Pinball (5 page)

A collective groan went up from the young group of gamers clustered in the living room.

“No, I’m serious. Come on, it’ll be an adventure,” he said as he walked into the house. Five pairs of eyes stared at him in utter disbelief. Who is this stranger who looks like Dad?

Finally Samuel asked, “Can I bring my sword?”

“You know what? I actually think that might be an
excellent
idea,” he said, grinning at the shocked expressions on their faces. They knew he’d never cared much for the sword.

Steven had his wife put together a care package with several ham and cheese sandwiches and six bottles of water. He sent Samuel to retrieve a hundred foot coil of rope that he had stored in the back of the garage. Steven then went to the storage shed out back and found the old combat knife and scabbard that had once been his father’s. Placing it on his belt, he looked around. What else might he need?

He went to his bedroom closet and traded the worn tennis shoes he wore for a pair of practically new hiking boots that he recalled having worn only once before. Then he realized that wearing the boots with his khaki shorts made him look as if he should be singing
The Lumberjack Song,
so he changed into his favorite pair of worn denim jeans and a chambray work shirt with his favorite tee shirt, a brilliant blue one that read M
ONTANA:
B
IG
S
KY
C
OUNTRY
underneath.

For the final touch, he took his son’s schoolbooks out of his backpack — a bright yellow one which had assured that Samwise would at least be visible to approaching traffic — and put the food and water inside. Then they all set out walking the mile and a half or so to where he’d found the portal.

The children made the noises of typical kids, complaining about the distance and asking how much farther it was —
Are we almost there?
— all during the hike, but they grew strangely quiet as they neared the strange vortex. Steven glanced at them and realized they were as scared of the vortex as he had been earlier. No, not just scared —
terrified
was the proper word, or more accurately,
scared shitless
. He realized that even now, he still felt exactly the same way.    

He walked over to a nearby tree, one of only a few in the area, and tied one end of the rope around its trunk with the only knot that he still remembered from his days as a Second Class Boy Scout nearly three decades before. Then he carried the rest of the coil over to within ten feet or so of the vortex.

He saw in their faces as he looked around that they knew precisely what he had in mind.

“Dad…” started Nikki, “You’re not actually going
in
that thing, are you?”

“Yeah,” said Samuel, a tremble in his voice. “What if you can’t come back?”

He paused a second to collect his thoughts. “Well, then, as Peter Pan once said, to die shall be the greatest adventure of them all.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Steven,” Lynne snapped. “You can’t possibly be serious.”

“I’ve never
been
more serious. That metal bird would have eaten the house and me with it if I hadn’t managed to bash its electronic brains out. I need to make sure there aren’t more of these things coming.”

“But —” she started.

“But nothing. Something weird’s going on here. I don’t know what it is, but I’m gonna find out.”

“Even if it kills you?”

He stared at her silently for a moment, and without a word began to tie the other end of the rope around his waist.

Chapter 6

As it turned out, entering the vortex wasn’t as difficult as Steven had feared, either physically or emotionally. When the rope had been tied tightly around his waist, he walked up to it, put his hand up near it, and tentatively reached out to touch it. It was actually a little difficult to tell just where the surface of the vortex was since it had a peculiar three dimensional depth to it, but when he finally encountered it, moving his hand gingerly toward it, he knew it. The sensation reminded him of the feeling of reaching down into a sink of lukewarm water, but one that was swirling as if it were going down a drain, constantly. It wasn’t painful, as he’d feared; it didn’t pull him in, or rip his arm off, or any of a dozen things he’d imagined might have happened. It was just a warm, flowing sensation. He reached farther in and saw first his forearm, then his elbow, then his upper arm, tinted green by the light of the vortex, take on the green shimmering quality shared by everything inside it.

He looked back. His wife was standing behind him, slightly to his left, surrounded by the children. Her eyes were wide now, concern filling her face. “Steve… are you sure about this?” she asked.

“I have to do this,” Steven replied. “I
have
to.”

“Hurry back,” she said in a whisper. “Please.”

“I will,” he replied, and took a single step forward.

Chapter 7

Disoriented. That was the word that came to mind.

It reminded Steven a great deal of the time he had broken both legs and one of his arms in a car wreck when he was a teenager. The doctors had given him morphine for the pain, and he’d had some pretty wild hallucinations. Now everything was green and swirling, and he felt as though he were a leaf being carried on the wind, or swept along by ocean waves.
Everything is green and submarine,
he thought.

He tried to look around, but it seemed as if his muscles were simply refusing to respond. The only part of his body that he could move at all was his fingers. He was reminded of when the Tin Man first showed up in
The Wizard of Oz
— rusted so badly he couldn’t even move. 

He gazed ahead, seeing only what chance and random motion brought into his field of view. Just as when he had looked into the vortex, he recognized all manner of things sweeping by — cars and trucks of all eras, animals of every type, even a house or two. People dressed in fashions from every conceivable time and locale tumbled past. Had they all been curious enough to walk into a vortex as he had? He saw what appeared to be a Roman Legionnaire, clutching his
gladius,
the Roman short sword, as if ready for a battle. Had he been swirling around inside this place for upwards of two thousand years? Did time even have any real meaning in this place?

Steven realized that he didn’t even have the ability to grasp the rope to attempt to haul himself back out of the vortex; he figured the only way that he’d ever manage to get out was when his family finally grew impatient and decided to try to pull him out. He could see the rope trailing from around his waist and leading forward, gradually fading from sight, but in the distance he saw what appeared to be an orange rip in the swirling green, which he took to be the backside of the vortex.

As he tumbled randomly, he suddenly noticed another glint of orange ahead of him. Another vortex? It seemed to be drawing closer. In fact…

The orange glow seemed to swallow him, and he realized that he had tumbled right into what seemed to be another tear in the fabric of whatever this place was — if indeed it was a place at all.

