Donny returned from the base of the mountain wall shaking his head.
“Not a sign of an opening, or that there’d ever been an opening. We are so fucked!”
“Be calm,” Hari said.
Donny threw his arms up. “How can I be calm when we’re trapped on another fucking planet?”
That had been Hari’s first thought too, but then she realized…
“Temporarily, yes, but we know that gateway is going to open again.”
“Do we?”
Hari struggled for patience and to keep her voice level. She was upset too, but somebody had to set the tone, and it looked like the job had fallen to her.
“Yes, Donny, we do. The truckers seem to be making daily trips, which tells me the gateway opens and closes on a schedule and someone out there knows it.”
“But we don’t.”
“We’re two smart people. We should be able to figure the interval—I’m betting it’s got something to do with the signal that’s right outside the gateway—and even if we don’t figure it out, all we have to do is wait.”
“And keep from freezing to death.” He rubbed his arms. “Did it just get colder?”
“Feels that way. Darker too.”
She turned to face the enormous red sun and saw its lower quarter had dipped below the horizon.
“Damn, that thing moves fast.”
“How long are the nights here?” Donny said. “We have no idea. At least we have the Tahoe’s heater to keep us warm.”
“But do we have enough gas? We started out with a full tank but do we have enough left to last the night?”
Donny stepped toward the rear of the Tahoe. “I’m going to check for an emergency kit. They might have flares.”
“Who are we going to signal?”
“Just give me a minute.” He flipped up the rear hatch and rummaged around. “Here we go. Jumper cable—yeah, right, like that’ll be useful. Tow rope—no use. Ice scraper—let’s hope it’s no use. Collapsible shovel—no use unless we need to bury one of us.”
“Please!” Hari said.
“Ah! Two flares. Good for heat and light and starting a fire.”
A cold wind had sprung up. The sun was two-thirds gone. Hari took a look around the steadily darkening plateau and saw only flat rock. Not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass.
“Hate to be a Debbie Downer, but there’s nothing here to burn.”
“Hey, even I know Debbie Downer. And we can always burn the Tahoe. Look here.”
He held up what looked like a large square of folded aluminum foil.
“We’re going to wrap sandwiches?” she said.
“Survival reflecting blanket. This’ll help us save gas.” As he slammed the rear hatch, he looked up. “Shit.”
“What?”
He pointed at the sky. “Take a look and tell me what you see up there.”
The sun had disappeared and all Hari saw was unrelieved blackness.
“Nothing.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, it is night.”
“No stars, Hari. Not one freaking star up there. Where the fuck are we? I mean, where in the universe is this planet that there are no visible stars? Or is it even in our universe?”
Hari had no answer and she wasn’t about to make up one.
Just then, green lights started wavering across the sky.
Hari pointed. “Those look like—”
“The Northern lights. Or for all we know they could be the Southern Lights here. It’s a sign this planet has a magnetic field that’s protecting us from at least some radiation.”
Hari nodded appreciatively. “You know all sorts of good nerdy stuff, don’t you.”
“Mostly useless nerdy stuff.”
“Either that or you’re an excellent bullshitter.”
“Actually, I’m a pretty bad bullshitter.”
Hari had come to that conclusion the day they’d met.
They stared as the aurora grew brighter and greener, undulating like curtains in a breeze, until Hari shivered in the wind. As beautiful as they were, the lights weren’t keeping her warm. She blew on her hands.
“Let’s get inside before we freeze our butts off.
Once settled in their seats, Hari started the engine and turned the heat up to max. The fuel gauge read three-quarters of a tank and the dashboard gave them a range of 322 miles. Who cared how many miles were left in the tank; it had now become a question of how many hours.
Donny pulled out his tablet.
“And before you say it,” he said, “no, I don’t expect to find cell service or a wi-fi hotspot here. But I can work with what’s already downloaded and I have all the latest signal reports in memory.”
Hari peered through the windshield. With the sun gone and no moon or stars, the darkness would have been impenetrable if not for the emerald-hued aurora wavering across the sky. She watched the lights, fascinated. She considered forty too young to have a bucket list, but if she ever made one, the Northern Lights would have been near the top. She’d been to Iceland where they have aurorae, but she’d traveled in the summer when the sky never got dark. The sun would set, but never too far below the horizon. The darkest hours came around 2 a.m., and the skies were skim-milk pre-dawn gray then. No aurora visible on that trip. She’d planned to return in winter sometime. Now she wouldn’t have to.
She hoped she’d at least have the option.
The reality of their situation crashed in on her. They’d entered a rocky opening in the side of a hill in western Massachusetts and ended up on an alien world. Shock and awe and the rush to make sense of what they were experiencing had held deep terror at bay. But now, sitting in a familiar vehicle and looking out at a totally unfamiliar vista that had them imprisoned for who knew how long…terror came knocking. They were the proverbial strangers in a strange land. They didn’t know the rules here.
