by Derek Ivan Webster
Bobby tried to wrap his mind around the idea, but his eyes just kept snapping back to the impregnable wall of stone that stood in front of them.
“You’re going to walk through the mountain?” he asked, for the third time since Doug had brought him down here to explain his newest enterprise.
“No,” Doug said slowly, using the single, long breath to reconstitute his patience. “I’m going to destabilize the particles of my body, just enough to slip through the molecular gaps in this stone. And then I’ll reassemble myself on the far side.”
“So. No walking will be involved,” Bobby nodded his head sagely, determined not to let his brother down.
“Precisely,” said Doug. Like dealing with a child, he thought.
“And you want me to work the equipment?” Bobby’s brows furrowed with discomfort as he motioned toward the blinking knobs and widget twirls that dominated the bed of their pick-up truck.
“Just make sure nobody else shows up and makes trouble. Oh yeah, and keep the camera rolling. This is scientific history. No matter what happens, make sure we get it on tape.”
Bobby bit his lip. A broad silence hovered between them. For Doug it was interminable; yet another one of Bobby’s mental hiccups. He’d been dealing with his brother’s mental deficiencies their whole life together. He loved the buffoon, but sometimes just looking at Bobby irritated him. How could you stare into such mental dearth and not end up questioning your own intellect.
“Doug?” there was a mounting anxiety beneath Bobby’s question.
“Yes?” Doug spoke over his own blooming annoyance.
“Where did you come up with this idea?”
Doug stared at his brother then really looked at him for perhaps the first time in a week. His big, dull eyes; his jutting lower lip; the receding hair-line that made his over-wide forehead even more prominent.
“I just mean… you know. Are you sure this is a good idea?” Bobby was quickly wilting under his brother’s gaze. “I’m just not sure that it’s safe.”
“Not sure, huh?”
“And remember what happened with the telescoper?”
“The teleporter.”
“Ms. Rantz still hasn’t found her cat.”
“A small price for such large science.”
“And I was reading the other day…”
“Leave the reading to me, Bobby.”
“It was in one of those magazines you subscribe to. Scientific Whatnot. You know the guy who wrote this article, he had so many letters after his name. He was such an expert. I couldn’t understand a word he said, but it got me thinking…”
“Leave the thinking to me, Bobby.”
“How you don’t have any letters after your name. How you build most of your science stuff, I mean your instruments, out of the scraps you dig out at Leary’s Yard. It just made me think—“
The blow struck with such sudden, absolute severity, it wasn’t clear which brother was more surprised. Bobby found himself thrown off-balance, and he landed with his back against the hard stone cliff. He blinked once. Twice. His ear was already bright red where the blood had flushed to the surface.
Doug stood, looking between his open hand and his fallen brother. Their eyes finally met.
“Bobby, I’m—“
“Sorry, Doug. I didn’t mean anything by it,” he had already scrambled to his feet and was heading for the truck. He threw himself into the preparation as best he could: quite a feat considering how unfamiliar he was with any of the flickering gadgets.
Doug stood in the same spot, his hand still open in front of him. The fingers, somewhat accusatory, stared up at him in disbelief.
“I don’t need school to tell me how smart I am,” Doug said quietly.
“What’s that? Better say it again for prosperity,” Bobby returned from the truck, camcorder obscuring half his face. He smiled broadly, forcefully, behind the camera. A thin line of blood was trickling from his swollen ear.
“Posterity,” Doug muttered to himself, then shrugged. Just another hiccup, he supposed. He’d never gone so far as to hit his brother before, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t called for. “Alright, let’s get the destabalizer set up. Make sure it’s pointing directly toward the rock…”
They went back to work, nothing more said between them beyond the boorish but necessary orders barked out between equipment and its proper placement.
Soon enough the truck bed was empty and the narrow patch of ground that opened onto the wall of stone was abuzz with flickering nodes and pulsing charges.
Doug glanced up at the fast dimming skyline. “It’s time,” he said and turned toward where Bobby hunched over the tripod and camera. “Let us proceed down this narrow path we have paved; the moment has arrived to let the world, at last, benefit from the fruits of our steadfast dedication to knowledge.”
Bobby never liked this part. Little good ever followed his brother’s premature declaration of victory. It was true their remote experiments had never been, knowingly, responsible for a human causality, but the collateral damage inflicted upon both animal and nature, though perhaps unqualifiable, was at least worth a small drop of humility.
“I shall not here bore you with the minutia of my achievement,” Doug continued his spiel into the camera. “Those precise and, of course, firmly patented details shall have to await the ground-breaking paper destined for simultaneous publication in Nature, Science and Popular Mechanics.”
Doug motioned for Bobby to start the machine. Bobby dutifully stepped away from the camera long enough to turn the small key and press the first of the contraption’s two small buttons. The thing immediately hummed to life and its frenetic light show redoubled in pace. By the time Bobby got back to the viewfinder, his brother was winding down the show.
“…of this brave new horizon, I only hope to share with the world,” and with that Doug closed his eyes and held his arms straight out to each side in one final dramatic flare. “Beam me up, Bobby.”
Following the cue, Bobby lunged back toward the machine and, steeling himself, pressed the second and final button. Closing his eyes, he fell to the ground in a protective ball.
Nothing happened.
After a moment, Bobby allowed his body to ease out of the fetal position. His sphincter unclenched, and the fingers fell away from his eyes.
The forest was not on fire. No birds fell from the air. No distant growls of pain and suffering. Even the equipment continued to blip and bloop away, entirely unimpressed with its own performance. In all his years spent assisting his brother’s speculative genius, this was truly an event unlike any other.
Bobby was halfway back to the camera when the bottom fell out of his gut. His eyes flicked from the beeping light of the camcorder, to the large hole in the wall of stone, and back again.
“Doug?” he said, with an unexpected calm to his voice. There was no one there. A bit of smoke swirled out of the clean circle cut into the rock face. He called his brother’s name again, walking cautiously toward this sudden opening in reality.
From a few feet away he could already see that the perfect circle, about the diameter of a man’s outstretched arms, extended all the way through the hillside. A ghost of orange light, presumably the far valley’s setting sun, shimmered through the veil of dissipating smoke. Bobby stopped at the edge of the opening and peered straight through. It was a tunnel, that’s what it was, just as smooth and pretty as if it had been drilled out with the finest diamond auger. Near thirty feet long, and clean wasn’t enough of a word. The smoke having passed through, the surface of the passage now shone with the clear polish of glass. Tentatively, Bobby reached out to touch that beautiful luster. He wasn’t surprised to discover it was neither hot nor cold. It just was. As in: it had not been one moment, and the next it was.
“Doug,” he said softly, and for the last time. The name echoed down the perfect chamber, escaping out the backside and being absorbed by the unseen valley beyond. His brother was gone. That much was clear.
“You really done something here,” he told the impossible place, because Doug was no longer there to hear him.
In the months and years that followed, as Bobby settled into his new life, buoyed up by the windfall that his brother’s final contraption had proven, he never stopped wondering what had happened to Doug’s body. He worried over whether those destabilized particles had been fused with the smooth surface of the stone, or had simply ceased to be, vaporized along with the rest of the massive amount of energy it took to eat a hole in a mountain.
On occasion the question would wear so heavily on him it would cause his ear to hurt, sometimes even bleed. At those moments he would catch himself, shake his head, and order another daiquiri. Best to let his thoughts wander on. Just one of the many ideas he’d never be able to wrap his mind around. Bobby would likely never understand how his brother walked through a mountain, and he’d have to be okay with that. Greatness had only been reserved for one of the two brothers. Bobby was happy enough with the hand that he’d been dealt.
About the Author
Derek Ivan Webster grew up in a tiny Alaskan fishing village before, quite unexpectedly, finding himself educated at Yale University. Years spent as a Story and Development consultant in Los Angeles were enough to drive him, stumbling, back to his own writing. Most recently, his graphic novel, “The Merlin Prophecies“, was lucky enough to receive an exclusive 2009 New York Comicon premiere through Ardden Entertainment. When he’s not staring at a blank page, and or screen, Derek enjoys following the sage advice of his lovely wife, and raising his two precocious little girls to follow their muse, wherever it might take them… within reason.
©2009 Derek Ivan Webster
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