The next great sci - fi novel to spew forth from our favorite author is an Outer Limits project due for release in September 2003. ( he actually submitted TWO novels for this series) I have had the rare privilage of getting a sneak peek at said novel, and have posted it below for your perusal. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, and after reading it, I'm sure you'll agree the wait will definately be worth it...
Dark Matters - The Outer Limits 
When I was a kid, my stable, sensible daily world was split open right down to
the roots, like a lightning-blasted tree, when I learned I had a stepbrother from my father's
previous marriage. It was so stunning to think that my father had ever had a wife and a
son whom he had loved, and a life long before my mother and I came into the picture.
He'd had a similar life to the one we all lived, presumably just as happy, for the most part.
It was like ours... but it wasn't ours.
And I suppose that's how the people of earth must have felt when they learned man
was not the only lifeform in the universe, like finding out God had been married before.
SETI protocol was this: First, confirm that the signal is of extra-terrestrial origin.
Second, release this information immediately to the whole world.
We did, but I always wondered if it was a mistake. The number of reported
abductions following our announcement spiked dramatically, until it seemed as if every
other person on the planet had been for a joy-ride aboard the mother ship. I mentioned
to Stefano they might want to think about carpooling.
I was sought out by all the world media for some kind of pithy insight, only
because I was the man in the chair that night and accepted the charges when ET finally
decided to phone home. It would have been better for all of us if the call had ended with
a triumphant "Baba-Booey! Howard Stern rules!"
My entire life was put under a neutron microscope and vivisected, looking for
the slightest sign that I had simply fabricated the entire incident, message and all, for the
fame and notoriety it brought me.
It was a bit of an intoxicant, at first, for the guy who lost by six votes out of ten
for the post of President of Mathemagicians back in high school, who was a sterling
member of the AV Club and knew all of the words to every Monty Python routine, but
that same sudden fame also made me a lightning rod for every nutcase on the west coast --
hell, the whole western hemisphere.
People called my home at all hours of the day or night, not just the media, but the
general public as well, wanting to know all about the message, which had not yet been
deciphered, and also accusing me of withholding information for my own evil ends when I
patiently told them, yet again, I didn't have any idea what the message said.
The calls became threatening, hostile, ominous, finally morphing seamlessly into
death threats for me and my family if I didn't reveal what was encrypted on that tape. I
had our telephone number changed several times, and made private, but it made no
difference, for the calls resumed almost without interruption. I thought I recognized
one of the threatening voices as belonging to the customer service representative who
helped me change my number in the first place. "This call may be monitored or recorded
for quality control," I told her, and she hung up.
I unplugged the phones, but caravans of believers and non-believers camped
outside our home. They followed my family everywhere: to work, to the store, to
school, as if we were about to make some interstellar drop and pick up a few more
alien secrets that we, for our own twisted reasons, refused to let the rest of the world in
on.
"Put like that," I told Sara, "I don't trust us very much, either."
"This isn't some Monty Python joke!" she snapped, pulling the living room
curtains closed against the Woodstock-like scene on our front lawn. I watched them,
standing there or sitting on their cheap, plastic folding lawn furniture, faces turned toward
our house, our window, us, and I thought of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead,
descending on the isolated Pennsylvania farm house.
Johnny's got the keys, I thought, but had the rare good sense not to say aloud.
Sara was upset enough.
"These people are -- "
"Lost," I finished for her. "It's a big universe and they've lost their way in it."
"Then let them call frikkin Triple-A," she almost shouted.
"Right now," I said, standing in the darkened living room and pulling back the
thick drape with my index finger; they were still out there, still staring at the curtained
window like expectant theater-goers, waiting for the show to begin; "I'm afraid that's me."
The next morning, I sent Sara and Vonnie to stay with her mother, but it did
no good; the believers and non-believers followed them there, and by the next day, my
wife and daughter returned to me.
It was on the third morning of the eleventh week that I cracked the code, and I felt
like a fool that it had taken me that long. It wasn't a language at all, but a schematic
buried within the radio wave. A schematic of a portal, and the rough equivalent of a man
-- or something man-shaped -- in the center of the jumpgate. It was painfully obvious
when I put the graphics on my monitor as a 3-D layer, instead of trying to read the many
codes individually.
