Whatever Gets You Thru the Night #35
3.
"A portal?" DJ Sotto Voce asked, with no small amount of incredulity. "You've been lolling around the desert in search of a stock sci-fi plot device?"
"Scoff if you want," Martin coolly replied. "My parents went through portals all the time when I was growing up. I had to pack my own damn lunches in sixth grade because they were stuck in traffic getting out of one."
"So, like, they navigated between dimensions and all that crap?"
"Call it crap if you want, but that's what they did. Sometimes they'd come back as if nothing had happened. Other times they came back talking like Wittgenstein and covered in spores. Sometimes their skin looked blanched. They were pasty-looking. They suddenly forgot how to count. The little things."
DJ Sotto Voce looked askance at Martin. Seeking support from Clemons, he found his tapir had wandered off to a nearby bluff and couldn't be bothered. He decided, mainly out of boredom, to go along with Martin's mindset.
"All right. So how are you supposed to find this portal? And what do you expect to find there?"
"Well," Martin sighed, "to answer your second question, I don't know. It's a total crapshoot. It could a glistening land of fulfillment or we could get killed. Perfectly honest, we can't lose either way. But to answer your first question... well, take a look at the undercarriage."
"How'm I supposed to do that? My back can't handle it."
"Fine," Martin scoffed. "Well, if you did look at the undercarriage, you'd see it's got a long enamel panel attached to it, eight feet wide, three feet high. This panel has been fashioned by extremely sensitive electromagnetic engineers to pick up otherwise undetectable shifts in the mantle of the earth. These are kind of.... I guess you'd call them 'electrical faults.' Or maybe 'doorways.' I'm not sure. But, basically, when you're over one of these faults, you have about a 10-minute window to dig from the other side of the earth, and hopefully a gap emerges that you can just pop through."
"How do you know when you're over one of these spaces?"
"Ah," Martin grinned. "Come round to the cab."
DJ Sotto Voce stepped over to the driver's side window. He saw two seats in the front -- one a typical driver's seat, the other a folding deck chair affixed to the shotgun side by a series of straps. In between the seats was a spring-like contraption with a red cushion on top. Martin regarded the crude machine with a semblance of self-satisfaction.
"That, sir," Martin boasted, "is the Gyp-O-Meter. Once the sensor picks up a hot point, it goes off. I built it myself. It just springs up and almost blows your face off."
"Charming," said DJ Sotto Voce. "When's the last time it went off?"
"It hasn't."
"Well, then, how do you know it works?"
"A combination of several hours doing long division and hope. But I'm confident about the math. Mainly because nobody was there to correct me. Which is, I realize, how we got into this mess in the first place. But I see no need to alter my methods now."
"That sounds utterly annoying. Well, good luck."
"Hold it," Martin broke in. "Don't you and your friend want to hop along and ride with me?"
"What? Are you serious?"
"Of course! The deck chair's comfortable and you can tend to the Gyp-O-Meter. Obviously there's no actual ice cream in the back, but I did fashion sort of a nesting spot with a bunch of recalled MyPillows that were littering the street. They're hypoallergenic. Well, almost."
DJ Sotto Voce considered his choice to ride with Martin or keep on hoofing it the way someone considers a presidential election: neither option was terribly appealing and nothing was likely to change. Ultimately, it came down to the curse of the biped: tired feet.
"Oh, what the hell," DJ Sotto Voce concluded. "Strap us in."
To be continued.
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