Panicked, Hoffman had called and spoken to the executive director at the airport, specifically requesting that anyone waiting to meet passengers from that flight be detained, held incommunicado. The airport administration had not understood the urgency of the situation and had not posted guards at the door of the room where the people were being held. The Navy guards he had sent hadn’t gotten to the airport fast enough and a girl had escaped, simply by walking out, minutes before the guards arrived. She had called a news service. From that point on, it had been downhill, a public relations nightmare. In retrospect, it would never have worked anyway—there were too many other people who had known that the plane was due in, people he had no way to control. It was a case of bad judgment, pure and simple.
Working around the clock, they had rebuilt the electronics and were on the verge of another test when a tall, slender man had stepped from midair onto the front lawn of the private residence of the secretary of defense.
Walking slowly and with great difficulty, he had faced down Secret Service bodyguards assigned to protect the secretary, introducing himself as Alan Lister, the commissioner of Crisium, former Lunar colony of the United States, now declared independent.
Once face to face with the secretary, Lister had offered the use of their Door to the military for the duration of the war.
And Hoffman had become a man without a mission. Instantly forgotten.
No promotions, no recognition would come for the man who had failed to produce a Door for his country. But the thing that galled him most was the fact that it had been one of those skinny-assed Loonies who had pulled the rug out from under him.
A textbook example of cutting the supply lines: The first to collapse were the fast attack units at the front. Lacking ammunition and medical supplies, the Brazilian forces fell back along the flanks of the advance. Like a miser reluctant to let go of a particularly shiny bauble, they held Mexico City for as long as they could before retreating. The last night saw particularly savage fighting as newly heartened Mexican troops, aided by American and Canadian forces, took the city street by street, flitting from one burned out hulk of a building to the next.
Viewing the smoking rubble from a low flying plane early the next morning, a NewsNet reporter compared the ruins to the aftermath of the disastrous earthquake of 2017. As if in response, a mild tremor hit at two that afternoon, although there was little left to damage; few were hurt, as the civilian populace had already fled the city.
The Holmes Door was instrumental in winning the battle for Mexico City. Since the United States had stubbornly refused to formally declare war, the military leaders were fighting with one hand tied behind their backs. Unable to mobilize sufficient forces to take the Brazilians by brute force, they were forced into a leaner, more efficient mode of fighting, almost guerilla-like. Strategies based on deployment of thousands of men were hurriedly rewritten for less, then scrapped altogether. All told, fewer than two thousand men passed through the Holmes Door during the war. It was later estimated that they had been more effective than one hundred thousand troops deployed conventionally.
Once Mexico City was regained, the lighting took on a different tone. The aura of invincibility that had surrounded the Brazilian advance began to look rather less complete. Morale of the troops pursuing the Brazilians rose daily.
Tentative plans were made for the final assault on Brasilia.
Jennifer Holmes glanced back worriedly at the man at the controls of the Door. She turned to Alan Lister. “I feel like I’m abandoning my post.”
He smiled. “I know. That’s why I came to get you. You’ll make him nervous if you keep hovering over him the way you’ve been doing.”
“But he’s—”
“He’s going to be just fine,” Lister finished for her. “He’ll need some practice, true, but it will be all right.”
Jenny blushed. “I… it’s not fun, exactly. It’s more like a feeling that I’m needed. Now, I’m superfluous.”
He shook his head, laughing. “Is it not enough that you’ve changed the course of human history? Jenny, every new transportation technology has changed mankind beyond recognition. People started out on foot. Learning to ride animals made an incredible difference in how fast someone could go, how far they could go, and how much they could carry. The wheel was such a potent advance that it’s still in use today. Boats gave us access to water. Planes allowed us to use the air. Rockets brought us here, to Luna. And there things have sat for the past century. Oh, the technology has improved. Cars are more efficient. Planes, too, for that matter. But it was time for a change. We needed a new mode of travel. It’s time to conquer new worlds.”
“That’s what I had hoped,” Jenny said bitterly. “I wanted people to use the Door for space travel, discovery—something noble. I didn’t create the Door so people could use it to kill.”
He rested his hand on her shoulder. “Give it time, Jenny. Throughout history, armies have been among the first users of new technology. As often as not, they were the ones who came up with it in the first place—peaceful uses came later.”
She pointed back at the Door. “Part of me understands that it’s just a tool, neither good nor evil. But it’s hard to look at it that way when a man dies in your arms. My mind and my heart can’t agree on this.”
“Jenny, you’ve created a link that binds us together, regardless of distance. In the long run, I think you’ll see that your Door is capable of far more good than evil.”
She sighed. “I suppose so. I just…” She shook her head. “Too much idealism, too little common sense.”
“Too much common sense can be a problem, too. If you had listened to your common sense, you’d never have created the Door. Who’d believe you could walk though thin air and pop up a quarter of a million miles away?”
They walked in silence for a moment. Then, musingly, she asked, “Remember back when I was working on oxbow universes? I gave up because my common sense took over and told me that what I was trying to do was impossible. That thing with the jet down in South Carolina made me take a fresh look at some of my assumptions.”
Lister blinked. “What did the jet have to do with oxbow universes?”
“Notice that there’s one glaring question that no one has been able to answer. If you put a plane inside a rock formation, where does the rock go?”
“So you’re saying that the rock went somewhere? To one of your oxbow universes?”
“I’m not sure yet. It’s something I’ve been working on in my mind while I’ve been driving the Door the past few days.”
Lister took a deep breath. “Do me a personal favor. Don’t spring anything new on me until the war’s over. I don’t think I could handle it.”
She laughed, more naturally than she had in days. “Oh, it’ll take a while to put this together—at least another week or two.”
Owen Rivers sat on a dock in Charleston harbor, staring moodily at the Cooper River. Ten minutes earlier, a man had left him. A man by the name of Hoffman.