The Far Side (19 page)

“Oh yeah!” Andie said.  She turned to Kris.  “You’re awfully quiet.”

“Yeah,” Kris replied.  “It’s scary is all.  I’m trying to get my heart to stop racing.”

“Deep breaths,” Ezra advised.  “Take deep breaths, slowly.

Kris took some deep breaths, and it seemed to steady her.  “Andie...”

“Kris?  You doing better?”

“Andie, Ezra said it best a while ago.  He found light at the end of the tunnel.”

“Light?  You mean... the outside?  What’s it like?  Tell me, please, please, please!”

“Andie, this is yours, okay?  We just found the light -- it was around a corner, and we didn’t even look outside.  You’re going out the door first, Andie, not us,” Kris explained.

Andie stared at Kris.  “You guys... why is it that some people are better than you deserve?  And others no one deserves?”

“It takes all kinds, Andie,” Ezra told her.

“I guess.  I’m still going to kill the fuckers!  I swear, you’re going to have to tie me down to keep them alive.”

Ezra laughed nastily.  “Andie, if I’m in the same room with them, I’m sorry to say, the prisoners will be shot while trying to escape.  An old army trick.”

The conversation ended there and time passed.  At a half hour, they all got ready, but their watches kept ticking and nothing happened.  At an uneventful hour, Kris was nearly ready to scream.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Andie said out of the blue.

“Yeah,” Ezra said, “and shit twice more.  I’m going over to the supplies for a second.  Holler if you need me.”

He walked a few feet away, and Andie looked morosely at the space in front of the happy face.  “I’m so full of myself!  I can’t believe we never got around to putting a camera on this side and watching what a door looks like from this side when it appears.”

“Relax, Andie.  There’s always been a lot to do,” Kris tried to calm her.

“Yeah, but still...  it would have been easy enough.”

Ezra came back and handed Andie a small can, perhaps three inches in diameter and six inches tall.  Andie hefted it and laughed.  “An air horn!”

“Yes.  Andie, that door is yours, okay?  I’ve got one of these and I’ll let it off if the door appears, okay?  Go look outside, you and Kris.  You two deserve it, Andie.  Kris, too.”

“How many of these did you pack?” Andie asked, curious.

“Six.  I’ve been in those caves in Afghanistan.  Radios are, to put it mildly, unreliable in caves and tunnels.  You should be able to hear this so long as you are in the cave.  I’m not so sure if you’d hear it outside.”

“This is the sort of thinking, Ezra, that sets us apart from the fucking assholes like Kit and Art.  They excel at stealing and breaking.  They have no ability to create on their own.”

Kris laughed then.  “I was just thinking that I told my father this morning that you and I, Andie, had agreed that we weren’t going to explore together.  I don’t know what sort of stupid story Kit will use to try to explain where we are, but my father is going to be suspicious.”

“Yeah.  Not to mention I talked to that lawyer guy the other day, and sure enough, he’s our attorney.  He says that anything I tell him is privileged, so I sent him a sealed copy of the fusor plans.

“That, and aside from Linda, Shorty, Lin and the others, I have a nasty, nasty surprise in store for them if I don’t sign onto my website for two weeks.  And there’s not a fucking person in the entire fucking world, except you two now, who know I even have one.  Much less that after two weeks of inactivity, a little program kicks off and unpacks the website I’ve been developing.  I’ve got canned emails with the addresses ready to go to all of the news media and about a couple of hundred other people -- and every fusion bulletin board in the US -- about two dozen of them.”

Kris nodded.  “Cool!”

“Yeah, and I figured that if anything happened to me, it would be because of one of two things.  Just now, someone trying to steal it, and later, once it’s further along, someone trying to suppress it.  If anyone’s trying to steal it, they’ll waste no time going public to claim it -- just look for who is trying to do that.  And if someone’s trying to suppress it -- hey, everyone in the world got a copy of the plans!”

Ezra laughed.  “I hope it works.  Now, why don’t you two go take a walk and let me watch this.”

