55. Hidden in Wood or Wold

Avi got particle accelerator time the day after Colette shot the note through. Maybe it was too soon for Mateo to have found it, or maybe it was the wrong place or the wrong time or the wrong universe. Maybe the multiverse branched to avoid causality problems and maybe Mateo and the arrow and the past he knew all came out in slightly different universes. Maybe the wormhole wouldn’t open again. Maybe he’d go crazy if he didn’t try.

Colette joined him. Maybe she’d go crazy too. She squeezed his shoulder in passing, unusual for somebody as hands-off as her.

“Stand over here?”

“Uh, a little further back. Uh, a little more. That’s good.”

He reached for the controls.

Then he stopped. “Uh, we need to plan. I think it stays open for five seconds, roughly...” The implications sunk in. “One of us is going to have to reach through and get the note, if there is one.”

Colette nodded somberly. “Or actually go through. There’s no reason the arrow’s string should be right next to the wormhole, is there?”

Avi winced. “Uh yeah, true. ” He eyed the distance between the controls and the place that the tear in reality had opened last time. Wormhole was a pretty cutesy name once you’d actually seen it in action.

“You’re not thinking of going through, are you?” Colette sounded horrified.

“One of us has to!”

“Yes! Exactly! One of us! Preferably the one who doesn’t know how to work that thing!” She gestured at the particle accelerator.

“You’re not planning to go through!”

“Why not? You were!”

Avi paused. “Yeah, ok, but—”

“It can’t be you,” she lowered her voice. “We need you. And if, God forbid, one of us did get stuck in the past, should it be the physicist who can bring people back through time, or the history major? Now tell me what to expect when passing through a wormhole.”

About ten minutes later, she stood much closer to the possible opening than Avi was strictly happy with, heart racing like she’d already sprinted through. Her hands kept going slick with chilly sweat and she kept wiping them on her jeans. She’d have five seconds, Avi said. Seven or eight, maybe, but that was all guesswork. Assume only five. Assume you might lose your balance passing through, there are probably weird gravitational effects. Remember it’s a three-dimensional portal, a sphere, not a flat doorway, a hole that opens up in all three directions you can perceive. If the arrow, or the string, aren’t within about ten feet of the opening, don’t even try. If you do try, you have to make the decision and commit as soon as it opens. If it does this time. The impulse would be to step back, or stand and gape. She’d have to pretend it was something as mundane as punching the close button on a garage door and then racing through before it closed without tripping the sensor.

The air began to hum. She blew out a forceful breath, trying to be steady, and gathered herself to move.

“Go!” Avi yelled, like the suddenly extant tear in the skin of the world wasn’t enough. “I see the arrow!”

Crazy with terror and determination, like somebody leading a bayonet charge, she raced for the wormhole and leapt through.

She saw a lensed distorted intermingling of lab and field, like alternated stacked dinner plates, then she was suddenly falling sideways down between two angled planes of sky and ground, not up, not down, but — Then she smacked into the wet ground and tumbled, head swimming with vertigo for a moment, rolled to her feet in the wet grass on some basal emergency autopilot, and sprinted for the arrow’s patch of yellow.

She grabbed it, ripped it out of the grass, wheeled, and sprinted for ... a circle of the tiled artificially-lit lab hanging in the middle of an autumn field, edges warping the scenes between them. It was so viscerally weird she slipped and almost fell again. Then total panic that it might close kicked her into high gear, and she ran, and leapt, and found herself skidding across the floor of the lab on her side, arrow clutched to her chest.

She looked up right as the wormhole closed — it was a rainy fall day on the other side, not the spring it had opened into yesterday. The arrow in her hands was wet and weatherstained, the post-it note bleached by the sun. How long had passed between...?

“Are you ok?!” Avi raced over to crouch by her. The floor was spotted with the rain that had fallen through.

“I ... I think so. Hang on. Don’t wanna get up yet. Inner ear stuff. Ok. Dizzy but ok. Must’ve been ... right. The — the gravity is totally weird.” She sat up, Avi helping her, and shook her head. “Wow. Uh. I feel ok now.” She still felt like she was having a heart attack, and Avi had to tactfully pry the arrow out of her locked-up fingers.

“Is — is the note— did he write anything on it?”

“I don’t know!” His hands were shaking so he could barely unpick the tape. Was it just her, or was it looser now? And if it was, was it just weathering? “I don’t—oh.”

“What’s it —“ she scrambled over on her knees to where Avi was crouching and grabbed his arm to steady herself.

Their note had a second piece of writing penciled below it, handwriting she didn’t recognize.

“Your friend, who is the first of the four accounts, is well and safe, and among friends. The time as I write this is 4.13 P.M. Greenwich Mean Time, the date is April 8th, 1943, on the Gregorian Calendar, and the location is approximately seven miles northeast of the village of Northwick, the Cotswolds, Gloucester, England.”

A drop of water fell on the paper. It must have been from Colette’s jacket.

There was too much here to process, so Avi just croaked “The first of the four accounts?”

“I think...you know how we didn’t put Mateo’s name on our note? I think whoever wrote this must be trying to return the favor and still let us know we got to the right person.” Another water drop fell on the paper. “I think they mean the first of the four gospels. Mathew is the English version of the same ... Aramaic? Hebrew? name that Mateo is the Spanish version of.”

The bottom line kept hitting Avi. Mateo was alive. He was ok, he had somebody on his side, they’d opened the wormhole into the right section of spacetime.

“I’ll be able to let everything cool off overnight and try and open it up again in the morning,” Avi heard himself say. “Hopefully it hasn’t slipped again.” That idea terrified him. “Will you come?”

“Will I come! Avi.” She gripped his arm a little tighter. “Seriously, man.”

Then he laughed, and somehow wound up with more drops of water spotting the paper. He wiped his noise. “Thank you.”

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