She flipped through several layers of data, describing the distances, the diameter, the constituents of the rising air, even the spectrum of the light coming in from one side, which Nala said matched sunlight.
“So how is sunlight getting into a smokestack?” Marie asked.
“It’s a door,” Thomas said.
“How do you know?” Marie asked. As soon as he said it, she thought he might be right. The headband could examine the composition of materials, and where the light entered, the curved wall of the smokestack changed from concrete to metal. There was some additional metal too, protruding out into the smokestack from where the light shone in.
“When I was a kid, my dad and I used to build whole cities out of Legos,” Thomas said. “Houses, offices, bridges, the works. I remember making a cheese factory once.”
Nala smirked. “A factory where they make cheese?”
“Hey, go with it. I was twelve. It’s not relevant to the story anyway. What’s important is that we made the factory look just like a real one that I saw in a magazine. And the real factory had a smokestack, so we made an exact replica in Legos.”
“Fascinating, but where is this going?” Nala asked.
“The smokestack in the magazine had a door, so we put one in. I don’t know, maybe all smokestacks have doors at the top. I think they use them for inspection or sampling or something like that.”
Marie examined the spot where the light came in. Two thin lines of light, both vertical and parallel to each other. “It does look like a door. And I think there’s some kind of structure in front of it.” She stood up straight. “We should test this. Throw in the water bottle and let’s see what it hits.”
“Wait a second,” said Thomas, “I’ve got something better.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a coin. “Just like a big wishing well. Maybe we’ll hear it hit.”
“Will sound travel from 3-D to 4-D?” Marie said.
“Normally, no,” Nala said. “But if this is a hole, all bets are off.”
“Shh,” Thomas said. “Listen for a minute.” He tossed the coin into the hole, aiming directly at the source of light. It dropped right through what would have been the 3-D surface and continued down into the real world. There was a slight ring as it hit something metal. Marie held up a hand and they waited, listening for the final ring as the coin hit concrete far below. Whether her hearing was normal or enhanced by the headband was hard to tell, but Nala and Thomas seemed to hear the ring as well.
“Solid evidence,” Nala said. “This is a hole, and that’s the three-dimensional world.”
“And that’s a long way down,” Thomas said.
“But best of all, there’s a metal platform in front of that door,” Marie said. “I can barely make it out. It’s not very big, but it’s horizontal, possibly with a railing.”
Thomas had a wide grin on his face. “Swan dive, I’m going in!”
“Wait a second,” Nala said, putting an arm in front of him just in case he really was about to jump. “You’re going to hit a small metal balcony that Marie can just barely see even with her alien vision?”
“Any better ideas?”
“How far down, Marie?” Nala asked.
“About twenty feet. Maybe less.”
Nala stood in deep thought. “We could tie all our clothes together, make a rope and climb down.”
Thomas laughed. “Your dainty sweater is going to hold me?” He waved his hands over his substantial bulk like a model showing off a new outfit. “Besides, you’d see me naked. Nope. I’ll jump.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Nala said, still holding an arm out. She was half his size and her thin arm could hardly hold the big man back if he was ready to go. “What else you got in that headband?”
Marie shook her head. “This is it. This is our only way out of here. I think Thomas is right. We’re going to have to jump.”
“Wait,” Nala said again, more forcefully and holding her hand up like a traffic cop. “Here’s the deal. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and I don’t even know how this could work. We’re standing in an extension of four-dimensional space, but we’re each a set of three-dimensional atoms. Gravity still pulls us toward 3-D because that’s where the mass of the earth is located, but how does our body suddenly flatten out right at Kata Zero?”
“True,” said Thomas. He probably saw the blank expression on Marie’s face and stepped in to explain. “Kata Zero is where all three-dimensional space exists. It’s like a page, a flat piece of paper, and we’re like paper-thin cutouts from that page. Right now, only the bottoms of our feet are touching it.”
Nala looked grim. “To rejoin the 3-D world, every bit of our body, every atom has to return to the plane of Kata Zero.”
“The coin made it,” Marie said.
“The coin isn’t alive,” Nala said. “We struggled at Fermilab to get the alignment right. Electronics were no problem, but the tolerance wasn’t good enough for anything alive. Cell walls break open. Blood vessels rupture. People coming back from 4-D die.”
Marie was certainly not going to question Nala’s mastery of quantum physics, but there was something she was missing. Marie couldn’t put her finger on it, but the headband seemed to be treating this as a fortuitous intersection between dimensions, not the pit of doom.
“It’s not the same as your lab,” Marie said. “I remember, I was with Daniel at Fermilab for Dr. Park’s demonstration. You displaced the contents of a test box and then returned it to its original position. But this is different; it’s a hole, a tunnel between dimensions. The coin just proved that. It didn’t need a neutrino beam or an advanced physics lab. It just fell into 3-D. Gravity did it.”
Nala shrugged. “Okay, I grant you that this is different. We never created an open passageway at Fermilab. But if we jump, I really don’t know how every one of our atoms is going to manage to hit the 3-D page at the same time. We’re really in uncharted territory.”