Once-indecipherable symbols resolved themselves as circuitry, equations, Mu, and
amplitude. It had all been carefuly calibrated to earthly specifications. Our friends in the
far corner of Alpha Centauri -- our stepbrothers -- were taking no chances.
I should have remembered what happened the first time I met my real stepbrother;
he gave me an atomic wedgie, broke my Aurora Glow-in-the-Dark Godzilla model kit,
and kicked the crap out of me. It was no easier on the firstborn, I realized, to know there
was another family out there that had your father when you no longer did. But at least he
was family.
"What is it?" Stefano asked, peering over my shoulder at the computer screen. I
clicked the mouse and rotated the image.
"Doorway," I offered. "Matter transporter, maybe?"
Stefano studied the diagram so long without speaking that I thought he must have
left my work station without a sound, and when he finally did speak, it startled me. "I
don't think so," he muttered to himself.
"Why do you say that?"
He tapped his finger on the screen. "This is designed for receiving, not sending.
It's a one-way jump, whatever it is."
"Again, meaning... what?"
He tugged thoughtfully on his lower lip. "It's the other end of a tunnel," he said.
"Think of this as an interstellar Chunnel, the French and English underground tube
connecting one country with another."
"Okay, but I'd prefer to think of us as the English."
"Francophobe," he admonished.
"True, but in my defense, they revere Jerry Lewis."
"Ah. Say no more."
I studied the diagrams, seeing now what Stefano had already spotted as a potential
design flaw. "What's the power source?"
"Right here," he said, pointing. "Uranium. But that's not the real source of power.
It's just meant to turn on this end of the tunnel. Whatever powers the jumpgate is on the
other side. Their side."
That gave me an uneasy feeling, and I didn't know why, exactly. But the curious
kid in me, the one who had thrilled to every new issue of Scientific American and
Popular Mechanics was more excited than alarmed.
Dumbass.
"Their technology obviously has a power-source we haven't discovered yet -- "
"Then why not include it in their schematics?" Stefano pointed out. "Why not
share it with us?"
"Maybe it's some source of energy we don't even have on the planet."
"What, Dilithium crystals?"
I ignored the alarm bells that were going off in my head, and continued, "Whatever
opens the gate on their end must be incredibly powerful, probably dangerous... black hole
technology... they've found a way to harness wormholes."
"That's what bothers me about this whole thing," Stefano said. I looked up at him,
and saw genuine worry on his face. On Stefano, it was jarringly out of place, as if
someone had decided to belch the National Anthem at the start of a baseball game. "We
don't have that same advantage."
I looked at him, but said nothing.
"Meaning," he said, but he was only stating what we both knew; "that, whatever
comes through that gate is here to stay."
Of course Stefano was right, and I suppose the aliens had been shrewd enough to
imagine a Stefano, and find a way around him. Greed, of course. It was simple greed, in
the end. It wasn't quite that old catechism, "For the want of a nail, the kingdom was
lost," but more like, "For the want of a nail that the rest of the world might get instead of
us" that doomed us.
The aliens had likewise beamed the same jumpgate schematics to anyone willing to
lend a sympathetic ear; Japan, Germany, China, Russia, England, even Time Warner/AOL
claimed to have the same information, but so far, only we had actually cracked the code.
But, what one man can learn, another man can also learn, and the thought of another
country receiving the benefits of making first contact was enough to overcome any
reservations voiced by the Stefanos of the world.
The edict to proceed came down straight from the White House.
Someone -- Stefano again -- suggested we build the jumpgate away from the
civilian sector in case whatever was waiting to step across the four-plus lightyear threshold
lived in an atmosphere of deadly microbes and viruses. I thought that unlikely, because our
ET pen-pals obviously knew something about humankind, knew we didn't have the kind of
power it would take to create a jumpgate to their planet, which should have made us wonder
how they knew these things. But we were being pressed to finish the gate before the other
world players finished theirs, and we had no time to wonder.
Once we commited to building the gate, it didn't take long for the curious to find
out where we were. The site, in the middle of Fort Bragg's proving grounds, was fenced
and guarded, but the immediate territory surrounding the project was anybody's game. The
circus set up its tents on the perimeter, far enough away to render the NO TRESPASSING!
signs impotent, near enough to be looking over our shoulders.
