Wildside

  IN THE NEXT HOUR. WE WILL DEACTIVATE IT IMMEDIATELY

  IF ANYBODY IS WITHIN TEN METERS OF THE TERMINUS.

  WE WILL SHUT IT IMMEDIATELY IF THERE ARE ANY

  HOSTILE ACTS, EVEN IF THERE ARE PERSONNEL AT THE

  TERMINUS.

  I wrote it on a sheet of notebook paper. Marie rewrote it, cutting it down to the current version and making it more legible. Clara and Joey came up with the delivery mechanism. Rick delivered it.

  “Cameras on,” I called.

  About two hours had passed since I’d closed the gate down. This time we’d set the video cameras five feet back from the gate, perched on boxes on each side of the tunnel.

  Marie and Joey turned them on and double-checked that they were indeed recording, then walked past Rick and me where we stood about thirty feet down the tunnel. They kept going until they were at the hangar door, where they joined Clara, waiting with an air horn in each hand.

  “Ready, Rick?”

  In Rick’s right hand was a water-smoothed rock, not quite a perfect sphere, about the size of a softball but much heavier. The note was secured to it with twine. He hefted the rock then nodded to me. He was the bowler in the group and his delivery had been perfect in the five dry runs.

  I wiped my right hand on my pants, then took up the little plastic remote control. “Let’s do it.”

  He brought the ball up under his chin then took two steps forward and bowled the ball—not hard—straight down the center of the tunnel. As it passed the video cameras, I pushed the right hand button and Clara held down the triggers on the air horns, a devastating sound in the enclosed space. The ball rolled slowly on, losing momentum, and for the briefest instant I thought that I’d timed it wrong, that the ball would roll past the terminus before the gate came on, or, as bad, stop dead just short of it.

  Then the dark end of the tunnel became the brightly lit tame side and the rock rolled over the terminus. I thumbed the left-hand switch. In the brief instant before the gate shut down I saw open mouths and I saw more men than I could count, not all of them soldiers. The nearer ones flinched away from the blast of sound and light, though one of the soldiers took a step toward the gate and then they were gone again.

  Message delivered.

  According to the tape, the gate was open for a total of thirty-six video frames—about a second and a half. Those frames showed us twenty-five men. One of them was Captain Moreno. Another fifteen were soldiers dressed and armed like those we’d seen before.

  The newcorners wore civilian clothes ranging from business suits to jeans. Most of the civilians were clustered near the gate itself, though they’d flinched back when it activated. The rock with the message tied to it glanced off of one of these guys’ ankles. Good thing it didn’t bounce back across the line.

  Two of the civilians, though, were dressed more formally—dark gray suits and tightly knotted ties. They were standing at the back, talking to Captain Moreno, when the gate opened. One of those two just stared at us, but the other one, a man with short red hair, darted his hand into his jacket. The gun in his hand was just coming out from beneath his lapel when the gate shut down.

  Let’s stay away from him.

  Another interesting thing was that they also had video cameras set up, though their equipment looked a lot better than ours.

  “They have us on video?” said Marie. “Shit.”

  Rick said, “Relax, Madge, your hair looks fine.”

  Marie frowned. “That’s not what I meant. They can ID us now.”

  “They know who we are, already,” I said.

  “You mean Luis…?” Clara said.

  I shook my head. “No. Luis wouldn’t say anything—unless they chemically interrogated him. But they didn’t have to. Not when they have accountants.

  “They followed the money. They followed it from the zoos to the Austin Bank, to Luis’s bank, to the working account, to our individual paychecks. I don’t know what they did to get the banks to trace the transactions, but it doesn’t matter.

  “By the end of the day they will probably have our high school yearbook pictures, our grade point averages, and our dental records.”

  We opened the gate ten minutes later. I didn’t want them to have too much time to think of ways to take the gate. And I certainly didn’t want to cut anybody in half.

  I was standing alone, six feet back from the terminus, right beside the cameras. The guys were watching from just inside the hangar door.

