by Al Macy
“His blood pressure is dropping. Hey, wait!” Exerb pointed. “Look. He’s moving. He’s rising into the air. Whoa!”
An elevation display appended itself to the list of information at the wire-frame-Jake’s shoulder. It had read an equivalent of 0.5 meter, shifted to ten, and then spun up to one thousand.
Marbecka bobbed her head. “Falbex. He flew to Jake and brought him on board. They’ve flown straight up, wisely staying on their side of the border, in case the rift happens again.”
Exerb ruffled his feathers. “There isn’t much they can do to keep him alive. He needs blood. We had him donate some of his own blood long ago, but that’s here and he’s there.”
“Kollet,” Marbecka said. “How have things changed now that he’s in the ship?”
Kollet shook his wrist with uncertainty. “Ach. Slightly better. But if we’re wrong—”
“Jobex, might the confluence rift happen again?”
“Maybe. The longer we go, the less likely.”
“Where is he now?”
“Right above where he was lying. Sheesh. They’re close to us, but in the other universe.”
“Okay. As Jake would say in English, it’s crunch time. Kollet, transport him.”
Kollet popped his crest and pointed to his display. “Wait. The granularity is at eighteen meters. There are seven people aboard that craft. We could transport the wrong one. Since it’s set up for Jake, whoever gets transferred could suffer a stroke or heart attack—”
“Do it, Kollet. I’ll take responsibility.”
Kollet’s pupils flared in frustration. He pushed the virtual engagement lever forward, then successively twisted four override knobs. A high-frequency whine filled the control room, and the space between the lower and upper dishes turned black. The computer took over, and they all flew to the side of the receiving chamber.
The whine increased in frequency and volume, and they each put their hands over their ear canals. The frequency peaked and dropped, and the opacity of the spherical receiving area decreased.
The medical team entered the room with a gurney.
A figure appeared in the center of the sphere, floating above the lower dish.
“Uh-oh,” Jobex said.
The transport procedure ended with a pop, and the figure dropped down, stepped out of the receiving chamber, and collapsed to the floor.
“Falbex!” Marbecka cried.
The pilot said something incoherent then passed out. The medical team scooped him onto the gurney and left for the infirmary.
The others stood, stunned.
Marbecka recovered first. “Okay, set things up again, Kollet. We’ll bring every person on that ship back if we have to.”
“But you saw what happened to Falbex—”
A bell sounded.
Kollet pointed to the display. Jake’s image had changed from a wire-frame figure to a fleshed-in hologram.
An announcement blared through the wall speakers. “This is copilot Carbot in AR-57. The confluence rift has reformed. I am crossing over the border into Celano-1 now. I’ll be landing on the roof of the research building in thirty seconds. Jake is in critical condition, and pilot Falbex has disappeared.”
* * *
I was pulled back to consciousness. What was happening? I was being eaten by a tyrannosaur. Not surprising. I had hoped to sleep through it, but now it had me in its jaws. It hurt even more than I’d expected it to. I opened my eyes.
“Jake. You’re dying.” Marbecka’s face was inches from mine. “We could maybe save you here, but if you die, the project is toast. It’s better to send you back right now, while you are still alive.”
Icy knives stabbed into my flesh. I sucked in a huge breath, and my heart fluttered in my throat. My head exploded.
“Jake, sending you back, we are. We brought you back from Dinosaur-1. I injected you with a stimulant. You’ll be dead in a few minutes, and then it will be overly late to send you home. We’re ill prepared, but we have no choice.”
I couldn’t understand her. Every muscle in my body was on fire. Going rigid. “You come with me.”
Her crest popped up. “No, no, I can’t. Hold onto this. Tightly. You’re going now.” She put my hand around a handle. A stalk led from the handle to a white chest with writing on it. English writing. “Hold this, Jake. You won’t remember. Goodbye.”
I won’t remember what? To hold it? I gripped the handle, and the bottom of the room fell away. The same whine as before built up, and I was falling, even though I could see the room was stationary. The red shift began.
