Chapter 97 – The Good Doctor

  “Are you kidding me?” muttered Howie. “The next trailer over?”

  Cole had to keep himself from laughing at Howie’s consternation. Dr. Sukesh had been less than ten meters away while the receptionist tried to stonewall them.

  “You know,” said Cole, “You work with people like Sophie, Bricker, and Jefferson too long and you start to forget what government employees are actually supposed to be like,” he said.

  “Tell me about it,” said Howie.

  Dr. Sukesh chuckled ahead of them. “You think it’s bad here, you should try overseas bureaucracy. Get a work exchange visa through the New Delhi Consulate and you will certainly cut the laboratory staff some slack, I think.”

  He badged through the door and brought them into an office that smelled like fresh coffee and old Berber carpet. The walls were lined with white binders and textbooks, and a small mess had a coffee pot, sink, and a softly humming fridge. Sukesh had to clear off a stack of papers from one of the spare chairs for Cole and Howie to both have somewhere to sit. Howie remained standing, looking at the spines of a few of the books on the shelf.

  “Do you have the transfer paperwork?” he asked.

  Cole produced the form Jefferson had given him. Dr Sukesh took it and dropped his spectacles from his forehead to over his eyes as he looked down.

  “Two men to deliver a dagger,” he said. “Either it must be very important, or they’re not giving Kickers enough to do these days, eh?” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “If only that were the case. It would be a day I would celebrate the rest of my life.” He pulled a pen from a mug on his desk and scrawled his name across the signature block below Cole’s before feeding it through the copy section of his printer. He handed the original back to Cole. “Signed and delivered. Let’s see what we’re dealing with, eh?”

  “Sure thing, doc,” said Cole. He passed over the pelican case and the key. Dr. Sukesh unlocked the case and withdrew the dagger from the foam cut out.

  “Hmm… Not a particularly impressive piece, is it? Dull luster, slightly chipped. This inlay looks like fish scales. I’m guessing… grade three, perhaps four? Ah, that would be average or above average, in Kicker parlance.”

  “No idea,” said Cole. “The key didn’t transfer when the owner died. But we want to find the world it came from.”

  “Ah… We’ve found the needle. Now we must find the haystack it fits, eh? No small task.”

  “But it’s possible?” asked Cole.

  Dr. Sukesh pursed his lips. “We have managed it in the past, but every world is different. I will not tell you outright that it is always possible, but I will say we have gotten quite good at it.”

  “I don’t follow, Doc,” said Cole. He thumbed Howie, behind him. “I brought an interpreter if I’m too dumb for this stuff.”

  “It’s my sole purpose on the team,” said Howie, thumbing through one of the books that had caught his eye.

  Dr. Sukesh laughed, slapping both his knees. “Ah, my boy, I have had to explain this to politicians. I promise you will understand more quickly. Picture a hallway full of locked doors.”

  Cole raised an eyebrow, but Dr. Sukesh raised both his own and waited expectantly. Cole took a deep breath and closed his eyes, picturing a long egg-shell corridor lit by yellowing fluorescent bulbs. A series of beige steel doors with cipher locks lined both walls and stretched out into the distance.

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  “Now, behind each door is a world. But each one has a different procedure to open it.”

  “Right, like a different key or combination,” said Cole.

  “Not quite,” said Dr. Sukesh. “The first door, you can only open by flattening yourself and sliding underneath it. The second door you must force open. The next door, perhaps it only opens on every third Tuesday. The next door kills anyone who is seen opening the door by someone inside. The next door can only be opened if the previous door is open. The next door must be fallen backwards through, or else it takes you outside the building entirely.”

  “Ok, so it’s not about locks and keys,” said Cole. “Each world’s got different qualifiers for entry.”

  “Yes, yes! Good! Now, imagine that corridor again, but the walls are bare and unbroken. The doors are still there, but you cannot tell what is a door, what is a wall, and what separates the two. And your whole life every professor, scientist, parent, and peer-reviewed study told you there were no doors at all.”

  Cole pursed his lips. “Ok, I’m imagining it. Why?”

  “Because it will help you appreciate just how hard my job is and how impressive I am,” said Dr. Sukesh, chuckling. Cole opened his eyes just so that Dr. Sukesh could see him rolling them, which only made the old scientist smile wider. But he cleared his throat and continued. “This dagger is a key, yes. And it will fit a certain lock. But we must find that lock, and the lock does not open the door itself. It might connect Earth to that door. My job is to find a way through each of those doors, and it has been a constant work in progress for the last fifteen years of my life. Come, let’s head over to the Trace lab. We can at least see if this fits any lock we already know of.”

  He slowly pushed himself off his chair with a groan. “My knees are not what they once were. Forgive an old man his pace, eh?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Doc,” said Howie, replacing the book. “I’m sure we’ll both be getting cortisone shots in our knees by the time we’re thirty.”

  If they made it to thirty. Cole left that bit unsaid.

  Dr. Sukesh shook his finger at the Marine but smiled as he spoke. “My daughter said the same. But after Lewis Field exposure, now I’m certain she’ll live to be a hundred and still fit.”

  Cole followed the doctor out of the trailer, waiting for Howie to catch up.

  “I’m not so sure about this guy,” whispered Cole.

  “I think we’re in good hands,” said Howie. “Did you see those books?”

  Cole snorted. “You impressed by books?”

  “I am when he wrote most of them,” said Howie.

  Cole paused. “Ok, yeah, that’s fair.”

  He hustled his pace and caught up with Sukesh as he badged open yet another gate to the large concrete building. “Your daughter is attuned?”

  “Oh yes,” said Sukesh. He waved to the soldier providing security and badged open the steel door, as well. The soldier checked all three of their cards, even Sukesh’s.

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  “Thank you, Henry,” said Dr. Sukesh. He pointed to a row of cubbies. “Phones and smart watches in there, if you have them. And yes, my daughter was taken when she was fifteen. Swept away to another world before my very eyes—one of red seas and mushrooms the size of skyscrapers. I thought I’d gone mad. Everyone I tried to tell thought it, as well. A renowned applied physicist at the forefront of his field, raving about portals and other worlds and strange beings. The police, they thought I killed her. No one would believe. Until Director Bricker found me. No coincidence, as he had people combing news sources around the world specifically for stories like mine.”

  “So you’ve been with DOR ever since?” asked Cole.

  Dr. Sukesh nodded. “There were already other scientists and researchers on the project. But they were the fringe, what others would have called crackpots—what I would have called crackpots. True believers that there were forces beyond the physics we understand. But I? I was someone who could turn ideas into applications. And armed with the knowledge that a whole new branch of science was waiting for me, and that my little girl was on the other end of it, I worked like a man possessed. It took three years before we could establish a stable gateway in an artificial Lewis Field, and another year after that before Director Bricker walked back to Earth with Surah beside him. No longer a child, but a woman grown. Powerful, capable. But still my little girl.”

  Dr. Sukesh paused and took a breath, removing his glasses for a moment to wipe his eyes. He smiled again. “I don’t think I slept more than two or three hours a night that entire time. A year later, Surah was using her gifts to help other children. And I was using mine to find them for her. She retired from the teams after five years and too many close calls to count. I am glad that others carry her legacy.”

  Several people passed them in the corridor, each of them greeting Dr. Sukesh as they passed. Cole looked around, somewhat non-plussed that the hall they stood in resembled the endless corridor he’d just been imagining in the trailer. But these doors opened in the normal way, and Dr Sukesh badged them into one labeled EC-1 TRACE SPEC LAB.

  “Here, gentlemen, is where we look for the locks.”