Just Plain Weird (14 page)

         
“Sausage? Onion? Anchovies? Green peppers?…”

         
“Yeah, and maybe those little shrimp, too,” I suggested.

         
“All right,” Eliza chimed, and eagerly left the room, as though she were happy to do something.

         
“Pizza?” her father said, when she was gone. “At nine-twenty in the morning? And this is going to make you feel better?” He paused to shake his head in wonder. “Well,” he went on then, “I see everything went all right, thank God. She’s much better now, but you should have seen her last night. I tell you, I didn’t know what to do with her. She can’t help it, though-- I realize that. A lot of it has to do with the way she’s been living-- the isolation, the moving…. But enough about that,” he said, as though the topic were distasteful, as though he bore the responsibility for the way Eliza acted. “At the moment I’m much more interested in your headaches. You say you never had a headache before a couple days ago.”

         
“Before the day before yesterday, really,” I said.

         
“Hmmm. The day you first saw Eliza. I wonder if that’s a coincidence,” he said, not completely serious.

         
I let the comment pass.

         
“When was the last time you went to the doctor?”

         
“Couple weeks ago,” I said. “I needed to get a check-up before starting school in the fall.”

         
He considered something at length, and seemed to remain doubtful about whatever it was. “Well, I think you should keep track of them, then,” he concluded. “If you start having them too often, you may have to go back to the doctor. How are you now?”

         
“Completely normal.” The pain was gone now.

         
“Well, that’s good.”

         
Just then Eliza returned. She couldn’t have been gone but a few minutes. She was balancing a pizza on the palm of one hand, which a six-pack of soda dangled from her other hand. She set everything down on the coffee table.

         
Her father stared at it all with a dour look on his face.

         
“I’m going to leave you two,” he said then. “I don’t think I can bear to witness such a dietary atrocity. I’ll be in the garage if you need me.”

         
After he left, we dug into the pizza, which turned out to be the best pizza I’d ever tasted. Eliza obviously had a very high metabolism, because she ate a surprising amount, considering her petite appearance. When we were finished, we both sat back in the sofa, and sipped soda for a while.

         
“I wish I could eat like that all day,” she said, and she was somewhat breathless. “It’s really ashamed that you have to get filled up like that. I swear it, if it weren’t for that, I could stuff my face for hours on end.” She paused here and unabashedly released a loud ripping belch, which she followed up with a giggle. “Gee, where did that come from? What’s the matter, Travis, you didn’t think girls burp? Well, they do. And if you think they don’t fart, wait till later. It’s too bad you never had a sister. You’d already known these things, and I wouldn’t have to be the one who breaks your heart.” She got slowly to her feet, collected the paper plates, empty soda cans, and what was left of the pizza, and retreated into the other room.

         
When she returned, she flopped down heavily on the sofa, and looked at me with eyes that were drowsy and content.

         
“So you were saying your father doesn’t know what the artifact is,” I said.

         
“Uh-uh,” she murmured, and seemed about ready to sleep. “Do we have to talk about that now? Yeah, I suppose so. All the madness you’ve been put through….But no, he’s not at all sure. He thought that maybe it was some sort of station. The chambers were so big, and there were so many of them. It took him months just to map out all the chambers, and still, every once in a while, he finds one that went missed. The thing is enormous, and so much room… it could only be designed to transport large numbers of supplies or people-- aliens, actually, because there is little doubt the artifact is of alien origin.”

         
“And we’re sitting in one of the chambers, now?” I asked.

         
“Yeah, we’re in one of the chambers. He learned how to reconfigure the space in the chamber to make it into the interior of a house. Here, let me show you,” she said, and forced herself to her feet. She walked to the opposite wall, and placed her hand flat against the wall on a certain spot. To my amazement, the control console rose out of the floor, facing the front window. She walked over to the console. After she pushed a few button, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, all shimmered and vanished. We were now in the huge, cavernous chamber that Eliza had described to me yesterday. The transformation was startling. Hearing somebody talk about it and actually seeing it for yourself, were two vastly different things. I stood up from the sofa, looking around in awe. My jaw must have been hovering just above the gray floor.
    
I wandered over to where she was standing, next to the console.

         
“Travis, look-- Travis-- Travis,” she was trying to get my attention, but I was mesmerized by the console. It was about eight feet wide and shaped like a semi-circle, so that if you stood in front of it you had controls round you one hundred and eighty degrees. “Travis-Travis--”

         
“Hunh?”

         
“Look,” she said, pointing straight ahead of the console, “If you walk to that wall, you’ll trigger a sensor that will open a door on our front porch, right? There’s another sensor way in the back that opens a door on our back door, right? The distance between the front door and the back door inside the chamber is over three hundred feet, while outside the house is barely seventy feet long. It still amazes me that your friend, Raffles, noticed a lousy three-foot difference. How this is all possible, Doc isn’t sure-- again, it’s not his field of interest-- but he says it must be based on law of physics that are unknown to us-- inter-dimensional physics or something. Whatever it is, it works, because the durned thing is a lot bigger on the inside than the outside.

