Twistor (24 page)

Jeffrey pointed to the beige telephone on the desk. 'We could phone my mom! Maybe she can help,' he said enthusiastically.

David picked up the telephone and held it to Jeff's ear. 'See, Jeff, no dial tone.' He pulled on the wire and showed him the cord, cut off by the twistor transition. 'You have to understand that telephones aren't magic. They're fairly simple electrical machines. They work by making electrons jiggle back and forth in wires that go all the way from one telephone to another. But if the wires are cut, then the telephone doesn't work, can't work. The lights in here don't work for the same reason. You have to think of machines in terms of how they work, not just what they do. OK?' He smiled.

'OK,' said Jeff. He wrinkled his nose and seemed lost in thought.

David shone the flashlight at the ceiling. He noticed growth rings in the wood grain near the top of the wooden 'dome' that became more tightly curved near the south wall, while the curvature of the rings was greater on toward the north wall. That would be the outside wall, he thought. He examined the north wall more carefully and noticed that the ring pattern made a sort of bull's-eye pattern at one point along the mid-wall bulge. Let's suppose, he thought to himself, that we are inside a tree. That
would
explain the smell and the growth rings. If that's so, then this point is closest to the outside of the tree. He tapped the wall at the center of the bull's-eye pattern and listened. It had a hollow sound here. Returning to the pile of tools on the desk, he fitted a slim adjustable auger bit in the folding manual drillbrace from the toolbox. He called Jeff to stand beside him and hold the flashlight. Melissa stood behind Jeff, watching intently. David turned the auger slowly. A light brown wood chip curled out of the hole as he methodically bored into the center of the bull's-eye.

'What are you doing, David?' Melissa asked finally.

'I think we must be inside some wooden thing like a big tree,' he said. 'I think the wall may be thinner here. I'm making a hole so maybe we can look out.'

Melissa looked worried. 'What if those men are still out there?'

'If there's one thing I'm sure of, Melissa,' he answered, 'it's that those men are not on the other side of this wall. That's one problem we don't need to worry about.' He continued to turn the auger. Suddenly his ears popped. He noticed a hissing noise coming from the newly bored hole. He removed the bit and placed his moistened lips over the hole. He could feel a cold rush of air against their sensitive surfaces. He smeared spittle on his palm and held it over the hole. Momentarily, the hissing stopped and a slight bubbling froth formed around the edges of his palm. Air was coming in. He sniffed at it. No odor except the near-cedar smell. Turning to the children, he pointed to the hole. 'There's air leaking in now. Wherever we are, there's a higher air pressure outside than in here. I'm pretty sure I can drill all the way through so we can peek outside.'

As he bored deeper, the hiss increased sharply, then stopped as David's ears popped again. He continued turning the brace until the auger cut through. He stopped and backed it out, then bent and sighted through the new
hole.
The smell of new-cut wood was thick in the air as he pressed his cheek against the wall and peered out. Moving his head back and forth across the narrow opening, he could resolve colors, mostly shades of brown and green. There were light brown verticals that could have been tree trunks. Whatever lay beyond the hole, there was certainly more space out there than in here. And more air.

'Can we look too?' asked Jeff.

'Do you see any people?' asked Melissa.

David turned from the hole and felt a rush of giddy relief. He'd been sure they were trapped in an airtight compartment like bees in a jar and would soon die of asphyxiation. He put a hand on the wall to steady himself and smiled at the children.

'You can look if you want,' he said, and lifted Jeff to the level of the hole. 'I have an idea where we are, now,' he said. We have air to breathe, and we can get outside, he thought. We're gonna make it!

Victoria came abruptly back to consciousness, startled. The bedside telephone had awakened her. Its burr had somehow been tangled in a vivid dream that was still evaporating from the surface of her awareness. 'Hello?' she said into the receiver, noticing as she spoke the sleep-softened formlessness of her own voice.

'Vickie, this is Sam,' came the familiar voice from the earpiece. 'I'm sorry to wake you, honey. I know you prob'ly worked all night. But you'd better get right over to your lab. There's been an accident.'

