The Farpool

by Philip Bosshardt

  Chapter 6

  Scotland Beach, Florida

  July 25, 2121

  5:10 a.m.

  Chase was fidgeting nervously until Angie finally showed up, hustling quickly along the curb from the Gilliam house toward the parked van. She had a bag full of something—Angie, really, do you need half the house?—and she broke into a trot when she spotted Chase and the bike. He had hidden it next to the van, pretty much out of sight from the street.

  “You’re only ten minutes late, girl.”

  She hissed at him, intentionally slapping the bag against him. ‘Yeah…well, it’s not every day a girl goes off diving into some whirlpool at sea. It’s all my makeup, if you must know.”

  They both laughed at that. Angie never wore makeup.

  Chase drove them down to Sandy Beach and parked the turbo next to the pier. They unloaded all the scuba gear.

  “I’m going to hike up to the aquarium alongside the canal…no sense bringing my bike up there…somebody’ll be looking for it. I told Kloosee to be ready when those sodium lamps come on inside. Should be about seven.”

  Angie was dressed in cutoff jeans and a T-shirt. She slipped out of her flip-flops and began sorting out the tanks, regulators, weight belts and other gear. “How are you getting back?”

  Chase shrugged. “Run like hell, I guess. Or maybe swim.”

  She looked at the tanks. “Have we got enough air, you think?”

  “I’ve been wondering about that, too.” He shrugged. “I’m trusting our friends to help us out on that. Well…here goes—“ He kissed her on the forehead and turned to run off, but she grabbed his hand and pulled him back for a longer kiss.

  “You know I’m skipping school today for this.” She rubbed his hair and the side of his face, feeling that burr of a beard.

  “I can see you’re pretty upset about that.”

  “No, really, I’m okay. I’m ready. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I trust you. I don’t know why, but I do. I want to be with you, like always…even…” she indicated the sea. “—even out there…wherever we wind up—“

  “Just get the gear ready, okay. Hey, I love you too. You’re good for me.”

  She pouted a little. “Thanks. Get going, you jerk.”

  He scrambled up through the dunes, squeezed through a row of hibiscus and scaled a fence, snagging and ripping his T-shirt in the process. Soon enough, he landed at the loading docks and went to the bay they had used before. The roll-up door was still loose and he slipped inside as easily as before.

  They really should get that fixed, he muttered. You never know who might be breaking in.

  His biggest concern was security…not just the bots and the lights and motion detectors but the fear that something had been added, something he didn’t know about. He would have to be careful.

  But nothing seemed to happen. He made the service hall, knowing full well he was probably on video and setting off all kinds of alarms. There ahead were the double doors to the main exhibit hall, but he didn’t need to go out there. The Waterflow System control panel should be to his right…he consulted his wristpad for guidance: Angie had taken a series of pictures when she had scoped out the area a few days before. He studied the pix, looked around in the dim lighting….

  There.

  He went down the hall and found the panels. They were even labeled WATERFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM.

  He studied Angie’s photos. Yep…this was the place.

  Quickly, he set to work. He had already studied the gates, locks and general layout of Gulfside’s waterflow system over the last few days. Now he studied a small hand-scribbled list of settings he’d cobbled together. It seemed to match the panel, which was actually a large touchscreen mimic panel.

  The panel was conveniently laid out in a schematic view, showing all tanks, lines, valves, pumps and gates. Chase had practically memorized the settings he needed to open the Dolphin Gallery all the way down to the sea.

  He studied the layout and began touching buttons on the screen.

  Right away, the thing asked for a log-in and password. Crap, he muttered, though he had expected just such an obstacle. He had several possibilities he could try and right away made it through the log-in using Dr. Josey Holland’s initials…a reasonable guess that turned out to be correct.

  Now for the password. Chase was no hacker but he knew a few and they had always said start with the obvious…the word password and variants of that. So Chase did.

