“I’ve bled out the pressure. I’m opening the outer hatch now. Just a little. Oh gosh, what is that? It’s not completely black. There is a little light. There are shapes. There is…a sky. A sky? With…stars? The shapes are like…corn…stalks. At night. I’m sticking my head out now. Air rushed back into the depressurize airlock. “They made this difficult. No, no…no…!”
“Joseph, what is wrong? Do you need help?”
Joseph laughed. An earthshaking incredulous laugh. A body-shaking guffaw so loud it distorted the audio transmission.
“Joseph!” Margaret was almost screaming.
And Joseph, now quiet, replied, “It’s…a house. They left the porch light on.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The House
Margaret floated in the airlock. She and Joseph had removed their helmets and gloves. There was no need for them. Joseph was floating next to her. They were watching the night sky. Smelling the warm breeze. Marveling at a house that must be 200 years old but looked eminently livable.
“How do we get out there?” Margaret asked. “We’re weightless here, but if there is gravity outside, it’s a long drop.”
“We’ve got to plan for that. It doesn’t make any sense for there to be gravity outside and none here. It violates all the physics I know of. But we need to be able to lower ourselves down. It looks like about, what, 5 meters?”
They retreated into the vessel. There was no need for the airlock now. Joseph had left both ends open. They removed all their space gear, and, now naked, they looked for ordinary clothes. The selections were amazing.
Still floating freely, Margaret dressed Joseph in jeans and a t-shirt. He dressed her in a light sundress, not very practical, but he thought she looked good in it.
And then there was the rope ladder. It was at least 5 meters, and the finding of it was unbelievably convenient.
Joseph fastened the rope ladder to the docking collar on the airlock. It latched as if made for it. Perhaps it was. He gently backed himself out of the airlock and immediately felt the pull of one gee on his diminished muscles. He remained hanging on the ladder to assist Margaret as she backed out, her sundress rippling in the breeze. The trip down the ladder did not take up much time or space, but it was truly a giant leap from one world to another.
They held hands as they quietly approached the house. When they rang the doorbell, the door opened, but no one greeted them as they walked inside.
The first floor was furnished as a late 20th century home would be, Margaret said. But there was a slight whirring noise coming from upstairs. They called out repeatedly, but there was no answer.
Joseph led the climb to the second floor. He was the first to see the woman at a sewing machine.
“Excuse me. I didn’t know anyone was home. The door opened by itself.”
The woman did not look up, neither did she slow in what she was doing.
“Excuse me, I’m Margaret. I’m sorry to intrude on you.”
The sewing machine continue to whirr. Joseph and Margaret looked around the room. There was fabric everywhere sewn together in the oddest ways imaginable. Nothing looked useful at all.
They made their way back to the first floor. Joseph was dumbfounded, but Margaret had an idea.
“I think this is Don Henson’s house, from the book.”
“The book,” Joseph repeated.
“That was his wife. He called her Sewing Sue. This was her reaction to an alien abduction, just to sew and sew, without any other purpose. Until she was rescued by Jim Drake and his group.”
“By yours truly.” Jim Drake was standing behind them. He was wearing a 20th century Air Force uniform, which looked out of place when combined with his bedraggled hair and beard.
“Where are we now? And how did we get here?” Joseph asked these questions almost wearily.
“You are being guided of course. All these paths are part of your guidance. And a consequence of your choices as well. I’ve seen that you have become rather close friends.”
Joseph and Margaret just looked at each other but said nothing. After a long pause Margaret asked, “Where is Don Henson?”
“At the time that you are perceiving he is on his way back from the quantum gate. It will take him several days to return. Very little time will have passed here.”
“That’s the opposite of what should happen with travel near light speed. Time should be shortened there relative to here.”
“Such is your understanding,” Drake replied. “But your Einstein just discovered laws. He didn’t make them.”
“So you make them then.”
“I am but your servant. Those who made the great oval that you saw…adjust the laws.”
“What were the heads that were following us? Drones? Robots?”
“They were also servants, but they were alive. All of this is alive. Everything in fact. You think it is not. But it has consciousness just as you do. Its awareness is appropriately limited for what it is, just as yours is. The totality is beyond what you can ever know.”
“How are we supposed to react to that?” Joseph demanded.
“React as you wish. The universe does not require your understanding. It does, however, require, and therefore requests, your connections to each other, and to what you can observe. Now, make yourselves at home. Sue will not see you, so you can’t bother her. She will be rescued from her dilemma soon enough. And then you will be ready for other places. But while you are here, be sure to check out the garden.”
∆∆∆
“Now he’s gone again. He always brings us these cryptic comments and then disappears. All I have to do is look away and then it’s as if he wasn’t there at all.”
“I know what you mean,” said Margaret. “I’ve never seen him disappear. You’re right: it’s as if he was never here, wherever it has been. What’s more, the time sequences are all off. Sue wasn’t sewing while Don was flying back from the quantum gate. And right now there is no garden, just a big cornfield. The garden came much later.”
“I’m going outside to look.”
