Being closer to it made no difference in its appearance. Still black. Like an open window on a moonless night, seen from inside a brightly lit room.
Bethany came closer on her own side. So far neither of them had put so much as a hand into the projection beam.
The angled windstream was still mostly affecting Bethany, but Travis could feel the edge of it, too, at this distance.
Bethany spoke, just above a whisper. “What’s over there?”
Travis could only shake his head.
Whatever the place was, it had to be outdoors. There was wind there. And it was nighttime, which narrowed the location down to half the Earth at any given moment.
Assuming the place on the other side was on Earth.
Travis wondered if the air coming through was safe to breathe. Probably too late to worry about it, if it wasn’t.
And it hadn’t killed the test animals in Border Town. Travis suddenly understood what they’d been used for. Paige and the others had put them through the opening, to test the safety of crossing the threshold.
He glanced at Bethany and saw her staring through into the darkness, eyes narrowed, no doubt thinking all the same things he was.
She turned to him. “Remember the end of the phone call? Paige said something like, ‘You can go through and come back.’ She practically screamed it.”
Travis nodded.
The wind through the opening shifted a bit toward him. He felt it tug at the arms of his T-shirt. It also gave him the scent of the place on the other side—a number of scents. Strong vegetation smells: pine boughs, dead leaves, ripe apples, all of it sharp and crisp on a wind that was maybe ten degrees cooler than the air-conditioned hotel room. The other side of the opening felt and smelled like an autumn night in the country.
“What location on Earth right now would have a climate like fall in the northern United States?” Travis said.
Bethany thought about it. She shrugged. “Maybe western Canada, a few hundred miles up the coast from Seattle. I really don’t know. It would still be dark there, for what it’s worth.”
Travis took another breath of the chilly wind.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Even if it really is an opening to someplace thousands of miles away—as impressive as that is—what could Paige and the others have learned from this thing? What could anyone learn from it that they couldn’t learn by just flying to wherever it leads?”
“There must be more to it than we’re thinking,” Bethany said.
Travis nodded. There had to be. And they weren’t going to find out what it was by just standing here.
Travis turned and looked around. There was a leather-bound room service menu on the nearest end table. He crossed to it, picked it up and came back to where he’d been standing beside the opening.
He held the menu by one end. He put the other end into the projected cone of light. It blocked a big chunk of the beam, maybe a third or more. That portion of the light no longer reached the black opening.
But the opening was unaffected.
In a way it was the most surreal thing Travis had seen yet. It was like sticking your hand into the beam of a movie projector, seeing the shapes of your fingers cast down the length of the light—but seeing no shadow on the screen.
“It makes sense,” Bethany said. “They’d have to build it so that the hole stayed open, even if part of the beam were blocked. Otherwise, think about it: you’d block the beam with your body before you could climb through the opening.”
Travis wondered how much of the beam could be cut off before the opening failed. Keeping the menu in the light cone, he moved it slowly toward the couch. Toward the cylinder’s lens, and the narrow part of the beam.
He watched the opening as he did it. Watched the rectangle of blocked-out light grow until it was well over half of the beam. Then three fourths. The opening showed no effect at all. It didn’t so much as flicker.
It stayed that way until only a sliver of blue light reached the hole. Maybe five percent of the total. When Travis blocked it further, the opening vanished. At the same time the projected light on the leather menu began to flash symbols in the same text that was engraved on the cylinder. Maybe it said obstruction error. Maybe it said stop blocking the light, asshole. Travis pulled the menu out of the way and the opening immediately reappeared.
He pressed his other hand to the menu. It felt as cool to the touch as when he’d picked it up. He held it close to his eyes and tilted it so that the gleam of sunlight showed him the surface in detail. It didn’t appear damaged.
He went back to the opening. He still held the menu. He shared a look with Bethany: Here goes.
He put the menu fully into the cone of light, and then he put half of it through the hole in the air.