I never liked working at Argus Labs. Not that I hated my job. I actually loved what I was doing. And I wasn’t mad that I had taken the job because my folks couldn’t afford to send me to college. So I figured a little work experience might be the thing to get me in somewhere when I had saved up enough to apply for admission.
I just didn’t appreciate having management on my ass about petty bullshit. I didn’t like the dress code or the strict punch in/punch out time restrictions. I didn’t like filling out forms documenting everything I had done, or was likely to do sometime in the future.
And I wasn’t exactly thrilled to work with some of the scientists. Many of them wanted me to know that they were doing “very important work” that I couldn’t possibly recognize as so astoundingly brilliant that it was likely to change everything we know about the universe. Those guys showed me all the respect and consideration you might show an oscilloscope.
That’s why I was happy to spend time with Dr. Feigelman. He struck me as a different sort of scientist. He was more approachable than his careerist colleagues and he didn’t go out of his way to make sure I knew he was smarter than me. Anyway, I already knew that.
He had a sense of humor, too, and he liked to mock the bureaucrats and their obsession with rules and procedures. He always carried a pipe in the pocket of his tweed jacket, although he knew Argus wouldn’t let you smoke anywhere on the premises. I called him the Professor because, with his thick glasses and head of unruly white hair, he looked like a stereotypical academic type. He didn’t seem to mind the nickname.
I take care of the recording functions at the lab. It’s the same sort of work that I did as the A/V guy in high school, except that I was getting paid for it. Sometimes, I call myself a Science Roadie. If you’ve ever been to an Argus Lab seminar and you’ve seen someone setting up a power point presentation or adjusting a mic, you’ve seen me.
Anyway, I was the one recording the Professor when the bug grabbed him.
The Professor was an expert on infrared spectroscopy. He once told me that his interest was in finding new ways to look at the universe. He said that he wanted to create an equivalent of the telescope or the microscope. Those inventions allowed humans to see things that were smaller and bigger than what we had believed existed. The Professor wanted to do the same thing with dimensional reality. He wanted to see through things.
The Professor had told his bosses he had found something hidden in the infrared range of the light spectrum. He thought the spectrum was “bent” at a very specific frequency because he had been unable to observe a predicted distortion of molecules there. I think that’s what he said, but I have to admit that I didn’t understand a lot of what he told me.
He had a notion that this anomaly represented a place where another dimension had intruded into our own. He wasn’t sure whether this intrusion had been created intentionally, or whether it was just some natural overlap of a multi-dimensional universe.
More importantly, he thought he had come up with a way of getting a look at something outside our own reality. I guess the administration didn’t give the Professor’s ideas much weight because I had been given the assignment of documenting the Professor’s attempts to see into this dimension and I’m the low man on the social order around here.
Most of the scientists at Argus regarded the Professor as a burned-out case, whose best work had been done twenty years ago. Management wasn’t prepared to disregard him altogether, but I had been told to spend as little of my work time as I could on the Professor’s project.
When we started working together, the Professor had asked me, “Have you ever used night vision goggles?”
“If you have,” he said, “you probably know that those goggles allow you to see in the dark because they register the infrared spectrum. What I’ve done is create a set of goggles that allow me to see infrared light, but at a specific frequency. I expect this to let me see the anomaly I’ve identified and, maybe, if I’m right in my conclusion, to actually see into it.”
I shrugged. This seemed like something out of a science fiction movie, but I was happy enough to work with the Professor, so I wasn’t going to question his ideas.
I rigged the lab with a series of cameras that would allow me to record what was happening while the Professor was peering into this other dimension. The Professor intended to describe verbally what he was looking at through his goggles, but I also wanted to film what was happening through another set of goggles so I could get a record of what we were actually seeing.
The next morning, I was positioned behind a set of monitors waiting for the Professor to start the experiment. He was sitting in a swivel chair that was usually behind his desk, but that he had moved into the middle of the lab. He told me it didn’t matter what the physical setting was because he would be looking into the bend in the light spectrum and not at any specific object.
I started the equipment before the Professor had his goggles working. The tape began with him describing the experiment he’d be performing. He talked about the infrared spectrum and went over the results he expected. He then turned on his goggles and activated the second set of goggles that was mounted on a pedestal to his immediate left.
The recording from the second set of goggles starts with an image of an intense light source. It’s circular and appears like a white hole that’s been burned through a film cell. This is what later got the name of the “rift”. It appeared something was moving across the face of the light source.
At this point in my video of the event, the Professor appears flustered. “Did you see that?” he asked.
The Professor turned back to the wall and resumed his narration, but with more excitement in his voice. “I can see what looks like some sort of alien biota. It has arachnoid features. I count eight legs, two of which seem modified to serve as… arms, perhaps. It seems physically active and fairly sentient. In fact, I think it is definitely aware of me because it’s moving, or should I say, scuttling, in my direction.”
