The Fellowship for Alien Detection (23 page)

“I have the field set to maximum!” Two shouted.

The flickering increased around Dodger, the strobe light reaching ahead of him down the tunnel wall.

“Heavy winds are expected later tonight along with those snow squalls.”

Dodger began to feel that slowing sensation again. Whatever this field was, it was causing his body to grind to a halt.
No!
Dodger thought desperately. Had to keep moving!

“So please be sure to be in your homes before they start, which should be around ten p.m.”

“He's slowing down!” One announced.

Dodger could feel it. And the glow he was creating with the crystal was fading. He felt his lungs starting to hitch, like something was stopping them. Like he was being frozen.

“Dan Spirit's advice is to go to bed early tonight, and when you wake up tomorrow, it's going to be sunny again, with highs in the low sixties—”

He was losing control of his muscles. The crystal slipped out of his hands. Dodger heard it shatter on the rocky floor.

The walls around him had completely lost color.

And now up ahead, he saw that the tunnel ended. There was a solid metal door. It was silver and sleek. There was no handle, no lock, only two black circles at chest height.

Dodger hit the door and leaned against it. The metal was warm. He pushed himself up, trying to find a gap at the edge of the door, anything, but the door was flickering in that freezing strobe light and his heavy breaths were slowing down and he could barely even move his neck and they had him, they had him.

A reflection caught his eye and Dodger saw a mirror image of his pursuers in one of the black circles that was down by his shoulder. The two alien agents, the freezing box flickering.

Dodger felt his body going rigid, no more feeling in his feet, his thoughts slowing. . . . There was no way out. . . .

Wait. . . .

Unless . . .

The reflection in that black circle . . . like crystal . . .

As if he was moving through two tons of wet clay, Dodger slid his hand over the black reflective disc. When his fingers touched the surface, it began to glow orange.

Maybe these discs opened it somehow . . .

Dodger tried to move his other hand,
dragged
it through the black-and-white world, time slowing down, stopping. . . .

His hand rested on the other disc. Both hands ignited orange.

And there was a flash.

A moment of blackness . . .

Dodger blinked. The strobe light was gone. His head was swimming, but he had feeling again in his body. He lurched forward, almost falling on his face, but caught his balance, and stood.

He looked behind him. There was the door. He was on the other side of it. Somehow, he had
used
the door.

And now he was in a room.

A vast room.

It was a spherical space cast in warm, fiery light. Its walls were made of some kind of metal that also seemed iridescent, like puddles around the city sometimes looked. Dodger was standing on a platform that ringed the room. Here and there, catwalks led out to the center of the room, to an inner ring that encircled a giant ball of crystal, maybe twenty feet tall, with a thousand angled faces It glowed with such intensity that it was nearly impossible to look at.

Wow
, Dodger thought.

Waves of energy and warmth pulsed out of the crystal, and as it washed over him, Dodger had an eerie sensation of being called to. Summoned. But not
ordered
. It didn't feel like he had to approach the crystal. He wasn't being dragged, but he was being invited, and he felt strongly like he wanted to go to it, like a smaller magnet being drawn to a larger one. He remembered the crystal shard warming as he'd lowered into the mine shaft. Maybe it had sensed this pull, too.

Dodger started across one of the catwalks toward the center. Around him, he sensed that there were banks of flashing equipment along the perimeter of the room. There were other doors here and there, too. He perceived this from a state of total calm. As he neared the giant crystal, he felt its power humming in him. This place . . . he was at peace here, and felt sure that things would be fine. He didn't need to worry about those people chasing him anymore. He was safe here.

Except then a little electric buzzing made Dodger glance over his shoulder and he saw that One had just popped into the room. She stepped aside as Two also appeared. His strobe light machine was turned off. They both looked around, and One saw him and pointed, and they hurried toward him.

Dodger ran across the catwalk to the center of the space. As he arrived, he realized there was a figure standing nearby, a little silhouette eclipsing the sunlike glow of the crystal.

This person glanced at Dodger. He was wearing a yellow hard hat and an orange jumpsuit. He had smooth plastic skin and black goggles over his eyes. He was holding some kind of glowing clipboard. He did a little double take when he saw Dodger and then he turned to a little console that was mounted on the catwalk railing. There were two black discs there, too. Tucking the clipboard under his arm, the little man pressed his hands to the discs. They lit up orange, and so did he, and then the man winked out of sight completely.

Dodger heard footsteps on the catwalk behind him.

Only one thing to do, he felt sure of that. He ran over to the console and placed his much larger, human hands on the pads. They lit up, and so did he—

And he left the catwalk, and, it seemed, his body.

He found himself lost in an orange space of light. Beyond that light there seemed to be stars in all directions, above and below. In the distance, he saw something bright like a collection of suns all in a cluster, orange like this light he was in. It almost looked like a collection of these very crystals, but so much larger. They were strung together with vast beams of some kind of iridescent metal.

But the view into vast space was not the only view. There were also caves, it seemed, tunnels, as if he was in two places at once. This was familiar. Somehow this was Juliette, but also not.

Welcome
, the crystal said,
to the Main Directory at Amplification Node 18.
Dodger felt like it wasn't technically speaking, but more presenting itself to him, as if his consciousness had interfaced with it.
Please choose function
.

Dodger became aware of options, again not actual words on a screen but a sense of things he could do inside this crystal. Was he actually inside it? He couldn't tell. Maybe his body was still back on that catwalk in that round cavern, in which case, One and Two might grab him and yank him from that console at any moment.