“No, you come, too!” I gripped Marbecka’s wing with my free hand.
She squawked and flapped, but I didn’t let go. The stimulant had given me strength.
She pecked my arm like a cobra striking its prey. Then, neither of us could move. I was shrinking. Folding in on myself. The world went black. Then, as before, the process reversed itself. The light came back, red at first. The whine lowered in frequency, and the subtle scent of Charli’s perfume drifted over me.
BOOK II
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I stood in the hallway of my home, the lunch guests rushing in to see what all the barking was about. What had just happened? The high-frequency whine, the colors going red, then dark, then everything returning to normal.
Boonie kept barking, and Marie had a death grip on my wrist. I looked at her. Marie! What was this unimaginable joy I felt at seeing my grandmother-in-law? I liked her fine, but we barely knew one another.
I hugged her, lifting her up into the air and kissing her forehead.
“Jake, what’s gotten into you?” She turned her head away. “Put me down!”
Boonie gave a yip. Boonie! I knelt down, hugged him, and ruffled the fur below his ears the way he liked it. He’d been with me all morning, so why did I feel this unbounded joy at seeing him again? Was it the champagne?
My guests stood in the hall with their jaws hanging down.
I squinted. “What? Can’t a guy hug his dog and his grandmother-in-law?”
But they weren’t looking at me. They were looking behind me. I turned.
What on Earth? A person-sized bird stood there, frozen. It looked like a cross between a dinosaur and a parrot.
Apparently recovering from its own shock, it squawked loudly. Ow! I covered my ears. The bird flew through the hall into the living room. I rushed in after it, hitting my shin on a large, white chest. Where did that thing come from? My guests followed me.
The dinobird thing had flown up to the rustic chandelier. It had some kind of cockatoo crest on its head, which popped up and down like mad.
The chandelier swung back and forth and then crashed to the floor. The dinosaur-bird thing flew head-on into the living room’s picture window and fell, senseless.
We all stared at it. The antique clock on the mantel ticked away the seconds.
My good friend Stephanie took a step back. “I don’t think we should touch it.”
I walked over and knelt. Its chest moved up and down. “It’s still alive. Maybe it’s just stunned.” I’d never seen anything like it. Had I? There was something familiar—
Charli came over and put her hand on my shoulder. Charli! I stood up and grabbed her and gave her a wonderful hug. Maybe a little too tight. I couldn’t stop kissing her face.
She laughed. “Jake, what the hell is going on?”
Sophia entered the room pulling a white chest by its handle—the chest I’d knocked into. Shaped like a huge cooler, it floated an inch off the floor.
Sophia! I rushed over, dragging Charli with me, and swept my daughter up in my arms, kissing her cheeks and forehead. She giggled. I sobbed uncontrollably, the tears sliding down my cheeks.
Charli put her hand on my forearm. “Jake?”
Stephanie frowned at me and went to the phone. “Jake, I think you need help. I’m calling an ambulance.”
Gordon Guccio looked at the creature on the floor. He pulled the unlit cigar fro
m his mouth. “Better call the zoo.”
I sobbed again, and the worried looks turned back to me. I held up my hands. “I’m okay, guys, really. I think I had too much champagne, and I’ve just realized how lucky I am.”
That didn’t explain my feelings, not by a long shot. I didn’t understand them myself. It was as if I’d been separated from my family for months, unsure if I’d ever see them again. But if I didn’t make up a reason for my joy and tears, I’d be looking at a seventy-two-hour hold in the psych ward. At least I wasn’t the only one who saw Big Bird. I took a deep breath.
The dinobird thing jerked on the floor. It fluttered to its feet and shook itself, puffing out all its feathers. We stood, frozen in place.
It looked directly at me. It spoke. “Fuck you, Jake! You’ve really screwed everything up on this day. Because you brought me with you, the cocksucking physicists will never—”
It froze. Something was happening. The bird no longer looked real and began shifting in color, turning red.