This is where the Professor started screaming. I looked up from my equipment and saw the Professor pulled from his chair and dragged toward the rift. I couldn’t see anything around him, but when I checked the feed from the goggles, I saw something that looked part crab, part tick, and all mean. In a second, the Professor disappeared and the image from his goggles went blank.
I wish I could have saved him. In my own defense, I’d like to say I was sitting behind a ton of recording equipment when this occurred. Also, it took me a minute to appreciate that the Professor was in danger. I was reaching for the Professor’s collar when he vanished.
Turns out, it was a very good thing for me that I had recorded everything that happened to the Professor. It wasn’t that I wanted to repeat seeing him getting snatched. It’s just that if you’re the only person in a room with someone who goes missing, you become everyone’s prime suspect.
The video clearly showed a big spider-like bug crawling out of the wall. People who saw the tape had to accept that the Professor had been the victim of an invisible something, even if their rational minds told them such a thing couldn’t have happened.
We went over the video at least twenty times. We, at this time, consisted of me, Dr. Marshwell, the head of the lab, Brad Volpe, the Chief of Security, Dr. Benteen, the assistant to Marshwell, and Dr. Kent, who had been the Professor’s direct supervisor.
In normal times, none of the bigwigs at Argus would have wanted to have any association with me. Now, they didn’t want to let me out of their sight, even though, as we started the debriefing, people were looking at me like I might be some sort of mad killer who intended to do the rest of them in.
When Dr. Marshwell turned the lights out to see the video better, I think a few members of the management team actually pulled their chairs as far away from me as they could, but by the time we had finished watching, the others acted like I wasn’t even in the room.
It was only after a half hour of discussion, all of which went on without my participation, that Brad raised a point the rest of us hadn’t thought about. What if the Professor wasn’t dead? What if he was just trapped in this other dimension? Shouldn’t somebody go looking for him?
I was pretty sure the Professor was dead. I had seen the thing that got him on the video feed, and it didn’t look to me like something that would have just wanted to take the Professor home to meet his family. The others were more optimistic, although maybe they were just hoping for an easy way out of this mess.
Dr. Marshwell agreed eventually that a “search team” would use the goggles to see if they could hunt up the Professor. He looked out at the room and asked, “Any volunteers?”
Brad Volpe held up his hand. “I’m in,” he said.
I assumed Brad wanted to go because protecting the lab was his responsibility. He seemed like a generally good guy and not just some macho “nothing scares me” type. I was hoping that he would take the lead if we went into the rift.
Dr. Kent was the next to volunteer. She offered to go because the Professor had briefed her about all his theories and because she knew something about how the Professor had put his goggles together. Brad had given her a look when she volunteered, but she had told him she was quite capable of getting herself in and out of the rift without anyone’s help.
Then Dr. Marshwell looked in my direction. “How about you?” he asked. “You know how to operate the recording equipment, and you saw the opening into the rift, so you know where he went in.”
“He’s just a kid,” Brad shot back.
“There might be liability problems because of his age,” Dr. Benteen chipped in.
“I’ll go,” I said. I was feeling guilty about not being able to save the Professor, so I hoped I might get another chance inside the rift. Anyway, I didn’t like thinking about how people might treat me if I didn’t go. I had enough problems with the staff. I didn’t want word to get around that I was a coward, too.
“Fine,” Dr. Marshwell said. He didn’t seem concerned about any of the objections that had been raised. I’m sure that from his point of view, I was entirely expendable. I was the person who was needed the least by Argus Labs.
Dr. Marshwell assured everyone there would be plenty of safeguards in effect for our trip to the rift, but the idea of safeguards didn’t seem very reassuring to me because no one really knew what we were safeguarding against.
He also instructed us that no one in the lab was to file a missing person’s report for the Professor. He said the Professor didn’t have any close family and that no one was likely to ask about him, at least, not until he missed one of his scientific conventions. I assume that Dr. Marshwell let corporate management know and that somebody in the government got a memo, but otherwise, we put a lid on things.
If you had walked in on us the next day, you might have imagined that you come across a remake of Ghostbusters. You would have seen Brad, Dr. Kent, and me wearing goggles and HAZMAT suits with safety lines tethered to what we hoped were immoveable stanchions that had been anchored to the floor. Twelve other guys were operating various bits of electronic gear that spilled out into the hallway from what had been the Professor’s office, which was now minus a couple of walls.
After checking our oxygen, going over each other’s suits for tears and making sure that the communications gear was working 5×5, we reviewed the safety protocol, which was, basically, if something tries to eat you, run away from it if it’s possible to run away. Then we switched on the goggles and looked at what we were facing.
There was a glow in the direction of what we knew was the remaining interior wall of the Professor’s office. Cautiously, anxiously, encumbered with our gear, we went toward the light.
Inside the rift, we didn’t so much walk as bounce. I suppose it was like being in space, except we didn’t need any external propulsion. Wherever you put your foot down, you encountered some sort of undulating surface. You could move yourself forward, but it was hard to judge how far each step took you.
We checked our safety lines. If we tugged, someone was supposed to pull us back, even if there had been no radio contact with us. “Don’t wait to hear us scream,” we had told the guys holding onto the ropes.