It was a seller's market just outside the gates: Winnebagoes with bright awnings
unfurled, shading the occupants and the wares they unselfconsciously hawked. Self-
published books with several typos and misspellings, with covers made of a material
somewhere between cardboard and flashpaper. The contents of said book being invariably
one man's -- or woman's; only the gender changed, the story itself was predictably the
same -- encounter with extra-terrestrial visitors, and the message of peace (or doom; this
was about the only point on which the books varied, all depending on the author's world-
view) to their guest. What message? Well, you'll just have to buy the book if you want to
find that out.
Another cottage industry was like a bad mix of sci-fi and tchotchke, oil paintings of
aliens on black velvet. All that was missing was the bad sideburns and petulant sneer and
Hey! Presto! ET Elvis! And now that I think about it, one of the books did mention
something about Elvis being an alien visitor sent to earth to spread love and peace through
his music, but we weren't ready yet, so he was taken back to the stars, to wait patiently
until we were. Thankyuh.
I grudgingly had to admire that inspired cross-polination of conspiracies, and the
man who could sell the book for $24.95 (for just $2 more, the author would sign and
personalize it for you) with a totally straight face.
Another starving artist was selling signed lithographs of otherworldly landscapes
to which his abductors had taken him. The talent behind the paintings was meager, and
the landscapes looked to be mostly of the Grand Canyon, with a couple of moons thrown
into a red sky, and I really think some of the cityscapes were lifted right out of The
Jetsons.
T-shirts and caps abounded, the simplest of them bearing the date 7/4/47, the date
of the supposed Roswell crash, to the more obvious message shirts: MY PARENTS
WERE ABDUCTED BY ALIENS AND TAKEN TO ALPHA CENTAURI AND ALL I
GOT WAS THIS LOUSY ANAL PROBE, or STAR-CHILD ON BOARD, to iron-on
transfers of aliens. I thought I detected the work of my ETs on black velvet artist here,
but I couldn't prove it.
Rows of videotapes sat in long-boxes, the tapes all shot on home video, usually
the subject being yet another abductee droning flatly on about the experience, the tedium
broken up occasionally by a couple of location shots in the woods or at the lake or on a
city rooftop, the site where the purported contact/abduction occurred. Sometimes the
interviewee would focus the camera on some physical abnormality -- a lump or a scar --
allegedly the place of a subdural implant. Often, the camera would linger on parts of the
body so long as to verge on pornographic.
Audio tapes, CDs, antennae, pointy-ears, Glo-Sticks, even Mom's Famous Out of
This World Chocolate Chip Cookies (I asked Mom about this and she said the aliens were
particularly fond of her Tollhouse cookies) were all for sale here.
Too many freaks, not enough circuses.
I had to drive through the thick of this every day, on my way to the jumpgate site,
and back through it again on my way out. At first, I laughed at these people and
mocked their beliefs, but I slowly came to the realization we were all the walking
wounded, lost, alone, just wanting someone to listen. But then I remembered the
crystal radio set my brother had helped me build when we were kids, and how I would
sit for hours in front of that primitive apparatus, broadcasting messages, waiting for
an answer that seldom came, and if it did, it was usually so static-garbled it was
impossible to tell if the message had been meant for me, or if I had just picked up
a CB signal from some trucker passing through our town on the interstate.
These people weren't so hard to understand, really; after all, I'd been doing the same thing
all my life, until at last I sent a message out into the universe and hoped someone would
listen.
It turned out Japan had broken the code at about the same time we did, and
were well under way with their own jumpgate. Russia and China had both figured it out
the same day.
Work efforts on our own gate re-doubled, one crew working all day, another crew
working all night under the harsh glare of deep-sea light towers, the equivalent of 35.000
household lights, the same kind of lights Bob Ballard used to study the wreckage of the
Titanic two-and-a-half miles down in her dark, watery grave at the bottom of the world.
We were in a race to prove to the aliens that we were the country most deserving
to receive their benediction, like people in the audience trying to be chosen as contestants at
a game show.
"Do you ever feel that maybe, just supposing," Stefano looked up from his
tabletop of circuits, a tangle of microfilaments around his brow like a crown, "that we've
bitten off more than we can chew here?"
I nodded, looking out across the campgounds, at the rising, incomplete skeletal
ring of the jumpgate; it described an uneven, massive capital "U". It looked like the ribs of
some giant Technosaur jutting out of the ground, or two vast and trunkless legs,
look upon my works and despair.
