Pinball (6 page)

In the meantime, his wife and kids had gotten up and begun to ask what his plans were. “Are you going back into that thing?” Samuel wanted to know.

“We don’t even know if it’s still there,” he replied. He explained to them how he had been unable to move while in the vortex, and that he was at a loss as to how to propel himself around inside it. He explained again how he had more or less fallen out of the other vortex into the Arctic landscape. “If I hadn’t more or less bumped into it, I’d have never seen that there are vortexes that open into other locations, and for all I know, other times.” He explained again about the people and objects he had seen that were clearly from other periods of history. “I just wish I could find a way to maneuver inside there.”

“Could you move your fingers at all?” his son asked.

“Yes, but that’s about all I could do,” he replied.

Samuel grinned. “I have an idea, Dad.”

Chapter 10

They got the large household fire extinguisher out of the coat closet, along with a belt. Samuel showed how they would strap the extinguisher to Steven’s back with the hose leading to his hand. “If you can point the nozzle in the opposite direction of where you want to go and then squeeze the trigger, maybe it’ll move you where you want to go,” he said.

“Worth a try,” Steven agreed.

They headed out to the site and found the vortex still in place. After securing the extinguisher in place, he told them to watch for the rope to move as he was propelling himself away from the portal. “It should feed out pretty quickly,” he said. “If it’s slow like it was yesterday, assume that this scheme isn’t working and go ahead and haul me back in.” They agreed and he made ready to enter the strange void again.

Samuel pulled the locking pin on the extinguisher and Steven stepped into the portal.

Immediately he was struck by how silent it was. The day before, he hadn’t really noticed; his mind was too amazed by all the other people and things he saw floating alongside him. Now the void seemed almost familiar.

Okay,
he thought.
Time to see if this will fly
. He managed to point the nozzle of the fire extinguisher toward the orange iris of the portal and gently squeezed the trigger.

White foam began to jet out, billowing into a large cloud in a manner quite unlike it did under more normal circumstances, but it seemed to be working. He moved away from the portal at what seemed to be a reasonable pace. He squeezed harder, and it disappeared into the distance.

How many of those gates could there be?
he thought, realizing that, judging by the number and variety of the occupants of the void, there might well be hundreds, or even thousands. Maybe millions.

He felt a tug at his waist and realized that he had reached the end of his rope, literally. In order to explore any further, he’d have to give up the security that the lifeline provided, but that would necessitate another return to his “home” portal, as he was unable to untie it himself.

He began to negotiate the turn toward home, when he felt the snugness of the rope around his waist suddenly go slack, and as he finished the turn toward the portal, he saw the rope seem to slither away, retreating into the shimmering orange light. He was relieved that he had the ability to move around using the fire extinguisher; apparently, when his family had started to pull him back out of the portal, his carefully tied Boy Scout knot had come loose.
Guess I didn’t remember the knot as well as I thought I did,
he thought, and began to glide back in the direction of the portal.

He thought that he had only been in the void for twenty minutes or so when he arrived back at the vortex, but when he guided himself into it, he discovered that it was dark and a crescent moon was rising in the east. His family was nowhere to be found.

He unbuckled the extinguisher, lowered it to the ground, and began walking toward home.

When he arrived and walked in to the living room, his family greeted him with relieved expressions on their faces, crowding around him, hugging him and smothering him with kisses. “What’s going on?” he asked, confused. “I was only gone for about twenty minutes… but why is it already dark?”

Lynne looked at him with wide eyes. “Honey…?” she said.

He looked at her expression and knew something strange was going on. “What is it?”

“You were gone for
two weeks
. We waited about ten minutes, like the first time, and went to pull you out, and when the rope came out with you not on the other end,” she began to bawl like a baby, “we all thought you were gone forever. We didn’t know what to do!”

He sat on the sofa once again, astonished. Clearly the flow of time in the void not only was different than in the regular world, but it varied in its flow as well.

It would take some very careful planning to figure out what to do next.

Chapter 11

Not only was Steven confronted with a bizarre situation to contend with, but two more weeks of his work time was now gone. He sat at the computer and told the tale as best he could reconstruct it, but knew that it was more important to try to crack the mystery of the portal than to worry about writing a novel. If he could successfully document the events that had occurred, he might be able to get some scientists involved. In fact, he wondered if he shouldn’t call someone from one of the major universities to come and examine the portal, as well as wondering why no one else had noticed its existence. Of course, it
was
pretty much in the middle of nowhere, in rural Montana, for God’s sake, but still, it was only few miles from one of the main highways. You would think that someone would have seen the green glow in the distance in the middle of the night. It was fairly bright, and light planes flew in and out of the area all the time at the little airfield.

It must just mean that I’m the one who’s destined to deal with this thing, he thought.

Over the next week or so he worked on ideas as to how he could maneuver around in the void. Everything he came up with ended up presenting more problems than it solved. Samuel suggested that he could use a jetpack such as had been tested a number of times over the years. He began to research these devices and found that a number of different attempts had been made to create a usable unit, beginning with the Germans in World War II. The German unit used Schmidt pulse jet tubes; later versions used compressed gases of various sorts such as nitrogen or hydrogen peroxide. He ultimately determined that none of the jetpacks designed to work in Earth gravity would be suitable as they had far too much power; something more along the lines of what astronauts use to maneuver in zero-G would be more practical, but as he had no connections at NASA, obtaining such a unit was quite beyond the realm of possibility.

In the end, it turned out that the solution was both simple and, in its own way, rather elegant. Steven went to the local electronics supply dealer and bought a case of canned compressed air — the type that is used to clean inside computer cases.

