Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 64 - Through the Double Doors

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” Tony said, his bushy mustache shimmering with spit.

He was panting and hunched over but still taking stumbling steps forward. His thin frame, apparently too tiny to suck in as much air as he wanted, struggled to catch his breath fully. Tabitha and Olivia had long ago passed them by, their younger bodies speedily propelling them more quickly down the length of the tunnel. James and even the more fit Frankie both lagged with him, an odd-ball and mismatched trio: the scientist, the architect, and the television producer.

“That wasn’t anything like what we were filming over Lake Michigan,” Tony continued. “It felt like it was attacking us.”

“It wasn’t an attack,” James said. He, too, glimmered with sweat as he lumbered forward, his curly brown hair matted wetly against his forehead, his glasses smudged. “It was merely growing almost faster than we could run.”

“Well, what the hell was it doing that for?” Tony asked, still gasping. “And what stopped it?”

“So that’s it, then?” Frankie asked. “That’s what Becca was making?”

“In a manner of speaking,” James said.

“That bloody woman.”

“So what’s about all this?” Tony asked, waving his hands at the flickering lights around them.

“Power fluctuations, I’m guessing,” James said. “It needs energy to grow, and just when it starts to grow, it runs out of energy. Over the lake, I think those smaller ones ran out of fuel and flittered away.”

“That giant one just now is like what we saw from the parking lot when all this started,” Frankie said. “Only that night, it must have tapped into whatever energy it needed to grow big enough to swallow everything.”

“If we’re in the same spot as the initial black hole,” Tony said, “why isn’t it tapping into that same energy now?”

“Something is holding it back,” Frankie said. “At least for the moment."

“So you were truly here, then?” James asked. “I mean, here at ENH? I must have misunderstood something, then. I knew Tabitha and Dr. Watts were here, and Dr. Watts. But what were you doing here, exactly?”

“I was the one who knew something was up in the first place,” Frankie said. “Becca was planning something, for sure, at least. I rummaged together Tabitha, there, and a couple of other eager beavers - one of whom had a bit of a crush on my wife - and we bullied over here to see if we could stop her before she did something stupid.”

“News flash,” Tony said, finally walking upright. “You got here too late.”

“So, how much do you know specifically about what happened?” James asked.

“The science and whatnot?” Frankie asked. “No more than you’d get off of a Saturday evening NOVA special on PBS, I suppose. I understand a bit of what Becca was really getting to - time travel and whatnot - but not the tech behind it.”

“So you’re also partly at fault for all this,” Tony said.

“There’s no way to Sunday I’m to blame for this,” Frankie said. “Just because I listened to her theories doesn’t mean I believed any of it.”

“What a supportive husband you must be,” Tony said.

“Listen, bub,” Frankie started, but James interjected before he continued.

“This wasn’t supposed to be used for time travel,” James said, waving his hand as they approached a set of double doors at the end of the corridor. “This was for space travel if anything. Exploration. Saving the future of humanity by exploring potential areas to colonize the galaxy, not destroy humanity by exploring the past.”

“Transgalactic research,” Frankie said. “That’s one term I remember because I’ve heard it a thousand times. But according to Becca, the two go hand in hand. You can’t mess with wormholes and whatnot, bending space like a noodle, without it doing some jujitsu on time, as well.”

“Not necessarily,” James said.

“I’m not defending her, friend,” Frankie said. “I’m just sharing a little pillow talk with you. In her mind, when she was pie-in-the-sky dreaming, she saw transgalactic and transchronological travel as companion pieces, that’s all. I didn’t necessarily believe her, but I listened. She saw this tech, looping together two black holes to magnify the wormholes already existing in particle matter between them, as the key to seeing how this whole world was formed, of unlocking the mysteries of creation itself, so you could turn around and use that new info to discover even more.”

“Sounds like you understand a heck of a lot more than what you’d learn on PBS,” Tony said.

“I’d say the same,” James agreed and scratched at his chin.

“You can give me a pop quiz, professor, and I’m pretty sure I’d fail the class,” Frankie answered as they approached another doorway at the end of the hall. Neither Frankie nor Tony was prepared for what was on the opposite side of the double doors.

They pushed through and walked straight onto a platform overlooking a cavernous underground warehouse easily the size of an indoor professional sports arena. Looking down to a platform at least three stories below them, they saw Tabitha and Olivia already standing in the middle of the enormous room. Olivia stood proudly with her hands on her hips as she nostalgically surveyed the room. James stopped in his tracks and smiled widely, breathing in the air like a mountaineer having reached the summit of a hike.

“I forgot how immense it all is,” James said.

“How do you forget something this big?” Tony asked.

“It’s like returning to your old grade school as an adult,” James said. “Everything is smaller than you remember. That’s what I thought I’d see now, but it’s the opposite.”

“How did you build all of this without anybody knowing?” Tony asked.

Looking up, Tabithat and James met each other’s eyes and smiled.

“Do you miss it?” she called up to him. Her words echoed against the steel girders and aluminum-laced walls.

“Very much,” James called back and laughed. “Very much, indeed.”

But then the glee in his eyes melted to concern as he glanced toward the far wall, where Olivia was trying yet another phone.

“I’m not sure she should be using that,” James yelled. “You…girl…”

“Olivia,” Frankie reminded him.

“Olivia!” James yelled. “That phone!”

Olivia looked up quizzically.

“It’s ringing,” she called out.

“The black hole!” James yelled again. “The phone caused that last one!”

Like a slowly clicking turnstile, James’s words clicked into place in Olivia’s brain, followed by a moment of panic, a terrible realization of what she’d done. Even as they’d run down the hall, terrified, the pulsing black anomaly reaching out for them with a crackle of electricity and a nearly irresistible tug from behind, it didn’t even occur to Olivia that perhaps she’d been at fault for causing the almost disastrous black hole that thankfully swallowed up upon itself and disappeared before it crashed down upon them completely.

Olivia slapped her forehead as she understood James’ panic from the platform above and started to hang up the phone.