'David!' said Vickie. 'I mean, is David all right, Sam?' The details of her dream swirled in her head, just out of reach. She and David had been working in the laboratory, and she had been very happy. Then something terrible had happened.

'I don't know where David is, Vickie. There's something here you've gotta see for yourself,' said Sam. 'If I
tried
to explain, you'd think I was nuts. How soon can you get here?'

'I'll be there in about twenty minutes,' she said. Something had happened to David. She was sure of it, and the thought was a dull ache of dread, an extension of the terrible dream. As she hung up the phone and propelled herself from the bed, she was already plotting a minimum-time strategy of dressing and biking to the lab.

Victoria stood at the door of the laboratory and stared in disbelief. In the space formerly occupied by her thesis experiment was a shiny convex wall of wood. It was a sphere! Ralph Weinberger, the department chairman, motioned her to come inside quickly. He closed and locked the door after she had entered, then asked if she knew anything at all about the wooden object. She shook her head. The room was permeated with an essence vaguely reminiscent of cedar. She walked over and touched the sphere, then walked around it, wide-eyed.

That thing was here when I came in,' said Sam Weston, pointing to the wooden sphere. There was water squirting all over the place over there, and some cut-off wires were sizzling in it. I cut the power at the breaker box and shut off the valves. Then I called you and got Professor Weinberger. Professor Saxon's out of town today, I guess.'

Vickie nodded. 'He's in San Francisco,' she said, stepping carefully around a puddle on the floor.

The water's mostly drained away now,' Sam continued. 'A few minutes ago I went downstairs and looked at what's there. This section of the building doesn't have basement rooms underneath, just a crawl space with a dirt floor and some concrete supports. This big wooden thing comes right through the concrete slab and goes down into the dirt. It's a good thing there isn't a basement room under here or the whole thing would've fallen right
through.
That big ball must weigh a heck of a lot, dozens of tons maybe.'

'Where's David?' asked Victoria, noticing the dark stains on the floor. Was it blood? What weren't they telling her?

'I wish we knew,' said Weinberger. 'I located his car in the parking garage, but he cannot be found. Tell me when you last saw him.'

Vickie described the shift change this morning and the schedule for the day until the time when the movers came. 'What do you think happened?' she asked.

'We have no theories,' Weinberger answered, 'but it doesn't look good, Miss Gordon. I've already called the police, and they'll be here soon. The liquid on the floor appears to be blood.'

Victoria looked at it closely. The reddish-brown stuff did look and smell like blood. And there was a disturbing quantity of it in the room. A trail of small spots led to the door. She unlocked the door and followed them outside, down the corridor, and finally to the small loading dock behind the building. The little spots stopped there. She returned to the laboratory.

'What about Allan?' she asked. 'Has he been told?'

'Susan has been trying to reach him in San Francisco,' said the chairman. 'Uh, Miss Gordon, Mr Weston, I want to caution you both to be extremely careful what you say to the police or to anyone else. We don't want any sensational publicity which might reflect unfavorably on the department. Stick to what you know, please, and do not engage in speculations about what may have happened. This may all be some kind of prank or hoax. We must proceed very carefully. Do you understand?'

'Sure,' said Sam, 'just the facts.'

Victoria looked again at the monumental wooden sphere, then nodded agreement. A knot of despair tightened in the pit of her stomach. David was gone, and she felt a sick certainty that she knew where he was. She looked across
the
room to the photographs of cold blackness punctuated by glittering alien stars, and she felt a sudden chill.

David braced one shoulder against the curving wood surface and turned harder on the auger, boring the last hole, the one that would complete a large linked ring of similar ones. He had been working for several hours. Now he was hot and sweaty, and his arms were very tired. The new holes formed a shoulder-wide circle centered about the peephole that had provided the first glimpse of their surroundings. Jeff, now seated in a chair, continued to provide light for the operation from the big fluorescent flashlight. As David drilled, the chips falling to the concrete floor had been smooth reddish curls at first, but now they turned brown and uneven as he bored into the outer bark. Finally the auger chewed through into emptiness, and he backed it out.