  I was wearing my flight jacket with my hands deep in the pockets. My right hand held the remote control. As usual, it was cold on the wildside, but I was sweating. I flicked the switch.

  They’d backed everybody away from the gate, though they’d left the cameras where they were.

  Captain Moreno and the two men in suits were standing at the thirty foot line. The technical types were a bit behind them and, back at the entrance to the barn, the soldiers stood, alert. They still carried their weapons.

  They were talking, but stopped immediately. Captain Moreno started to step toward me, then stopped. He half turned instead to the man beside him.

  Now we know who’s in charge.

  “One of you can come forward,” I said. My voice was less nervous. My thumb was on the left-hand button and I was pretty confident that I could close the gate before they crossed it.

  “All right.” The man in the middle walked forward. He was of medium height and his hairline receded above each temple. Steel-rimmed bifocals perched on a sharp, downward-hooking nose.

  As he got nearer I could see a scar high over his right eye and lines across his forehead. His hair was shot with gray.

  When he was about six feet from the gate, I said, “Far enough. Who are you?”

  He ignored the question while he studied me, peering at my face with narrowed eyes. I tried to remain motionless, to still a sudden urge to shift my weight from foot to foot. He didn’t smile, or frown, or put on any facial expression used in person-to-person communication. He was looking at me like one examines a problem, a puzzle, or an obstacle.

  I was about to ask the question again when the intensity of his gaze relaxed and he said in a level voice, “I am your best friend…or your worst enemy. The choice is yours.”

  I blinked. “Mr. Your-best-friend-or-your-worst-enemy is a little awkward. Perhaps I could just call you Mr. Bestworst?”

  His lips did something like a smile but the rest of his face was still. The scar on his forehead darkened slightly.

  “What are you doing on my property, Mr. Bestworst?”

  “We can do this hard, Charles, or we can do this easy,” he said. “Cooperate and the government will compensate you for your, uh, discovery, and inconvenience. You could come out of this very well off, perhaps with a position further developing this, er, project.”

  He smiled and this time it looked real, his face crinkling at the corners of the eyes and dimples forming in his cheeks. He spread his hands persuasively, his posture open, relaxed.

  Then his hands dropped and the smile dropped. “Get in our way,” he said raising his right index finger and tightening his voice, “and you’ll think you’ve been hit by a train.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I took a step back and nearly closed the gate. Mr. Bestworst took a step toward me, matching, and I said, “Get back!” The anger I felt at myself for flinching showed in my voice, and he took a slow step back to his original stopping place.

  Tersely, I said, “What do you want, Mister…dammit, what is your name?”

  “Bestworst will do. Just remember what it stands for. What do I want? For starters,” he said calmly, “I want to understand what’s going on here.”

  “Well, right now, what’s going on is you’re trespassing.”

  He dismissed this with a wave of his hand. “You want a search warrant? Easily done. Backdated, too.”

  I pointed at our video cameras. “Would you care to repeat the fact that you’ve invaded my property without a search warrant to
the camera.”

  The scar on Bestworst’s forehead darkened again, though Bestworst shrugged. “Let’s start with criminal traffic in endangered species.”

  “Passenger pigeons are not on the list.”

  “They are now. There are twenty in existence.”

  This was a tack I hadn’t considered. I’d avoided several other species simply because they existed and were endangered on the tame side. “Are you arresting me, Mr. Bestworst? You haven’t even shown me your ID. Shouldn’t you be reading me my rights?”

  “A train, Charles. A train.”

  I tried another tack. “Perhaps I should be talking to my lawyer instead of you.”

  “Luis Cervantes by any chance?”

  I nodded, stone-faced.

  “I don’t think he’ll be available to represent you.” Bestworst smiled briefly. “He wasn’t interested in cooperating either.”

  I didn’t like his use of “wasn’t.”

  “Just out of curiosity, have you let him see a lawyer?”

  Bestworst shrugged again. “Cooperate with us.”

