Twistor (25 page)

Jeffrey walked over to the bench and examined all three objects closely. Melissa came to stand protectively beside him. David knew that despite Elizabeth's efforts to discourage the tendency, Jeff was very interested in guns. But he studied the cut-off hand first. 'Yuck!' Jeff said finally, rendering his decision. That hand is real yucky.' Next Jeff studied the gun without touching it. Melissa cautioned him to leave the gun alone.

'Guns are dangerous,' David commented. They mostly hurt their owners and their friends and families. But we may need this gun. I'm very glad that I have it and know how to use it.' He placed the gun, its clip, and the plastic-wrapped bundle on the top shelf of the gray cabinet. Later he'd bury the hand in the woods.

'
I think we should talk now,' David told the children. He coaxed Melissa and Jeff to a spot in the daylight. He pointed to the cabinet and said in a serious voice, That hand and the gun belonged to one of the men who came into the lab while you were hiding there. They came to steal our equipment. One of them had a gun. He was pointing it at me and threatening to shoot me. When we were moved here, he must have had his hand inside the twistor field. So the field brought his hand along and left the rest of him behind. I guess it cut his hand off. It's bad luck for him that he was hurt, but he shouldn't have been pointing that gun at me.'

Jeff nodded his head solemnly, agreeing that justice had been done. Melissa had recovered from her fright and looked interested.

'
Now,' said David, 'I want you both to see where we are, and then we'll talk some more.' He moved a box near the new door so that first Melissa and then Jeff could stand high enough to look out the hole and view their new home. It was an amazing change from the university campus.

There
was a rich, familiar yet unfamiliar forest smell: green growing things and composted leaves with just a hint of spice. As far as one could see through the woodland dimness, giant trees marched into the distance. They were like no trees David had ever seen. The trunks resembled those of evergreens but were a lighter shade of brown. They had dark green leaves that appeared feathery and club-shaped, more like, leaves of a water plant than of evergreen. The ground was covered by an orange-brown carpet of dried leaves, and here and there was the green of low brush. Looking upward, one saw more green than blue, for an enveloping canopy of feathery leaves blocked all but a few glimpses of sky. Unfamiliar birdcalls sounded from above, and there was also the keening sound of wind in branches.

The children were very quiet. David sat down on the now-illuminated concrete floor and leaned back against the smooth hollow of the wall, and the children joined him. He considered how the children must be feeling about now. They seemed to be watching him for a clue as to how to behave. 'Melissa, Jeff,' he said finally, 'we're in a lot of trouble. We need to think and talk about it.'

'First question: Where are we? We're still in my lab, in a way, but at the same time we're very far away from where we were. We're not in Seattle anymore. We're in a place where nobody has ever been before. We're very far from our friends and your family.

'So we'll need to get back. Trouble is, right now I don't know how to get us back. But don't worry about that, I'll find a way.' David looked down at the children beside him to see how they were reacting.

'What happened?' Melissa asked. 'Why can't we go home?' She looked bewildered.

'That equipment over there is a twistor machine. Vickie and I have been working on it for the last few months. We discovered that it can move things from our world to this one. Those men that came were trying to steal the
machine.
I had decided to turn it on so they wouldn't be able to steal it. It was set to send itself where they couldn't get it. But we were too close to it when it moved itself, so it moved us here too. Wherever "here" is.

This,' David gestured toward the ceiling and walls, 'is a hole in a very big tree, in the middle of a forest full of other big trees. The wood here,' he knocked the curving wall with his knuckles, 'is the inner wood of the tree. We have a sort of treehouse to live in. There are animals here; the green bird on the branch tells us that much. But with our treehouse, we should be safe from animals and well protected from the weather.

'We're about thirty feet above the ground. If any of us fell from here, we'd be killed or badly hurt. Our first job is to make a safe way for getting down to the ground. I'm going to put together a sort of rope ladder using that coil of big wire over there. When we're outside we'll have to look around and see what we can find. We don't have much food or the other things that we're going to need, like water and warm clothes. We don't even have a bathroom.'

Jeff giggled, then looked serious, then worried.

'Don't worry, Jeff,' said David. 'We'll make one.'