On a cold and clear mid-December morning, they made the trek up the hill to the site of the portal (he had been checking it daily to make sure it was still there as well as to see if there was any change in its status) and, equipped with a backpack full of food and eight extra cans of air, a can rubber banded to each wrist plus a can in each hand, Steven stepped into the portal without the benefit of a rope tether, praying silently that this was not the last time he would ever see his family.

Chapter 12

The disorientation was not so severe now.
Perhaps I’m getting used to this place… if it
is
a place,
Steven thought. He even thought he had a little more control of his muscles. Yes, it was true, he could bend his elbows, if only slightly. That would help with his maneuverability, though. He knew there was no way he could retrieve additional cans of air out of his backpack, but the extras attached to his wrist would be accessible. He had read that when the astronauts used their jetpacks in space, it took only tiny jets of propellant to move them around; he hoped to find that this was also the case here, so that he could make one can of air go a long way.
Only one way to find out,
he thought, and squeezed a brief burst of air from the can in his right hand.

There was a rather satisfying pushing sensation and he moved away from the portal, making a mental note of the specific items that seemed to be clustered around it: a black and white Holstein cow, an abandoned rowboat and some fishing tackle which he assumed had spilled out of the boat when it entered the portal.

He watched the vortex’s orange glow fade as it receded into the distance, and he used the jets of air to turn himself so that he could see in the direction he was traveling. Soon he saw another vortex nearby and glided toward it.
I’m getting the hang of this,
he thought. He slowed himself as he approached and peered into it, trying to determine whether it was the wintry hell he’d stumbled upon the first time he’d entered the void. Instead, he saw verdant green pastures and thick forests. He guided himself toward it head first and emerged in…

…well, he’d thought to call it paradise, but it was paradise with a twist.

The grass and trees were a lush green, but such a brilliant hue that it was almost unnatural. They almost glowed with an eerie light. However, that wasn’t the oddest thing about this place. The sky was a deep violet color and the shadows that fell from the trees, rocks and even his own body were multiple and multi-shaded. He looked into the sky and realized there were three suns in the sky, one near what he took to be the western horizon, which was about the size and brightness of the Earth’s sun, and two others that were close to each other, near the zenith; one of those was a brilliant orange and about half the normal diameter, while the other was a blinding white circle half as big as that. The portal he’d chosen apparently had taken him, not just to another planet, but another star system entirely, and a
triple
star system at that. He realized his mouth was agape.

I’m just lucky the atmosphere here is even breathable,
he realized, and on further reflection decided that there probably wasn’t as much oxygen here as on Earth, because he was becoming decidedly light-headed.
I had better get back into the portal,
he reasoned,
but I don’t want to leave. I’m the first human to ever set foot on another planet. Or maybe not.

At last his increasing narcosis provided the motivation to dive back into the vortex, and he explored further than he had ever ventured. After what seemed to him like thirty minutes — he wondered whether it was three minutes or three years back home — he found another portal and peered into it. The view sent chills up his spine, for what he saw was nothing but empty space, a brilliant star cluster taking up most of his field of vision. If he were to have gone through it, undoubtedly he’d have died in deep space like an astronaut with a leak in his spacesuit. He carefully backed away from the portal and looked for another.

It was nearly an hour later when he found another of the orange rifts. This time, what he saw was a landscape that looked as inviting as anything he’d ever seen in his life, and there were buildings as well — wooden structures that seemed to him to resemble the sort of construction you saw in towns in the Old West — and people! They appeared to be human, and were dressed in a nondescript style that defied his attempts to determine what time period they were from. He hoped they wouldn’t shoot him, hang him, or burn him at the stake. He gently jetted forward through the portal.

Chapter 13

Steven stepped out onto a dusty, ruggedly beautiful landscape which was dotted with trees. He realized that this must also be another planet, because the sky was a rose pink, while the trees had leaves that looked like nothing he’d seen before, with a sort of blue-green, almost plastic looking foliage. The people looked human enough, however.

He was wondering how he would communicate with them when one of them, a red-cheeked, bald man who appeared to be about 70 with a fringe of longish silver hair around the back of his head, saw him and came walking down the dirt road with a huge smile on his weathered face. He was dressed in what seemed to be a sort of mustard-colored coverall and a pair of black boots.

Steven couldn’t keep the shock from showing on his face when the man raised his hand and shouted, “Welcome, traveler!”

“You speak English,” he said incredulously as the man approached.

“Indeed,” said the stranger, “and it is fortunate that you do as well. It is
so
much easier that way.”

“You don’t seem at all surprised to see me,” Steven said. “Do you often have visitors climb out of a hole in the fabric of space?”

“Oh, that Gate has been there for decades,” the man said with a smile, “and we’ve had hundreds of people come through it. Some stay with us, some go. Most everyone here in Centra arrived through it.”

“Centra?”

“”Yes, we call it that because this place seems to be a sort of crossroads — I think you might use the expression ‘Grand Central Station’ — for Gaters.”

“What are Gaters?” Steven asked curiously.

“Gaters is our term for those who travel through the Gatespace. Oh, but where are my manners? I have not properly welcomed you and I am afraid that I am leaving you increasingly curious with every word I utter. Come along, and we’ll get you some food and drink and I’ll be happy to let you quiz me — pick my brain, I think you might say? For I know you must be full of questions.”

The man led him into the village, where they encountered a dozen or so other people on the street, all of whom were as cordial and welcoming as the silver-haired man. They came to a large building with a double set of doors and he led Steven inside.

“This is our inn,” the man said. “Please, make yourself comfortable and I’ll get you something to eat and drink.”