We had only been inside for a few minutes before we found the Professor’s body. That this was the Professor was something of a guess because the corpse was wrapped in fibers, but there was enough of his clothing showing that I could make the identification. I remembered what he had been wearing when he was abducted. It was pretty clear he wasn’t coming back alive with us.
After I’d played the recording of the Professor’s disappearance, everyone had weighed in with a theory as to why the spider had gone after the Professor. I think that the consensus was that it had seen him as food. We couldn’t really tell what the body looked like under the wrapping, so it might be that the bug had sucked him dry, but it looked more to me like it had played with him. Maybe the bug was trying to figure out what the Professor was.
Another theory was that the bug was territorially aggressive. He had seen the Professor as a threat and gone after him. By this logic, the bug was the apex predator of his dimension. I guess it didn’t occur to management that this other dimension might be big enough that it could support more than one apex predator, let alone thousands, so we were totally unprepared for what happened next.
I had pulled a body bag out of my equipment sack when Dr. Kent noticed something coming toward us.
Brad had brought a pistol. There had been a good deal of discussion about whether a weapon that operated according to the laws of physics in our dimension could operate effectively in another dimension, which might have a different set of physical laws, but Brad’s pistol seemed to work just fine. He hit the bug with his first shot and the bullet blew it apart.
We were full of confidence for a moment, figuring the gun gave us the upper hand. We had turned back to the effort to remove the Professor’s remains before we realized we were surrounded by the things. They were leaping, bouncing, and rolling toward us from all directions.
It was like a flood of spiders. It was like standing in the middle of an island as the tide rushes up and covers everything that you can see. But drowning would have been kind compared to the fangs that were coming for us.
Brad kept shooting, but he was the first to go down. I could see that there were bugs all over him.
I heard Dr. Kent shouting over the radio for me to get going. She had been standing closer to Brad than me and either she wanted me out of her way, or she figured I was the only one of the team who had a chance to get out of there alive.
I pulled on my safety rope and maneuvered myself in the direction that I hoped was the way out to our own dimension. As I bounced away, I heard her radio cut off.
I was hopping and sliding back to where we had entered the rift when I realized I didn’t have a chance. The things were scrambling over each other to get at me. There were so many of them I couldn’t even see the dimensional entrance anymore. Bugs were piled up in front of it.
A pilot friend of mine told me that there were two things to do when your plane loses power at night and you have to make an emergency landing. You turn on your landing lights and, if you don’t like what you see, then you turn your landing lights off. I decided that I didn’t want to see what was going to happen to me.
I don’t know how it happened, but taking my goggles off and losing visual contact with the bug dimension put me back in our dimension. I found myself in the basement of the laboratory with my leg bent back in an unpleasant way. After calling for a medic, I blacked out.
The maintenance crew found me. I was still wearing my HAZMAT suit, and I still had a length of safety line trailing from my midriff. The guys upstairs were holding the other end of the rope. The rope had been sliced in half. Someone called for the EMTs and I was taken to the hospital, but only after Dr. Marshwell got a chance to tell me to keep my mouth shut.
Dr. Marshwell and some government types debriefed me while I was stuck in my bed at the hospital. They shooed all the medical personnel away and asked me about what had happened in the rift. Dr. Marshwell expressed his grief about losing the other team members, but I thought he was secretly excited about having been handed one of the most important discoveries in history.
It was generally agreed among the scientific crowd at Argus that the goggles were more than just a way of viewing the rift. They were necessary to being in the other dimension. If you couldn’t see the dimension, you weren’t there, or maybe the dimension itself wasn’t there.
I signed some documents that said I knew I could be sent to jail if I ever told anyone what had happened and went home. Argus didn’t make any fuss about my application for disability leave.
My physical therapist says that there shouldn’t be any residual effects from my injury, but regardless of how well I heal, I’m not going back to Argus. I’d rather just move on to the next thing in my life.
For one thing, I’m worried because I know that the scientists at Argus are continuing to study the rift. God knows what they’ll stir up. I don’t want to be around the next time they decide to look inside that other dimension.
Dr. Marshwell seems to think they’ve got the only entrance to the rift. They want to believe they’ve got these things confined behind the wall of the Professor’s office, but I don’t figure that these things are limited to just one place.
I mean, if we found them in the infrared spectrum and infrared light is everywhere, why couldn’t they be in your house right now? They’re probably wandering around your kitchen, but you’re invisible to them just as they’re invisible to you. Or, I should say, you were invisible to them.
I think that when we powered up the goggles, it was like dropping a torch into a cave full of creatures that live in the dark. The goggles drew them to us and that’s why so many of them showed up while we were trying to get the Professor back.
Now they’ve seen us. If they’re intelligent creatures, they know that we’re out here. Maybe they’ll try to find us again. I hope that they’re not capable of that.
My mom always told me that if I went looking for trouble, I would be sure to find it. Well, I’m not looking for trouble, but the people at Argus Labs sure are. I wonder if it might not find them first.
