Herbert's Wormhole

by Peter Nelson

“Observe.” Herbert turned, faced his bedroom wall—and ran straight into it.

  Almost immediately, Herbert popped up, pulled out a tiny screwdriver and began making adjustments to his suit. He stepped over to Alex and quickly made the same adjustments. “Still working out some kinks,” he said. “That should do the trick.” Herbert stepped back and nodded toward the wall. “Go on. Fire her up and have a run at it!”

  “Uh, no thanks,” Alex said. “I think I’ll just pass through the door, like normal people.” Alex stepped out into the hallway and ducked back in, just in time to miss getting smacked in the face by a pair of Herbert’s soggy underpants.

  “C’mon,” Alex said sadly. “Our moms are making us have a playdate together on my new jungle gym. We might as well get it over with.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Alex sat atop the jungle gym ladder, at the mouth of the tunnel-slide, and watched as Herbert ran full-force into Alex’s fence. He looked at Herbert rubbing his bruised head.

  This “playdate” cannot get any worse, he thought.

  Then he saw Sammi Clementine peeking over the fence separating his yard from hers.

  “Hey, cool slide,” she said.

  “You betcha!” he blurted awkwardly. “Wanna come check it out? It’s got a rock-climbing wall. I know you’re into rock climbing. Tuesdays and Thursdays, noon to three, right?”

  She looked at him. “Why would you possibly know that?”

  Alex suddenly felt very warm, even though it wasn’t very hot out.

  “Anyway, I can’t,” Sammi said. “I’ve gotta get to my swim meet. I just heard something bump into my fence. I thought maybe you got a dog or something.”

  They both looked over at Herbert, who at that moment ran straight into a tree.

  “Well, I’ll let you guys get back to playing…spaceman, or whatever,” she said. “See ya.”

  Sammi disappeared. Alex buried his face in his hands for a good long time. He heard a crunch as Herbert dove headfirst into a thick bush. He stared down at Herbert’s blinking, lit-up N.E.D. suit, and studied his own suit: the lights, the wires, and the little switch on his belt buckle. Without thinking, Alex flipped it on. The lights went BLINKA-BLINKA-BLINKA.

  The wires went HRUMMMMMMM…. It kind of tickles, he thought. Then he noticed a WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA… It was a strange, pulsing sound, and it wasn’t coming from his N.E.D. suit. Something pulled at him. He turned. The sound was growing louder by the second—and it was coming from inside the slide.

  A shimmering, silver-blue surface rippled and vibrated a few feet down the tube, like a shiny electric curtain blocking the inside of the slide. Alex leaned in toward it and got a closer look. It was very weird, but not as weird as the fact that Alex wasn’t leaning on purpose—he was being pulled toward it. Alex grabbed the edge of the tube slide. He looked back at Herbert, who was making adjustments to his N.E.D. suit with his tiny screwdriver.

  “Hey!” Alex yelled.

  Herbert looked up and saw that Alex’s suit was turned on. “Hey!” he barked back. “That is a delicate piece of experimental equipment, which you are not authorized to activate! Turn it off immediately, before you break it!”

  Alex didn’t dare let go of his grip on the tube to reach down and turn off his N.E.D. suit. He was being pulled harder and harder every second, and that WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA sound was beginning to rattle the entire jungle gym.

  “I said, turn it off!” Herbert was climbing the shuddering ladder toward Alex, holding his screwdriver in his teeth. With Herbert’s every step, the force seemed to be pulling Alex harder and harder.

  “Stop! Don’t come any closer!” Alex yelled.

  Herbert reached the top of the ladder and suddenly flew into Alex, as if yanked by some invisible force.

  “What did you do?” Herbert yelled.

  “Nothing!” Alex screamed back.

  “Did so!”

  “Did not!”

  WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA!

  The two of them were now side by side on their bellies, their feet dangling into the gaping, rattling mouth of the slide.

  “The edge of the slide’s too smooth—I can’t hold on!” Herbert said through clenched teeth, the screwdriver still in his mouth.

  “Try!”

  “Great advice, thanks!”

  “Shut up!”

  “You shut up!”

  WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA-WUBBA!! The awful noise echoed louder and louder inside the vibrating slide, as if it were some hungry monster whose stomach was grumbling harder because it knew it was about to be fed.

  Alex and Herbert’s faces were just inches apart.

  Their fingers ached—and began to slip.

  They screamed.

  Herbert’s screwdriver dropped from his opened mouth and clattered down the tube just before he and Alex let go.

  FOOMP!

  In an instant they vanished, swallowed up by the shimmering curtain of light. In the next instant, the light vanished behind them.

  The jungle gym stopped vibrating immediately. At the bottom of the slide, Herbert’s screwdriver skidded out and landed safely on the grass. Alex and Herbert, however, did not.

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  Alex popped out of the cave and skidded through the rocky dirt. His nose smooshed against something dirty, cold, and furry. It was resting on a large hairy foot, which was attached, predictably, to a large hairy leg. Alex slowly looked up. The large hairy foot and the large hairy leg were attached, not predictably at all, to a large hairy caveman.

  Scrambling to his feet, Alex scurried back toward the cave he’d just popped out of. But instead of running into the cave entrance, Alex ran into the cave entrance—it was there, but it was solid black, painted on the wall of rock. He slammed into it and bounced backward. Alex quickly dived behind a nearby jungle fern.

  Herbert was already hiding behind the fern, crouched down, scribbling a long mathematical equation in the dirt. Alex peeked through the leaves, relieved to see that the caveman and his cavemen buddies hadn’t moved an inch. They were gathered around a fire, so amazed with it that they didn’t seem to even notice the huge woolly mammoth standing perfectly still, staring at the fire with them. What is wrong with these guys? Alex thought.

  Alex looked at Herbert’s scribbling. “What’re you doing? This isn’t the time for homework! I don’t think it’s even a time when homework existed!”

  Herbert didn’t look up. “Quiet. I’m calculating the probability of polarity-reversal within hypothetical interdimensional time travel.”

  “What?” Alex whispered, glancing out at his prehistoric pals. “Why don’t you calculate this, Brainiac—how the heck did my jungle gym transport us to an actual prehistoric jungle?!”

  “Wormhole,” Herbert said.

  Alex’s eyes narrowed. “Call me that again,” he said. “I dare you.”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this!” Herbert said. “The built-in motion sensors in the video game suits, working in tandem with the molecular polarity enhancers I installed, stimulated previously unseen areas of exotic matter containing high quantities of negative energy density—the exact necessary conditions for a wormhole!”

  Alex blinked at Herbert.

  In the dirt, Herbert drew a horseshoe shape. “Observe. Einstein proved time isn’t a straight line. It curves, like this. See? Present, past.” He placed two pebbles on the “present” leg of the horseshoe. “These pebbles represent you and me.”

  Alex nervously glanced from the pebbles to the cavemen. “Okay. We’re all just pebbles on the horseshoe of time. Got it. How ’bout we speed up the lesson?”

  Herbert drew a line connecting the two legs of the horseshoe. “This is a wormhole. An invisible tunnel connecting two points in time.”

  “Like Chutes and Ladders!”

  “Nice theory, Einstein. But no. My antimatter suits opened a wormhole in your jungle gym”—Herbert slid the Herbert and Alex pebbles from the “present”
leg of the horseshoe to the “past” leg—“and safely transported us here, to what I’d estimate to be roughly 10,000 B.C.”

  “Safely transported us?” Alex forgot about the nearby cavemen for a moment. “Your stupid invention flushed us down the time-toilet!” he screamed. “We’re stuck here!”

  Herbert smiled. “Not to worry. My calculations lead me to conclude that reverse polarity can be achieved with our current negative energy displacement settings.”

  Alex gave him a threatening look.

  “The suits,” said Herbert. “They go in reverse.”

  Herbert and Alex tiptoed to the cave entrance. TAP-TAP-TAP. Alex knocked his hand against the fake, painted-on black cave entrance. Herbert nodded and hit the switch on his N.E.D. suit. It immediately lit up and hummed. The glowing, shimmery light from the tunnel-slide appeared in the painted-on cave entrance. Alex gave him a thumbs-up and hit his switch as well.

  Nothing.