“Ezra, you know you can write your own ticket with me, from now on, right?” Andie told him.

“Whatever.  Just go and check out that there isn’t a train coming from the other end, okay?  Try not to stir up the local headhunters.”

Andie grinned and she stood up from where she’d been sitting.

Kris joined her and they walked down the tunnel.  It was an odd thing, Kris thought as they went along.  It was maybe three hundred feet from the door to where the entrance to the cave was.  At one time, the distance had seemed huge and insurmountable.  Now, it was short and they stood with their flashlights lowered, looking at the glow in the distance.

“Hot diggety damn!” Andie said.  “Come on, Kris!”

The two walked together and turned the corner.  The light didn’t seem as bright as it had earlier, but there was an obvious entrance about ten feet farther on.  “Come on, Kris!”  Andie repeated.

“Andie, you go first.”

“Me?  Girl, you’re out of your mind!  What if there’s a dragon out there?  I want a fifty-fifty chance he’ll eat you first and give me a chance to escape!  You and me together, my friend!”

They walked forward, Andie being the first to turn her light off.  Kris promptly followed suit.  They stopped just before the entrance and Kris laughed.  “I forgot to bring the camera.”

“Hey, when MacArthur came ashore on Bataan, the book I read said they took those pictures a couple of times.  We’ll do a reenactment later!”  She grabbed Kris’s hand and pulled her forward.

The sun was low in the sky, a sky that was gray, like evening was approaching.  They were on the flank of a substantial mountain that loomed above them, and the ground in front of them was relatively steep.  Kris looked around, taking in everything she could see.

“This is all limestone,” she observed to Andie.

“Yeah.  This looks like layers of rock that have tipped up about twenty degrees.”  Andie shaded her eyes and looked into the distance.  “I’m pretty sure that’s either a huge lake out there, or the ocean.  It’s probably two miles away.”

Kris waved to a spot a few feet away.  There was what looked like a scrub bush growing there.  There were more such bushes dotting the landscape.  They were sparse.  “This looks pretty dry,” she told Andie.

“It does,” Andie agreed.  “Do you see the steps out there -- plateaus that lead down to the water?  I’m betting that those are ancient shorelines, because all the rocks I can see are tilted.  You’d need something like wave action to level the playing field.”

“We seem to be higher than the highest one of those steps,” Kris observed.

Andie turned and looked at the mountain above them.  “There’s not much more vegetation than this all the way to the crest of this mountain -- and I’d say it’s another mile higher than we are now.  And we’re probably at two thousand feet here.  I don’t recognize the geography, but we could still be on Earth.”

“Well, Ezra pointed out that there were some piles of junk in the big room.  He said that it looked more suitable for the Middle Ages than our world.  Oh, and he found a sword hilt.  He says his fingers fit on the hilt comfortably.”

Andie grimaced.  “Well, maybe if nothing else, we have a jim-dandy way of getting around on the Earth.”  She laughed.  “Of course that means we’re going to have to fight the airlines, automobile companies, and everyone else in the transportation business, as well as the fucking power companies.”

She jerked her head towards the inside.  “Let’s go tell Ezra we didn’t rile up any headhunters.”

Kris looked around once more.  “I’d call this high desert.”

“Me, too.  So, odds are, people or whatever are here will be nomads.  Or high tech.”

They returned to the cave and found Ezra patiently waiting in front of where the door should have been.

He’d moved some of the cases of food close to the Far Side Door and was sitting on them.  He listened carefully and asked a lot of questions, many of which neither Kris nor Andie could answer.

They’d turned all of their flashlights off except for Ezra’s.  The conversation drifted until it finally stopped.  “Two hours now, I figure,” Andie said looking at her watch.

“Something is clearly up,” Ezra agreed.

“I am so going to kill those fuckers!” Andie repeated for the thousandth time.

“I don’t want to sound like I’ve given up hope,” Kris said, “at least not this soon.  But it was twenty degrees warmer outside.  We’ve seen the areas closest to the entrance and there are no signs of large animals...”