"Yeah," I admitted. "I'm sure we did."
"So... what do we do?"
I shrugged. "Learn to chew bigger."
The stock market couldn't decide what to make of the impending contact with an
alien culture, so it fluctuated drunkenly, opening high, closing low, then reversing the
trend the next day. Finally, everyone decided to shift their fortunes to technology-based
industries, gambling our visitors would share some of their good science with us. Others,
not quite so sure of the aliens' intentions, invested heavily in gold.
Churches, synagogues and mosques all over the world either fluorished or went
bust. People sought guidance, or forgiveness, and many thought the aliens were secretly
angels and these were the end times, ushered in by man's own hubris.
Got that in one.
New religions sprung up, of course, dedicated to the jumpgate; their symbol was
the vaguely man-like form standing in the portal, just as I'd first seen it when I overlaid the
graphics. "Does that make you John the Baptist?" Stefano asked me.
I hoped not. That gig didn't end too well for John, as i recalled.
Camera crews followed us everywhere, recording everything we did, and why not?
It wasn't as if we were the only nation given the jumpgate technology. It was almost as
common as eyelashes at this point. CNN, PBS and the BBC filmed our every moment,
the good and the bad, and I thought I finally had a pretty fair idea of how the Beatles must
have felt during the filming of "Let it Be."
I wish our little group had had a Yoko to break us up. Several times I looked at
the jumpgate as it approached completion, like a circle about to close, the jaws of a trap
about to snap shut, and I wondered what the hell we were doing. But even if I could
halt the project somehow, there was no turning back. The N'lani had seen to that.
Whatever else they did or didn't know about us, they had unerringly zeroed in
on the one thing that is a global constant: the heart of man is easily corrupted. By
sending us all the same schematics, through Mutually Assured Construction, they had
guaranteed we'd leave the light on and the door unlocked for them.
My own little Felini movie, the road show of Amacord, still cluttered my end
of the cul-de-sac outside our home. They were loyal, I had to give them that; they
didn't just pull up stakes (if you could even do that to a house with hubcaps), and
migrate with the rest of the sideshow out to the desert. No, by God. These were
my freaks, and so they remained faithful to me, although I suspected I had probably
lost a few here, gained a few others there.
Sara's car was in the carport when I arrived home for my two days off, so I had to
park in the driveway. As soon as I stepped out, briefcase in hand, I automatically locked
the door. The moment I turned away from the car, the man was there.
He might have been standing in the shadows among the tall bushes flanking the
house, just waiting for me to return home, or perhaps he had been standing in that same
spot all along and I simply hadn't noticed. My mind may have been focused on any
number of things, but the fact is, I had gotten used to seeing people I didn't know
standing about, and I had paid this one too little attention. Whatever the reason, as
soon as he stepped close to me and spoke, I knew this was the one man I should
have been looking out for, even if I hadn't known who it might be.
"Devil," he said, softly. "Judas."
My mouth went dry as a ball of dirt. For a moment, I couldn't speak, because
even in this dim, purple evening light, I could see the high, whirling, twirling light of
madness in his eyes, burning as brightly as a gas flame.
I swallowed -- twice -- my throat making a dry, clicking sound, like dice rattling in
a gambler's hand, or the sound of a hammer being cocked on a pistol. I knew just what
that sounded like, because I'd heard it the moment the man with the gas-flame eyes
stepped up to me and called me a devil. He had a .38 leveled at my stomach. I wish I
could tell you I was brave at that moment, but I felt tears welling up, threatening to spill
down my cheeks; tears of helplessness, of anger, and fear. That, most of all. My wife and
daughter were just on the other side of the wall, not knowing I was home, or aware I was
about to be shot dead not ten feet away from where they sat, watching television.
I could hear the sound of Jerry, Kramer, and George, through the slightly-opened
window.
I became acutely aware of everything in that moment: a bead of sweat as it
trickled its way down the mastoid behind my left ear; how my entire body was covered
with an oily fear-sweat; the sound of Langdon Donahue, poor nerd that he was, calling for
his dog, Axel; the sound of a bird somewhere twittering something that sounded vaguely
like "Che-bur-gah," and I remembered my dad telling me once that this was the cry of the
rare Cheeseburger Bird.
I could smell fresh-cut grass, and the aroma of red beans and rice simmering on the
stove of one of the little nearby campers.
