The Man From Taured (17 page)

Then he was out.

***

The next morning Shaw woke up with blood dried on his face and the feeling like he had been out drinking all night. However, he also felt a strange surge of energy. As he stood and cleaned himself up and got dressed, that hungover feeling gradually vanished and he started to feel more and more of the energy. By the time he was back in his lab, he felt like he had been drinking coffee for hours and was practically vibrating with energy and excitement.

Shaw threw himself into his work. That day he worked on his food experiment. That afternoon, he got a call from Frank that the lab for his dimensional experiments was nearly done. Late in the afternoon Shaw went down to see the lab.

It was like something out of a James Bond film, or perhaps a Hammer film horror movie. There was a huge flight of stairs and a tunnel well below ground. Shaw felt a moment of claustrophobia as he drove down through the tunnel in a golf cart with a security guard driving. Then the lights came on and he soon found himself in the lab.

The lab was loaded with every bit of equipment that Shaw could want. The vibration devices were much more modern and recent and high-tech than the equipment he had tried to use days prior. There were banks of computers. There were what seemed like acres of tables and more electronic equipment. Shaw gasped at the lab when he finally saw it.

That night he slept in the new lab. He spent hours and hours arranging the vibration devices and electronics. He set up the circle the way he had done so in the smaller lab. This time the circle was bigger and the machines so much more powerful.

For weeks Shaw worked a life that revolved around Gemini labs. When he saw the sun he felt like a vampire, wanting to cringe away into the shadows. He showered in the showers provided by the company. He got to know some of the other scientists and employees who seemed to spend 24 hours a day and every day of the week. They all had the same look, that of fear of the light and wearing wrinkled clothing. It was like running into fellow zombies. All of them ran from place to place, loping along, as if afraid that someone would find out what the other was working on and might steal it. The experiments did not go well, at first. Time and again the machines vibrated themselves into pieces, or the lights would fall or the walls would start to crumble and debris would fall on everything.
There were times when he had the nightmare that he would be buried alive as the wave machines caused the entire ceiling and the tunnel leading to the lab to collapse.

Still he slept down there. Still he continued, altering the machines, rebuilding them, adjusting them. He took meticulous notes and, slowly, the machines and the vibrations began to stabilize. He was trying to find the right frequencies.

Then, one day, a Wednesday, Shaw turned on the machines and adjusted them, the air in the middle of the circle began to shimmer. Slowly, like watching a poorly filmed movie, images began to form. He could see shapes and shadows. It looked like a busy street again, with people walking past and doing their business and shopping. It was hard to tell male and female apart, and as the image began to form he carefully adjusted the wave machines.

Slowly, agonizingly, the image began to resolve itself. Shaw could smell exhaust from the automobiles. The people looked normal. He wondered if he was actually remote viewing someplace in his current time and his current dimension – sitting in one place while seeing something else from an entirely different place, his consciousness elsewhere. Then he saw that the cars looked more like spheres and domes than the boxes of his time. He also saw a street sign written in a language that looked like scratches and lines and not words.

Shaw stepped closer to the image. It was floating in mid-air, inside a circle that shimmered and wavered like it was inconsistent and fragile. Shaw could look through the image and see the other side of the circle and the back wall of the laboratory. And yet there were people walking down a street in another dimension.

Shaw adjusted the frequency and the circle began to solidify. Now, faintly, he could hear voices chattering away in a language he had never heard. There, drifting in on the air like a soft breeze, he could smell food cooking somewhere.

He opened his mouth, gaping at the image, lost, studying the faces. There were subtle differences between the people he knew in his dimension and these in the alternate world. Their noses were long and thin. Their lips were thicker. Their hands only had three fingers and a thumb.

Something exploded in one of the wave machines. There was a shower of sparks and the smell of ozone. A small fire erupted from the machine and the image wavered again, then it
flickered, and was gone.

"No!" Shaw called, running to where the portal had been. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck and arms rise as if there were still a charge in the air, but there was nothing there.

He was close. So close. If he could figure out how to stabilize and amplify things, he might be able to step into the portal. Perhaps he could cross over into that alternate world.

How would he get back?

He had to start making the devices smaller. Shaw set about trying to make the wave machines pocket-sized. If he could find a way to trigger them while in the alternate world, he could come back. He then set about trying to determine the resonant frequency of the dimension in which he lived.

The days flew by. His work on the food technology was also coming along and, before long, he had turned over his work to Gemini so that they could patent the damn thing and turn it into something from which they could make money. That was OK with Shaw as he wanted to spend his time below ground.

His skin was so pale now. He was spending so much time underground that nearly any bright light sent spears of pain rocketing through his brain. His hair was falling out and Shaw could swear that when he looked at himself in the mirror he could see his veins more clearly. None of that mattered. If he was becoming some kind of underground dweller, that was fine.

Once he determined the resonant frequency of his current dimension, Shaw went back to trying to see more dimensions. He added more machines. He brought more and more into the room and the once-too-large room was now crowded and it was hard to move around.

He saw one dimension that overlooked a green field that smelled like lilacs, but the flowers were bright red. He saw another dimension populated by more humanoids that had an insectoid faces and spoke in strange clicks. In another window he saw a world that looked like it had been completely frozen and another that was almost entirely fire. In another dimension there were horrendous creatures with green skin covered with scales and faces covered with tentacles or feelers. In another, green slime flowed everywhere and there were pus-like slug-creatures with mouths full of teeth swimming within it.

