Patrick Lee: Deep Sky

He could see the far end.

It might have been a thousand feet away. Distance was hard to judge. It opened into someplace a little brighter than the tunnel itself.

He leaned closer, extended his hand and passed it through the plane of the Breach’s opening. For maybe a quarter of a second he thought he felt it resist him, and then his hand simply went through unhindered.

Another step—both feet on the trampoline now. He leaned all the way forward, his shoulders and head crossing the plane and his hands falling to the tunnel’s surface just beyond the mouth. He found it to be as solid as it looked—and then found it didn’t matter. He tipped the rest of his upper body into the channel and realized he weighed nothing once inside it. For a few seconds he stayed on the margin, his legs and feet pulled down by gravity on the platform, the rest of him floating suspended in the first three feet of the tunnel. Then he pressed his hands to the sidewalls and shoved himself forward, and a second later he was gliding along the channel’s length, as frictionless as a puck on an air hockey table.

He shoved again, and then again. Each time his speed stepped up and stayed up; only air drag slowed him—and maybe something else. Something he couldn’t quite get a fix on. It felt like the hint of resistance his hand had met briefly at the tunnel’s mouth. He sensed it only occasionally—sliding past one shoulder or the other, or compressing strangely around his feet. That made sense in light of what Garner had described: the idea of a one-time-only scouting trip. The tunnel’s resistance force was still as powerful as ever; it was simply letting him pass now in some active, selective way. A little bubble of nonresistance, following him as he glided along.

He waited to feel something, as the tunnel walls continued slipping by. Something like a barrier, or a threshold. Something—anything—that could be called a filter.

But there was nothing.

Just the smooth interior of the channel streaming past.

Much closer now. Maybe a hundred yards from the tunnel’s end. Then fifty. Then ten.

He could see details of the space beyond. A brightly lit room of some kind. Metal flooring. An opposite wall, easily a hundred feet beyond the opening. The chamber outside the tunnel must be huge.

He put his hands out again and caught the channel’s sides repeatedly, shedding the momentum he’d built up earlier. He came to a complete stop with his head right at the tunnel’s threshold. He hovered, staring at the room that lay beyond.

It was massive, and exotically shaped. The floor was a sweeping downward curve, like the inner surface of a barrel laid on its side. The walls to the left and right rose and angled inward, as if toward the barrel’s center somewhere high above the ceiling—though the ceiling itself had to be forty feet up. The floor just in front of the tunnel was metal, as Travis had seen earlier, but everywhere else it was glass or some equivalent—it was simply an enormous, curved window, and after the first passing glance at the room itself, Travis found his gaze drawn down and outward to the view.

A planet. Right there. Suspended in deep black space and filling two thirds of the window. It was an amber-and-white version of Jupiter. Distinct bands of color met along ragged, swirled boundaries, and bent around cyclonic formations that were probably bigger than the Earth. Only a crescent edge of the giant world was lit up, catching the glow of a red-orange star that hung beyond it and far to the side. The star was visually the size of a quarter held at arm’s length.

A second star, the same color, hovered much further away—it shone as no more than a superbright point in the darkness. Travis knew these were the two suns that formed 61 Cygni, seen as a single dim speck from the desert in eastern Wyoming.

He stared for probably twenty seconds, his thoughts nearly blank. He noticed that the entire view outside was sliding steadily in one direction, and knew what that meant. Then he bent his legs and drew them forward and got his feet ahead of him in a seated position, and slid out of the tunnel.

Gravity exerted itself at once. A good stand-in for gravity, anyway—the centrifugal force of the rotating ship. He put his feet down on the metal and felt his weight transfer onto them—exactly as it would have on Earth.

“Jesus, it worked,” a man said.

Travis turned to see a doorway that’d been out of view from inside the tunnel. Standing in it was Richard Garner, looking about as old as a college kid.

Travis stared at him, and then past him, suddenly wondering who else might step into the frame.

Garner seemed to understand. “It’s probably best if you don’t meet yourself,” he said. “It’s not going to split the universe or anything, but I think it would be very distracting.”

He had an accent—one Travis was sure he’d never heard before. Nor had anybody else in 2016, he knew.

Garner stepped from the doorway and advanced. He smiled vaguely and shook his head. “I haven’t seen someone look this old in over a thousand years.”

They stood at the center of the gigantic floor pane and spoke at length. Travis told Garner, in broad strokes, the story of the Breach as it’d played out on Earth. All that had resulted from that day in March of 1978. All that this version of Garner couldn’t know about—the aftermath of the plan he and the others had conceived and launched from this ship. The man looked disturbed, even remorseful, by the time Travis reached the end. He stared away into the starfield below—the planet and twin suns were no longer in view—and exhaled slowly.

“We knew it would go bad in a lot of ways,” Garner said softly. “We debated whether to do it at all. But in the end the decision was unanimous. We had the chance to set things right. How could we pass it up?”

He stood staring into the depths a moment longer, and then he drew a folded black card from his pocket and handed it to Travis. “Don’t open that until you’re ready. Inside is a long string of random letters, which your counterpart here has already thought. Once you return to your end of the tunnel, the Breach will revert to the form you’ve seen all these years. The plasma channel with entities coming through. It’ll stay that way until you unlock the tunnel once and for all.”

“And to do that, I just think what’s on this card,” Travis said, more verifying than asking.

Garner nodded. “It’ll work best if you read it aloud—that should keep your stream of thought on track. Other than that, there’s nothing to it. You can do it from anywhere on Earth, anytime after you go back. You read those letters, and the tunnel opens for us to come through. Easy as that.”

Travis looked at the card. He thought of the disparity between its size and its power. Like a nuclear launch key. He slipped it into his pocket, then looked back up at Garner.

Garner was gazing down through the window again. Watching the edge where stars were continually sliding into view. Travis realized he was waiting for something.

At last the man pointed. “There.”

Travis followed his downstretched arm and fingertip and saw a medium-bright yellow star that’d just crept into the frame. At a glance there was nothing special about it. It was all but lost amid the scatter of other stars.

“Is that what I think it is?” Travis said.

Garner nodded and spoke just above a breath. “There’s not a day I don’t come to this room and look at it. I stare at that little speck, and I wonder if there’s anything left of the Ferris wheel on Navy Pier in Chicago, or the Ko¯toku-in temple in Tokyo, or Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. And I’ll never know.”