I could see the unnaturally huge barrel of the gun leveled at me, as wide around as
a bear cave, the small tufts of black hair speckling my assailant's trigger finger, and his fat,
pouty, almost feminine mouth, and the almost obscene way his tongue, fat as a thumb,
poked between his lips.
"Whatever you want -- " I tried to speak, my tongue as thick as shoe-leather.
Inside, from the television, a burst of laughter floated out, lending this whole surreal scene
even more of a sense of unreality. I was about to take a gutshot that would blow my
intestines and most of my left kidney out a hole in my back, all over the driver's side of
my car. "Do you want me to beg?" I asked. "Fine. I want to live. I want more than
anything to see my daughter grow up and have kids of her -- "
"Shut up!" he snapped, gun barrel weaving and wavering. There wasn't much
doubt I was going to get shot, it just didn't seem such a sure thing anymore that it would
kill me outright. "Just... shut up!"
I thought it was a bigger risk not to talk to the man with the gas-flame eyes,
because in that quiet, I knew -- I didn't just suspect, I knew -- he'd listen to his own inner
voices and find the resolve to jerk back on the trigger, just the way Gary Yokum had listened
to his own set of voices years earlier.. As long as I could keep him focused on me, I thought
I could talk my way out of this, or at least keep him occupied until someone in the circus
saw what was happening and dialed 911. But I also thought of all those old, wild animal
documentaries, where the lion brought down a gazelle or an alligator snapped up a heron w
while the cameraman just kept filming. Frikkin' Darwinism.
I let a slow, trickling breath out of my chest, like a balloonist releasing hot air to
keep from rising too high, and asked, "What's this about? What have I done to you?
What can I do to make it right?"
"You're in league with the demons!" he gibbered, and I thought his gas-flame eyes
burned even brighter. "I can smell the evil on you! The stink of the fire pits! You're one
of them!"
Not that there's anything wrong with that, I heard Jerry proclaim. How long
had we been standing here? It felt like ages, but I suppose it couldn't have been more than
five minutes, and probably closer to three.
"They're not demons," I corrected, gently. "They're aliens. A very scientifically
advanced race, but just aliens..."
"You cost me my job," he told me. "This economy that your demon friends
brought about caused my church to close -- "
"Church?" This just got more and more abstract.
" -- And now I'm living in my car!" His eyes flickered toward my house, and I
felt oddly violated, thinking of those eyes of gas-flame madness even looking at the one
place on earth where my family was supposed to be safe, as if his burning eyes could
somehow cause the house to explode in an unchecked conflagration.
And then I thought, what if he shoots me? What if he actually does it, and what
happens to Maryvonne if she discovers my body? Worse, what happens if she hears the
shot and comes running? Would this madman turn his gun on an innocent child?
Yes, I was sure he would. He'd take down everyone he could before turning the
last bullet toward himself.
I had nothing to lose and I knew it, but neither did he, and he outweighed me by a
good sixty pounds and a .38 caliber. "All right," I bargained crazily. "I can halt the
project, change a couple of equations, sabotage the gate..."
"See how easily betrayal comes to you?" he said, his voice deceptively calm, and
squeezed the trigger.
Click.
I gasped and swore I felt the bullet rip into me, but it was only because I was
expecting it. Had this all been a joke? A cautionary tale? This time you get to live, but
next time...
No. The look on his face told me he was as surprised as I was that I was still alive.
Misfire, that's all, or maybe he'd forgotten to flip the safety. I wasn't going to squander
this moment and allow him the chance to correct whatever rookie mistake he'd made.
Sure enough, he had forgotten the safety, and as his sausage-casing fingers
fumbled to release it, I brought my briefcase up -- a little surprised to see I was still
holding it -- hard as I could, banging the steel-reinforced corner into the man's left temple,
raking it across his cheek as the force of the blow snapped his head to the right. I watched
a red seam appear in his cheek, exposing the dental work beneath. His teeth were yellow,
from too much coffee, or perhaps smoking, and he showed early signs of periodontal
disease.
He cursed something unintelligible and went down, but he was a long way from
out. He still had the gun, and still worked to throw the safety. I swung my briefcase once
more, slamming the steel corner into his teeth, pulping that pouty, almost fey, mouth.
