Category: Story

Daniel Wasserman almost forgot to return the salute. He’d stepped on to the station landing deck from the transport, wrinkled flight fatigues, duffle bag over his shoulder. And when he saw the Lieutenant in duty whites standing at attention holding a salute, at first, the thought did not occur that it was for him. Until…

Jeff stood in the cavern of the emptied building, surrounded by nothing but the vast concrete floor, concrete pillars holding up the ceiling, and gloom. The chill he felt, he was sure, was his imagination. He hadn’t felt it the last time he’d been in this building—at least, not before hearing that eerie voice… He…

On a tour—on a normal tour—Richard would try to go on a daily run; outside, on real roads, in the real air. It was how he’d get a sense of a city, even when the tour consumed the day, even with the smooth-headed Rengle guards on the street corners. He’d run, with just music in…

When Randy got back from getting his Nobel Prize, what was the first thing he wanted to show me? The medallion? The check? Him in a tux trying to give a speech? No. “Patty—you’ve got to see this—they interviewed me. Me. They cut it down to only a few minutes for broadcast, but she put…

EXCERPT: I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, took a few seconds before responding. “Yes, sort of. There’s enough thrust developed, in a light enough system. But the infrastructure we’ve got around it—the cooling system, the containment system—they’re not up to military specs.”

“Right. No one’s saying that the systems here,” he waved a hand around, almost sending himself into a spin before he grabbed a handrail, “would be up to the sustained stress of military duty. But a few days of stops and starts? Why not?” When I didn’t immediately respond, he added, “You don’t see a reason why not? I trust?”

EXCERPT: “Well, I assume you’ve heard about near-death experiences?”

“Yeah, sure I have,” I said. It’s a cliché, the tunnel and the light and all that.

“What if, when you die, your consciousness goes to that other universe?” he asked. “That’s the question I am working on—at least, in my free time.”

“Yeah, but, that would have to be just speculation, right? There’d be no way to really find out.”

“There could be a way,” he said. “Theoretically, it should be possible to create a wormhole through. However, trying to make a wormhole from this universe to that one would take more energy than humans are likely to have for millions of years. My thinking is this: If this is true—if the information from our experiences is imported into this neighboring universe, then it must be pulled from that side, rather than pushed from this one; and the attendant wormhole must be like a valve—easy to open from that reality, very, very hard to open from this one. So what I want to do is, when the passage might be open, send a small probe through.