hardy boys fan fiction

TIME SHARE

hardy boys nancy drew fan fiction

by

Hyena Cub

Chapter 6

hardy boys fan fiction

THE CHAPTERS

INTRO

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

The scientist took them into a back room, closing the door and locking it, and inviting them all to sit down at a plain wooden table.  The room was plain, too, with only a small coffee station at one end, some filing cabinets, and a chalkboard; a generic meeting room, then.

After the Hardys, Captain Thompson, and Lieutenant Morgan had finished their tales, McDougal was wide-eyed with fascination.  Excitement shone in his eyes, and Joe was at once irritated and amused.  Even now, with some sort of time disaster upon them, the scientist was fascinated by the strangeness and the effects of the experiment he had worked on.

“Incredible,” he whispered, shaking his head.  “Well, we knew something had gone wrong.  You said you saw the news report,” he said of the Hardys, who nodded in agreement.  “We said there that we were several weeks from being able to crush our asteroid-mass into a black hole?  Well, that estimate was hugely erroneous.  It seemed that once we got past a certain point of crushing this mass down, it almost began to do it on its own, like a real black hole would.  With our help, with the vacuums, the presses, and everything else we’ve been using to break it all down, it began almost to suck itself into itself.  To implode, almost.”

“So you got your black hole,” said Morgan, sounding skeptical.

“Oh, indeed, we did,” said McDougal excitedly.

“So what went wrong?” asked Frank.

At this, McDougal’s smile faded, and he sighed, slumping back in his chair.  “I don’t know.  I know that’s a horrible answer, but...here’s all that we’ve been able to figure out.  We had JUST gotten our asteroid-mass black hole created...asteroid-mass, as we’ve been calling it.  The storm had already begun, as you all know.  Normally the storm would be no big deal, for our facility is well-equipped to handle thunderstorms, but the tornado....”

“Oh, jeez,” said Joe with a wince.  “It hit?”

“It did,” said McDougal grimly.  “It only clipped the building, and destroyed a small part of it.  But something...and this is where our data simply stops...something happened.  The chamber the black hole was in was breached, and something, perhaps air pressure or lightning from the storm, or something in the tornado itself, arced directly through the black hole.  There is incredible energy, and some say even the ability to travel through time in a black hole.  We had already gotten light to bend into it, and watched miniscule objects being sucked within and crushed to become part of the black hole’s mass.”

Joe frowned, putting the heels of his hands briefly against his eyes, trying to sort it all out.  “So you think maybe it sucked something else in?” he asked.  “Some wild agent, something you couldn’t predict?”

McDougal grinned suddenly.  “Exactly, my boy!  Something got into it...and was slingshotted by it.”  As Joe’s expression grew blank again, McDougal tried to explain.  “Now there have long been theories that we still cannot confirm nor refute, that if one were to fly straight at the sun’s gravitational pull, survive its heat, and have enough power not to be pulled right into the sun...that he could use the immense speed the sun’s gravitational pull would give it to slingshot it around the sun, back the way it came.  This theory says that time travel could be possible using this as a sort of catalyst.”

“Like in Star Trek 4, Joe, said Frank with a wry grin.  “Remember at the end, they did that loop around the sun?”

Understanding flicked Joe’s eyes open wide again, and he laughed.  “Oh!  Okay, I got it.  Yeah, that was a pretty neat idea, I thought.   I didn’t know it was a real theory.”

McDougal smiled thinly.  “It is.  Well, what we think happened is that some energy force was drawn into our little black hole, and slingshotted through, not around it.   Through the absolute middle, where we also think time travel may be possible.  And where it struck, there radiated out this...this circle of...destruction.  We thought it was destruction at first, that is.”

Joe felt just a little bit sick.  “What could escape a black hole’s gravity like that?” he asked.

But McDougal was shaking his head.  “Remember our black hole was extremely tiny.  Miniscule, compared to even the smallest naturally occurring holes.  Anything big enough or traveling fast enough to escape the gravity of an asteroid could get through it.” The scientist sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache.  He probably did.

The lieutenant spoke up then, his tone rather dry.  “Sounds to me like you boys were fooling around with something you didn’t know enough about.  Either that, or your precautions against outer interference were shoddy.”

McDougal shot the army man a dirty look, but his cheeks were also turning pink, which told Joe the lieutenant was probably right.  Choosing to ignore the comment (and not really needing to answer, anyway) McDougal said, “Now we have no clue what happened.  Only that whatever energy coursed through our black hole hit about fifteen miles away.”

“And did what?” asked Captain Thompson.

McDougal said nothing, but it wasn’t because he was embarrassed, or because he was trying to evade her question.  The bemused, frustrated expression on the man’s face told Joe that he had no clue whatsoever, and was casting desperately for an answer.  Finally he just shook his head.  “We have no idea.  We have sought answers for the last twelve hours straight.  None of have slept a damned wink.”

“Well,” said Captain Thompson, “it sounds to me you could use some fresh outlooks.  Obviously, this all here has gone way beyond your scientific calculations—” the scientist’s cheeks went pink again, “—and we’ve had far more rest than you have.  Maybe we can offer some fresh viewpoints.”