It vanished.
* * *
Marbecka had shaken the cobwebs from her mind and looked at Jake. Why had she let her fear take control? She knew what a window was—they had windows in her universe—but her primitive brain screamed for her to fly. Fly! She’d flown directly into it. She could have broken her neck.
Without me the project is doomed. No one else has the motivation or the know-how to complete it. “Fuck you, Jake! You’ve really screwed everything up on this day. Because you brought me with you, the cocksucking physicists will never—”
She froze, unable to move. Good, she was paratransitting. The project was saved. She waited through the long minutes.
Pop.
She was back in her own environment. She stretched her left wing and flared her tail. She bobbed her head.
Her colleagues didn’t approach her. Why weren’t they celebrating? They’d saved the project, hadn’t they? If she were stuck in Human-1, all would be lost. Smoke! No!
Her assistant turned in circles on her perch. “We had to run it in overdrive. You would have been lost otherwise.”
She turned. Half the paratransit assembly had melted to the floor. A mist of smoke rose above it, drifting to the ceiling. An alarm sounded, and automatic sprinklers flooded the room with water.
* * *
I stood in my living room, blinking. The strange birdlike creature was gone as if it had never existed. The chandelier lay on the braided rug.
Everyone turned to me.
“Don’t look at me. I’ve never seen that thing before in my life. I don’t know what’s going on.” I didn’t tell them there was a vague déjà vu quality to that creature.
Guccio squatted down next to the white chest Sophia had pulled into the living room. He read us the wording on the top. “Please touch here for critical information about our worlds.” He stuck the unlit cigar back in his mouth and looked up.
I walked over and squatted down on the other side. “Sure is tempting.” There was something familiar about the chest, like the memory of a toy from one’s distant childhood. Someone telling me, “Hold this.”
Guccio pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll get some FBI techs to check it over.”
I put my hand on the chest to help myself stand up, and a holographic image materialized above it. This was no Star Wars shimmery picture. It was a 3-D, lifelike video of the alien creature that had so recently disappeared from our living room.
Everyone gasped, and Sophia ran over to me. I picked her up and took a few steps back.
The creature, half small dinosaur, half bird, sat on a perch. It spoke, the tenor of its voice matching that of a parrot. “Greetings, people of Earth. I am speaking to you from a parallel universe. My purpose on this day is to be communicating with the scientists on your world. I am warning of a catastrophe that will unfold in both of our worlds unless we can work together to prevent it.”
A chart appeared next to the creature. “Note that at any time, you may speak the following commands, which Jake has told me you will be familiar with: Pause, Rewind, Play, Menu, and Help.”
Charli said, “Pause,” and the video froze. Everyone turned to me.
Guccio dropped down onto the couch. “Lucy, you got some ’splainin’ to do.”
I shrugged and shook my head. I said, “Play.”
The creature continued. “My name is Marbecka. I am a female dinobird. That’s what Jake calls our species. Jake, if you are watching, know that your memory of the months you spent in our universe is gone. Our plan is to be returning you to the same point in space-time from which we pulled you. For the benefit of your scientists, that is described in some of the electronic documents in this chest.”
The dinobird thing fluffed its feathers. “Also, we had you record a video journal of your experiences. You may choose to watch that video from the main menu—”
“Menu,” I said. This was something I had to see. No one objected. The hologram spread out across the room, displaying perhaps one hundred menu options. I found the one I wanted. “Jake video journal. Play … Pause.”
The hologram, occupying a six-foot cube in the center of our living room, showed me, sitting on a strange chair. The “me” on the screen weighed twenty pounds less than normal me. I was deeply tanned, with a full beard and dreadlocks. Everyone gasped, and Charli came over and put her arm around me. We found places to sit and watch. Boonie lay on the braided rug, crunching a rawhide chew.
I said, “Play.”
My caveman image leaned forward. “The dinobird called Marbecka has asked me to record a journal of my experience in this parallel universe. I know it sounds crazy, but this is a real place. This all began on June 1, 2020.