  He was rewarded more quickly than he ever dreamed possible. The password turned out to be PssWd01.

  Really, he half laughed at how easy it had been. You guys need a little more training in better security procedures around here. But he was in and that was all that mattered.

  Now, Chase began setting up the valves. B1 OPEN. C2 OPEN. A1 and A2 both OPEN. L1 and L2…those were the lock valves. A small window opened next to those valve labels, giving him the option to select a Fill Time. He selected Max.

  Now for the final step. G1 and G2 were gate valves that opened the waterway to the aquarium channel and then to the sea itself. He pressed G1 OPEN, but when he pressed G2, he got a warning screen.

  OPEN TO SEA…PRESS OK TO PROCEED.

  He pressed OK.

  At that very instant, a warning klaxon sounded throughout the hall. Emergency lighting on the walls began flashing like strobes. He didn’t know if it was his valve setup or if he had triggered another alarm. He didn’t intend to wait and find out.

  Chase streaked back to the loading dock and slid under the door. Outside, more lights were flashing and horns going off. He heard shouts…they didn’t come from bots. People…probably police…were coming. He could hear shouts and footsteps, doors opening and slamming. The loading dock was bathed in floodlights.

  And through it all, he heard the sound of rushing water. Water was flowing rapidly through nearby channels…the connectors and aquarium channels were emptying into the canal. He ran toward that sound and had to stop short, nearly plunging into the foaming, hissing water in the channel.

  In the glare of the floodlights, and the first faint orange glow of sunrise, he could see humps glistening in the water. Humps and fins and flukes. The Dolphin Gallery was now fully open through a series of locks and gates all the way down to the Gulf. And the residents of Tank B were noisily honking and clicking and chattering their way downstream, toward the canal and the ocean.

  He hoped Kloosee and Pakma were among the crowd.

  Voices interrupted his efforts to locate the Seomish.

  “POLICE! GET ON THE GROUND NOW! KEEP YOUR HANDS OUT---GET ON THE GROUND!!”

  He heard the footsteps and saw half a dozen men backlit in the glare of the lights, scaling the fence, running, shouting, waving things.

  Chase looked back. There was no going back. He looked at the rush of water in the canal.

  The decision took only a split second and the hell of it was he had almost expected this…he had come semi-prepared with swim jams underneath his shorts. He stripped everything off but the jams and executed a perfect racing dive into the canal waters.

  Right away, he was bumped and thrashed by bodies and shapes fleeing the aquarium. The water was relatively clear, but cool, very salty and thick with bodies…flippers, fins, flukes flashed by and he found himself pummeled and knocked about, until all he could do was let the stream carry him on. Once or twice, he poked his head up for air, but mostly he stayed submerged and went with the flow.

  He could tell when the ocean was near. The water changed, it became rougher, saltier, slightly murkier. And the press of bodies began to thin out.

  Chase took a chance and dug in his heels to stop his forward motion, clawing at the dirt walls of the canal to slow down. He lifted himself half out and found himself falling into sand…beach sand.

  He had made it down to the beach. Then a shout, more feet plowing and kicking and stumblin
g through the sand.

  Angie’s hands helped him to his feet and he coughed and gagged and spat water for a few moments until he got his breath.

  “Where…what…?”

  “Come on…” she yelled. “They’re in the surf…in the waves…waving at us. Get up!”

  Chase struggled to his feet and saw that Angie already had her gear on. He floundered around, finding his own gear: flippers, mask, heave up and slip on the tanks, check out the regulator and mouthpiece. Adjust weights. Dive watch. Buoyancy packs.

  Up on shore, beyond the dunes and the sea oats, they could hear voices, shouts, they could see flashlights waving.

  “STOP! STAY WHERE YOU ARE…GET ON THE GROUND RIGHT NOW!!”