Marie flipped to a data layer of forces. Gravity loomed large, bending space downward. There was no question if they jumped, they would plunge through the hole. The headband even calculated the velocity of any falling object and retrieved the exact momentum of the coin when it had hit the metal grating.
Momentum. A simple Newtonian force. Mass times velocity.
Marie leaned over the edge and looked down. A person falling five hundred feet would produce the same momentum of a car hitting a wall at sixty miles per hour. The human body plus gravity could create a lot of momentum.
Marie turned to Nala. “If we jump, how fast do you figure we’ll be going when we hit 3-D?”
“I don’t know, ten meters a second.”
“All parts of us?”
“Sure.”
“Every atom?”
“Of course.”
“And what’s on the other side of this plane of Kata Zero?”
Nala furrowed her eyebrows. “Nothing, assuming they created the 4-D bubble in only one direction, not two.”
“Is that the way it’s usually done?”
Nala slowly nodded. She seemed to be listening.
Marie wasn’t sure if this was coming from the headband or her own brain. It was hard to tell the difference anymore. Maybe she’d already crossed the line into crazy and the idea was entirely psychotic. “So, if there’s nothing beyond it, then we just splat against the plane of Kata Zero. Every atom. We jump off this wall, and just like the coin, our momentum carries us into 3-D.”
Nala scratched the back of her head. “I don’t know, it’s not that simple. You’re betting your life on it.”
On impulse, Marie pushed herself to the top of the plastic rim, first on her knees and then standing erect. She teetered on the edge of the five-hundred-foot abyss.
Nala ran over. “Jesus, this is fucking crazy. You’re guessing. Let’s try the clothes rope and lower ourselves down.”
Marie stared into the distant darkness below. Her heart pounded. “Won’t work. There’s
no momentum in it.” She glanced at Thomas and smiled. “Besides, you’d see me naked.”
Marie held both arms out like a platform diver. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is it. This is all I’ve got. I came here to find a way out, and I have done exactly that. Here it is, this hole at the top of a smokestack. There’s nothing else, so it’s time to take that one-in-five chance to survive.”
Marie looked down at Thomas and Nala standing respectfully on each side. Her feet wobbled on the narrow rim; her toes stuck out well beyond its edge. “Just so you know, that’s not the headband talking, that’s me. And, yes, I might very well be fucking crazy.”
Thomas took off his Viking hat and covered his heart. Nala bit her lip and acknowledged the decision with a dip of her head.
You’re in way over your head.
Marie pushed off and plunged into the shaft.
45 Kata Zero
There was a clang of metal and pain in her head. Marie lifted herself up, winced and fell back to her side. Sharp edges of a metal grating pressed into her right arm. She touched her free hand to the pain in her face and withdrew, revealing blood-covered fingers.
The pain centered around her nose and cheek. There was also something wrong with her eyes. She blinked, and the inside of an enormous circular chimney came into focus. The curving wall of gray concrete was streaked with black soot, to be expected for the inside of a smokestack.
But the waves were unexpected.
She watched, oddly entranced by the wavy movement of what should be a solid structure. It wasn’t her eyes, she quickly decided. The metal grating where she lay also pulsated along with the concrete walls. The waves even passed through her body, making the pain in her head throb with each crest and trough and verifying that the undulating scene was not just another hallucination.
Rolling onto her back, Marie searched for the smokestack’s rim with Nala and Thomas peering over its edge. Instead, twenty feet above, dirty white plastic sealed the top of the huge cylinder. There was no sign of the bubble of extradimensional space above it. No sign of Thomas or Nala, either. She hadn’t really expected to see them. Three-dimensional eyes wouldn’t be able to see around a four-dimensional corner. The peculiar world of quantum space was once again sealed off.
Back in the page, as Thomas had described. Kata Zero.
She reached up, grabbed the railing and pulled herself up to a seated position. The platform was no more than a ledge, perched on a curving vertical wall. The railing extended on three sides, bent in one place. Probably where she’d hit. Her head ached.
Holding tightly to the railing to steady herself in the unnatural waves, she peeked over the edge. The huge structure dropped into darkness far below. Air rushed upward, bringing with it greasy smells of the power facility somewhere in the depths.
Marie carefully stood up without releasing her grip on the rail. She looked up to the white cap overhead and called out. “Nala! Thomas!”
It wasn’t a cap, it just looked that way with three-dimensional eyes. Somewhere up there, around the 4-D corner, they waited, perhaps even able to hear her through the interdimensional hole.
“They’ll need room,” she said to herself and pushed herself as far against the wall as she could. It was remarkable that she’d managed to land on such a small platform. Maybe it was the headband.
The headband.
She reached up, but even before she touched her head she knew the headband was gone. She looked down into the depths below. The headband was most likely at the bottom, probably destroyed forever.
There was a blur and a scream, and a large man slammed into the metal deck, hitting on his feet and bouncing into the wall just inches from Marie. Thomas dropped to his knees and rubbed a hand on the back of his head where he’d hit.
“Thomas!” Marie shouted and hugged him. “Are you okay?”
“Didn’t quite stick the landing,” he grunted, rising back to his feet. He looked at her face. “You’re bleeding.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Thomas looked around, observing the pulsating interior of the smokestack. “Damn. It’s that wavy thing.”
