The Far Side (5 page)

“Me, I’ve found that the people in the movie business don’t know jack about electronics.  Someone who knows their shit can make a mint.  I’m making a mint.”  He waved at Kris.  “Mr. Boyle likes me.  I’m bright, cheerful and always willing to help.  All of those things add to my bottom line.  I make three times what the next highest paid of my classmates make.  At some point it’s going to be a lot, lot more.

“I have no intention of trying to horn in on your pumpkin patch, okay?  You asked for my help and I’ve given it -- for a hell of a lot less than I charge anyone else these days.  Believe me or not.”

“You’re not stupid,” Andie said levelly.

“No, I’m not stupid.  Most people don’t get equipped to go big game hunting in their closet, without a larger closet than yours.  Not that yours doesn’t measure up against the best.”

“Yeah, there’s something else.”

“I figured that out a while ago when you spoke of a trifecta,” Kit told her.

Andie laughed.  “You really are a smart dick, aren’t you?”  She waved at the machine.  “And you’re not even a little curious about number three on the trifecta card?”

“It’s number three, and of course I’m curious.  But this is new and you’re cautious because you don’t want anyone to steal your work.  Trust me on this -- ask Miss Boyle -- you have no idea how hard they try to step on people stealing intellectual property in the movie business.  Up to and including putting people in jail.”

“That’s true enough, Kit,” Kris told him.  “But the fact is that almost every day someone does it -- and a couple of times a year it’s someone in the industry.”

Kit stood silent for a moment and then looked at Andie.  “I’m curious, you understand?  If I wasn’t curious I wouldn’t be who I am.  Still, I can understand your concerns.  Ask me to walk out the door and never look back and I will try my damndest.  Ask me to lend a hand -- well, I’ll try my damndest there, too.”

“What do you think, Kris?” Andie asked her friend.

Kris mentally sighed, then realized that Andie was like she was -- not sure.  Andie was going to have to decide though -- just now she was asking for advice.

“Andie, at some point, we’re going to need help with this.  You want us to go through there -- well, frankly, the idea of us there, with no one here who can fix this if the power goes or something blows -- that pretty much sucks.”

“You want me to stay here while the two of you explore the far side of that door?” Andie said, her jaw dropping.

“Andie!” Kris said sharply.  “Kit knows what this machine is.  He knew it when he looked at it.  He might be my father’s computer geek, but he’s not stupid.  I might not be able to come up with this on my own, but I’m not stupid either.  You need to train Kit and me on this machine before we do much exploring.

“When you went through yesterday, what would I have been able to do to help if there was a problem while you were gone?  Scream loudly and cry; that’s about it.  Maybe someone else could get it right, but you have no idea what’s making this work and what’s making the other side where it’s at.

“This may not be a hydrogen bomb, Andie, but it might as well be one, considering the risk right now of someone going through it.”

“Exploring on the far side isn’t negotiable,” Andie said stubbornly.

“Well, maybe you don’t care about coming back, Andie, but I sure the fuck do!” Kris told her friend.

Andie stood starting at Kris for a moment, then swallowed.  “Okay.  You two go explore -- be back in ten minutes.  Kit, do you know how to work the camera?”

“Not like Miss Boyle.”

“For fucking crying out loud!” Andie yelled at him, venting her frustration.  “She’s fucking Kris and I’m fucking Andie!  You dig?”

She turned to Kris.  “Okay, how hard is that laser thing to work?”

Kris giggled.  “Andie, your old man could do it.”

Andie giggled too.  “Okay, brain dead simple.  Teach Kit to use it.”

Kris bent down and picked up the laser.  “Okay, there’s this red button on the hand grip,” she told Kit.  “Look through the viewfinder and press the red button.  The distance in meters or feet appears on the red LEDs.  Note that the distances are in decimals, not inches or centimeters.  So you get distances like 22.781 feet or 6.944 meters.