  Chase peered out past the surf line. He could see fins circling. It had to be Kloosee and Pakma…Scotland Beach hadn’t seen a shark sighting in years. But still—

  He grinned at Angie and grabbed her by the shoulders. “This is it! You ready?”

  She nodded, slipped her mask down. “Ready as ever. Let’s go!”

  They plunged into the surf and kicked and scrambled their way through the breakers until they found deeper water. They didn’t look back and soon ducked under.

  There was a surprising amount of light for early morning and the sea was clear, the seabed sand and silt calm and generally undisturbed. Right away, they ran into Kloosee and Pakma, huge hulking shapes easily noticed by their unusual forepaddles, paddles with hands and fingers.

  They didn’t have the echopod and both Chase and Angie could hear the two Seomish chirping and whistling and clacking away. They were saying something, indicating something with their hands, but Chase didn’t understand a thing. Finally, Pakma swooshed by and stopped, manually placing Chase’s own hands on Kloosee’s tail flukes. By her motions, she wanted Angie to grab hold of her flukes the same way.

  They’re giving us a ride, he thought. How convenient. I wonder where we’re going.

  But he didn’t spend long thinking about that. He grasped Kloosee’s tail flukes firmly and hung on.

  The four of them headed out to sea buddy-style, toward deeper water.

  The trip lasted half an hour and Chase had no real idea where they were or where they were going, though he had dived these waters often the last few years. He looked in vain for something familiar…a rusting car hulk, a discarded stove, an ancient refrigerator, some sunken boulders. But he saw nothing.

  Then, almost without warning, they entered a shallow depression ringed with a fence of blue-white coral and he saw something he had never seen before. There was the usual jumbled pile of car bodies in the center of the depression. But off to one side, anchored with some kind of line, floated a most curious sight.

  It was a vessel, a vehicle of some kind, bearing more than a slight resemblance to a midget submarine. The vessel was attached at the stern by tow line to another vessel, an egg-shaped vessel with double rows of fins.

  Chase had a feeling he knew what the purpose of the egg-shaped vessel was.

  That’s our ride to…wherever we’re going.

  Almost as if he read Chase’s mind, Kloosee circled the two vehicles and eventually brought them to a stop above the egg-shaped craft. With his forelimbs, he did something to a small panel on top and a hatch yawned open. Kloosee pointed and Chase understood he was supposed to enter the craft, which was barely large enough for one person, let alone two.

  Pakma did the same with Angie and after a few moments, with both Seomish pointing and clicking and whistling and grunting and chirping, the teen-agers had figured out how to position themselves inside, head to toe, each facing in opposite directions.

  Like babies in a mother’s womb, Angie thought, but she quickly banished that kind of thinking.

  There were harnesses and Chase figured out how to slip into them and secure them. You had to contort yourself like a gymnast, but it was doable. It occurred to him that the compartment and the harnesses weren’t really designed for bipedal, air-breathing humans.

  Inside the cramped compartment, there was a small panel ahead of them, below twin portholes. The panel was clearly some kind of control station, though its buttons and switches weren’t designed for human hands. The controls were more like the round end of a spoon, a series of narrow bowl-like depressions made for pressing with something other than fingers.

  While Chase studied the panel, Kloosee fiddled with another set of controls near the hatch. Angie had noticed a double row of small pod-like containers ringing the perimeter of the compartment.

  I wonder….she said to herself. They didn’t have an echopod for translating and could only puzzle at Kloosee and Pakma’s gestures and clicks and whistles. Most of the time, the Seomish managed to make their meaning clear.

  Kloosee patted Chase on his head and backed out of the compartment. At once, the hatch swung down and was locked. Moments later, the pod-like containers began to spew bubbles. Initially a steady stream of bubbles, the pods soon were discharging something at high pressure. The stream of bubbles became a torrent, then a flood, enveloping the entire space.

  Chase closed his eyes. What are they doing now? Maybe this wasn’t such a great idea. Alongside, he could feel Angie squirming too.

