“Most of the time? What else do you do?”
“Write reports and position papers. I don’t get to play at spy stuff except when something unusual happens, like when the Colonel roped me in for that thing with Gomez and Jack because he needed another body with all the right clearances. The talent pool’s tiny when you get down to it.” She sounded irritated.
“So that’s why you were along with HaptoTech?” Rita asked, biting back her instant angry response. Was the entire trade show job a ploy to get me into a sandbox, surrounded by DHS agents? It seemed excessive, even knowing about the JAUNT BLUE technology.
“Partly. We use their motion capture implants for driving bots around, some of the time.” Rita couldn’t be sure, but she thought the other woman was shaking her head inside her bulky headgear. “Come on, we need to de-suit before we can enter the clean room.”
A door gaped open onto another white space, a NASA-esque vision of a space station airlock vestibule. A bench ran the width of one wall, occupied by empty suits with their backs docked to small hatches. Julie helped Rita sit down and showed her how to lean back against the suit-lock. “Duck down to get your head out from under the helmet rim, grab the overhead rail, and swing yourself out,” she advised.
After a minute of mild claustrophobia Rita managed to worm her way down and out through the back of her radiation suit. She found herself in a cramped robing room. “Ms. Douglas?” A lightly built man was waiting for her. He wore a skintight but weirdly quilted outfit that left only his face bare. “You haven’t been here before so I’m going to have to authenticate you. Hi, Julie, you can go in, but you’ll need to help Ms. Douglas suit up for the Gate.”
“The Gate?” Rita looked from face to face. “Is that radioactive, too?”
“No, but you need vacuum protection. I’ll hang around, Jose.”
“Wait—‘vacuum’?” It was one too many surprises for a single afternoon: Rita was beginning to feel petulant and resentful at the way it was all piling up.
“Yes, like I said, all the air in the valley was being sucked out through the Gate when we found it.”
Jose took Rita through the increasingly familiar DNA sample and password authentication routine. “Okay, in the next room Julie will help you into one of these,” he explained, pointing to his own outfit. “It’s a mechanical counterpressure suit—it compares to a normal space suit the way a wet suit is to an old-school canvas diving suit. Keeps you from blowing out in vacuum because it’s elasticated and squeezes you, while a regular NASA suit is an airtight bag. The reason we use them is we have to work in confined spaces beyond the Gate, and ambient pressure suits are too bulky.” He raised his left arm and pointed to an intricate tracery of red seams stitched across the fabric around his torso. “Got to get it skintight first, though.”
Rita swallowed. “What is this Gate?” she asked, trying to keep a plaintive note out of her voice.
“They didn’t tell you?” Jose stared at her. “It’s the Gate. Uh, it’s a para-time portal. The one that nearly vented all the air in this time line into vacuum, except we caught it before that happened and it’s small enough that it would have taken tens of thousands of years anyway.”
You have got to be kidding me, Rita thought as Jose, with Julie’s assistance, strapped her into a space suit that felt like an inch-thick body stocking, hung a slim life-support vest around her, and screwed a helmet onto the steel ring that hung around her collarbone. I’m going to wake up any moment now, she told herself uncertainly. This is just crazy. World-walking she could handle: she could do it herself. But she’d never heard even a hint that the government was sitting on top of some kind of gate between time lines. She felt numb. The implications of what she was being shown today were too big to get her head around: she ought to be freaking out, she felt, but over what particular aspect of the whole shocking secret?
“I’m monitoring your vitals remotely,” Jose added. “In event of a pressure emergency the helmet will seal automatically; there’s a short-range voice channel over infrared: the transponder’s on top of your head.” Julie, already suited, raised a hand and tapped a protrusion on her helmet that Rita had taken for a headlight.
“What about Mission Control?” Rita asked.
“I am Mission Control. We requisitioned this stuff from NASA—space station spares and prototypes they never flew—but we don’t have their manpower. Or their budget.”
“But what”—Rita turned to face Julie—“do you need me for?”
Julie waved her forward, toward a rectangular metal door at the far end of the robing room. “Jose? You don’t need to hear this.”
“Gotcha. I’ll be in the office; page me if you need me.” He ducked out.
“This way,” Julie said.
“You haven’t said why.” Rita stood her ground, stubborn.
“The Colonel told me to give you the dog and pony show.” Julie momentarily looked mulish. “If you want to know what this is really about, you’ll have to ask Colonel Smith: I’m mostly just a researcher here.” She looked around warily. Rita couldn’t be sure—the humming aircon and the muffling effects of her helmet liner messed with her hearing—but Julie seemed tense. Almost as if she was afraid of being listened in on.
“I’m not arguing, but—” Rita stopped. “You’ve got a script, you’ve got a dog and pony show to give me, I get that, but do we need to do this drip-drip thing? Why couldn’t you show me the video or something instead of dragging me out here?”
“Because the Colonel wants you to see it with your own eyes,” Julie said snippily. “You wouldn’t believe us if we just showed you a video. This stuff’s real. It’s also so crazy that most people go straight into denial unless they see it for themselves.” She took a deep breath. “If I had to make a guess—this is just a guess, you with me? I don’t know that this is what’s happening—I’d guess that he’s worried about your commitment. But you’re not stupid or crazy, so he’s giving you enough of the background to make up your own mind.”
She pointed at the door. “On the other side of that airlock there’s a walkway into the Gate. It’s a gate into another time line. One where there’s no Earth. We built a receiving area and laboratory on the far side, but there’s a risk of micrometeoroid impacts, hence the suits. Part of the dog and pony show is that the Colonel wants you to use your magic JAUNT BLUE thing to log your knotspace location before you step through the Gate, and again on the other side. You’re not to try and jaunt there, you understand—you’d die, with or without a space suit. But he wants to see if you can log it, and if it agrees with readings we’ve taken using other devices.”
Her heart pounded. “But why? I mean, couldn’t they just map the knotspace location anyway?”
“He wants you to do it. So that you get to see what’s on the other side of it.”