“There is a little ‘units’ lever that lets you change between units.  Make sure you’re not aiming at someone and it works over about a mile.”

“And we want to measure what?  I really don’t want to hear ‘pyramid.’” Kit asked.

Andie ignored that.  “The far side is a cave of some sort.  The passage where we come out is about eight feet tall and about four feet wide.  It is, roughly, the dimensions of this closet, about twenty feet long.  I put a happy face on a rock in the wall facing the entrance... I use that to make sure we’re coming back to the same place.” Andie elaborated.

“We want to measure things, with the rangefinder,” Kris expanded.  “There’s no telling how far underground the cave is.”

“How close is the cave size to the size of the closet?” Kit asked.  “Are they aligned congruently?”

“No,” Andie told him, “they are close in size, but not the same.  The cave angles that way,” she pointed roughly northeast, “while the closet goes north and south.  Also, to the northeast the cave passage roof dips down, to maybe four feet.  To the southwest, the cave ends in a rock wall.  The entrance is more or less facing the short dimension of the cave, just a few feet from the cave wall, and roughly parallel to the wall.”

Andie looked at Kris.  “I know you think I’m crazy, but I’m not.  I don’t want to lose anyone, okay?  I’m responsible -- this is my idea.  But you’re right -- at this moment I’m the only one who could help here if someone got stuck there.  So, right now, I want you to go through, Kris, use the camera and light bar we made.  I have a hundred foot extension cord.  You map as far as you can go with that, and then hustle back.  Shoot lots of tape.”

Kris nodded soberly.

“Kit, you can take the rifle, Kris should carry the pistol, because she can put it in the holster and carry it on her waist.”

“The rifle has a sling?” Kit asked.

“Yeah.  And there are some extra magazines and a couple of boxes of bullets.  The buggers cost enough to make even my old man blink.”

Kris turned to Kit.  “Let’s do this.”

Kit nodded and a few moments later the blue surface stopped wiggling in the breeze.  Kris simply walked up to it and through, while Kit was a few steps behind.

Kit looked around, and Kris flashed the light bar to show what was around.

“What kind of rock?” Kit asked.

“Limestone, we think,” Kris told him.  There are fossil mussels in the rock.”

Kit swooped down and picked up one of the loose rocks on the floor.  “Clams,” he said succinctly, “not mussels.”

“How can you tell?” Kris asked.

He laughed.  “Mussels are longer than they are wide, like a harmonica.  These are oval, and roughly the same dimensions.  Clams.”

“Whatever,” Kris told him.

She kept the camera going, continuously, pointing the broomstick where she wanted the camera.  Kit gestured towards where the passage narrowed and they went that way.  Andie was paying out the extension cord on the other side of the door and Kris had no trouble moving.

Kit was crouched double, while Kris was crouching, trying to keep the camera level.  Kit peeked around the corner and waved Kris forward.

It wasn’t a nice place, Kris thought.  It was about four feet high, about two feet wide and about six feet long at the narrow place.  She kept pace with Kit, even though her instincts were to drop everything and run for her life.

There was a boulder where the passage opened out, sitting squarely in the way.  Still, the squeeze past it was easier than the short, narrow passage.  And Kit moved ahead, again waving Kris forward.

This time the gloom swallowed the light from the spot lights.  She could see the walls around her fade into darkness to the left and right, and above her.

She froze, not sure what to do.

Kit spoke evenly.  “My eyes are adjusting to the dark -- the light bar messes that up.  So, I’m keeping my eyes slit.  The range finder says that this room is about sixty feet around, and the ceiling is more than that above us.”

“I can’t see anything beyond the light,” Kris told him.

“Yeah, I couldn’t either.  Do you see to our left front, about twenty feet ahead, a ring of stones on the floor?”

Kris looked.  “Yes.”

“Follow me that way,” he told her and started moving.  The ring was about twenty feet away, towards the middle of the chamber.  Kris followed silently, her eyes swiveling every which way.  At the stone ring she looked down and saw what looked like the remains of a very old campfire.