  “You may have control of my ranch—and even jurisdiction. But where I’m standing, you have none. And I’m not particularly concerned,” I lied, “about your mythical charges and search warrants.”

  The geniality dropped from his face like a guillotine falling. “My jurisdiction is wherever this nation’s security is threatened.”

  I felt my face getting stiff. I didn’t say anything for a very long time. Finally I said, “You don’t even know what we have here, do you? How can you know national security is at risk?”

  He shrugged. “How do I know that it’s not?”

  I stepped to the left side of the wall and picked up the rifle barrels from where they leaned against the wall. I tossed them gently, one at a time, over the line, onto the dirt floor in front of Bestworst.

  The perfectly flat surface where the metal of the barrel and the plastic forestock had been sheared by the gate gleamed in the light of the fluorescents. Bestworst eyed the two pieces thoughtfully.

  I said, “This conversation is over.”

  Then I turned off the gate.

  “Wow, Charlie. You oughta be in pictures,” Rick said. He meant it as a joke, but the humor didn’t touch his voice or face. He looked scared.

  “You told us it was legal,” Clara said. She sounded mad, and I remembered other times she’d gotten angry, and the circumstances. She was scared, too.

  Marie held Joey’s hand and neither of them spoke.

  We’d just finished replaying the video of my encounter with Mr. Bestworst. I got up to shut off the video monitor, then turned to face them.

  “It was legal. You can’t make something illegal and then prosecute people retroactively, can you?”

  “Well, actually,” said Marie, “you can.”

  “You can?” I was horrified.

  “My senior honors paper was on the Superfund. There’s a concept called strict liability. There are companies who are being charged for the cleanup costs after dumping toxic substances that occurred before it was illegal to dump those things.”

  I was relieved. “That’s because that pollution is still poisoning water tables, though, isn’t it? And to cover costs of cleanup? We haven’t contaminated playgrounds or anything. We resurrected an extinct species from the dead. No court in the country would convict us.” I licked my lips. “But he doesn’t want us in court. Courts have public records and publicity is the last thing he wants. He doesn’t know what we have, but whatever it is, it’s easier to control if nobody else knows about it, right? I mean, we certainly had an easier time of it before they found us.”

  “But what do we do, then?” asked Rick. “I’m not spending the rest of my life over here. Chris is over there—if this thing isn’t settled soon, I’m going back.”

  I sighed.

  Clara said, “What makes you think they’ll let you see Chris if you go through that gate? If we don’t resolve this, you may spend the rest of your days in a dark hole, locked away from the world, your friends, your family, and, especially, the press.”

  “It might be worth it,” he said, “if they really will lock me away from my mother.” He looked at the dirt floor of the hangar, then back up at me. “This plan of yours better work, Charlie. That’s all I can say.”

  I swallowed and tried to look as confident as Captain Moreno. “I think it will work, Rick. But no promises.”

  Four hours later I opened the gate again. There was a flash of blinding light characteristic of something being sheared by the gate and I said, “Shit!” A man fell backward, away from me, a pole of some kind held in his hand.

  I took a step forward, compulsively. I stopped myself before I stepped across the line to help him. “Are you all right?”

  He was one of the technical types, not in uniform, and he seemed to have all his parts. Another two technicians standing behind him moved forward, to help, I guess, but I held up my hand and they stopped.

  The man on the ground looked embarrassed. “I’m fine.”

  I took a closer look at his pole. It was a piece of angle iron with a coaxial cable taped to it. At his end, the cable ran up the tunnel toward the barn. At my end, the cable ended abruptly, cut at the same point as the bar.

  “Video camera?” I asked.

  “Yeah, and a light.” He climbed to his feet, brushing off his butt with his free hand.

  They were probably looking at the back of my contraption, trying to figure out the machinery. I smiled. “When I shut the gate again, you can snag it back across with the pole. Don’t cross the terminus with any part of your body, though.”

  He nodded.

  “I want to talk to Mr. Bestworst. Could you get him please?”