“I have no idea what’s going on,” Marie said.
“I do,” Thomas said. “And it’s not good. This place is about to turn into rubble.” He looked up, unshaken by the view of the solid cap just above. “Nala!” he yelled. “Quick. Jump!”
They waited. “Hurry!” he yelled again. “You can do it.” He held out both arms and as they watched, another blur dropped from above. She was off target and Thomas leaned far over the railing to catch her. Nala’s leg hit him first, twisting her fall. He managed to get both arms around her torso but momentum carried her through his grip. His body bent over the railing, and one hand caught her forearm, stopping the plunge.
“Got you,” he grunted. Nala dangled in midair with Thomas bent in half across the railing. His large hand squeezed her thin arm.
She looked up with desperation on her face and nothing but darkness below her. “Don’t let go,” she cried.
“Don’t wiggle,” he said through gritted teeth.
Marie put all her weight against Thomas’s back and gripped the rail on either side of him. She had no way to reach Nala, but she could keep Thomas from slipping over the side. The waves passing through the structure were only making matters worse.
Thomas grunted and heaved himself upward, dragging Nala up with him. With one more mighty pull, the big man stood up straight and threw the much smaller woman over the railing and onto the metal platform. All three of them fell backward against the wall and slumped to the deck, Thomas heaving with each breath.
Nala wrapped herself around his neck, hugging him tight. “Damn, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. When she released him, tears were streaming down her face.
Thomas gently lifted her arm, bright red where he had gripped her. “I didn’t break anything, did I?”
Nala shook her head and hugged him again. “It’ll bruise. I can live with it. You saved my life.” She reached over and touched Marie’s chin. “You’re bleeding.”
Marie felt again. “Yeah, I know. Does it look bad?”
“Coming from your nose,” she said. “Does it hurt?”
“Yeah, my nose and cheek.”
“Good.”
“Good?”
“Yeah, it means you’re bleeding because you hit something in the fall, not because your cell walls ruptured.”
“Then we made it back to 3-D okay?”
Nala smiled. “I think we did.” She looked up at the solid cap and shook her head with amazement.
“We’re not out of here yet,” Thomas said, motioning to the waving surfaces all around them. “You know what this means.”
Nala nodded. “Yeah, I noticed. Bad shit. How do we get out?”
Marie stood up. Behind them was a door with light coming in around its edges. There was no doorknob, but Marie pulled on a metal handle welded to its surface. The door wiggled but didn’t open. “Locked, probably from the outside,” she said.
“Stand back,” Thomas said. The two women squeezed to one side of the platform and Thomas backed up to the railing. He threw his weight into the door with a loud bang. The metal bent, but the door remained in its frame.
“One more try,” he said, rubbing his shoulder. He backed up again and slammed into the door, further bowing it outward, but leaving it intact. The gap on one side was larger now, and daylight streamed in. A dead bolt was visible between the door and its frame.
“Hmm,” Thomas said, inspecting the bent door and frame. He took off his Viking hat and pushed one of the horns into the gap, twisting hard to one side. The door frame bowed outward, increasing the gap. With a loud crack, the horn broke in half and Thomas lurched forward.
“One down, one to go,” he said, sticking the other horn into the gap. He twisted again, putting his weight into it. The frame warped further, popping the dead bolt from the frame slot. The door burst open, swinging outward, with Thomas and t
he Viking hat following into the glare of day.
Nala grabbed the belt on his pants and Marie grabbed one arm, barely preventing him from sailing out into open air. He grabbed the door frame and pulled himself back in. Five hundred feet below, his Viking hat smacked the ground.
There was no corresponding balcony on the outside, nothing but a sheer drop. A gust of wind blew in through the open doorway.
“Holy shit, that was close,” Nala said, peering outside. Marie peeked over her shoulder, thankful for the fresh air.
The countryside of Texas spread out before them. Trees, pastures, farmhouses. It would have been a lovely scene except for the wavering. Everything moved with ripples that spread in every direction. It was like looking into a pond disturbed by a thrown rock.
Far below, industrial buildings and a parking lot wavered too. The branches of nearby trees bent violently in the wind, with dust and debris blowing across the pavement.
It was a long drop, and there didn’t seem to be any way down. “Jesus. Can we get a fucking break, here?” Nala asked.
Thomas grabbed the door frame, hooked his left foot on its edge and swung out into the air with his right leg and arm.
Nala yelled, “Wait! What are you—”
He reached into a recessed space, barely noticeable on the smokestack wall, and grabbed a bar inside. His foot found a step just below in another recess. The bars he’d found were embedded directly in the concrete structure, and they continued one after the other, hundreds of steps all the way to the ground five hundred feet below.
“Come on,” he said. “A ladder.”
The whole structure wobbled, more like a strand of spaghetti than a concrete building, but Thomas managed several more steps down the outside. He seemed unconcerned. “I’ll go down ahead of you. Don’t worry. If you slip, I’ll catch you.”
Nala looked at Marie, incredulous.
“Well, he caught you once before,” Marie said.
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 58