on the wrong stump. I forgot there’s a second one over there, now.”
Quentin groaned. “You mean I dug all that for nothing?”
Tocho slapped him on the back, making him wince. “It was good exercise, and you look like you needed it. Now then, you should be able to move over this way about four feet and dig.”
“I don’t think I can. My back is fried from the first hole.”
Bob grabbed the shovel from him. “Hang in there, kid, we’ll help you out.”
They all took turns on the shovel, and soon had the box unearthed. It was wrapped in an oilcloth, and although the exterior wood was falling apart, the interior was in surprisingly good shape. The walls of the box were thick, and it smelled strongly of creosote, with a hint of bananas.
“I sort of expected the box to be all rotted out,” Quentin admitted. “I’m glad it isn’t, because the stuff inside it would probably be useless.”
“This is a dynamite box,” Tocho explained. “They’re pretty tough.”
They unpacked the box and matched up all the components with the items from Bob’s shed.
“I think we’re good,” Bob said, finally. “If we can remember how it all went together, we should be able to make it work.”
They divided up the equipment into four gunny sacks, which Tocho outfitted with slings, to turn them into makeshift backpacks. After a quick lunch, they set out through the woods on a faint trail.
“When’s the last time you checked on the door?” Bob asked. “I haven’t been over here since we took it apart.”
“It’s probably been close to two years,” Tocho replied. “I used to check on it every few months, but I’ve sort of gotten away from it.”
A twinge of unease passed through Quentin’s stomach. Two years was a long time, especially outside in the weather. With the rain and the humidity, the control boxes might have rusted away by now, and termites could have eaten the door, itself. He pushed the negative thoughts aside and tried to enjoy the scenery. The forest was stunningly beautiful, and the shade was pleasantly cool after all the digging in Tocho’s yard. Small flowers grew in bunches among the palmettos, and the live oak trees were enormous, much older and larger than any Quentin had ever seen before.
The woods grew wilder as they went deeper in. It was clear that this was not a place that was visited by people. There were animal tracks on the faint trail they were following, but nothing that looked man-made. They flushed a number of birds into flight, as well as an occasional rabbit and deer.
“This is really fantastic,” Quentin said, breaking a long silence as they trudged up an incline. “It’s great to see some wild land that isn’t being messed with by people. There’s not a shred of trash anywhere, or mud holes that have been ripped up by four-wheelers, or deer stands, none of that. I love it.”
“He’s starting to see the bigger picture,” Bob called up to Tocho. “Look out, he’s going to want to stay, if we’re not careful.”
Quentin laughed. “Well, I can certainly see some of the appeal that kept you here,” he admitted. “I’m still pretty fond of electricity and running water, but I know it comes at a terrible price. Of course, you have this endless war over here, but on the upside, it’s kept the population down. That’s the whole problem with our dimension; there are just too many people. We could have all the technology stuff without destroying the planet, if we could keep the global population under a billion.”
“Everything fails when it gets too big,” Bob agreed. “What’s the population on your side these days?”
“We’re well over the seven billion mark,” Quentin said.
“Holy shit,” Bob muttered. “That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and houses to build, and cars to fill up with gas.”
It was rare for Quentin to have someone to talk to about this stuff, besides Eissa. They had spent years discussing best management practices and good stewardship of the planet, but there weren’t many other people interested in talking about it on more than the surface level.
“They think it’s going to max out in the next hundred years, and start dropping back down,” Quentin said. “Unfortunately, it’s probably going to be the hard way, with people starving to death, and killing each other for food and clean water.”
The discussion paused as they took turns scrambling over a fallen pine tree. The jagged, twisted scar down its side showed that it had been struck by lightning. Quentin held Eissa’s hand as she hiked her leg over the trunk and slid across to the other side.
“You’ll find in almost every dimension that people as a whole do everything the hard way,” Tocho said. “As a species, we’re just destructive and self-centered.”
