Otherworld (14 page)

Less than ten miles away, the driver of an overloaded tractor-trailer fell asleep on a Dallas straightaway. At the incredible speed of ninety-five miles per hour, the truck began to drift across the lanes.

Coming from the other direction, unaware of the monster rocketing across the yellow center stripe, a lady bopping along to the Goo Goo Dolls in a small Volkswagen took a seemingly harmless break from her attention to the road ahead of her to look down and adjust the radio volume. When she looked up, it was too late.

At the point the two paths intersected, the small car exploded in a loud blast of crunching metal. The truck sent it flying in all directions, its frame disintegrating throughout its short and abrupt trajectory. When it landed, already crushed and stripped of most of its parts, the truck hit it again, this time pushing it with deadly velocity up over a sidewalk and through the glass and brick of Tom's Hardware.

Two lives. Two vapors. Both here and then gone in the blink of an eye.

 

Dr. Bering led Mike into his study. Every step shot lightning bolts of pain up Mike's legs, and so it was slow going. Once in the room, Bering sat his wounded friend down in his own recliner.

The study was a warm, inviting place. The walls were shelves filled with books that reached to the ceiling. It was quite a substantial library, and Mike sat wide-eyed, scanning the spines of the thousands of books, catching titles and authors he recognized. Bering's fiction shelves groaned under the weight of the collected works of nearly every literary master, old and new.

Bering pulled up a chair across from Mike and sat down.

“It's an admirable collection, I know.”

“It is,” Mike said.

There was a vintage movie poster matted and framed on the wall: Billy the Kid's Women. Clearly some pulp flick from the dustbin of post-war cinema. Mike looked for the year on the print.

Bering smiled. “I was in that.”

“You were in this? The movie?”

“Yep. I played Kid Number Three. That was 1957.”

“How'd you do that?”

“I grew up in California. Here, sit down. My mother was a Hollywood hanger-on of sorts. Never really amounted to much, but here and there somebody owed her a favor, and putting her kid in a few terrible movies was one of them.”

“You in any others?” Mike asked.

“Just one other.
Men From Venus
. A fantastic piece of sci-fi garbage that made Ed Wood look like Godard.”

“This one any good?” Mike said, gesturing at the print.

“No, not really. I enjoyed being on the set, but we all knew even then we weren't making anything worth anything. It's not available even on video today. Every now and then, I'm told, it pops up on some Sunday TV matinee in some backwater markets. But I've never cared to watch it again. The poster was one of the few things of my mother's that I kept.”

“Did you know any famous people in Hollywood?”

“Oh, plenty,” Bering said. “They were nearly all boring. Some of the most uninteresting people to ever exist. For all the glitz and glamour, Hollywood stars were but shadows of real human beings. But I did grow up around a few famous folks who were a bit different.”

“Who?”

“Well, I could tell you about Ron Hubbard.”

“The Scientology guy?”

“Yes, the Scientology guy. My mother was one of his many mistresses. He was one of the prime figures in the Rosicrucian commune my mother and I were a part of for a while in Los Angeles. A few has-been actors and actresses flitted through. But Hubbard and the writer Robert Heinlein were probably the most integral names you'd recognize today. And the rocket scientist Parsons. They had a good little something going patterned on the work of Aleister Crowley.”

“The Satanist guy?” Mike asked.

Bering glanced away, pained. “That's an unfortunate designation. Crowley was a mystic, Mike, a conjurer of the inner human spirit and its outer connection with the invisible, primordial life. He was the discoverer of the Themelite perspective, which to this day is probably the closest religious approximation of true gnosis.”

The professor propped his feet up on an ottoman. Mike did the same.

Bering was close now. He continued:

“These men in this community were striving after something each in their respective trades had been searching for. Through art, through rocketry, through magick. Each lost his own way. They lost the gnosis, the essence. They lost the science and so lost the art. Hubbard of course went for the therapeutic approach and made himself the great cult. The others left the pursuit and went after science fiction. They diverged. Do you see? What they didn't look for was the science. The reality. The facts under the fantasy.”

“Which would be what?” Mike said.

“In 1919, an unknown German mathematician from the University of Konigsberg wrote a rather spellbinding letter to Albert Einstein. His name was Theodor Kaluza, and in his short letter, he made the proposal of uniting Einstein's theory of gravity with James Clerk Maxwell's theory of light. Maxwell, you'll recall from my article, is the man who recorded the basic laws of the electromagnetic force, which, of course, brought us into the era of electricity. Anyway, Kaluza reconciled Einstein and Maxwell by introducing a higher dimension. He said that light itself is not a wave, but a
commotion
, if you will, caused by the rippling of that dimension. Now, Einstein's field equations for gravity are written in four dimensions, but Kaluza wrote them down in five. Then, he mathematically calculated, within these five dimensions, Einstein's theory
and
Maxwell's. Well, you can imagine Einstein's shock. The old fart was dumbfounded, I'm sure.

“What this obscure German mathematician had done was unify the two biggest field theories known to science. And Kaluza's field theory was like a well-crafted puzzle. Take the pieces apart, and there you had both theories—Einstein's and Maxwell's—still completely whole.