  “Hold on a sec!” he whispered, glancing back at the woolly mammoth. “My thingy’s busted!” He frantically flipped his switch on and off. “Yo, pebble-boy! My thingy’s busted!”

  Herbert was already getting pulled into the shimmering wormhole. He looked back at Alex and blurted, “Just jiggle the glorb—” as his head was swallowed.

  “The glorb?! What the heck’s a glorb?!” Alex saw Herbert’s shoulders, then his back, sink into the wormhole. He glanced at the woolly mammoth—had it moved closer? He quickly turned back to Herbert and grabbed his ankles. He leaned back with all his might and yelled, “No! This playdate is not over!”

  Alex put his feet up on the side of the rock wall like a mountain climber and tugged backward. Slowly, he started winning the tug-of-war with the wormhole! He could see Herbert’s knees, then his butt. Then he saw it. Herbert’s belt buckle.

  “Eureka!” cried Alex. He hit the button that shut off Herbert’s N.E.D. suit. The wormhole belched out Herbert and disappeared. Herbert and Alex went flying backward. They sailed through the air, slammed into a still-staring caveman, and landed in the fire.

  “Aaaaahhh!” they screamed together. “Stop, drop, and roll! Stop, drop, and roll!” Alex and Herbert held each other tightly as they rolled around in the fire together. Eventually they stopped. As the cavemen continued to stare at them, Alex and Herbert got up and checked themselves. Realizing that they weren’t burned, burning, or even uncomfortably warm, they glanced down at the “fire” they’d just squashed. It was a bunch of red, yellow, and orange streamers being blown upward by a fan in the floor. And it was a floor. The sand, the fire, the cave, it was all fake. And if that was fake, then so were the—

  CREEAAAAK!

  Alex and Herbert looked at their prehistoric audience. One of the cavemen was moving. Well, wobbling. It wobbled like a department store mannequin—if a department store mannequin were dressed up like a caveman, then slammed off-balance by two boys thrown through the air by a suddenly deactivated wormhole.

  As Alex and Herbert watched, the wobbling cavemannequin stiffly fell over. BONK! It hit the cavemannequin next to it. BONK!—that one hit the next one. BONK! BONK! BONK! Like Neanderthal dominoes, they all toppled over one by one, until the last cavemannequin hit a boulder. Its head popped off and rolled to a stop at Alex and Herbert’s feet. Alex glanced over at the woolly mammoth to get his reaction to all of this. The big, furry beast was now lying on her side, still staring at the trashed fake fire as if nothing had happened.

  “Man, that’s gotta be the most relaxed woolly mammoth I’ve ever seen,” said Alex.

  “It’s not relaxed, it’s inanimate.” said Herbert. “All of this is.”

  Alex and Herbert slowly stepped back and looked up at the “sky” above them. From this angle, they noticed something that would normally be hard to miss, if there weren’t headless cavemen and relaxed woolly mammoths standing around to distract a person: A huge silver spaceship hovered over the entire scene.

  “Whoa,” Alex said. He and Herbert took in the shiny flying saucer, and then read the large sign hanging nearby.

  “I may have been a little off on the year,” Herbert said. “But I stand by my theory.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Herbert and Alex hopped a railing and stepped from the rocky sand onto a smooth, shiny black floor. They turned around and faced the very real-looking, but very fake, prehistoric scene.

  “It’s like a set from a movie!” Alex said. “About a bunch of cavemen and their pet woolly mammoth who are suddenly attacked by two kids from the future!”

  Herbert stared at the spaceship above the scene, then looked down an endless hallway at hundreds of other stages, behind hundreds of other railings. “Except this isn’t a movie set,” he said. “It’s some sort of museum.”

  Alex and Herbert walked across the hall and faced the next scene. Another spacecraft hovered, this time over an enormous glacier. A gigantic blow-dryer machine extended from an open hatch in the belly of the UFO. It was melting the ice. Mannequins of animals and humans were in various stages of being thawed out. “And we’re not from the future,” Herbert added, staring up at the UFO. “I think we’re in it.”

  The sign hanging from the spaceship over this diorama read:

  As this sank in, Alex and Herbert were startled by a voice from behind them: “WELCOME TO THE HALLWAY OF

  HUMAN HISTORY!” They spun around to see a bubblelike silver sphere, about the size of a beach ball, floating down the hall. A panel in its metallic skin slid open, and it projected images of excited schoolchildren crowding around and pointing at the very prehistoric diorama Alex and Herbert had just destroyed.