“That’s very depressing,” Quentin said. “It’s killing the moment in this wonderful, unspoiled patch of woods. Let’s think happy thoughts for a while.”
“Yes, good idea,” Tocho said. “It’s important to understand the problems of our species, but it’s dangerous to dwell on
them.”
“How far are we from the door?” Eissa asked, shifting the bag around on her shoulders. “This thing is really starting to cut off circulation.”
“Not too far now,” Tocho said. “Maybe another mile, or so.”
They walked on in silence for a while. When he and Eissa talked about the problems of the world, he always concluded that there was no way to fix it, and people as a whole were too self-centered to do what was necessary for the common good. To hear Tocho claim that the same thing was true across other dimensions was a nasty shock. Surely there were places where people managed to make better decisions, right? As usual, the topic left him swirling around the drain, disappointed.
At last, Tocho veered off the game trail and walked towards an area of dense foliage.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see, now. We go to the big fallen tree on the other side of this, and line up with the big piece of limestone sticking out of the ground on the other side of the wash.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus on a stick,” Eissa said. “Here we go again with the pirate map.”
Tocho turned red as Quentin and Bob burst into laughter, but a moment later he was laughing, too, shaking his head. “You got me on that one, Eissa,” he said with a grin.
“I think she’s got you figured out,” Bob said, wiping his eye.
Tocho located the rock and started walking towards it. The undergrowth was waist high, and thick enough that it was hard to walk in a straight line. When they got to the rock, Tocho positioned himself on the other side of it, and scanned the forest before him.
“It’s done a bit of growing since the last time I was here,” Bob grunted. “I hardly recognize anything.”
“Yeah,” Tocho agreed. “There’s a lot of young stuff that didn’t used to be here. I think it’s over here, though.”
He took off again, and the rest of them trailed after him, wading through the bushes and young trees. There were spider webs everywhere, as they got deeper into the forest and away from the game trail. Tocho picked up a stick and began waving it in front of him to clear them away as he walked. At last, he stopped in front of a massive live oak tree. Its canopy created a heavily shaded area near its trunk, with the branches nearly touching the ground on most sides. Tocho clapped his hands and smiled.
“Well, here we are,” he announced with an air of triumph. “I’ve still got it, walked right to it.”
Quentin felt the excitement building in his gut. Finally, they were about to go home. Whether or not that was a good thing remained to be seen.
Chapter 9
Quentin squinted, peering into the gloomy interior of the overhang. There were vines and Spanish moss hanging everywhere, and he was sure that there were snakes hanging out in the branches too, just waiting to drop on someone. It was too dark to make out anything clearly, but he saw nothing that looked like a DimGate.
“Uh, where?” Eissa asked. “I don’t see anything.”
“Right there, under the tree,” Tocho pointed.
“I’ve got nothing,” Eissa said. “Or is the door buried too, like twenty paces from this, and ten paces from that?”
Tocho stuck his tongue out at her as he dug in his pack and handed out heavy leather gloves to everyone. He walked past a low-hanging branch, and began tugging big clumps of moss and vines out of the tree. Quentin moved in and helped, and a minute later a vague door shape began to appear. It was covered in thorny vines that grew across it and up into the tree branches above, creating a very effective camouflage curtain.
“Well, nobody was going to accidently find that,” she said. “You could have leaned against it to take a nap and not realized it was there.”
“That’s the idea,” Tocho said. “That’s another reason why I didn’t want to come check on it too often, as I would have made an obvious trail leading right to it.”
The four of them set to work, clearing away all the growth around the door. It was hard going, and took them the better part of an hour to get it done. The humidity in the woods was high, and the gnats and mosquitoes were delighted to have such a bountiful and unexpected buffet presented to them.
Eissa staggered over to the trunk of the tree, and collapsed against it in a sweaty pile. Tocho handed her a canteen from his bag, and sat down beside her.