He landed head first in something white and unimaginably cold after the nothingness of the vortex.

Snow. It was snow! He was buried head first in a gigantic snowdrift.

He jerked to his knees and gasped for air. Although it hadn’t seemed as if breathing was necessary in the vortex, now he hungered for air like a drowning victim. He scrambled to his feet, glad that he had changed into his hiking boots.

He looked around, realizing that he was in the middle of nowhere — literally. There was nothing but snow and ice as far as he could see. No lights, no civilization, just blowing snow and the fading light of what seemed to be an Arctic sunset.

He knew immediately that staying here would mean freezing to death, so he made sure the rope was still secure around his waist and dove back into the vortex.

Once again, he floated in a green hurricane of confusion, unable to guide himself. He began to wonder if his family would ever get around to attempting to haul him out of here.

As he spun around, he watched the vortex he had just left recede in the distance, and wondered where the original one was that would lead back home. He tried to catch sight of the rope as it trailed away, but he found himself unable to focus on it.

A pair of figures tumbled by; two men in Civil War era uniforms, one in Union blue and the other in Rebel grey. They held rifles with bayonets affixed, like statues come to life and yet still frozen. He made eye contact with the Yankee as he floated past and realized that the eyes were alive and aware.
They’re lost in here,
he thought,
just like me.
He wondered if they had stumbled upon a vortex while in the heat of battle. Perhaps they had the misfortune of having one of the green portals rip open around them.

As he tumbled through the green space-that-wasn’t-space, he saw a myriad of things pass before his eyes. Gradually, he began to realize that he recognized some of them; a group of five World War II vintage Navy planes, torpedo bombers, which he realized must be the famous lost Flight 19 that disappeared in 1945 off the Florida coast. The planes were tumbling end over end and yet remaining in a rough formation as the entire flight passed by him.

Steven watched as hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, vehicles, animals and more passed by him. He had been floating in the green void for days, it seemed, and the longer he remained, the more paranoid he became. He felt certain that something had happened on the other side of the vortex; perhaps another BirdBrain had emerged and killed his family, or perhaps the rope had somehow been severed. Whatever the reason, he felt coldly certain that he was destined to spend all of eternity here.

Then, abruptly, he saw the rope that was around his waist go taut in front of him, and far off in the distance, in the direction that the rope led, he saw the now-familiar orange light. He saw the whorl edge closer and closer to him, over a period of what seemed like hours, and then all at once he found himself emerging, tumbling out onto the dry, spiky grass, surrounded by his family. He gulped the fresh air and stood weakly to his feet, clutching his wife close in a bear hug.

“Oh, God, I thought I was trapped in there forever!” he cried, “Why did you wait so long to pull me out? Where have you been?”

“What are you talking about?” Lynne asked incredulously. “You were only in there for
ten minutes.
”

Chapter 8

Back at the house, Steven sat on the sofa, staring into space. According to what his wife and all four kids had told him, he’d been in the vortex only ten minutes, but it seemed to him as if he’d been lost in there for at least two days. How must the Navy pilots on those torpedo bombers feel after nearly 65 years? Or the Civil War soldiers he’d seen, or the Roman? His mind reeled.

What in the hell had he stumbled across?

He went to his computer and Googled “dimensional vortex.” 441,000 hits, but almost all of them seemed to be about a computer game. He tried again with “dimensional portal,” and found that Google suggested “dimensional portals,” as well as “how to open a dimensional portal.” The first brought up 171,000 responses, some of which appeared to be about government projects that dealt with the subject. That was intriguing, but he decided to look at “how to open a dimensional portal” first.

To his surprise, there were 4.3 million hits on the topic. The first link was to a web page that described using
prana
energy, described as “the life-force that animates our existence… the purest, most basic form of energy before it is converted into molecular structure,” to open a portal on a surface such as a wall by spending 30 minutes a day visualizing it over a period of two weeks. He rolled his eyes. Clearly, this had little to do with what was out there on the hillside.

He looked at a few more entries, but none seemed scientifically sound, so he returned to the “dimensional portals” search and scanned through several of the links. He found several that made references to a “Project Galileo” and a “Project Pegasus,” but no definitive information was listed.

A search for “time portal,” once again, revealed mostly video game and science fiction references. He did find a page at the Stanford University website which appeared to be a serious discussion of the possibilities of time travel, but it was far over his head. There was also a page entitled “The Time Travel Institute,” but it didn’t seem to be a serious discussion of the matter. He read that the concept of multiple universes is mentioned many times in Puranic literature, and is part of the belief system in Hinduism. He also read interviews with Carl Sagan and Kip Thorne, but found himself no closer to understanding what he had experienced.

He finally decided to go to bed. If the thing was still there in the morning, he’d decide what to do then. Perhaps it would be gone, and his decision would be made for him. At least he hadn’t seen any more Guardians, Mini- or otherwise.

Chapter 9

The Saturday morning sunrise, filtering through the bedroom curtains, woke Steven up. He looked at the bedside clock and discovered it was nearly 8:30 am, and he generally got up at seven, even on the weekends. He sat up and looked at his wife, who was lying on her side, wrapped in blankets like a sexy burrito. He smiled and decided to let her sleep a little longer.

He went to the computer and checked his e-mail, then the news feeds; the national and world news from CNN.com and the local news on the state’s major newspaper’s site. No mention of strange green interdimensional portals having been sighted. Maybe he had dreamed the entire thing?

He stepped to the living room window and saw that the deep gouge across the yard was still there. That much, at least, had been real. He drank two cups of strong coffee, and ate a piece of toast with some butter and jelly. He went back to the computer and did a few more searches for terms related to the vortex but found nothing of interest.