Ship of Fools - Chapter 37

On the Path

[Start at the beginning of the novel: Prologue.]

[Go to the Table of Contents.]

Welcome back to Ship of Fools, my satire about a science journalist trying to make sense of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers, moon-landing deniers, New Agers, and more.

Before we get going, here’s an offer: Do you like free books? Through this promotion on Bookfunnel, you can get a free copy of my old story collection, Desert Trilogy, in ebook form. Plus a lot of other novels and nonfiction titles. (There’s a lot of romance in there, but who doesn’t love a good romance? I’ve even written one myself.) The only cost to you is providing your email address. And since you’re likely already a subscriber to Glass Half Full, that’s no cost at all. If you choose other books from this promotion, then you’ll likely be put on those authors’ email lists.

And now, on with today’s chapter. The last time we were in Antarctica with Liz, Sarge, and Dawa, Liz had just fallen through apparently solid snow and her rope had failed to catch her.

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AT LAST the rope caught and Liz’s fall slowed to a stop, leaving her dangling, ski poles and one ski flailing uselessly. She didn’t feel like she’d injured anything, though her back hurt a bit.

Dim light seeped in through the hole she’d made as she fell, revealing a crevasse maybe four or five feet wide where she dangled, and maybe thirty feet long. She couldn’t see the bottom. But wait, was that some sort of light down below? It couldn’t be a reflection of the dim light from above, since it seemed brighter.

“Liz!” Sarge yelled down, his head appearing at the top of the crevasse.

“I’m okay, but you’d better stay back. We don’t need two of us falling down here.”

“Dawa is setting up an anchor. Shouldn’t take more than a minute. You should have seen him self-arresting with just his boots and his bare hands!”

While she waited, she tried to get a better look at whatever was beneath her. It wasn’t just light, it moved, sort of swirling like a disco ball flashing off mirrors in a club. But what was a disco ball doing at the bottom of a crevasse in the middle of Antarctica?

“Liz!” Dawa called.

“Dawa, there’s something down here.”

“Ah, very good, Ms. Dare. You’ve found it!”

“Found what?”

“The key!”

He disappeared and soon he and Sarge were hauling her up. When she reached the surface, Dawa brought the sled over and began unloading the ladders and climbing gear.

“What do you mean, ‘the key’?” she asked.

“You will see.”

“I’ll see? You’re not going down there!?”

“Of course, and I think you’ll want to as well.”

She stared at him, baffled, as he enlarged the hole with a shovel, staked out the boundaries of the crevasse with flags, then strapped crampons onto his mountain boots for the descent.

“How about that,” Sarge said. “It may not be a wall, but it’s something Liz Dare can’t explain, and that’s all right by me.”

Dawa had Sarge belay him as he descended into the chasm, then had him lower the ladders after him. The top of the second one stuck a couple of feet out of the hole once Dawa had it lashed to the other and fixed to the ice.

Dawa’s head popped out. “First, we have some lunch, eh?”

“First? Before what?” Liz asked

He didn’t answer, moving quickly back to the sled and pulling out the stove for melting snow. He continued not answering her questions as he brewed tea and they shared a lunch of sardines and crackers and dried fruit, saying only, “We will see.”

They packed away the remainders of their meal, then Dawa stepped over to the crevasse and began organizing ropes. “I’ll belay. Who wants to go first?”

“I’ll go,” Sarge said. “Heaviest first, right?”

“Fine with me,” said Liz.

It only took Sarge five minutes to reach the bottom, then he gave a low whistle before tugging at the rope to indicate it was free.

Liz went next, wondering what the hell she was getting herself into, and what the hell those lights could be.

She reached the bottom and unclipped from the rope, finding it hard to keep her balance on the uneven surface where the two walls came together. Sarge was staring, transfixed, at the source of the light, a tall rectangle of shimmering blue on one wall of the crevasse. It looked like a projection, but there was no projector in sight. It didn’t seem to have any sort of frame or structure, just blue light laid directly onto the wall of ice.

“It’s beautiful,” Sarge said, reaching a hand out to it.

“Don’t touch it!” She grabbed his arm. “You don’t know what that is.”

“It’s a door, of course,” said Dawa, taking the last step off the ladder.

Liz turned to Dawa, wondering if she hadn’t hit her head during the fall and this was all a dream. “A door? To where?”

“I told you there are other realities.”

“But that’s…crazy.”

“No, it’s science.”

“What, you mean like parallel universes? String theory?”

Dawa shrugged, non-committal.

“So this is a…” — she could hardly bring herself to say it — “…a wormhole? But that’s only in science fiction.”

“Perhaps. But there’s only one way to find out.”

“No, you can’t go in there. We have to get back to the station. The scientists from the NSF will need to study this before anyone touches it. They’ll need instruments, Geiger counters…and oh god, the radiation we could be absorbing even now!”

“No way, Liz,” Sarge said. “If those high priests from the NSF get their hands on this thing, not to mention the military generals and their spies, they’ll all bury it, just like the other stuff they’re hiding. They’ll make us all sign non-disclosure agreements, if they even let us go free. I’m not letting them take this away from us. In fact, let me see if I can get a livestream going.”