         
“Along both walls there are sensors that open doorways to corridors that lead to other chambers, many of them the same size as this. So you sort of have an idea how humongous this thing is,” she said, and then added in a somber tone, “This is my curse. You don’t know how many times I’ve wished I hadn’t stumbled across it. My father says it’s still a good thing, because it was better that we found it than somebody else. If somebody else had found it, they would already be back-engineering the technology, unlocking all its secrets, which my father was always certain would be used for no good.
 
Maybe he was right. Maybe the technology would be converted to military uses.”

         
“The people who built this thing-- any idea what happened to them?”

         
“Uh-uh. It’s impossible to say how long the artifact was at the spot we found it,” she said. “It could have been there for a million years or only a single day. Really, there is no way to be sure what happened to them, why they were here, or what they were doing. My father was able to access what looks like their central computer, and he’s been able to pull up what looks like logs, but so far he hasn’t been able to translate them. To me they look like a mishmash of different symbols running up and down in endless lines in endless computer files.”

         
My curiosity was beginning to flare up. “Can you show me the view screen you told me about?”

         
“Yeah, sure,” she said, and tapped a couple of the symbols of the console in sequence.

         
The entire wall ahead of the console glistened. For a second it took on the appearance of quicksilver, before it solidified into a screen that showed the northern hemisphere of the planet.

         
“See right there,” Eliza said now. “The symbol that marks our present location.”

         
I scanned the topography of the map. It wasn’t like looking at a regular map, a map with all the borderlines that formed the states or the provinces of Canada. Finally I found the symbol:

         
“Looks like the symbol for Gemini, doesn’t it?” Eliza asked.

         
“Yeah, very close.”

         
“My father says that’s just a coincidence.”

         
“Are these maps the only thing this screen has ever shown?”

         
Eliza frowned vaguely. “Why do you ask that?”

         
“Just wondering.” I shrugged.

         
“No, it’s funny you should ask,” she said. “About a year ago, my father was-- well, I guess the only thing you could call it is playing-- with the console. He hardly ever does it, because it’s all trial and error. You press the wrong buttons in the wrong sequence, and who knows what could happen? Anyway, he was playing with the console one day, and he came up with this.” Here she tapped a couple buttons, and the view screen changed; the map vanished, and was replaced by a star field. “We’re not quite sure what it is-- as far as we know it could be like a screen saver on a p.c.. Either that or it’s a view of the sky on the planet where this was built. We know enough about astronomy to be sure it’s not local; none of the stars seem familiar.”

         
I stood in front of the console, and gazed up at the enormous screen, which was filled with inky blackness except for the thousands of speckles of light scattered across it. I was transfixed by the dazzling array of stars. There was something here, something I couldn’t put my finger on.

         
Now I sensed Eliza step up to stand next to me.

         
“Travis, you all right?” she asked.

         
“When I was five years old,” I said. “I looked into the sky one night. It was clear and cold and all the stars were out. I was fascinated by the way they seemed to dance across the sky. I think it was the first time I actually noticed the universe, and started to realize just how small I was-- how small I would always be. That Christmas I asked my parents for a telescope. You do realize I don’t use my telescope just to spy on people?”

         
“Well, I sort of figured,” she said, giggling.

         
“And during all your spying on me,” I asked, “did you ever find out that I’m somewhat dyslectic?”

         
“Uh, no,” she said, tilted her head in interest. “I didn’t know that. Is that why you were held back in school?”

         
“Yeah. I fell pretty far behind by the time they realized the problem, and ended up having to repeat the third grade. On the other hand if you write something down backwards, I can read it without blinking an eye.” I nodded toward the screen. “And-- you know something?-- that’s Sirius.”

         
“Well, it sounds serious,” Eliza said gravely.

         
I tore my eyes away from the screen to look at her.

         
“No,” I said. “On the screen. That star is Sirius,” I said, pointing to the bright point of light at the lower right side of the screen. “And if you move up this way: there is Orion-- Rigel, there-- Betelguese, there. And there-- Castor and Pollux: Gemini. They’re all out of position, though.”

         
“What? You mean backwards?”

         
“Not exactly backwards, no…. maybe about thirty degrees off of backwards, which means-- and here I’m just guessing-- this is a view that can be seen from about…say…Vega. Yeah, I’m pretty sure in that general direction. If this were a 360-degree view of the sky, Vega would appear behind us and to the left. But wait,” I faltered. I started doubting that I was right about the whole thing. “That doesn’t make any sense.”