She had seen such rings a dozen times and at first it didn’t hold any significance, even when she saw Kit leaning down, touching the charcoal and feeling the ground.  She focused the camera on what he was doing, but there wasn’t much to see in the fire ring.

Then it struck her and a profound sense of relief swept over her.  A fire ring!  There were people here!

Then reality set in as she lifted the camera and panned it around the chamber.  People?  How did she know that?  She actually had no idea!

The chamber was about sixty feet in diameter, and there were a few dark areas around the perimeter that might have been deeper passages.  Abruptly Kit chuckled.  “Do you know what we forgot?”

“Not a clue,” Kris told him, scanning around again, much slower.

“That’s an XL-2 not the HD Cam.  We forgot to change cameras.”  Abruptly a spear of light shot out from his hand.  “This is a four-cell Maglite.  Let’s just leave the XL-2 here in the middle, go back and pull the plug in the closet.  We toss the plug through the door, so next time we can get a longer extension cable.”

Kris laughed.  “If you think I’m going to leave two thousand dollars worth of camera sitting on the floor of a cave God knows where, you’re wrong.  And, like you said, we need to switch cameras.  So...”

She reached down and unplugged the lights from the extension cord.  The dark closed in on her, and it was harder still not to be afraid.  But the flashlight provided good light and this time Kit let Kris go first, and a two minutes later they were in Andie’s bedroom.

They looked at the tape for an hour, but there really wasn’t much to see.  Dusty rocks, a circle of rocks with some old burned wood in the middle of the circle.  It wasn’t until the end that Kris remembered something.

“Those stones in the circle?  They’re round and smooth.  They came out of a stream somewhere,” Kris told Andie.

They all spent a while looking the stones but they were stymied by the fact that they pretty much looked like any stone from a stream.

They spent an hour afterwards with Andie showing them how things worked and what order things worked in.  Both Kris and Kit made check lists and compared them.  They spent another half hour bringing the machine online and turning it back off.  A little before six Andie stuck her head through the blue door and reported that they still had a happy face.

“So,” Andie said to sum things up.  “We’re going to do this again tomorrow.  Can you get off, Kit?”

“Sure.  The principle filming of the studio’s latest project is done.  I’m getting equipment back, inventoried and stowed and making sure the stuff we rented is back where it belongs.  I’m nearly done now and what is left is still in use.  They’ll be going back and doing retakes for a couple of weeks.

“Most of that I’ll be like part time -- or even less.  On call.  I can go in early and leave whenever I want.”

“Can you meet us here at three-thirty tomorrow?” Andie asked him.

“Sure, no problem.”

They traded email and cell phone information, not to mention chat names, and then Kit left.

“What do you think, Kris?  Is Kit okay?”

“My dad likes him, Andie.  Of course my dad’s criteria for that is someone who shows up every day in plenty of time and then stays to the bitter end.  Oh yeah, no fuckups.  Ever.”

“I think he’s okay, even if he is a guy.  But I need to think about this some more.”

“You’re still not sure?”

“Not about that.  No, he points up a weakness in my plan.  I want to explore... but right now I’m the only one who understands what I did.  I can show someone else, but the fact is we need to experiment a lot first to know what’s going on.  There’s some reason why we keep going to the same place... but I have no idea what it is or what controls it.

“On the other hand we have a nice shirtsleeve location.  Mess around and we could lose it.  Anyone who is smart enough to understand what I’ve done is going to be a threat until I can figure out a way to establish precedence.  Except for that, I’m going to need to do a lot of research.  Except if I’m researching, I’m not going to be exploring.  This fuckin’ bites!”

“Andie, you know I’m a good girl.  I don’t break rules.”

“Yeah, you’re a regular goody two-shoes.”

“Hit your old man up for a loan.  Ask for a couple of million.  In two weeks we’ll be on summer break and we’re off to college in the fall.  Both of us at Caltech.”