“That morning—” parallel-me cleared his throat “—with my sleeping wife snuggled against me, I had no idea that in a few short hours, I’d be the only man on Earth.”
My alter ego leaned back. “Around lunchtime, I was in the hall of my home when I felt as if I were flying down the first drop of a roller coaster. I held on to Boonie’s fur, and Grandma Keller held my wrist. Next thing I knew, I was sitting in the redwood forest with my dog and my grandmother-in-law.”
Marie said, “Pause.” She crossed her arms. “So, I was there, too.”
“Apparently so.” I shrugged.
Guccio crossed his legs. “Does any of this stuff ring a bell, Jake?”
“Only on a sort of emotional level. Does that make sense? If my brain reverted to its state before I left, I shouldn’t remember anything at all. But emotionally, I feel like I’ve been away a long time. I can’t describe it.” I rubbed the top of my left ear.
“You guys go ahead and watch it. I’m going to make a few phone calls.” Guccio got up and walked into the other room.
“Well,” Marie said. “At least we now know why Boonie stuck with you all morning. And perhaps, why you were so happy to see us.”
I got the video going again—a surreal and engrossing reality show. It included pictures labeled “From Jake’s Telephone,” apparently photos I’d taken with my smartphone. The first one was of a dead, tiger-striped lizard thing. Another showed my companions in front of a small cave.
The deaths of Marie and Boonie brought tears to everyone’s eyes. Except Marie’s.
She continued knitting. “Well, I’m okay now, anyway.” She sure takes things in stride.
Charli squeezed my arm tighter and pushed her head against my shoulder. “Oh, Jake. How can this be?”
Guccio came back holding a beer and dropped into a chair.
From the point of my rescue from the nature reserve, video footage accompanied my monologue. Limping into the blue ship, I was covered in dirt and wore filthy rags. A bloody arrow stuck out from my calf. The narrator, parallel-me, said it reminded him of an arrow-through-the-head gag toy. Watching the video, I’d had the same thought.
It continued for hours, describing my time teaching English to the dinobirds. Toward the end, a segment showed me fighting a di
nosaur. It showed how two of the red dinobirds distracted it, allowing me to get away. They saved my life. We heard Marbecka’s voice in the background. “He’s running straight down the hill. The konrato isn’t chasing him, but Jake doesn’t realize that.”
Sophia pointed at the hologram. “Konrato? No, that’s a dilophosaurus.”
In the final, rushed entry, Marbecka addressed the camera. “Jake is residing at this moment in a third parallel universe. He’s injured and will expire soon. If he dies, we will neither be able to send him back nor the chest of documents. We aren’t ready, but we must—”
A second dinobird interrupted her, and the video ended.
Guccio stood. “With your permission, Jake, I’d like to take this device to DC. I assume you and Charli will come, too?”
“Will do.” I looked at Charli.
She nodded.
Sophia had fallen asleep, sitting between Charli and me. I picked up my daughter and carried her to her bed. Behind me, armed federal marshals entered the living room and carried away the white chest.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two weeks passed before Charli and I were summoned to Washington. Give the government a deadline that is a year away, and it will act like a high school student assigned a term paper. Nothing will get done until the last minute. I welcomed the opportunity to spend more time with my family.
President Young was doing all he could to get the wheels turning, but it was already mid-June when we entered the Oval Office. The morning had been unusually cool, and a small fire crackled in the fireplace. While the president finished up some paperwork, Charli and I checked out the new bust of Dane Hallstrom. Charli had been chief advisor to President Hallstrom, and I’d been on the team tasked with defeating Cronkite, the alien who had almost taken over the world. We’d both quit—dropped out—after we put Cronkite into DC’s supermax prison.
Young came over to us. He hadn’t seen Charli or me since our wedding. He was the country’s first albino president. Without extensive makeup, applied each day, he looked a bit like an extraterrestrial himself. After hugs and small talk, we sat on the couches and poured ourselves coffee.
