“Take you for a ride on my big green tractor,” sang a contented country musician over a radio down the hall, and Meg knew she was at home. Home had only a vague meaning left to her now. It meant that she was in her own world, where she had been born, and where she had known nothing of the other worlds. That playful ballad had been sung for her first dance. And on her first dance she had followed a man to another world.
Many a girl has felt as much. For Meg it was actually true. Dancing has a way of transporting a person. Meg had been caught up in the closeness the dance gave her with David. She was following him, held by him. His eyes were on hers, inviting and rewarding her every step. As he led her towards the edge of the dance floor she had wondered what he was thinking. He seemed to be planning something, his eyes eager with a surprise.
David spun her out and brought her back. He leaned close to her cheek and she felt a rush pulse through the center of her. “Stay close to me,” he whispered, and his hand was firm against her back, his other hand holding hers and directing her. She closed her eyes to concentrate on her senses, marveling that her feet knew how to dance if only David led them. Something brushed against her on all sides, another fantastic sensation of being in love, she though. And the music stopped. All sounds stopped. Her shoes brushed against carpet instead of hard wooden flooring. Meg opened her eyes and screamed a quiet gasping shriek, then held tightly to David – less because she trusted him than because he was the only familiar object in the unfamiliar room.
There have been better ways invented of introducing people to the other worlds. For one thing, getting them to walk back through a solid wall to their home world was found to be rather difficult if they had never before known it was possible. David had been to other worlds before, on little ventures and short training missions that Meg knew nothing about, though they had been dating for over a year. The week before he had made a decision to jump into the life of a sort of missionary there in those other worlds, and had wanted Meg to come with him. Using the enchantment of a dance with a young girl in love, he had spun and led, stomped and stepped right through the wooden wall of the dance hall.
For a moment he had held her close, studying her reaction. He had been telling her for months that he wanted to do something important, that a settled life on a farmstead was not his dream. Meg had pushed him and challenged him, gotten excited with him about possibilities she could barely imagine. David knew she could do this. She was brave and strong and good – and without her, David wasn’t sure he could be any of those things. He waited for her to speak her question.
“David? Am I crazy?”
The hearty laugh Meg was used to hearing from him was softened to a whispered chuckle. But the glint of humor in his eyes was the same. It annoyed her.
In two minutes David had explained that the world was built of much more than 3 spacial dimensions and that there was very little actual separation between them. We walked up and down, left and right, forward and backward because there was nothing in our way. But with the tiniest bit of mental energy, there was nothing preventing us from moving to the other dimensions. In its simplest form, it involved the mental exercise of walking through a wall, like one swam through water, gently pushing the molecules and particles aside and letting them fall back in place behind you. No one knew why the worlds they found on the other side of these dimensional gates were so similar to their own – maybe humans had been traveling back and forth for thousands of years, shaping the other worlds to match their own. Laws were a little different, and technologies – just as you would find by traveling across traditional geographies. His words spilled faster and faster as he explained, until he remembered that to Meg this was more than just a story or a theory; it was a reality she had been carried into. Her face told him there were a very few specific questions she needed answered. He stopped mid-sentence.
“Can we get back?”
He nodded.
“How?”
“Just back through the wall the way we came.”
Meg looked over her shoulder at the wall. She was skeptical, but her mind was racing with new questions. “Won’t people notice?”
“Probably not at the dance. A lot of activity. Low lights. Crowds. Romance.” His smile told her he had not moved on from their romance in the world next door. But Meg was far beyond it for now, feeling tricked and used and as though more even than her first dance had been ruined. “Watch.”
He stepped towards the wall of paint and plaster and wood, put his hand through, and then stepped out of sight. She shivered, and looked at the empty room she was in. Whose was it? What would happen if she was caught? Even if this was possible, why on earth would someone want to jump blindly into a situation in which he was unexpected? The people here might be friendly, but they wouldn’t be friends. She moved towards the wall. Was David coming back? What if he couldn’t get back just to that spot? Meg’s breaths came in panicked pants. She put her hand on the wall and felt its firm smoothness. When she pushed it didn’t yield. Then how did she get here?
A moment later she watched David appear through the wall. She wondered when you left one dimension and entered another, then decided not to ask. All she wanted to do was get home. The sight of parts of David appearing before other parts, of the wall flowing around him just like the lake he had compared it to was weird. And then he held out his hand and said to her, “Do you want to go back?”
Of course she’d gone back. The experience was intoxicating. And dizzying. What else was different than it seemed? Who else knew they could walk through walls? Why did David know, and why did he want to tell her?
“As long as I’m with you, it really don’t matter,” finished the radio down the hall. Meg sighed and let go of the memories, her hands still rubbing the smooth wall at her back. The architecture and radio station told her she was probably in the United States. The good old US of A was a country that still hadn’t publicly acknowledged the existence of other worlds. Studying the phenomenon occurred but in secret – by religious sects and classified government departments. On earth there were a few countries openly using inter-dimensional travel or at least studying the physics behind it. But the US made sure her citizens knew nothing of it; conceptual free press did keep secrets so well.
Some days Meg just wanted to sink to the ground when she got to a new world and take a good long nap. Instead she took a deep breath, turned on her well-trained instincts, and began to understand her surroundings. A trained agent knows how to get out of houses (without getting out of that world). She knew how to avoid being seen or heard. Training taught them the common places to find maps in each world. Some worlds used the same alphabets and languages of Earth. Others were unrecognizable. So an agent was taught to look for pictures and to interact with children in non-threatening ways. And as always, an agent had to be on guard against enemies.
There are three kinds of threats to an agent. The first is called a Hassle. Hassles are ordinary people who notice abnormal things like strangers appearing in rooms or people walking through solid objects and disappearing. Next are Difficulties. Those are people who would be troublemakers even if there were no different worlds to come from or go to. Most dangerous are Combatants. People who know about other worlds and use it as a means for anarchy instantly oppose those who know what they’re doing and would restrain or contest them. Agents are trained primarily to suppress the plots of Combatants. It’s a complex task.
Meg moved down the hall in the opposite direction of the radio, betting that any occupants were nearer the music. She found the door to the outside and breathed fresh country air. It was still nearly an hour before sundown, the late summer haze spilling over hills checkered with woods and corn and little lakes. Most likely
