Stranger in the Woods

The next week, a cold front swept through and the temperature dropped below freezing for the first time. Zach’s state of mind deteriorated to a near-panic. He desperately felt like he had to do something, anything, to help speed things along with the machine in the basement. Every day when he came home from school, his grandfather was in the lab, working diligently, but he still declined Zach’s assistance. Finally, on Thursday afternoon, he called Zach into the equipment-crowded room as soon as he walked into the house.

“I’ve got something to show you, but I’d like to show all of you at once. How quickly can you get your friends over here?”

Fifteen minutes later, Zach and his friends were crowded around Grandpa in the laboratory, their faces eager. Zach was so wound up that his fingers were twitching at his sides, and he finally had to shove his hands in his pockets to get them to stop.

Grandpa cleared his throat and said, “The new tubes came in yesterday.” Zach started to complain but Grandpa quickly added, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to get your hopes up and be disappointed if things didn’t go right. I wanted to install them and check everything out before I let you know what was up.”

“As far as I can tell. I’ve only had the whole system on for about a minute, and then I shut it down because I didn’t want anything burning out before you got to see it. I know you have a lot of time and money invested in this, and it’s only fair that you be here for the big test.” He looked into each of their faces and said, “Are you ready for this?”

They assured him they were. “Okay, then. I think you’re going to like what you see.” He reached over and pressed the main switch on the control station. The row of meters on the top pegged to the right for an instant, then settled down near the middle of their arcs, while a deep hum filled the room. Zach held his breath and gritted his teeth, waiting to see if anything was going to blow up. Nothing did. He exhaled.

“Look at that.” Grandpa pointed at the tall cylinders. A shimmering field now appeared in each of them, filling their openings from top to bottom. Each field looked like the surface of a stretched-out, supernatural soap bubble, with iridescent colors playing about in fantastic patterns.

“Yep.” Grandpa picked up a broom that was leaning against the nearby bench. “We can’t know for sure if it’s doing what it’s supposed to do, but I thought of a way to test it to see if it’s doing something, at least. Who wants to try this?”

Jason stepped forward and took the broom from Grandpa while Zach and the others hesitated. “What do I do?” Jason said.

Grandpa picked up a small cardboard box from the bench. “I put some junk in here, mostly leftover plastic and metal bits, to give it some weight so you could feel it. I thought you could set this on the end of the broom, put it through the field, and tilt it so it dumps out on the other side, and then pull the broom out. If there really is another side. We’ll know for sure if the box disappears but the broom comes out in one piece and doesn’t get disintegrated or something.”

“Can’t we tape my phone to it, set it to record, and put it through?” Zach said. “Then we could see what’s there.”

Grandpa shook his head. “I don’t know what the field would do to the electronics of your phone. Let’s just do this for now.” He nodded toward Jason to proceed.

Jason stepped to the cylinder on the right and held the narrow end of the broom horizontally before him. “Let me try this, first.” He cautiously pushed it forward until it penetrated the shimmer and the colors rippled around it like water. “Cool,” he muttered, then pushed it farther, until it was almost all the way through, impossibly past where it should’ve bumped into the back of the cylinder, but didn’t.

Jason pulled it out, still intact. “Now for the box.” He turned the broom around and balanced the small cardboard container on the flat of the bristles, then eased it through the field while everyone watched.

Jason twisted the handle and his eyes widened. “It fell off. I can tell.” He withdrew the broom to find the box gone. Shelby clapped her hands and bounced on the balls of her feet. Zach felt like doing it, too.

Jason turned the broom around again and slid the pointed end back through the field and waved it slowly up and down. “Wonder where it went. Is it on Bo’s world, you ’spose?”

“Doubt it,” Grandpa said. “I changed a couple of the settings on the main knobs just to be sure. We don’t want another one of Bo’s people to come stumbling through like he did.”

Suddenly there was a sizzle and pop from inside the control station, and the field vanished from both cylinders.

“Uh-oh,” Jason said and examined the severed end of the slender pole. From where Zach was standing, he could see that it was sliced smoothly, as if from a fine-toothed saw.

Grandpa frowned at the control station. “Not sure, but it sounded like something blew out in there. Let me have a quick look.” He grabbed a screwdriver from the bench, knelt beside the machine, and backed out the four screws that attached to the front plate. He pulled it loose and set it on the floor.

“It’s not time to panic, yet.” Grandpa stood and brushed his hands together. “Let me check everything out with my tube tester and then we’ll know where we stand.” He motioned toward the door. “Y’all run along. I can’t do this with you looking over my shoulder and fretting over every little thing.”

Zach’s friends left, and he tried to do his homework at the kitchen table so he could hear Grandpa when he called him back down to the lab. Zach found it hard to focus with his mother cooking dinner, banging pots and pans around and opening and closing drawers and cabinets. He finally had to go to his room.

He didn’t get much work done there, either. He couldn’t concentrate on the math problems he had to solve. His mind was downstairs with his grandfather in the basement. It wasn’t until nearly six o’clock that his mother called to him to say that Grandpa wanted to see him.

“But it’s almost Thanksgiving! That’s next week. That means the mail will get really slow, doesn’t it, with the holidays coming up? And me and my friends don’t have much money, only seventy-five dollars, and that’s counting my allowance. How much do you think everything will cost?”

“If I remember correctly, these tubes will probably set you back about two hundred bucks, with shipping. They’re the most expensive ones in the machine.”

“We’ll never be able to make that much money in time! Bo…oh, dang it! He’s screwed. Totally screwed.”

Grandpa gestured gently with one hand. “Hold on, don’t go all gloom and doom on me. Give me what money you have and I’ll make up the difference. Consider it an advance.”

“Let’s make a deal. I’ll loan you the rest of the money to pay for the tubes, and every time it snows, you and you friends have to shovel my front walk and driveway.”

Zach started to object until he realized what his grandfather was offering. It’s not a loan. He’s giving it to us. Zach was surprised. His grandfather always seemed to be careful with his money, almost stingy. “Sure. We’ll do it. But what about the control station? It could blow up again just as easy as it did today, couldn’t it?”

“I’m going to install a regulator and an internal breaker this time. I should’ve done it before, but I wanted to stay as true to Uncle Nicholas’s original design as possible. Now I see that he should’ve put both of those components in there in the first place.”

“I believe so. You’re right about the shipping. It will be slower because of the holidays coming up, but I’m going to pay a little more and upgrade to the faster option. I don’t think they offer overnight service, so we’ll have to trust them to get the tubes to us quickly enough.”