Finally McDougal only nodded, the pink fading from his cheeks, leaving his face looking pale and stressed.  Joe kind of felt sorry for the guy.  “Yes, perhaps you could.  Well, I suppose the first thing would be to show you the black hole.”

Even Joe felt excited at that idea.  To him, black holes really were things out of sci-fi movies and books, but to see one...a real one, even in a scaled-down version! 

The authorization for the group to see the project took surprisingly little time.  The Hardys had a good reputation, and of course they had found McDougal and gotten him back safely.  “And anyway,” was the dry comment from one of the lab’s guards as he escorted the group towards the back of the building, “what more could you possibly do that we haven’t done ourselves?”  He had a point, though no one was so tactless as to say so.

“Well,” said McDougal, pausing dramatically before a metal door with “ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT PROPER AUTHORIZATION” stenciled right on the painted surface.  The man looked nervous, and Joe supposed he was not used to showing off his work to anyone outside his own circle, much less people who weren’t even scientists of any kind.  “Well.  Well here it is...now I ask you when you get inside not to try and touch it.  It could knock it off kilter, could drive it off balance...anything.  The tornado forced energy through it, but luckily did not dislodge it from its place...else who knows what might have happened then?  But you may get close.”  Joe raised a brow, wondering if the man was stalling.  Finally McDougal turned to the door, opening it with a key and letting them all inside.

When Joe stepped through, he fully expected something far more impressive than what he first saw stepping through the door.  The lab was a vast room, filled with filing cabinets, cupboards, tables, and counters.  In fact except for the computers that lined one wall, it looked a lot like the chemistry lab at Bayport High School. 

One far corner of the room was gone, crumbled into debris from floor to ceiling, and had been covered with industrial-thickness plastic sheeting.  The plastic was held on by duct tape, which nearly made Joe burst into laughter.  The opening  was about three feet wide, and through the wavery plastic, Joe could see that several guards were posted out there as well.

And then he saw it.  A gasp from Frank told Joe he had seen it at the same time, but Joe did not look at him.  His gaze was riveted by the amazing phenomenon that hovered at the far end of the room.

The contraption was all open, which Joe had not expected, even after being admonished not to touch the black hole.  It looked a little like a tall speaker’s podium made of some kind of metal, coated with a light gray paint of some kind.  It was hollowed out and open on the top, and it had four sides, but the sides were not attached.  At each corner of this podium device was a gap of at least one foot, and through one of these gaps, Joe saw it.

It was eerie, eerier than Joe could have imagined.  In the center of the open area hovered a pulsating...mass.  That was about as close as Joe could get in his thinking: a mass.  It hovered right in the middle, revolving quickly, a black spiral of nothingness half the size of a BB.

“Amazing,” whispered Captain Thompson as the group crept over to the amazing entity.  At that point, the group included three of the lab’s security staff and two other astronomers who worked on the project.  “Absolutely amazing.”

“The containment box uses magnetism and air pressure both to keep it in place,” said one of the other scientists, a woman with wire-rimmed glasses and short, almost butched blond hair.   Her tone was pitched very low, as if she were afraid of waking the black hole up.  “So you see why no one can just stick their hand there.  It could throw everything out of whack.  We have precision instruments that work with the magnets that do all the physical work we need.”

Joe nodded vaguely, only barely hearing the woman, as he knelt down.  He peered intently into the open area, which was perhaps two feet wide and long, and laughed in soft amazement.  The black hole was blacker and darker than he thought it was possible to be, and the area around it was dim, also, lightening only towards the outside of the area.  “It’s sucking in the light!” he whispered, his eyes wide.  “This is...freaky!”  And was it sucking in sound, too.  The closer he got to the thing, the more silent it seemed around it, as if the air itself was muffled. 

Gooseflesh stood out suddenly on the skin beneath his sleeves, and he stood, backing away a step. 

“Amazing, isn’t it?” asked McDougal happily, gazing at the thing as a father might gaze on his newborn daughter. 

“And you say some kind of energy, maybe lightning or the like, got forced through the center?” said Frank, frowning the way he did when trying to puzzle out something confusing.

“Yes,” McDougal said, finally tearing his gaze from the miniature black hole.  “Yes, I thinking it could have been lightning, or even air molecules, ripping through the black hole with tornado force.  Either way, they pushed through the center, where time travel, where time warping might occur.  Perhaps even time itself exists in a solid form!”

“And this...fracturing of time,” said Frank, frowning yet harder, “this happened when the energy blasted out of the black hole and sorta just...what?  Struck everywhere?”

McDougal nodded.  “Ground zero, as I said, is about fifteen miles away; according to our sensors, things seem to radiate away from that point.”

And so of course the question was: what did they do from there?