Just as Joseph suspected, the cornfield was entirely gone. There was instead a beautiful, well-maintained garden.
“Wow! It’s pristine. When I saw it, it was more than 100 years old and completely dilapidated. We’ve got to document this. I’ll write, you draw. Now I think I know what part of our purpose may be. We’ve got to restore this garden in our time.”
“Provided we get back to our time. Next thing you know we’ll have dinosaurs running through here.” The microraptor appeared at the edge of his vision and quickly disappeared. “Hey, did you see that?”
“What?”
“It was a big bird with four wings.”
“Four wings? Was it flying?”
“It was jumping. I didn’t see it long enough to know if it was flying or not.”
“So now you’ve seen a microraptor,” Margaret said.
“Just as I mentioned…it. I’m not going to say it again. Let’s get back to the garden.”
Margaret led Joseph along the now complete garden path.
“Amazing! There is the unicorn. Don Henson had that statue placed here because he saw a unicorn in one of the places he was transported to. Just as you saw the microraptor. This is a memorial garden essentially. The unicorn symbolized a place that was perfect in his mind. Oh, look! This stone is dedicated to the campers who disappeared here one night. Henson thought they were taken by extraterrestrials, much like the oval people, I guess. They had a song about finding a way to a place called home. I can finally make out all the words, and the names.”
Margaret was clearly rapt by what she was seeing. To Joseph it was a pretty place but without much meaning, except for his dinosaur.
Next came the memorial to “The Girl with the Star Tattoos”.
“Why was she so important?” Joseph asked.
“Because she believed in Henson and what he had seen. It was necessary for someone to believe him without eviden
ce, to save humanity or something like that.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Remember that the universe has no need to explain itself.”
“It would be nice if it tried… just a little. We have questioning minds.”
“It does explain itself, just a little. We have little questioning minds.”
“I would have done things differently,” Joseph said.
“Yes, Joseph, I suppose you would. But would it have been better, ultimately? If you want to play God, you will have a great deal to manage.”
“I would have kept it simple.”
“Maybe it is simple. As are we.”
“Star tattoos. We saw a girl covered with stars while we were on the moon. I couldn’t tell if the stars were on fabric or on her skin.”
“I don’t know either. Maybe she is, or was, the same. We had to believe her, to get back to the PSV, although I preferred the museum.”
“I know you did. But before the PSV, and from the museum, she led us to this garden, didn’t she? On the moon. There were blue flowers and these markers. I couldn’t read them, but you said they were in the book.”
“And they said what we are seeing now. Just like in the book.”
Finally was the grave, or what appeared to be a grave.
“It’s Jim Drake, isn’t it? His grave, although he keeps showing up to us. Look at the shrub next to it. It’s a mandrake. Jim Drake used mandrake as a symbol of himself. Mandrake, the plant, the root, has hallucinogenic properties. Many people thought that Jim Drake was no more than one of Don Henson’s hallucinations.
“Now I wonder: is that what they gave me? In the ritual I attended, when another Don, Ritual Don, who looked like the farmer but different, he proclaimed that there is no meaning to where we are. And then I slept but I had such dreams afterward. About an eye.” Margaret’s attention had drifted into her thoughts, balanced on the tip of a dream.
They returned to the house in silence but with many notes. They would spend several days there, while the woman upstairs continued to sew, day and night. They would return to the garden several times, and Joseph would sketch the markers, the details, and map the grounds. They would have enough material to recreate the garden in their present time, if they ever returned to it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Cave
Joseph turned in his sleep. He was uncomfortable. The bed had become hard, and he was cold. The covers had vanished. Margaret was trying to cling to him for warmth.
“What’s this? No covers? This bed is cold. And hard. Smooth and hard.”
Margaret was waking slowly, and because of the cold, she was clinging to Joseph ever more tightly. Their only attire was underwear and t-shirts, and the temperature had plummeted compared to the comfortable bedroom they shared in the Hensons’ house.
Joseph reached about him and felt nothing. He stood and reached all around, stepping carefully, reaching forward and to each side.
“Where did you go?” Margaret asked.
“I’m here. I’ll keep talking. It’s as dark as a cave in here. Where in this world, or another, have we gone now? And couldn’t they have given us our clothes at least?”
A soft glow had become barely detectable. Joseph was not sure if he was adjusting to the darkness or if the light was actually increasing.
“It’s getting lighter. Very slowly.”
“I think so too.” Margaret was standing now, and she could make out a suggestion of Joseph’s location. She knelt and felt the floor. It was cold and very smooth, like glass. It also felt very clean.
∆∆∆
Acceptable light slowly returned to the glass cave. That is what Margaret was calling it, and she said that it too was in the book.
“It’s not exactly like the glass cave in the book though. For one thing, this material has a glowing luminescence coming from a deeper layer. The coloration of the glass is almost iridescent, but it’s providing a neutral and natural colored light. In the book, the glass was alive. I don’t know if that is true here or not, and I don’t know how we could tell if it were. But it’s freezing down here!” She was shivering by now, and her teeth were chattering. She held her mostly bare arms tight against her chest.
Joseph was trying to do jumping-jacks. “It’s not helping. There, in the shadows. Do we see corridors, maybe to warmer rooms?”
The corridors lightened slowly as they entered. They seemed extensive but there were no doors.
“How are we going to get back to where we started?” Margaret was worried.
“Does it matter? There’s no way out anyway. We got…transported in here. So we’ll have to get transported out.”
“Will that happen before we go into hypothermia?”
Just then Joseph touched a place on the wall and a formerly invisible door slid open without making a sound.
“Okay…we have another room. Or another corridor behind a door.”
The door silently slid closed behind them. This room was smaller than the first and a little warmer. They both started feeling along the wall for any other doors that might appear. One did and led them into another corridor. The corridor was becoming warmer as they followed it, still feeling along the walls.
There were no rooms but there was a fountain spurting up from the floor, its fluid flowing into a narrow channel that led into a small dark passage.
“Is this water?”
“It looks like water but how can we tell?”
Joseph cautiously dipped the tip of his little finger. Then his hand. The fluid was warm.
“It feels like bath water.” He smelled what was in his cupped palms and then tasted. “It tastes like warm water.” He put both feet into the pool it had formed around the fountain itself. He looked so pleased that Margaret quickly joined him and began wetting her arms. They stripped and, naked, they immersed themselves into the shallow tub of life-preserving H2O.
“I don’t want to leave. We’ll be cold while wet.”
“Not as cold as we were before.” Joseph had exited the pool and donned his shorts. The water was dripping down his arms and legs and he kept trying to brush it away.
“Here let me help.” Margaret was trying to shake the water off while brushing down Joseph’s skin. “Would you mind turning please?”
She used the facilities, such as they were, with no place even to hide, before re-dressing.
“I hope we’ll be dry soon, preferably not freeze-dried.” They had to take care in walking with wet feet on the slippery floor while they felt the walls and sometimes caught themselves on them to keep from falling.
The path beyond the fountain, pool, and channel led into several other corridors. “This definitely is not the glass cave in the book. This is huge. Interesting how nothing is completely flat, not even the sliding doors. But the colors keep changing. We don’t reflect the colors though.”
Finally a door led into a giant room with a house-sized block structure in the middle of it. The structure had the first flat and vertical walls they had seen. Considerable heat emanated from large silvery tubes that stretched from it in all directions.
“Maybe we can get dry after all.”
∆∆∆
It had been a matter of hours, but Margaret and Joseph were reluctant to leave the large room with all the warm machinery.
“If we leave, we’ll freeze again,” Margaret said.
“If we don’t, we may never get out. And we’ll need drinking water soon. I don’t know if that spring water is drinkable or not. At some point we might have no choice but to risk it.”
“If we can even find our way back to it.”
“Maybe there are others.”
“Or maybe not. I’d like to take a nap before we head out again. It’s so comfortable here even though the glass is hard.”
The glass became spongy. She lay down upon it and suddenly it gave a little beneath.
“This is soft here. Well, a little soft. Not like the glass we’ve been walking
on.”
Joseph lay down beside her and sank a little into the slightly foamy glass.
“This is nice. Do you suppose they’re wanting us to stay?”
Joseph called out, “We’ll need food and drink, alien people! And some clothes!”
One of the silvery tubes was moving. It detached itself from the far wall.
“What the…? First they give us a bed and now they want to swallow us!”
And it did. The detached end enlarged sufficiently to scoop them both up. They rolled together and apart as the tube propelled them into the block of surfaces in the middle of the room.
A moment later they were in a comfortable-looking enclosure. There were couches, of a sort, rounded protrusions of the same glass that made the undulating floor and rounded walls. The glass was softened much like what they had found when they lay down in the big room.
A section looked like some kind of food station. There were depressions on its “counter” containing substances of various shapes and color. There were “bowls” of water and detachable articles that could serve as cups. There were alcoves in the curving walls, and one contained what looked like fur blankets. They discovered the furs to be warm and tingly in an unfamiliar way.
Behind a protrusion there was a hole in the floor and water flowing into it from the wall. Each took a turn using this area for what seemed obvious.
“The water in the kitchen is good,” said Joseph. He’d filled a “cup” and sipped slowly despite his thirst. It was cool but not too cold. The bowl seemed to refill itself after Margaret took a cupful. The “snacks” were bland but not terrible even though they had no idea if any of them were actually compatible with their physiology. They were filling at least.
“How long will this last? They make us semi-comfortable and then they take it all away.”
“Like life,” said Margaret as she finished eating a wafer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Unimaginable
Days passed, or what seemed like days. The lighting mercifully lowered during a “sleep period” and raised again to wake them up. They even had a bright blue sky, with clouds, on the high vaulted ceiling. The noon-day sun was directly overhead making the room seem to be roofless. There was no way out that they could detect and feeling all over the walls accomplished nothing. At least the temperature was comfortable if they wrapped up in the fur blankets. Lacking laundry facilities they soon chose to wear nothing else.
Personal Space- Return to the Garden Page 7