  The compartment was smothering them with bubbles but it wasn’t long before Chase understood.

  Air. It was air. Kloosee had called it Notwater.

  The compartment was being filled with air at high pressure. And sure enough, the water level began to subside, first at their heads, then dropping slowly but steadily below their faces, their necks, their shoulders.

  When it was done, there were still several centimeters of water left in the bottom of the compartment, but now they could breathe.

  Cautiously, Chase removed his mask and mouthpiece and took a breath. It was air, stale, smelling like iron filings and ozone, but breathable air. He nudged Angie and she took her gear off too.

  “Whew…that smells good. What the hell is that odor?”

  Chase sniffed. “Must be the filters. Thank God they thought of this…I wasn’t sure what we were going to do when our tanks ran dry.”

  Angie squirmed some more, wriggling to get comfortable. “I don’t think I like this place…where are they taking us? Maybe this wasn’t such a—“

  But she choked off her words for in that moment, the little craft began to move, jerking and gyrating into motion. Chase stuck his head as close to the porthole as he could.

  “We’re underway…we’ve just lifted off the sea bed…I can see that tow line. Kloosee and Pakma must be in the sub up ahead…now we’re off. But to where?”

  Angie just shuddered and tried to relax. “How do we know they’re not going to kill us…or eat us?”

  Chase squinted out through the dense convex lens of the porthole. The scene outside was heavily distorted. “We don’t actually.”

  “Great. That’s just great.”

  “Well, we sprung them from the aquarium. They sort of owe us. I guess we have to trust ‘em.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better. Can you see anything? There’s no porthole at my end.”

  Chase hmmm’ed. “We seem to be headed out to sea…the seabed’s dropping off…getting deeper. I can’t see that far. Just the tail of that sub.”

  They traveled at a steady clip for nearly half an hour.

  Both Chase and Angie had drifted off into a light doze when a faint tug on the side of the craft startled Chase awake.

  “Angie…Angie, wake up. Something’s happening—“

  She stirred. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, but it feels like we’re moving sideways.” Chase plastered his nose to the porthole, trying to make something out. “It’s silty out there. Dark too. Deeper water. You feel that?”

  Some kind of force was pushing them sideways in the water. At the same time, the compartment picked up a light shuddering vibration, gyrating like a
top at the end of a string.

  “Yeah…what’s happening?”

  “I don’t know, but I think we’re on the outer edge of some kind of vortex…the water’s all rushing sideways, dirt, pieces of things…I can’t really make it out.”

  “God, I hope it’s not a spout.”

  The force began to increase, a centrifugal force that soon shoved them to one side of the compartment and pressed them hard against the walls. Worse, the compartment began a slow roll, a rotation that didn’t remain slow for long, but picked up rate at a steady clip.

  Soon, they were spinning enough to become disoriented and dizzy.

  “Chase…my stomach…I don’t feel so—“

  Angie’s words were suddenly lost in a bright flash of light, a searing, painfully white strobing light that flooded the compartment and blinded Chase.

  “Ow…I can’t see—“

  The spin kept accelerating and moments later, Chase and Angie passed out.

  Early morning beachgoers at Scotland Beach were treated to an incredible sight offshore, just before dawn. Backlit with the orange glow of sunrise to the east, a thin ropy waterspout formed several miles off Half Moon Cove. As the spout danced and skipped across the waves, a bright pulse of light emerged from the sea and vaulted heavenward along the length of the spout, followed by a series of light pulses, as if the spout were sucking buckets of light right out of the ocean.

  The light pulses disappeared into low-hanging clouds and vanished, leaving only a faint iridescent flicker, like a silent lightning discharge.

  Moments later, the waterspout collapsed into the sea and the ocean returned to its restless heaving.

  Unknown to the residents of Scotland Lake, Chase Meyer and Angie Gilliam had just been catapulted six thousand light years across the Galaxy and several hundred years into the future.