“Einstein, though astonished, was probably more than a little unnerved. Two years passed before he even decided to submit an article outlining Kaluza's findings for publication. It was indeed groundbreaking, but scientists became fed up with it. Most physicists didn't believe in a fifth dimension, and furthermore, its existence couldn't be tested as even Kaluza admitted, since it had to be ‘balled up' into a tiny circle totally invisible. The energy needed to examine this ball would be one hundred billion
billion
times greater than that locked in a proton. An amount amazingly beyond what we will be able to produce even in the next few centuries. Kaluza-Klein theory was abandoned for several years.

“But then, as you read in my article, the eighties saw its resurrection. By this time, though, scientists had discovered more forces in the universe than light and gravity, and they were astonished to find that Kaluza-Klein had room for them all. Kaluza-Klein is just the launching pad, though. It opened the door for super-gravity and super-strings. Mike, super-string theory unites everything! And Kaluza-Klein opened the door for the study of black holes and wormholes and other mysteries.

“The trick is to go back and see just what exactly happened before the big bang. At the onset of creation, what was going on? Really, the only theory that can propose to know is the ten-dimensional super-string theory. It supposes that our four-dimensional world split with a six-dimensional twin.”

“Where's the twin?” Mike asked.

“Remember the tiny circle? That's it. But you see, it may not be all that tiny. I mean, in its world, everything seems normal just like ours, but in the grand scheme of the entire universe—or universes—our planet, and even our solar system or galaxy, may seem like a tiny invisible ball. Somehow, though, beings from our twin are able to manipulate time and space, perhaps using wormholes, to manifest themselves right here as if they were ordinary human beings like you or me.”

“How?”

“Good question. I don't know exactly, and I don't know if anyone will ever know. They are light-years ahead of us, technologically speaking. And, on top of that, if we had the means to do it, we still would find it unbearably impossible. See, we can only think in three-dimensional space, or four, if you throw in ‘time' as the fourth dimension. Do you know the Pythagorean theorem?”

“Uh, yeah.
A
squared plus
B
squared equals
C
squared, right?”

“Right. That gives us the length of a triangle's hypotenuse. The sum of the squares of the smaller sides equals the square of the longest side. It works three-dimensionally, as well. The sum of the squares of three adjacent sides of a cube is equal to the square of its diagonal. If
A
,
B
, and
C
are the cube's sides, and
D
is its diagonal length, then
A
squared plus
B
squared plus
C
squared equals
D
squared. And it works in N dimensions. An N-dimensional cube can have an unlimited number of sides—a ‘hypercube,' if you will. You can't picture it, because your three-dimensional mind can't picture it, but mathematically it works. Every letter,
A
through
Y
, when each is squared and their sum found, will equal
Z
squared. And it goes on infinitely. I'm getting away from my point here, but as you can see, what is entirely possible can be beyond the realms of our comprehension. Hyperspatial beings can travel to our world with relative ease. The fact that we do not understand their methods does not hinder them at all.

“Imagine soap bubbles floating in the air, distinct worlds oblivious to each other. Somehow, a pixie can hop from bubble to bubble. Or imagine a rubber basketball that is worn down from constant play. In some areas, the rubber may be very thin, allowing air to pass through from the inside of the ball to the outside. This world may have thin, worn-down areas that allow for passing through. The worn areas could be wormholes. Gateways from one dimension to another. Here on Earth, they abound in areas prevalent with magnetic energy. Places the Native Americans would say are mystical. They could be present near catastrophic geological phenomena or cataclysmic meteorological events where the magnetic energy is in abundance. Perhaps the mysterious Bermuda Triangle lies in one such area. Along fault lines or in places of strong volcanic activity.” Bering smiled. “Maybe your Superman cartoon wasn't too far off the mark, eh?”

Mike listened attentively, his wide-eyed gaze focused on the professor, who continued: “Think of the phenomena this could explain, Mike. Ghosts. UFOs. Mythology may not be so mythical. Angels. Spirits. Flaming chariots in the sky. Higher dimensional beings can explain it all. And above all, it's all well within the realm of scientific possibility! So long as we don't diverge. So long as we press into the gnosis.”

It was like a drug taking effect.

 

Mike spent the night at Dr. Bering's house. It was a pleasant night, full of warmth and deep slumber, an experience he cherished and accepted like a gift he had waited too long to receive. Bering's guest bedroom was small but held a full-size bed, bureau, and more bookshelves teeming with fairy tales, fables, and wonderful, spiritual poetry—books of dreams that seemed to fill the air in the room with a giddy comfort.

A strange current had swept Mike up, and he suffered it gladly. It was as if the collision with the lady's car had jarred his conscience loose inside him—jarred it free, he would have thought (had he been thinking)—freeing him from his obsessive and paranoid over-rationalization. Redirecting his gaze to north of navel. He was a man used to worry, despair even, and now he found the former departing (despite his ragged physical and emotional condition) and the latter leaving his disoriented mind susceptible to the professor's knowledge. The man was cocaine.

Before he had succumbed to sleep, though, he had quietly explored Bering's home and came upon a large vacant room down the hall from his guest room that resembled a ballroom with parquet floors freshly waxed. It was devoid of furniture, of objects of any kind. Two windows stared from the far wall like empty, black eyes. Yes, the room was empty … but somehow not unoccupied. A pleasant electricity seemed to fill it, coaxing Mike in, caressing him. There was something incredibly fantastic about the room, about the whole house. It felt like home. More so, even, than his own, especially since Molly had left. He spent many nights in that house, many sleepless nights. Alone. Aching for her touch. Her voice. Her breath. And she had left. And now, he was in a new place, perhaps a new home.