  “COME, STROLL DOWN THIS CORRIDOR OF COOPERATION….” the floating object continued. “MARVEL AT HUMANKIND’S HISTORICAL HELPERS WHO HAIL FROM HIGH ABOVE THE HEAVENS—THE G’DALIENS!” The panel closed and the words MONITORB MESSAGING flashed across the sphere in an impressive and highly memorable logo.

  It began to replay its message as it drifted past Alex and Herbert. They looked at each other and thought the exact same thing, which didn’t happen often: “What’s a G’Dalien?”

  Alex and Herbert strolled down the Hallway of Human History. Scene after mannequin-filled scene showed important moments in history and how humans, since the beginning of time, were given gifts, breakthroughs, and inventions from an unseen alien race known as G’Daliens.

  Whether it was the introduction of stone tools, the building of the pyramids, or the invention of cheez-in-a-can, there was always a G’Dalien spacecraft hovering somewhere in the scene. It seemed that without G’Dalien help, humans never would have figured anything out. And yet, Alex and Herbert noticed that over the centuries, these helpful strangers always kept their distance and never showed themselves—that is, until the very last diorama in the Hallway of Human History.

  It showed a G’Dalien spacecraft parked in the middle of a big city, surrounded by grateful, cheering humans who were overjoyed that these beings had saved their planet. It looked like a parade scene, with the humans holding up babies, balloons, and banners that read, WELCOME, G’DALIENS and HOORALIENS FOR THE G’DALIENS! In the center of the hoopla, apparently for the first time, the G’Daliens had stepped out of their spacecraft and let themselves be seen.

  The G’Daliens looked—well, there’s a saying that people say, which goes, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

  All right, fine.

  The G’Daliens looked, to put it as politely as possible, absolutely disgusting. Their squidlike bodies were the color of moldy mushroom soup. They were fat and slimy with six legs, two shiny, ink-black eyes, and one small, lipless mouth crammed full of tiny, razor-sharp teeth.

  “Ew,” Alex said, staring at the fake alien’s blobby belly. Then he heard something he’d never heard Herbert do before. He was giggling. “What?” said Alex.

  “Look—” Herbert said through his growing giggles. “Look at his mustache!”

  Alex looked at the slits that served as the G’Dali
ens’ nose holes and burst out laughing. Perched directly beneath their fleshy nostrils were big, bushy, very obviously fake mustaches. But it didn’t stop there. Alex pointed at something else. “Look—” he said, snorting out a laugh, “Look at their hair!” Indeed, resting like birds’ nests on top of each and every G’Dalien mannequin’s gray-green head was the silliest-looking toupee either Alex or Herbert had ever seen, including the squirrel-tail their fifth-grade math teacher, Mr. Kurlycheck, had worn on his head for last year’s yearbook Faculty Picture Day.

  This combination of head and facial hair would’ve looked strange on a human. On these repulsive creatures, they looked fall-down, pee-in-your-pants hilarious. Alex and Herbert couldn’t stop laughing. They couldn’t catch their breath. And they definitely couldn’t hear the slurping sound approaching from behind.

  “G’Day, mates!”

  They heard that. Alex and Herbert spun around and looked up. Towering over them was a real live G’Dalien. She smiled at them, then spoke in a thick, cheery Australian accent. “Good onya, fellas, enjoying what’s one of my favorite displays!” she gushed. “It’s such a happy ending to such a come-good story, eh?”

  She grinned at Alex and Herbert as she waited happily for a response. Alex and Herbert stood staring, frozen in fear.

  CHAPTER 8

  The nastiest thing about seeing a real live G’Dalien in the flesh was, well, her flesh. It was grayish-green, like on the mannequins, but it was also kind of see-through. Like Jell-O, if Jell-O made a flavor called “Scummy Sewer Water.” It wobbled like Jell-O, too. And when she chuckled, as CA-ROL suddenly started to do, the wobbling, scum-colored, semi-see-through Jell-O-like flesh was enough to make a person gag.