He lost his grip on his gun but fought to grab it back, even as I delivered a solid
kick to his ribs, cushioned by layers of fat. I snatched the gun from the drive, even as
his fingers, smeared with his own blood, felt blindly for the weapon. Whatever madness
empowered him seemed inexhaustible, like some fissionable material.
He looked up at me, his flensed cheek pressed to the gravel of the driveway, the
pilot light of his gas-flame eyes dimming, sputtering, but I knew it would take only the
tiniest spark to reignite that madness, hotter and brighter than ever.
I felt my finger tighten on the trigger. I wanted to shoot this man. I was going
to kill him
Not that there's anything wrong with that
and I might have, if my hand hadn't been shaking so badly. The bullet whanged off the
driveway and went whining away into the evening shadows like some pissed-off mosquito
in search of blood. I started to tell the man to beg, but the words were breathless, choking
sounds, and I sicked everything up. My stomach cramped up from all the adrenaline
that had been dumped into my system, and my knees got that rubbery wobble that
comes with averted disaster. I had to steady myself against the hood of my car.
I reached into my coat pocket and got my cel phone and started to thumb in
911, but stopped. I was going to have to subject myself to a lot of questions, not the
least of which would be why I had powder residue on my hands and a bullet missing from
the drum if I was the one assaulted. A lot depended on the cop who answered the
call, presenting me an equation with too many variables and imponderables.
"I closed the cel hood and slipped it back into my pocket. "Go," I told the
man with the gas-flame eyes. I suppose my eyes looked a bit like that, in that moment.
"But if you ever come back, or come anywhere near my family, I won't hesitate to
shoot... I won't hesitate to give you to my demon masters," I amended.
That night, without explanation, I moved my family to a small motel near the
jumpgate construction site. In a few days, I told them, everything will be back to
normal.
Most of the nearby motels were full-up, of course, because of the news crews
and interested obervers (we called these prurient voyeurs jumpgatecrashers), but a
technician on our team agreed to let us have his motel room after I explained what had
happened.
"Didn't you ever think that might be the response?" he asked, point-blankly, in the
motel parking lot as I was transferring luggage. Heat snakes slithered and squirmed up
from the baking blacktop, rippling and distorting my view of the world beyond.
"No," I admitted. "I mean, I guess I knew this information would change a lot of
lives, but I always thought -- " I always thought I'd be a hero, I heard my inner voice say,
whining like a petulant child. "What are you saying?"
He shrugged. "They're scared, a lot of them. Most of them are just simple folks
who go through life day to day, happy with the sameness, and feel like they've won the
lottery if the local A&P has triple-coupon week. They have simple needs and even
simpler beliefs."
"And I shook that up."
He put his hand on my shoulder, drew me close and gave me a friendly, brotherly
hug. "Let me give you a bit of advice my father gave me," he said. "If you keep this in
mind, I think it'll make your own day-to-day life a lot easier." He paused a moment,
letting the nearby whine of interstate traffic die down so he wouldn't have to dilute his
philosophy by shouting it in my ear. When the air was still, he said clearly and simply, and
with the gravest of gravity, "People are cretins."
"Run for your lives," I muttered under my breath; "the cretin dam has burst."
We finished the jumpgate a few days earlier, and the day we declared it officially
open was a Saturday. The afternoon was hot and clear; it was not a day packed with
omens. It was just a day.
The testing grounds lay flat in all directions for miles, but the grounds were packed
shoulder-to-shoulder with the apostles who had come to hear the sermon on the military
proving grounds, and those who had come to protest, and those who had just come to see
us fail spectacularly.
Stefano told me he had heard on the news that pregnant women had been
demanding doctors induce labor. When I asked him why, he told me it was because
they didn't want their children born during an alien invasion.
The hurricane fencing was still up, and only a select few hundred had been
allowed inside the compound, near the jumpgate. There was a high-school band standing
by, ready to play the theme from 2001 and Close Encounters for our visitors, like this
was all just some big half-time extravaganza. Also standing by were a few military
sharpshooters, just in case the N'lani were suddenly filled with the idea of eminent domain,
or in case the crowd harbored a suicide bomber with a bad dose of xenophobia.
A shining gold ribbon was strung across the portal opening, which was wide enough
to allow two double-decker buses to drive through, side by side, and at the end of the
ceremony, the governor, the head of SETI and I, would all cut the ribbon, and Miss
California would flip the switch, opening the jumpgate. In fact, the switch did nothing. It was
all for show, for the dozen upon dozens of TV stations filming the event. The gate was already
"on." It would take a while to power up, and the ceremony was timed to conclude at the same
moment the gate came online. Something like this didn't work with a simple on/off button.