He removed a mitten and pulled out his phone. Liz didn’t even bother chiding him about the satellites he’d be using to transmit his feed.

“Sarge is right, Ms. Dare,” said Dawa. “We’ve come this far, we should keep going. One foot after another along the Path.” He pointed at the door. “This is the Path. And if I’m not mistaken, someone is waiting for me on the other side.” He closed his eyes. “Yes, the presence is strong.”

“Come on, Liz,” said Sarge, “what have we got to lose? This is your big scoop. Don’t let it slip away.”

His words reminded her of her assignment, so she got some shots with her Nikon and recorded video of Dawa and Sarge standing before the portal, or whatever it was.

Sarge kept checking his phone. “Hey, I’ve got a signal!” He pressed the Live button. “This is Sarge Marshall and I’m here in the Antarctic with science journalist Elizabeth Dare and Buddhist monk Dawa Tenzing, and we’ve found something amazing!” He panned from his companions to the blue rectangle of light. “We’re in the bottom of a crevasse, two days’ march from the station at the supposed South Pole, and we’ve found this. We think it’s a doorway.”

Dawa ignored him and turned to Liz. “I hope you will follow; in fact, I believe you will. But if not, it has been a pleasure traveling with you. You should have no trouble getting back — just follow the markers. And there’s always the sat phone to contact Mr. Nordquist.”

With that, he turned to face the door, closed his eyes, mouthed something inaudible, and stepped into the blue light, becoming first an outline of himself, then disappearing altogether.

“Oh shit,” Liz said.

“Wild, huh?” said Sarge, still streaming. “It is a door or a portal, or something. We have no idea where it leads but we’re going to find out. Can you believe the bastards were keeping this hidden from us all this time?”

“Now you think the scientists and the military have known about this all along? Then why did they just let us ski out here to find it?”

“Who knows?” he said with a wink. “Hope to see you on the other side.” Still streaming, phone held out before him, he stepped into the portal and disappeared, the same as Dawa.

“Shit-shit-shit,” she said, pacing up and down.

There had to be some trick. She tried feeling all the way around the opening but found no gaps between it and the ice, no “other side” they could have slipped into. She took a breath and tried putting her hand into the light, a finger at a time. Her hand tingled and she drew it back.

“Shit,” she said again. Then she thought, we can’t just vanish off the face of the Earth. I can’t just vanish.

She climbed the ladders out of the hole, finding it not too difficult even without a belay, then pulled the sat phone out of the sled and called Union Glacier. It took a minute for the comms team to put Sven on the line.

“Liz, is everything okay?”

“We found something, Sven.”

“What? Wait, don’t tell me — the Ice Wall!”

“No, a door, a portal. At the bottom of a crevasse.”

“I told Dawa, there aren’t any crevasses.”

“I fell into one. That’s how we found the portal.”

“Are you okay? You sound okay.”

“I’m fine.”

“All right, but what do you mean, a portal? Where does it go?”

“I don’t know, another dimension? A parallel universe?”

“Come on, Liz, stop joking around.”

“I’m not joking. Dawa and Sarge already went in, or through. And I…I’m going too.”

There was a pause. “Liz…”

“I know, we were just getting started. But I have to. It’s the scoop of the century — hell, the millennium.”

“Liz, I know it’s soon but… I think I’m falling in love with you.”

“Me too.”

Another pause.

“All right, I’ve got to go.”

“But…when will you be back?”

Liz looked around at the frozen landscape, the flat sea of ice in all directions, thinking this might be the last view of Earth she’d ever have. She couldn’t quite believe what she was about to do. “I have no idea…not when, or even if there’s any coming back at all. But you just need to follow the flags to find the crevasse, and I’ll set off the emergency beacon. It would be nice to have someone waiting when we come back.”

“I’ll be waiting, or someone will, depending on how long it is.” He paused again.

“And then there’s winter.”

“Please don’t wait until winter.”

“I’ll try not to. Oh, and could you call my mom?”

“Of course.”

“You know what? Call Lonnie Ester too. This is right up his alley. Okay, it’s time. I don’t know how long they’ll wait for me on the other side.” She could only hope there was an “other side,” and that they’d be waiting there, not disassembled into their constituent atoms.

She cut the connection and put the phone in her pack. She found the emergency beacon and switched it on, leaving it on the sled. Then she climbed back down the ladder, slipping only once, sending her heart pounding.

Stepping off the ladder, she took a moment to calm down. Then she faced the portal, took a deep breath, and stepped through.

—End of Part III—

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, please give it a like, a share, a restack, or a comment. And if you really enjoyed it, I hope you’ll buy me a coffee or upgrade to a paid subscription.

From one cliffhanger to another! What do you think will happen to Liz next? Is this a portal, and is there an “other side”?

Next up: A Flat Earth Interlude, in which Sam and Geraint approach a mysterious spot not far from the North Pole.