Turning to the pile of tools on the desk, David put down the brace and bit and selected a hammer. He hit the wooden circle a sound
thwack
and it moved slightly backward. With each successive blow it retreated further. Finally it fell outward, to be replaced by a circle of brilliant outdoor light.

David squinted into the brightness, then jumped back. Something alive out there was looking back at him through the hole! He took a deep breath, fighting for calm against the adrenaline rush the surprise had triggered. He looked out through the hole again.

The confused jumble of colors and shapes framed by the ragged circle finally clicked into register. A beaked head was hanging upside down in the hole, looking in. The head tilted sideways, regarding him with a single eye. Something about that movement suggested a bird. Yes. A large green birdlike creature was peering in at them through the hole. It must be hanging head down from whatever was outside. Perhaps it had been attracted by the drilling and hammering sounds he had made in
breaking
out of the tree. Like a chick pecking its way out of an egg.

David extended the drill bit slowly out through the hole. The creature pecked at the drill, made a squawking noise, and was gone. There are birds in this universe,' he said to Jeff, who was standing beside him, 'quite big ones.'

David studied the scene now visible through the hole. Below, the ground was a peculiar orange-brown color. It was punctuated here and there with shades of green that must be brush and small plants, and he could see a line of bright colors on the ground. Light brown columns, probably the trunks of enormous trees, soared upward out of sight. They were in a forest.

He put a piece of corrugated cardboard over the splintered edges, carefully squeezed his head and shoulders through the hole, and looked around. 'We're up in a tree, a very big one,' he said. He looked down. The ground was a good ten meters down. A fall from this height could be fatal. They'd have to be very careful. David visualized the sequence of events that had put them where they were. He whistled. If they had materialized only a short distance to the north, they would have been in midair. It would have been quite a fall!

There was a large branch just below the hole he'd made. The green bird was perched far out on the branch, watching him with evident suspicion. Its color matched the foliage of the tree, and from a distance it might have been taken as a clump of leaves on the branch. David looked at it more closely, and blinked. It was not an ordinary bird. It was standing on a pair of taloned feet that gripped the branch, while a second pair of clawed feet projected outward from its breast. It used these occasionally to claw something out of the branch, then peck it into its mouth. The claws looked sharp.

'Come have a look, kids,' David called, withdrawing his head. 'We've got ourselves a tree house, complete with a four-legged green bird for a watchdog!'

The
visibility inside was better now that light streamed in through the hole. Melissa had been sitting across the room; now she ran along the wall toward the spot where David and Jeff were standing. As she ran, her foot kicked against something hard, and she stumbled. She glanced down at the object that had tripped her. Then she screamed. On the floor near her foot was a large human hand. Clasped in the hand was a big blue-black pistol. A brownish smear led down the wall to the hand, and nearby on the floor was a red puddle.

She backed away and pointed at the thing on the floor. David walked over and crouched down. 'It's all right, Melissa,' he said. 'It can't hurt you.' Struggling against his own revulsion, he used a single finger to set the gun's safety lock. Then he turned and walked to the lab bench, returning with a large translucent plastic bag. He inverted the bag, put it around his hand, picked up the hand and gun from the floor and reinverted the bag. Finally, through the plastic wall of the bag he pried the gun from the pale thick fingers and removed it.

He placed the plastic bundle on the bench and wiped off the gun with a white tissue. David's father had been a hunting enthusiast, and at age twelve David had been educated in proper gun handling. He expertly removed the clip from the handle of the weapon, ejected a cartridge from the receiver, and slipped it into the clip. He studied the gun, then held the clip up to the light and counted bullets. 'It's a laser-guided flechette pistol, a "Police Special," ' he said at last. 'It points a little red laser beam down the barrel to show where the bullets will hit, to help aim better. It also scares the guy it's pointed at, because he sees the red spot on his chest and knows there'll be a bullet hole just there if the guy with the gun squeezes the trigger just a bit harder. There are twenty little high-velocity explosive bullets in the clip now. Our big one-handed friend has given us a present, a weapon made for intimidation and killing. I hope we won't need
it.'
He placed gun and clip on the workbench beside the plastic-wrapped bundle.