Sara sat near me on the makeshift dais, and Vonnie next to her. I scanned the
crowd restlessly; my encounter with the man with the gas-flame eyes had left me jumpy
and skittish, expecting him or one of his equally insane brethren to step serenely out of the
shadows and finish the job. See ya in hell, y'hear?
"...man looked to the stars from the mouth of his cave..." the governor was
droning on; I only picked up a few words here and there. I could feel the small hairs on
the back of my neck and arms bristle as the jumpgate powered up nearby. I blinked; the
fluid behind my eyes began to swim, affected by the ambient energies stirring just a few
yards away.
I looked at Maryvonne, who rubbed her eyes repeatedly, and looked as if she were
about to cry from the discomfort. We were several years on by this point, since that night I
received the message, but Vonnie still looked young and helpless. I reached across Sara
and gave Vonnie's little hand a squeeze. "It's okay," I told her. "It's just the jumpgate. I feel
it, too."
"Is it safe to be sitting so close to it?" Sara asked.
"Oh, sure," I said, trying to sound as if I did this sort of thing all the time, but the
truth was, I didn't have any idea. No one had expected this kind of reaction on organic
matter positioned near the portal. If it grew worse, I would pick Vonnie up and walk
with her and Sara away from the platform.
The governor was feeling the effects, too, like a welling nausea that keeps rising,
but relief never comes. He lost his place in his speech, shuffled his notes, wiped at his
streaming eyes, and tried to resume the thread of his ceremony.
The jumpgate stood nearly two stories tall, and its center was a perfect circle, save
at the bottom, where a gently-sloping ramp had been added. I wanted to add a handicap
sign to the platform, but Stefano told me that was not politically correct, even after I pointed
out to him, if you really look at that universal symbol for handicapped parking, it looks
suspiciously like an alien with a big ass. He laughed, but held firm. It was probably
just as well. I didn't need that kind of notoriety, on top of the disdain that would soon
follow.
The gate was perhaps two feet deep, composed of several layers, each layer made
of spent uranium, because the gate would need such durable material, to contain all the
massive energies it would be required to summon. Every few yards, within the center
circle, were placed energy ports. The outer rim of the gate was an onyx colored metal,
and a few amber lights were set into the surface at irregular intervals. Great, snaking
steel cables wound their way from the command center, through the audience, to the
jumpgate.
But the look of it -- the design -- was all wrong. It made me think of the gates
of hell, all cold and sterile efficiency, sharp edges and jagged bits of steel with no other
purpose than to spill your blood if you got too careless. I really wondered what we
had been thinking. If we had been thinking, because if we had, I don't believe we ever
would have built this obscenity.
My bowels began to liquify, and I heard Miss California, who was seated near me
strangle a duck. The governor was perspiring heavily now, blinking almost non-stop to
clear the sweat from his eyes. People seated in the front rows of the audience began to
fidget uncomfortably.
"...The moon and Mars are just our stepping stones," the governor continued,
gamely, his voice breathless with discomfort. I turned to Vonnie; she had her arms
folded around herself, rocking back and forth on her chair, crying freely. Sara tried to
comfort her, but could not. My wife looked at me, her eyes wide and pleading, begging
me to do something.
One of the military men came running through the crowd, pushing people out of
his way as he ran. He was shouting something, but he was too far away to hear clearly
over the beating of the blood-drums in my ears.
"Stop... Japan... attack...!"
That didn't make a lot of sense, unless he was the last man on the planet to hear
about Pearl Harbor. Either that, or he'd been running since 1941.
His words took on more meaning as he got nearer the dais, but they didn't make
any more sense. "Japan is online!" he shouted, bellowing the news like a Drill Instructor,
competing with the shrill whine of the jumpgate as it cycled up. "Their gate is open!
They're under attack! You have to shut that thing down -- now!"
The shriek of the jumpgate fed through the microphones, creating a terrible sound
loop of feedback. I felt something heavy burst in my nose, and a spray of blood coated my
shirt. I turned to the portal, eyes squinted as if gazing into a blinding light, and watched a
shimmering curtain of energy fill the gate like a kaleidoscope. A greenish mist began to
creep out of the portal like some luminescent ground fog.
