Twistor

by Cramer, John; Wolfe, Gene;

  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, h
ad 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.

  Carefully, Jeff planted the stick in the freshly turned soil of the planet. 'I, Jeffrey Ernst, claim this u-ni-verse . . . ' he paused to think, ' . . . this ter-ri-to-ry in the name of the Uni-ted States of Ame-ri-ca,' he recited the words they had composed together. David and Melissa laughed delightedly at the performance. David stopped the camera, and they clapped. Then he took a shot of the computer-paper flag, its crudely formed stars and stripes fluttering and crinkling in the late-afternoon breeze.

  He glanced upward. The treebird was regarding them quizzically from its elevated perch.

  They were out of the tree, the flag duly planted. Now David was feeling a growing fatigue. They needed a fireplace and workplace, a center for their activities. That was the first order of business. He pried up another large flat stone. Underneath, white grublike creatures with large brown pincers squirmed and scurried for the cover of leaves. Pink worms, their heads iridescent with bright and changing interference colors, sank into the bare earth. It was a different world, he mused.

  As David carried the stone toward the site of what would soon be their new fireplace, he crossed the multicolored line he had spotted from the tree. He stopped and looked down at it. It was an intricate linear pattern made of linked splatters of color, white, red, green, blue, and violet splotches that repeated after a few meters. Now he noticed that the other trees were ringed with similar trains of color, but the patterns were not the same. Curious . . .

  He continued to the pile of stones, dropping the one he was carrying beside the others. Sinking down on a mound of orange leaves, he inhaled the rich, mysterious smell of the forest. He must pace himself to avoid complete exhaustion. The light was going fast, and they would need to eat soon. Leaning back, he looked upward, following the soaring column of their tree. It had the familiar tree shape, but that familiarity was an illusion. It was not even close to any tree he'd seen before.

  A flying insectlike creature landed on the flat stone and crawled across it. It had the usual six legs and double wings, with a triple-segmented, slightly iridescent blue body. A dangerous-looking triple-pronged trident projected from the rear of its fat, elongated abdomen. The basic insect design was there, yet it did not resemble any Earth insect David could recall. He tentatively extended his hand in its direction, but it flew off.

  His gaze moved downward. The dried leaves on the ground, he now noticed, also had an unusual form. Groups of feathery, orange-brown leaflets organized themselves into a shape that was like the club suit of a playing card. The leaf was a fractal, David realized. He could resolve tiny club shapes that formed larger club shapes, and those formed still larger club shapes, and so on. Nature was using some genetic subroutine to repeat the same pattern over and over at increasing scale. He smiled, imagining the tiny club shape repeating itself infinitesimally inward, down to minuscule club-shaped molecules. He rubbed one of the leaves between his fingers until it powdered to an orange dust; then he smelled his fingers. The characteristic smell of the forest was there, now greatly magnified. It was a green, resinous, spicy smell. Might taste good in spaghetti sauce, he mused . . .

  Again he surveyed his surroundings. If he squinted his eyes, this might almost have been a California forest of giant sequoias. But on closer examination almost every detail was unfamiliar, alien. This is not Earth, he thought, it's a whole new world in another universe. He inhaled deeply, allowing the chill of alienness to penetrate successive layers of his consciousness. He felt so isolated, so alone . . .

  Above the dark hole of their 'apartment' he could see through the dense upper branches a few wisps of clouds interspersed with blue sky. The great rising trunk gave the illusion of continuing upward to infinity. Yet it was clear that this tree, as enormous as it was, was no larger than most of the others nearby. He stood back and sighted with the CCD camera. He zoomed the lens to maximum focal length, panned up the tree, and then did a slow sweep of the other trees, concluding with a dezoom back to maximum wide angle.

  He recalled a family vacation many years ago. His father had taken the family to Redwood National Park in California, and then they'd driven to the giant sequoia groves of Yosemite. Both parks had enormous trees, some that were thousands of years old. One had been so large that an automobile could drive through it. But the trees in this forest were certainly bigger. Wait 'til Weyerhauser finds out about this place, he thought grimly, recalling hikes in the Cascades on forest trails that wound past the slash-and-burn devastation left in the path of logging operations.

  Melissa appeared around the curve of the tree, her arms loaded with dead
branches. 'There's lots of wood on the ground around here, David,' she said. 'And I saw some mushrooms, too.'

  Jeff was just behind her, panting and dragging a huge branch that should have been too big for him to handle. He pulled it up near the pile that Melissa had started. Then he ran over to David. 'David!' he breathed. 'There was a squirrel on that tree over there! It was a funny greenish color at first, but it sort of flicked its fur and turned brown when it saw me. It ran around the tree, and I couldn't find it any more. David, it had six legs!'

  David followed Jeff to the spot, but there was no sign of any squirrel-like animal, only a few treebirds climbing on trunks of the big trees and some smaller birds flying in the high branches of the forest canopy. He squinted upward at the flying birds. There was something odd about the way they flew, but they were too far away to pinpoint the source of the strangeness. Well, forests should have birds and squirrels, he thought, even if they're strange and green and change colors and have too many legs.

  17

  Wednesday Evening, October 13

  The fading light through the door-hole was almost gone. David looked at his watch, noting that it was just after 7:40. Sunset came at the same time in this universe, he thought. He peered into the darkness. He thought he could make out vague shapes flitting among the trees. Bats? Or something else? He shrugged and pulled up the ladder, rolling it into a rough cylinder and placing it on the floor near the opening. He covered the door-hole for the night with a large circle of aluminum-covered Fiberglas insulation, secured in place by several horizontal wooden branches tied to the nails driven into the wall.