Shaw was repulsed and fascinated. He was terrified and enraptured. In each case, the image would hold for a while and then the energy required to maintain the portal proved too great on the machines and they would give out. In a few cases the portal was unstable from the beginning, always on the verge of disappearing.

After a full year of this, Shaw was exhausted. He had been living in his lab for so long that he was no longer even sure he had a house. He had not made a mortgage payment in a while. However, he felt so close. He was turning into a kind of zombie, shying away from anyone else, determined to keep his discoveries a secret. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he saw the image of one of those weird, frightened scientists that he noticed when he first moved into the lab.

But Gemini left him alone. He had not heard from Frank for months. Shaw had routinely asked for more power and generators and, in each case, his needs had been granted.

He tested his pocket-sized wave generator and it appeared to work, but since the thing was supposed to take him back to his current dimension it was hard to know for sure. Was he ready to step into another dimension only then to find out that his device would not work over there? He thought that he was. There was always risk in discovery and he had to be willing to risk his very existence to further things.

Ezekiel, Whitten and Mr. Void all seemed like very distant things and he wondered at times if he had dreamed them all.

The nights and days blended together. Shaw's clothes began to fall apart since had only brought one suitcase full of them and just washed them over and over again in a sink and hung them to dry in the lab. He often stood at the lab tables wearing his white lab coat and nothing else, surrounded by clothes lines full of drying garments.

One night, a year and a half into the experiments, he came very close to producing a stable portal. He was looking at the circle in the middle of the room and studying the people. This dimension looked very much like the one Shaw called home, only the fashions and styles reminded him more of the mid-70s. He wondered if maybe this was a relatively close dimension, perhaps a slightly newer one, a new layer to the onion, and they were just a few decades behind. There were a few changes, such as the cell phone-like devices that many people had up to their ears and at least one person sitting at a park bench that looked like he was on a laptop, but the clothing was very much like something out of the 70s.

Shaw stood back and watched and watched and watched. When he again studied the clock he realized the portal had been open for more than half an hour. He did a quick check of the machinery and it was all humming along nicely. Now his heart was beating, his entire body shivering with excitement. This was the longest and most stable any portal had been. Yes, Shaw concluded, this must be a very close, very new dimension since it was taking slightly less power to hold this portal.

Shaw grabbed his remote devices and a clipboard and ventured close to the vibrating disc in the middle of the room. He could hear people talking through the scrim of the dimensional barrier. It sounded like English, although heavily accented. He leaned his face close to the portal and could smell the exhaust from the cars, freshly cut grass, food being prepared and served by street vendors. It was all he could do not to giggle.

Did he dare?

No.

Not completely through. That would have been crazy. He might only get halfway through and the dimensional portal would close and he could end up half in the lab and the other half of his materializing on a street in some alternate dimensions, bloody, screaming in pain, bleeding out there in front of families.

His arm, however...

Shaw looked around the lab. He checked the machines again. All was running right. He wondered, for an instant, if he should call someone. Maybe he should call Whitten and tell him to get in touch with Mr. Void. Perhaps they should be here to see this. Perhaps he should call Frank and tell him and get someone else in here in case his arm was sliced off.

No.

No, this was his. He had been working for it for so long.

Shaw cleared his throat, wiped the sweat from his brow, walked up to the shimmering portal, and stuck out his hand. His fingers shook from sheer nerves as they approached the portal. He could feel energy from the disc as his fingertips got very close. It was like a mild electrical charge, and all of the hair on his body suddenly stood on end.

Slowly, so slowly, Shaw would swear that he could hear the ticking of the clock on the wall, each movement of the second hand as loud as a bass drum. His fingers approached, and then sank into the image of the other world before him.

He gasped. There was a feeling like his entire arm had fallen asleep. Shaw remembered the one time he had to go in for surgery and the anesthesiologist had told him to get ready to go to sleep and then started the medicine into his left arm. There had been an intense tingling that ran up his arm from his wrist and eventually enveloped his head and he was out. This sensation was very close. At the time of the surgery the feeling was so intense and it happened so fast, Shaw had only been able to get out one tiny word. He now repeated that word as his hand sank through the portal.

"Whoa," he whispered.

There was that intense tingling, followed by an intense coldness. For an instant it looked like his arm had been severed at mid-forearm. Then he saw his fingers appear within the other dimension. He could feel the breeze from the other side.

"I'm feeling weather in another dimension," he whispered, now wishing he had thought to turn on a voice recorder or something to document this.

Shaw wiggled his fingers. It was a street scene he was looking at, but not the main street that he had been watching before. By adjusting the machines slightly, he had discovered he could move the portal and he had chosen a slightly more isolated area when he had decided to try entering this new world.

Shaw wiggled his fingers. There was a tiny delay before he saw his hand wiggle in that other dimension. The tingling sensation in his arm was growing in intensity and the coldness was now localized, focused on his elbow, which must have still been lingering in that between-world limbo.

"Amazing," Shaw whispered.

Another breeze blew in the alternate world. The air was humid over there, as if it were the middle of summer and very hot. Perhaps the land he was looking at was tropical in nature. Then there was the feeling of water on his palm.

Shaw jumped, at first, surprised at the sensation, and then realized it had started to rain over there. He laughed, then opened and closed his fist, feeling the water between his fingers, running over his arm. He wondered if he could palm enough of the rainwater to bring it back into this dimension and study it. What kinds of things would be in the air and water over there? Would they be more polluted or less? Did they even breathe oxygen like we did?