Maryvonne was running around in tight little circles, hands cupping her eyes,
shrieking like a bat. The portal was glowing brightly now, as webs of energy crossed and
re-crossed from side to side, like a blazing hi-tech pentagram. I didn't want to see the
demon this was conjuring. This wasn't a gate to another world; we'd built a gateway to
hell.
"Shut it down!" the general commanded.
I was the nearest tech on hand, since I was supposed to take part in the ceremony,
but there wasn't much I could do, except grab up the nearest folding chair and start
banging it against the jumpgate circuitry.
This ain't rocket science, I thought, crazily.
The problem was, this thing would take as long to power down as it did to build
up; there was just too much raw power contained in the conjuring circle (and I saw now
with all the clarity of hindsight that that's just what this thing was; the man with the gas-
flame eyes was crazy, but he was also right) to simply pull the plug, and I suspected, once
it was activated, the gate couldn't be closed, anyway. I think the N'lani had seen to that.
One of the soldiers had found an axe and was trying to chop through the main
power cable, as thick as a sewage pipe, wrapped in titanium steel.
In the blazing brilliance at the heart of the jumpgate, I could see a misty figure,
big as an Asgardian Storm Giant, begin to form, and another, and another, like this was
the 21st century's answer to the endless clown car. Beyond those figures, the light of an
alien world, a different galaxy. I was momentarily mesmerized by the sight, until I heard
Sara scream.
I kept smashing at the exposed circuits of the gate, and thought I might be able to
do enough damage to stop the advancing Storm Giants, given a few more moments, but
they proved to be moments I didn't have.
"Get Vonnie out of here!" I shouted to Sara, giving her a hard push toward the
edge of the platform.
The crowd was screaming now, and all I could think of was, Don't worry, ladies
and gentlemen, those chains are made of chrome steel, but obscure bits of dialogue
from King Kong weren't going to help me now.
A widget of some sort darted from the gate, moving at incredible speeds. It
looked like a techno-organic dragonfly, with wings like stained glass windows. The
beating of its wings made a whining sound, but if you tried to follow it by sound alone, it
was already somewhere else before you even heard it.
The general unholstered his sidearm and tried to draw a bead on it, but it was
hellishly fast, and it impaled him on its long, spiked tail. The last thing the general saw in
this life was his own shocked features, reflected and reflected in his insectile killer's
compound eyes.
I heard the crack of gunfire, flat and hollow, as the military sharp-shooters tried to
take the dragonfly down. The steel-jacketed slugs cracked the techno-insect's carapace,
exposing meat and circuitry. A second fusilade failed to find its mark, because now the
creature was aware of the danger and had pinpointed its attackers' location. It hovered
in the air, inches above that crowd that, incredibly, remained seated, too stunned by fright
to move. The dragonfly's wings beat faster and faster, until they were a blur, then
invisible, and I saw the air around the creature ripple. A wave of sound, too high-pitched
to hear and as solid as a wall, rolled forward and struck the two nearest sharp-shooters,
shattering their guns, bones, organs, shredding their bodies into bloody rags and filaments.
Gobbets of soldier rained down on the crowd and pavement.
I forced myself to look away, and found Sara and Vonnie, halfway through the
crowd, caught in the rush toward the exit.
Sparks erupted from some of the circuitry I was smashing, and for a moment, I
thought the figures in the portal might have flickered, but it might have been the spatial
distortion/interface, or, more likely, my eyes adjusting to the glow.
There was a strange, disjointed moment, as if time had somehow slipped,
lending this an out-of-body experience feeling, like waking from a dream of falling,
jolting suddenly awake in your own body. The gate was probably mucking up
time around its acretion area, like a black hole freezing light. I had to stop it --
now. While I still could.
I pounded again, bare-fisted, at the exposed circuitry beneath the cowling I had
broken open, reaching in, ripping and tearing relays and microchips out by the handful,
like a jewel thief in some mad crash and dash.
"Daddy!" I heard Vonnie scream. I found her in the crowd, pointing at
something behind me, her mouth describing the perfect letter "O" like the jumpgate.
I turned to see what she was pointing at and felt the air leave my lungs in a
rush.
"Paul!" Sara screamed.
Paul.
That's my name.
Paul...