“Well, if I had known it was going to get like that, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to take it all apart,” he chuckled. “The tree did a way better job of protecting it than I would’ve expected.”
“Yeah, I don’t think anyone was going to go to the trouble of clearing those damn vines away, just to see what was inside them,” Quentin said, plopping down beside them. He took the canteen from Eissa and drank deeply, then handed it back.
Bob stayed by the door, continuing to clean around the right side of the frame. This door was similar to the one in room 12-100, but it was too dirty from years of pollen and moss growth to see the details of it. At last, Bob tripped a hidden catch, and the entire side panel opened, revealing a maze of circuits and wires hanging inside.
Tocho got up and began clearing a place on the ground beside the door. Quentin groaned inwardly, but got up to help. He pulled handfuls of weeds, vines, and small bushes, swearing as the vines scratched at his arms and legs. He reminded himself over and over that the sooner they got done, the sooner they could go home. The heat sapped his strength, but it didn’t take long for them to create a suitable workspace. Tocho produced a small tarp and began emptying their bags and laying out the parts.
“Now for the fun part,” he said. “What do you think, Bob, is it all coming back to you?”
Bob grunted noncommittally. “The humidity has done a number on some of this stuff,” he said. “There’s a fair bit of corrosion in here.”
Quentin watched with interest as Bob assessed the inner workings of the DimGate. It looked like the inside of a computer, just a lot bigger. That made sense, as it was the inside of a computer. He could even identify certain components after looking at it from that perspective.
After cleaning things up as best as he could, Bob walked over to the parts layout where Tocho was readying everything.
“Okay, I think we’re ready to start putting parts back in,” he said. “I’m a little worried about how well the connections are going to function from the corrosion, but I got the worst of it cleaned up.”
“Some of this stuff has got the same problem,” Tocho said. “The wire insulation has gotten brittle and comes off in your hand when you bend it. We’ll have to be super careful with everything.”
“Okie dokie,” Bob said. “You bring me the parts, and I’ll install them. Quentin, you stand here and hand me tools, and be an extra set of eyes and hands for me.”
“Got it,” Quentin said. He tried to suppress his excitement, but the idea of assisting in the repair of a door that allowed you to travel from one dimension to another, and even through time, at least theoretically, was almost too much for him. Focusing on identifying parts and functions helped him at least limit the range of his enthusiasm to useful things.
“Let’s start at the top,” Bob said. “Well snap all the diodes back in, and sort of build up to the harder stuff. It’s been a while since I worked on this thing.”
Tocho began handing things to Quentin, who in turn handed them to Bob. Eissa leaned against the tree and tried to exude an air of complete disinterest. An hour went by, and the pile of parts grew smaller. Quentin recognized most of the items as he passed them to Bob. This stuff might come from a different dimension, but it looked like a computerized operating system functioned pretty much the same way everywhere.
“I think we got carried away when we took this door out of service,” Bob remarked, pausing to stretch his back. “Not that I actually expected to ever put it back together, mind you.”
“As I recall, we wanted to make it hard, so that we wouldn’t be tempted to try travelling again,” Tocho reminded him. “This part was about protecting it from us, too, not just someone else that
might find it.”
“Yes, yes, I remember talking about that, now,” Bob said. “Well, in that case, our efforts have certainly served their purpose. I’m already considering going back home and forgetting the whole thing.”
Tocho laughed, lying back on an empty sack. “I know what you mean,” he said. “All this stooping and squatting and sweating is a young man’s game.”
“I don’t have a soldering gun, of course,” Bob mused. “I’ve been trying to come up with an effective way of attaching the wiring from the control panel relay to the main circuit board. I’m sure I had a plan when I pulled them off, but I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was.”
“Is it a stable platform, or is there a lot of movement?” asked Quentin.
“It’s stable,” Bob said. “The door isn’t actually moving in space as we think of it, so there isn’t any wind buffeting, or anything like that.”