38. Heard You Searched the Hollow Earth

Avi was stepping away from the controls, head pounding with exhaustion, when there was a whiff of humid air. It smelled damp, like spring, and was now a steady breeze blowing past him. Time seemed slowed — maybe it was slowed. He turned like a man in a dream and saw it.

The whole wall of the lab was distorted, like reality was a stretchy piece of cloth someone had slashed open and shoved a sphere into. The lines of the ceiling and floor were dragged up and down into extreme curves like a thousand fisheye lenses stacked inside each other. Some colors right on that bizarre border were warmer or colder, like somebody had edited the color balance.

The whole thing was maybe eight feet across, and inside, warped slightly around the edges, was a green landscape of gently rolling hills. It looked like pastureland, crossed here and there with dark green hedges, some fields solid yellow with wildflowers. A steady breeze was blowing from the lab into it, but he could still smell something like damp ground and plants, not like the late fall outside. He could hear birdsong. The sky was overcast, but bright enough to cast a noticeable halo on the floor, a circle directly below it.

Then it was gone. No sound, no warning, just gone. The wall of the lab was back. The whole thing had taken maybe a second and a half from start to finish.

Colette was packing up to go home. She wanted to sleep so bad. And she wanted another night without knowing, so she could pretend that maybe this time would work, until she got back the next morning and found it hadn’t either.

She turned when she heard someone running. It was Avi, racing down the hall towards her, waving a printout.

“Colette!” she heard him screaming. “Colette! We got it! We got it!! Come quick!”

She came quick.

He beat her to the lab, shut the door after them, and raced for the control panel, hit the right settings, and ... showed her. He heard the gasp and turned. She was walking towards it as though in a trance.

“No! Wait! STOP!”

She stopped.

“It doesn’t stay open very l—“

And then it was gone again.

“You found it,” she said, like she didn’t dare to move her feet in case she fell out in space. “...you found it.” And she started laughing and couldn’t stop for a while, while the tears ran down her face.

Avi was all for turning it back on and jumping in. She’d shut that down as soon as he spoke.

“No. This might be the one that got Mateo, or it might just be another stable wormhole. And you’re the only one who knows how this works even a little. We can’t lose you too.”

“I could throw a message through. If that’s where he came through, I bet he’ll go check it to see if it opens up again. We can tell him to be ready. We can tell him we’re coming for him!”

“Throwing paper is the worst. I don’t want to be anywhere near the opening when it closes. What if it cut your arm off?” She sounded reasoned but her voice was shaking.

Avi’s face went stark. “...yeah, ok.”

“Maybe we could slingshot it or ... hang on, I’ve got a bow.”

“You do?”

“In the garage somewhere, I’ll go get it right now. Stay here! And don’t do anything until I get back!” She raced out the door.

She came back an hour later with a recurve and a bunch of arrows. They all looked dusty.

“Ahaha, I guess we can test if momentum is conserved passing through a wormhole!” Avi was always a mad scientist, but just now he looked more like a mentally ill scientist, trying to distract himself like that. “Ok, the note, the note, what should it say? ‘Mateo, we found you, we’re going to —‘“

“No! Don’t put his name!”

“Why not?”

“He might be burned as a witch! Just put it on a neon post-it note and he’ll know it’s from now if he finds it!”

“A witch, really? He came out in modern times!”

“Two assumptions you’re making that you can’t prove,” she said, feverishly stringing the bow. “One is that this wormhole actually leads to the twentieth century. The other one is that there’s any society that doesn’t have the concept of a dangerous outsider who needs to be killed for the good of the group.” She selected an arrow fletched with feathers rather than plastic, hands trembling. “Hell, if he came out during a war that would be a pretty reasonable assumption on the locals’ part.”

“Colette,” Avi said, face set. “I need to tell you something. I think the other end of this wormhole may be slipping. It was late summer here and I think summer there when he went through. It’s November for us but —“

“—spring on that end. OH.”

“So if he got into any kind of trouble it may be too late. And it might have slipped a LOT.”

They stood in silence for a minute, not looking at each other.

“Ok,” said Avi after a while. “Here’s the note. I want you backed off as far from the wormhole as you can. You tape it to the arrow, you know more about arrows. And let me know when you’re ready. Maybe wrap it up in a lot of tape so it kind of waterproofs it.”

“Good idea. I’m going to tie some string to the back.”

“...it’s most likely going to get severed.”

She shook her head. “That’s ok. If the other end of the wormhole doesn’t drift much in space it should be easier to retrieve if ... if anyone leaves a note for us on it. Or anything.”

“Ok.”

Avi went to the controls while she got the note and arrow set.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Not going to give you a countdown, but I think you have about five seconds before it opens.” If it opens again, nobody said. “Shoot as soon as it does.”

“Ok.” She blew out a breath, shook out her arms, and drew. And the wall of the lab again opened like a flower. She shot, and a second later 2005 snapped shut after it, leaving only a spatter of rain and half a length of twine on the lab floor.

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