Melissa asked, 'David, how can we be in your lab and far away in a new place at the same time? Shouldn't we be either in one place or the other?'

'Melissa, I can't explain that too well,' said David, 'because I don't completely understand it myself. But there are other universes, shadow universes, places that are "parallel" to ours, lying next to each other like the pages of a book. This place is on one page, the place we came from is on another page, and there are still other pages lying very close by. But they're in a direction we can't turn, so we never see them. The twistor machine makes a kind of bubble, and everything inside the bubble is turned in that extra direction and gets swapped from one page to another. Anything inside the bubble
on
our page is exchanged with whatever was in the same place on the other page. It's like one of those rotating theater stages that pivots, moving one set in front of the audience while it moves another set away. Can you visualize that?'

Melissa frowned and then nodded.

'Just before those men came in, I'd been making some measurements. I had the twistor field set to make a very big bubble, the size of those curving walls you see over there. Those settings were still in the computer when the twistor transition came, so the part of the laboratory that was inside the bubble was rotated here. Most of the lab must be filled with a giant wooden ball right now!'

Jeff laughed at the idea, but then looked around with a worried expression, wrinkled his nose, and asked, 'Where are we gonna sleep, David?'

David laughed, That, at least, is no problem, Jeff. There's a folding cot and two sleeping bags in the cabinet, mine and Vickie's. We keep them here for when we have to watch an experiment all night. You and Melissa can share the cot and Vickie's bag. I'll make myself a mattress out of some of that cryostat insulation over there.'

David stood and walked to the hole. 'Our first problem is that we've got to make the hole bigger and smoother so we can get out more easily. Then I'll drop some wire down as a climbing rope and climb down. I'll find some small trees or big fallen branches. There's a saw wire in the toolbox, so I can cut them up as rungs for the ladder. Then we can all get up and down easily. We can pull the ladder up at night for safety, like a drawbridge at a castle.'

Jeff looked out. 'David,' he said, 'that big green bird's still out there. Maybe you could shoot it with the gun, so we'd have more to eat.'

'No!' Melissa objected. 'Maybe it's a nice bird; maybe we can feed it.'

David looked speculatively at the green bird, still picking at the branch. 'No, Jeff,' he said, 'we're not that
desperate
for food. Not yet. We don't understand anything about this place, and we can't start by killing things at our doorstep. That bird seems to be eating something on the branch, maybe insects that are attacking the tree. Killing it might indirectly injure the tree. And besides, the gun shoots explosive bullets. It'd blow that bird into little pieces. There wouldn't be enough of it left to make a good bite.'

'
Oh,' Jeff said, 'I wouldn't wanna do that!' Melissa smiled.

'
We should think of ourselves as explorers, not hunters,' David continued. 'This is a whole new world where no one has ever been before. We will have to find food and water and firewood as soon as we can, but we have to be very observant and very careful. There may be dangerous animals here. Or snakes. Or stinging insects. Or poisonous plants. We've no idea what we've gotten ourselves into. We shouldn't disturb things until we understand them. We're the pioneers. Since we've discovered this world, we get to explore it. But you must always remember, explorers have to be very careful. OK?'

Melissa and Jeff nodded solemnly. Then Jeff brightened. 'David, can we put up a flag, like real explorers? Like those old-time astronaut guys did on the moon?'

'Hey, that's a great idea!' said David, winking at Melissa. 'I've got some computer paper and colored pens right here. You can make us a flag, and we can claim the territory! I'll take your picture, Jeff, and when we get back you'll be on television like Neil Armstrong. And Melissa, I want you to go to the cabinet and get out the orange sleeping bag and the aluminum cot. Do you know how to set up a folding cot? Good. Find a nice spot where you two can bed down tonight. OK?' Jeff, a happy smile on his face, immediately set to work gathering materials for the flag, while Melissa rummaged in the cabinet.

David selected a grease pencil from the desk drawer and began to trace a rectangle extending downward from
the
hole he had made. Their new door wasn't going to be pretty, but it would allow them to climb outside. Then the work of organizing their survival would really begin.

Martin Pierce, seated at his broad desk before the flat screen of his terminal, stared in disbelief at the newly decrypted message from Puget Sound Reference Service. The incompetent fools! The simple scheme for getting the twistor apparatus from Saxon's laboratory with 'movers' who arrived a bit ahead of schedule had seemed foolproof, a potentially huge gain with very little downside.

But now the simple operation had been hideously transformed into a scandal involving the disappearance and apparent kidnapping or murder of three people, two of them small children. His agents had left blood everywhere, and a police investigation was in progress. Pierce considered the implications. With children missing and evidence of violence, the FBI would certainly be called in, and nosy reporters would not be far behind. Megalith's isolation from this botched operation must be preserved. If this problem wasn't controlled and cauterized immediately the corporation could be discredited or destroyed, its stocks and bonds made worthless, its corporate officers sent to prison.

Professor Allan D. Saxon was the key. This morning Saxon and his lawyer had done everything they could to generate confusion and delay any signing of agreements. It appeared that Allan Saxon, using some clever ruse that Pierce had not yet penetrated, had managed to thwart Pierce's plans to obtain the twistor apparatus, even while he sat haggling over contract details with the lawyers. He was a tricky, devious son of a bitch.

Saxon must now be hiding the twistor apparatus somewhere, and, as the leader of the research team that had discovered the twistor effect, he knew how to exploit it. And he knew enough to implicate Pierce and Megalith in
this
mess. If Saxon could be removed from the picture, the whole thing would blow over in a month or so. If Saxon could be made to reveal the present location of the twistor apparatus and provide the details of how it worked, Pierce might yet turn a tidy profit from this operation. But if the bastard told all that he knew to the FBI . . .

Pierce reached for the telephone and dialed Megalith Corporate Security. In a few minutes he was able to determine that Saxon and his lawyer had already boarded a plane to Seattle, out of immediate reach. Pierce was going to have to take charge of this himself.

He consulted his schedule for the rest of the afternoon and tomorrow. Nothing that couldn't be postponed. He gave Darlene details of how to rearrange his schedule. It was now after four, but if he moved fast . . . He ordered the corporate jet readied and a flight plan filed for a San Francisco-to-Seattle flight to take off at 6.30 P.M. He spent the next twenty minutes preparing, encrypting, and transmitting a set of instructions to PSRS. Then he extracted a prepacked tan leather suitcase from an upper shelf of his closet and headed for the door. It was going to be a long day.

Standing beside Melissa on the mat of oddly shaped orange leaves, David inhaled the strange smells of the forest. He looked up along the massive rounded wall of the tree trunk to his recent handiwork. The crude ladder, two lengths of heavy electrician's wire supporting rough wooden rungs, snaked out of the dark hole ten meters above them and cascaded down the wall of light brown bark to their feet.

The bark had a scale pattern that suggested a colossal brown fish, but the scales projected upward instead of downward. That arrangement perhaps helped to collect rainwater and nutrients during rainstorms. Whatever the purpose of the bark structure, it would make the big trees
easier
to climb. He frowned. Easier for large animals to climb, too . . .

The large green bird – David was beginning to regard it as the owner of this tree – was now moving along the upthrust bark of the trunk. It grasped the bark with the talons of its fore and hind feet, and it probed and pecked with its beak into the cupped recesses of the upthrust scales, collecting whatever was there and occasionally tilting its head backward to swallow. David noticed similar green birds on the other trees nearby, but never more than one per tree.
Treebirds,
he thought, local property owners.

He walked to the foot of the ladder and glanced at his watch. It was now four-thirty. The light wouldn't last much longer. He fitted a blank ROM cartridge into the side of the little CCD camera, set it for sequential pictures at tenth-of-a-second intervals, and sighted upward, taking a quick shot of their green treebird at work.

Jeff emerged from the hole, his new-made flag gripped in his teeth, and David started the camera again. Jeff turned to wave triumphantly, causing David to catch his breath, and then began to climb down the ladder. The rapid descent was executed with a carefree skill probably acquired on playground slides and climbers. When he reached the ground, he turned and looked inquiringly at David. David pointed to a small patch of ground that had been cleared of leaves and where the soil was already loosened.