  He started to turn, then paused. “Answer a question, first?”

  “Maybe, Mr.—?”

  He hesitated, looking over his shoulder toward the door to the barn, then shrugged and said, “Bob Orkand, Sandia Labs. Why is it colder on your side of the tunnel?”

  I started to say something about different climates, but stopped when something else occurred to me. “Where do you think the energy to maintain this gateway comes from?” I hadn’t the faintest idea what the real answer to his question was, but maybe I was right? It could happen.

  The man’s eyes widened and he opened his mouth to ask more questions. I was about to remind him about getting Bestworst when Bestworst strode into the far end of the tunnel followed closely by Captain Moreno and the red-haired civilian with the fast gun hand.

  “Please stand back from the terminus,” I said to Orkand. He backed away, looking past me, trying to see as much as possible of the tunnel behind me.

  Bestworst looked annoyed when he had to step around the oblivious Orkand to approach me.

  He stopped at the six-foot mark, about where he’d stopped before. “It’s your nickel,” he said.

  He was starting to remind me of my father.

  “I would like to see Luis Cervantes and Richard Madigan.”

  “So?” Even more like my father.

  I gritted my teeth and resisted the urge to shut the gate in his face. Carefully I said, “I would be very grateful for your consideration in this matter.”

  His eyes widened slightly. “How grateful?”

  I paused. “I would consider answering some questions.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Would you, now.” He thought about it for a moment. “What do you mean by ‘see’?”

  “See. Standing where you are. You can restrain them, if you like—to keep them from crossing over, but I would like to verify that they’re all right—talk to them.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t really see why I should.”

  I was rapidly passing from distrust to active dislike where Mr. Bestworst was concerned. “If you’re not willing to let us see that Luis is unharmed, then the possibility exists that you’ve harmed him. And if that’s the case, then we certainly aren’t willing to give you a chance at us. Let
us talk to Luis or we shut the gate down.” I mentally crossed my fingers. “We won’t open it again—not at this location, anyway.”

  He seized on that like a cat on a rat. “What do you mean, Charlie? Where else could you open the gate? Are you talking some other place or”—his face twisted like he’d bitten into a lemon—“some other time?” There, he said it.

  I smiled slightly. “That sounds a lot like a question. Remarkably like a question. I’ve already outlined the circumstances under which I am willing to answer questions.”

  He sat frozen, thinking about it, while I fidgeted slightly. Finally, he said, “Okay. I can have Cervantes here within thirty minutes. Richard Madigan is in Austin—I can have him here within four hours.”

  “Why so long? You’ve got enough helicopters to fly the Houston Oilers to the Super Bowl, which, by the way, is the only way they’d ever get there. Surely you can airlift one innocent lawyer from Austin.”

  He frowned. “Do you have any idea how much Jet-A a helicopter burns a minute?”

  “Single or double turbine? Blackhawk or Kiowa? Unladen European swallow or African? I am a pilot, after all. Throw him in a cop car, then, and have them run the siren all the way. Surely you can do better than four hours.”

  “What’s your hurry, Charlie?”

  I felt the palms of my hands get wet. “I’m anxious about their safety. Concerned. Tell you what, I’ll open the gate again in two hours. I expect to see both of them, then.”

  “You’re closing the gate now?”

  I nodded.

  “What if we get them here earlier? Wouldn’t you want to know?”

  “I’m scared of you, Mr. Bestworst. You seem the kind of guy who breaks down doors. I’ve got a door you can’t break down, and it doesn’t do me any good if it’s not closed.”

  He nodded, almost politely, as if what I’d said made perfect sense. I shivered.

  “In two hours, then,” he said.

  I nodded and thumbed the switch.

  We spent the two hours outside.

  When we’d fled to this side in the morning, the weather was gray and cool with a stiff breeze across the buffalo grass that made it ripple like the sea. By two in the afternoon, though, the overcast had cleared, the breeze had moderated, and the sun shone brightly, making jackets optional.