He had to be quick. He scrolled through the option-feelings. They seemed to be:
Connectivity, Time Parameter Management, Transit
.

Dodger had no idea what these meant. And yet he did, or something. It was making his head hurt. But he felt sure that what he needed right now was Transit.

Transit
, the crystal confirmed.
Sublocal, Local, or Upload for Macro
.

Dodger had no idea.
Local?
he thought. That made sense.

A kind of map appeared seemingly all around him. At first he couldn't even make sense of it, but then he saw that there were light points across landforms. It was a map of the United States, no wait, it was bigger than that, it was the continent, oceans, the world. Okay, it was the world, and all around it were these little orange dots.

Please select a destination node
.

Dodger felt a kind of mind-blowing sense of possibility. Here, apparently, was travel to the far corners of the world. But what did it mean? That there were crystals like this one at all these locations worldwide? There were hundreds, no, thousands of points, maybe ten thousand, he . . . This was all too much. Dodger couldn't handle it.

I just need to get out of these caves
, he thought to the interface.

Sublocal transit
, the crystal confirmed.
Please select a Sublocal transit access point
.

Dodger now saw something like a map, except it was vertical as well as horizontal, a kind of schematic of Lucky Springs both above and below the surface. He saw little discs that seemed to represent doors like the one he'd entered the room through. He spied one that seemed like it would work and thought,
There
.

Commencing
.

There was a rush, a strange pulling and stretching, and for a moment Dodger lost track of everything, no thoughts even, just a kind of nothing, and there was a sound like the ocean through a seashell, a vastness that seemed to spread and exist between each of his billions of molecules. . . .

And then he was himself again.

And he was in the regular old dark.

And he was falling on his face.

He landed on a dirt floor, and immediately vomited. Sour liquid splattered on the rocks.

Dodger looked up and saw that he was in another tunnel, similar to the one he'd been in while fleeing from One and Two, only this one was lit with weak lightbulbs strung along the ceiling. He got to his knees and turned to see another metal door with the black crystal ovals. He was outside of that cavern now, the place where he'd interfaced.

Dodger tried to piece together the flotsam in his brain from the last minute. It was as if giant feelings of disorientation and then understanding had flooded over him in successive waves that had now left him pummeled and lying on a beach. First, he'd uploaded himself into a giant crystal. Then he'd seen a view of space, or something. And then a “local” map of the entire planet (and that made him wonder, what would he have seen if he'd said “Macro”?), and then a map of this mine system, from which he'd picked this door to exit by. Based on that map, this tunnel he was now in should be part of Vee's mine tour and lead him right back up to her shop. The lights on the ceiling seemed to confirm this. But so did something else.

Dodger stood up, stumbled forward on rubbery legs, and slammed into an iron-barred gate. It was made of damp rusted bars. Dodger saw that there was a sign on it, but he couldn't read it from this side. Probably put up by that mining company Vee had mentioned, to keep tour people away from the door.

Dodger shook the gate as hard as he could, but it didn't budge. He was trapped. His only way out was to go back through the door behind him, but what about One and Two? They would be here any moment, wouldn't they?

He turned back to the gate and rattled it again. “HELP!” he shouted. His voice reverberated up the tunnel. There was no reply—

Except now footsteps. And a light, rounding the corner and falling on him.

It was them. They'd already figured out where he'd gone and—

“Francis?”

The light stopped. Behind it was a large hulk of a man.

Harry.

“Dad,” said Dodger blankly.

Harry stepped up to the bars. He was breathing hard. “What are you doing in there?”

Dodger saw Harry gaze past him, to the metal door. He aimed the flashlight at it.

“Dad,” said Dodger, feeling a nervous spike inside at what his dad might be thinking. “Can you get me out?”

Harry turned his attention to the lock. “It's pretty rusty, hold on . . .” He reared back and slammed it with the flashlight. The flashlight casing cracked, but the lock held. Harry reared back and hit it again. This time the flashlight shattered, the bulb popping, but the lock also came free, thudding to the ground.

Dodger pushed against the gate, felt it being pulled as well, and then it was open, and he stumbled out, right into his dad's chest.

“Oh, hey,” said Harry awkwardly. His hands fell on Dodger's shoulders and he moved him a step back, gently.

It was an odd feeling. Dodger almost flinched away from Harry's grip, but he was too tired, too completely wiped out.

“Are you okay?” Harry asked. He was talking quietly, almost like he was trying not to get caught, either.

“Fine,” said Dodger.

Then he stumbled to his knees and barfed again. Whatever he'd done—“teleporting” was as good a word as any—had messed him up worse than any roller coaster.

Harry's hands slid under his arms and dragged him up. “Son, you . . . you're a mess.”

Dodger wobbled on his feet but managed to stay up. Harry kept a hand on his shoulder.

“We should go,” Dodger said, swallowing sour bile. They had to get out of here first, then Dodger could think about everything that had just happened—

“Sure,” said Harry. He started up the tunnel. Dodger followed, and as he did his thoughts finally started to catch up with reality, and then there was one thought that immediately popped out of his mouth:

“I thought you were going to be at the casino?”

“Bah.” Harry waved a dismissive hand. “Those tables were rigged, so I came and took the tour. As a result, two Royal Rip-offs in one day.”

It was classic Harry Lane, Dodger thought, only he was overcome with a sudden and certain feeling: