Chapter 12

I had not seen the slaves I bought or was given until two weeks after the defeat of the Habstner. They were all healthy and happy. In fact, one of them was simply glowing. Lomma was very pregnant. I knew who the father was and Jonna smiled at me a lot. I should have been pissed off at her but it was my fault for not asking her for a potion that would keep a girl from conceiving.

This was not the worse by far. The rest saw that I was starting to make heirs and they wanted their share. From the satisfied look that Jonna gave me I knew that this must have been the plan all along.

I had a laugh on Jonna because I left her and Artlam here in charge while I went home. Galdem was going to be her right-hand man or whatever Jonna needed him to be.

The trip was less stressful now. The cities in Mendab had to be retaken. In this case, the Habstner would just have to swear to me and stay in place but under some new rules.

We had an escort of a hundred men. We stopped every so often to talk about the land we were going through and where the new road should go. The drones helped with their birds eye view and we made better maps.

When we came to our forest we picked the best route and started pulling out trees. This way, the road would not be built over some vegetation that was going to rot away eventually. With the road laid out, we went the rest of the way.

Nothing much had changed on Earth. Because of my absences and my new commitments, I talked to my accountants to find a way of shifting the ownership of the bakery and the store to my relatives. You would be surprised what one dollar could buy. The nursery operation was changed so the employees got a share of the profits in lieu of some of their pay. They gave up a thousand dollars to make seven. That wasn't bad in my books.

Willie was called to the house. He was saddled with more gold and a shopping list for a lot more twenty five millimetre grenades and all the other supplies we had used.

"You know, there are a lot of people interested in gold now. Yours is good, it is always at least 95% pure. The thing is that a lot of people see the linkage between the metal and the military weapons. I'm not going to be of use to you much longer."

"Are you saying you want out or that you're going to subcontract?"

"The money is too good to leave. You should find an alternate spot to deliver your shipments too. The Americans are afraid of a few Arabs and they are hunting for people that want a box of 22 shorts."

"Do they suspect you?"

"Sure they do. They kept me at the border for five hours then let me go. My car was bugged and I'm sure I was followed. Hell, as far as I know they were doing it with satellite. Don't worry, I came here with a new set of clothes and a borrowed car."

"Then I guess we look for an alternate spot."

After Willie left with his gold, Lauren asked, "What are we going to do?"

"Like I said, we are looking for a new a building."

We left in a van to a warehouse district. When I found one that looked good I went for the portal. When we left the property it began to act erratic and when we got to the warehouse we found it didn't work at all. We quickly drove back to the farm and happily found that it worked once more. This necessitated some research and we found that it only worked within eight hundred metres of the house.

We took a trip to Toronto and found no indication of the portal finding a new home. I said to the girls, "If I had my druthers, I'd rent a helicopter to fly a grid with us checking the portal for activity. But having the pilot watching us doing weird things would not be a good idea."

Tiffany asked, "Why not a plane?"

"They have to fly too high and maybe too fast. I don't know if they would work but they might. Cars are too slow and have to follow roads."

My contacts found tractors for me. The tires would fit through the frame if they were taken of the steel rims then the rubber compressed and wrapped with chain. When the portal was not being used, it was transported all over the place to search for a new home.

After a month of road trips we decided to work on the other worlds. World #1 was opened with a different animal key. This one looked like a long legged bear. We sampled the air with a canary and found nothing wrong. I went into the large room with a centimetre of dust on the stones.

The room was a hundred and forty seven metres in diameter. And everything was made of what looked like standard sized cobblestones. The gravity was lighter than on Earth. The portals were mounted in the stone like our portal to Bejek was. Some portals were small while others were like a garage door or even a double door. All were level with the floor though. I counted forty seven other portals. There were two shafts going down and two more going upward. For all I knew, they would lead to other portals. Each of the openings were twenty metres across and there were no railings against somebody falling in.

Later that day, I lowered a camcorder and a light cord and saw a similar arrangement to what was below. Going up would have to wait.

Usually we would stay with one silver icon until we exhausted its possibilities. This time we went to worlds #2 and #3. They were the same as #1. The portal sizes were different but the shafts were similar. The shafts and corridors in #3 were much larger. The gravity was different on each.

World #4 was next. When we opened it with a bird in flight, the air was sucked out of the room and any loose paper flew into the corridor. A window in our home was sucked inward and broke. I heard doors slamming as if in a wind. I closed this gate quickly before we were sucked in too.

Lauren was very worried as were the rest of us. We could have been sucked through the portal to die. She said, "What happened?"

After I thought about it I said, "The air pressure has to be lower there. It might be a low pressure world or perhaps the room's on the top of a mountain."

I immediately thought about getting a robot to check this for me but decided to go to world #5 first. This key turned out to be a strange looking fish. When I opened the portal dirt and stone fell into the room which frightened all of us especially after what had just happened. I did not pull the key away. It stopped after a while. The girls sniffed the air.

Lauren said, "A little musty and dry too. Looks like a cave-in."

The portal was closed and temporarily moved to the barn. We took out more stones or let them fall into a steel box used in the orchards. There were so much material that the portal was shifted again to a dry creak running through our property and we continued. We poked at rocks because we didn't put any shoring in. Steel rods were turned into hooks or had cups made to fit the end. The rocks were dragged out. None of them were bigger than my head and only a few were smaller than my double fists.

There were three major cave-ins until I built the shoring to support all four surfaces. I wanted to see what this place was like behind the rocks. The portal was needed for other tasks but we removed debris every chance we had. I needed a light to see. Gravity was like what we had on Earth. The floor was identical to what I had seen before. I fabricated a shallow steel pan. I pulled this with a rope and filled it. The girls pulled it to them and dumped it. I then repeated the process. Steel was put up to support the soil above me in the tunnel and to keep the walls apart. More rock fell, but not much.

Eventually, I made it out of the tunnel and into a large room similar to the rest I had visited. The flashlight showed where a section of wall had collapsed.

Now began the labourious task of digging the many tonnes of large native rock and the cobblestones into the pan for disposal. This job was automated by the use of a tractor that pulled the loaded pan out through the portal to be dumped while I pulled the empty pan back. Soon I had help loading the pan. It was far easier to empty.

Part way back to our portal I saw another portal leaning from its mount in the wall. This one was of the largest variety. It had been blocked, but more importantly it had been ripped from the wall. There were some silver clips attached to the silver frame but basically it was the same as the small one we used. It wasn't hard to remove the rest of the rock so it was completely separate.

Eventually we cleaned enough that we came to our portal. It was a shock to see that this portal was just as large as the larger ones. How was I able to go through a small one and come out a large one. I could vaguely see the outline of our own frame in something that reminded me of mist.

I don't know where the idea came from, but I picked up the steel tray and turned it sideways. It would fit through the large portal but not our own. I pushed with some difficulty until I found that I had made it through without ducking to fit through. The tray was considerably wider than the receiving frame.

Kuenta said, "What did you do?"

"Something I thought impossible."

All the girls had to experiment. They could not push a wide article through from our side but they could do it from the other. When the novelty died down I looked at the other frame that had been ripped out. I searched its surface for marks and only found two. This reminded me of our frame and I looked to find the girl with the open hands and the globe. I was actually shocked to find something.

It was not a girl and it was not art. It was a simple arrangement with a cup frame. I chipped the rock away until I found the sphere that went with it.

I took them back to the house and Ronnas asked, "What's that?"

"The frame that was broken from the wall had this attached to it. It may lead to the world of the people that used the big door."

"Don't go. I think they're big and mean."

This may be the truth but I wanted to find out for sure. There were a good proportion of them that were king sized. I cleaned up my two finds. There was rock stuck to the frame but it could be something like concrete for all I knew.

Our frame was deactivated and I put in the new holder and the #9 sphere. There was no difference. The #5 sphere was put in and we all went into the room I had just been in.

Caiti said, "What do you want us to do?"

"I want to pick up the other frame and push it through the big frame and see if we can get it into the barn.

"Why?"

"Maybe we'll get a big gate."

Caiti's eyes lit up. She knew how much work this would save us.

All the debris had to be cleaned up and I figured we had to put some steel into the area of the wall that had failed and pour in concrete. When it came time to move the frame, there was a lot of grunting and groaning. This much silver was heavy. It was difficult to get it started through the portal and there was still a lot of work to move it when it was partially there. I let go of the frame and walked slowly toward our goal and again I didn't have to stoop. It was as if the receiving portal was elastic and could be stretched if we knew how.

I pulled on one side of the frame. It eventually came through and we leaned it against the garage wall. The girls had to stoop to get through this time. The opening inside the frame was roughly measured at 3.7 metres by 5.2. It would have either passed a very wide individual or somebody that liked a lot of room.

World #5 went back and #9 went onto the large frame but nothing happened. It was Kuenta that said, "You might have to charge it?"

There was no storm due so I hooked up the DC welder and made the connections secure before I flicked the switch. After a while I knew the cables were getting warm but the frame was just the ambient temperature. With nothing to lose, I set the welder at the lower amperage setting and left it.

While working on my projects, I thought about charging the portal. I could only think that a lightning strike was millions of time more powerful than the welder. During the last storm the smaller frame had sucked up five bolts.

"Small frame?"

The lights went on in my mind. I went back to world five and with a hammer and chisel I removed the smallest portal and the rock around it. I chipped away looking for anything odd but saw nothing. I pulled out the sphere and photographed it as #11. The frame was only eighty nine centimetres by sixty two. The interior was twelve centimetres smaller each way. When the frame, the holder, and the sphere were clean they were put away. The holder and sphere went into my collection but the frame went into the barn with the big one. When lightning came, it would charge both.

Days later and many hours ahead of the storm we were planning our strategy. I had made arrangements with a local window installer to use his truck. It had provision for carrying something as large as the larger frame.

We drove north and west until I found a region without too many people. A storm was slated to pass through this region. I put the large frame near a small lake and leaned it against a rock. On the other side of the lake I put the small frame. Because of the lightning, I made sure they were far from the trees.

We drove into a small town and shopped and just waited for the storm. Three hours later it started to pour. An hour after that we were treated with the wildest lightning strikes the region had ever seen. I know because it was in the weekly paper that came out. When we picked up the portals we found rocks split from the heat and dead fish floating in the lake. I wasn't happy about that.

When I tested the frame nothing happened but we weren't near the house. We got home late but excited. The little frame worked just fine but we had no key. When we put the big frame in the barn, we found it was a portal too. It gave a good view but we couldn't go through. We tried all of the other silver objects but none would make either of them work. They oddly didn't form a mirror surface as if these were industrial units and not for domestic use.

I had to stop now and think this through. The large rooms with the portals had to be some sort of station. The portals allowed travel both ways and the pits or the holes in the ceiling had to lead to other floors similar to the ones I had seen. The holes had to provide more than ventilation so people or perhaps cargo could move between floors.

This had to be looked at like the main train station for a world. If you got access to this area you could continue on to other worlds or to local destinations. I did not see a reason why an advanced and perhaps affluent world wouldn't have hundreds of these stations. This was assuming that there were hundreds of worlds to go to. Then again, there may be more than one station servicing two rich worlds.

There were a lot of deductions that could be made if the situation or my grasp of super physics was taken for granted. It did not explain how come there was dust on the floors. Alien civilisations falling apart due to disease, war or apathy could account for this. Humans used this technology so they may even have some worlds that were strictly for Humans. This did not explain how come Humans didn't use the system.

It occurred to me that perhaps Humans were simply locked out of the system because of the way we tended to foul our own nests. We could have been found wanting and the aliens decided to cut their losses and just left after securing the system.