“And not much sign, if any, of smaller animals,” Ezra contributed.

“So, I’m in favor of spending the night outside.”

“And how would we let people know where we are if they come after us?”

Andie laughed.  “I need a sheet of paper.”

Kris supplied her with one and Andie wrote four words.  “Now I need one of those air horns, Ezra.”

Ezra brought it up and peered over her shoulder to see what she’d written.  He chuckled as he gave the can to her.  Kris held up her hand and Andie passed her the paper.  The message was short, succinct, and indisputably Andie:  “We’re outside.  Blow me!”

Kris gathered up a ration case, while Andie brought along a jug of water and Ezra grabbed a package with some blankets.  They went outside.

There was no longer any doubt about it.  The sun was descending into the west, and was now barely above the horizon.  Ezra looked around the bare expanse.  “I’m tempted to say that we should retire into the innermost chamber, but there’s nothing I can see here.  Still, a fire will be visible for miles and miles, while you can smell smoke almost as far.”

“So,” Kris told him, “we forgo barbequed marshmallows and the fire to toast them on.”

Ezra nodded his head.  “I’ll grant you, I haven’t seen any signs of animals inside.  But on Earth, this sort of environment existed all over the southwestern United States and in other places around the world.  A lot of those locations had lions or other big cats.  They weren’t common and in recent times they avoid people, but who knows what conditions are like here?  We should at least sleep in the first chamber.  I brought blankets so that we could.”

He surveyed the area again.  “And yes, that sure looks like a large body of water off to the west.”  He chuckled to himself and Andie looked at him.  “Are you taking notes about what we forgot to bring?”

“You bet.  No pissant mother fuckers are going to stop me!”

“Well, a pair of binoculars would be good about now.”

“So they would,” Andie agreed.  She borrowed another piece of paper from Kris.  “Sorry, Kris, I should have been better prepared.”

Kris laughed.  “Andie, I’m sure the next time you’re kidnapped through an inter-dimensional Far Side door you’ll have all your emergency gear on your back and be ready to hit the other side running.”

Ezra smiled but didn’t laugh.

“Okay, so my optimism is misplaced.  Still, I’ve learned one thing from this -- trust my instincts.”

She too looked around.  “What really frosts my cake is if the fuckers hadn’t done this, about now I’d be standing here trying to figure out a way to explore this place.  Now, I’m too afraid of losing the way back home.”

Not very much later the stars started coming out, and Andie looked up at them when it was full dark.  “I don’t recognize these stars.”

“I’ve been south of the equator,” Ezra told her.  “These aren’t southern hemisphere stars, either.  At least,” he admitted, “I’m about ninety-nine percent sure.  For one thing you can see the Milky Way there and I don’t see a river of stars here.”

Kris pointed eastwards, over the mountain.  “Look at that!”

“That” was round shape not much larger than a pea.  It was almost certainly a small moon.

“This isn’t Kansas, lady and gentleman,” Andie declared.

* * *

Oliver Boyle stood with one hand on Otto’s shoulder, while Helen stood on Otto’s other side, her hand on his other shoulder as well.  Standing in front of them a thin man with grizzled gray hair, wearing a fireman’s jacket and a white fireman’s helmet was explaining things.  There were still plumes of smoke rising from the Schulz home.  The fire had all but leveled it.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Schulz, but I don’t have any information for you at this time.  The fire is out now, and my people are searching the debris.  As yet, we haven’t found any remains.

“However, we have found evidence of an accelerant that was used to spread the fire.  This is virtually certain to have been arson.”

From the near distance, someone was waving her arm vigorously shouting, “Mr. Boyle!  Mr. Boyle!  Please!  I need to speak to Mr. Boyle!”

Oliver really didn’t want to be disturbed at the moment, but he recognized the woman as one of those who had been hired by Kit.  He waved her over and the policeman holding the crowd back let her through.