She turned on the headlights. The beams lit up the semi-trailers arrayed before them. Nothing moved out there. Was this planet inhabited? And if so, by what?
The possibilities only increased her terror.
“How does this happen, Donny? We entered a passage into the side of a cliff on Norum Hill and came out here. That’s not possible. And yet…here we are.”
“It’s not possible by our rules, but maybe those rules have been superseded by others.”
“That’s not an explanation. And why should new rules start to apply?”
“Remember I told you I tapped into the Septimus Foundation’s servers and culled through their emails? They’re obviously expecting something apocalyptic to happen when the frequencies align. They have this mantra they repeat to each other over and over and—”
“It wouldn’t be a mantra unless they kept repeating it.” She waggled a finger at him. “I was raised in a Hindu household. I know these things.”
“Pardon my pleonasm. Their mantra goes something like: It will begin in the heavens and end in the Earth, but before that, the rules will be broken.”
“What’s that—a prophecy? We’re dealing with a prophecy? When did I fall into a Tolkien movie?”
“This is real, Hari. And when you think about it, the rule that says you can’t drive an SUV between planets has been broken.”
“But-but-but…it’s more than a rule. It breaks all the laws of physics…”
“A law is another name for a rule. By the way, it’s getting awfully hot in here.”
Was it? She was too chilled to notice. She turned off the engine.
“You’ve become awfully calm about this.”
He shrugged. “I was anything but calm at first. I’m not prone to panic attacks but I was on the verge of one out there, but you brought me down. Thanks for that.”
“Any time, but…I did?”
“You were taking a rational approach and so I did too: Put the emotions on hold. Plenty of time to panic later. Do some critical thinking first.”
She touched his tablet. “Come up with anything?”
“Maybe.” He turned the screen toward her. “From what I can tell, someone assigned numbers to the signals. The one on Norum Hill is designated two-thirty-seven. I’ve gone back through the lists and it seems that since the frequencies started changing, someone from a place called Williamstown—I assume it’s in the neighborhood—has been reporting any variation in the two-thirty-seven frequency every time the signal occurs, which seems to run every eighteen to nineteen hours.”
Hari said, “Soooo…if we go by that, dare we assume a periodicity somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, eighteen hours?”
“We can dare. The trucks made a delivery here yesterday afternoon and again this morning. I don’t know the exact times off the top of my head, but the interval seems like roughly eighteen hours and—hey, wait. Uh-oh.”
“Don’t do that.”
They were already trapped on an alien landscape. She didn’t need to hear Uh-oh.
“My tablet downloaded the latest signal report right before we entered the passage. It says all of the reported signals, including two-thirty-sevens, have synchronized their frequencies with the Prime Frequency.”
“Why does that rate an ‘uh-oh’?”
“What if synching with this Prime Frequency means two-thirty-seven won’t open the passage anymore?”
Hari’s heart clenched. “Now who’s Debbie Downer?”
“Sorry.” He pointed to the dashboard clock. “It’s noonish back in our world. We’ve been here, what, half an hour? That means—if signal two-thirty-seven still opens the passage—”
Hari whacked him on the arm. “Do not mention that again. I’m serious.”
“Okay, okay. If we’ve got the interval right, that means the mountain wall will open at five or six a.m. or thereabouts.”
The wind rocked the SUV.
“Let’s just hope we don’t freeze to death before that.”
He stared at her. “Seriously?”
“Very seriously. Because I can’t see how we have eighteen hours of running time in the gas tank.”
He held up the foil packet. “But we do have this super-duper reflecting survival blanket. We can turn on the engine and the heater intermittently and maintain our body heat under this.”
Hari watched askance as he began unfolding the foil blanket. “You’re talking about snuggling under that?”
He laughed. “Well, we don’t have to ‘snuggle,’ exactly, but we should stay close. Shared body heat is a tried-and-true method of surviving the cold. They say Eskimos sleep with their huskies on cold nights. On a regular cold night they use one dog; when it’s colder they bring in a second dog; and a three-dog night is the coldest of them all.”
She couldn’t resist. “So I’m a dog?”
“No-no-no! I didn’t—”
She waved off his explanation. “Kidding. I guess it’s a good thing then this Tahoe has a bench seat up here.”
“You haven’t asked, but yes, I have heard of Three Dog Night.”
“Name one song.”
“‘Joy to the World,’ so there’s hope for me yet.” He handed her a corner of the foil. “Get under this—up to your chin and tuck your feet up under you while I skootch over.”
As their shoulders bumped, she said, “Don’t get any ideas.”
“Oh, believe me: Being stranded on another planet is not my idea of a first date.”
“Yeah, you really know how to show a girl a good time.”