What followed then was a half hour of talking, and getting absolutely nowhere.  Joe was reminded of their seemingly endless conversation back at the airport terminal, after discovering the demolished buildings and the mutated bird.  It amazed him that standing next to a pin-sized miracle, that scientists and military could argue for so long about absolutely nothing.  Frank asked what could be done, and the scientists managed to give long, complicated answers that told them nothing.  McDougal, in particular, seemed particularly unhelpful.  Joe supposed that if you took a scientist out of the carefully prepared situations they were accustomed to working in, they were pretty much out to sea.

“What if we just destroyed the black hole?” Joe asked, and felt his face burn a bit hot when everyone fell silent to look at him.

The scientists all stared, and McDougal looked horrified.  “That could be a disaster!” he said fervently, shaking his head.  “No, no that could be...no, that could cause ten times more damage.  That should be saved only as a last-ditch effort.”

Joe shrugged as if to say “no big deal”, but in truth he was a little surprised at the man’s demeanor.  When he’d been afraid of his life, he’d acted like a mouse surrounded by hungry tomcats.  But now he seemed to have gained a sort of emotional fever, making him look a little insane.  And so he said no more.

“Maybe we should visit this ground zero,” suggested Lieutenant Morgan.  “And we can go from there.”

Everyone was agreeable to this, and the scientists, in particular, were downright relieved.  But their alarm to begin with was beginning to make less and less sense.  Frank thought so, too.  The two brothers hung back as McDougal led the way outside, and towards the vehicles.  They’d decided that McDougal’s group would use McDougal’s own car, and the Hardys’ would ride in the Hummer. “Their protests aren’t making any sense,” Frank said quietly as they stepped out into the sunshine. 

“I know,” murmured Joe.  “If that thing only has the mass of a small asteroid, why would blowing it up be such a huge deal?  Because of the time warp effect?”

Frank shook his head.  “That can’t be any worse than what’s already happened, and blowing it up it’s the only way to rid ourselves of it.  I’m becoming more and more convinced that making this black hole was a bad idea from the start.”

“You’re telling me,” Joe said.  “Even without the tornado, it all seems so unpredictable.  So why do you think the scientists are balking?”

Frank sighed, watching as McDougal’s group split off to head for his car, and watched them for a few moments before turning and climbing into the backseat of the Hummer.  “Its their baby, Joe.  Something they’ve worked hard for, a real scientific breakthrough.  It’d be like telling Alexander Graham bell that his telephone invention was dangerous, and that all working models and technical information had to be destroyed.”

When it was put that way, Joe began to understand how McDougal and the others felt.  It couldn’t be easy, hearing someone say so casually that their creation should be destroyed, no matter how dangerous it was.  But damn it, the world sure as blazes couldn’t stay the way it was now!  “How widespread do you think this is?” he asked.

Frank shook his head darkly.  “I don’t know.”

There was silence after that, as the Hummer took off towards the area McDougal called “ground zero”, following McDougal’s dark red Toyota.  But that was okay with Joe; he was too busy gaping out the window like a tourist from a ranch in Texas visiting New York or Tokyo for the first time.

As they left the territory of Mid-America Physics and Astronomy, the land began to fracture yet more.  Joe saw a large patch of land with an unidentifiable building on it, something he was absolutely certain must come from the future.  Or even another planet?   Could a black hole alter space as well as time?  Several buildings crowded the area, all of them tall, spiky, and made of some kind of material Joe couldn’t identify.  Someone or something was moving among the buildings, and Joe would have given an awful lot to see what it was, but they moved on past without stopping; it was probably a good idea, too.  Joe had no idea what it was that was moving around.  For all he knew, ten thousand years had made the human race into a bunch of bloodthirsty cannibals who would shoot them on sight with a Buck Rogers laser.

‘For that matter, that’s damned close to what we are now,’ Joe thought rather glumly, thinking of some of the people he and his brother had faced down.

As they got closer and closer to their destination, the ground seemed to be patchier and patchier.  An area that had to be no more than ten square yards had a thunderstorm brewing in it and ferns waving in the wind that looked like they came straight from Jurassic Park.  Another jagged strip of land had sheer ice on the ground and a large area of land was covered in wildflowers.  And the level of the ground was wildly different.

“Why’s it doing this?” Joe asked.  “Wherever that energy landed when it zapped out of that black hole...are there going to be more and more patched areas closer to ground zero?”

“Looks that way,” Frank murmured.  “I have this wild urge to step in one time period with one foot, another time period with the other.”

Joe laughed, not because it was a silly thought, but because he had been thinking the same thing.  “Kinda like when we went to Four Corners and stood with an arm and a leg in four different states.”  He grinned, remembering the giant concrete slab, with the crossing lines and carved letters spelling out Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah on it.

“That was when we were catching all the National Parks, wasn’t it?” Frank asked.

“Yeah.”

Not all of the land patches were so blatant as the one with all the space-age buildings on it.  In fact most of them were just plains, and Joe knew they were in a very rural part of the country, and anything from the past up until several years in the future likely wouldn’t have much on it except for earth.  But even the plain patches were clearly in different time periods, showing every season and damned near every weather phenomenon there was. 

The Hummer even rode through an area that was hard-packed desert sands, and in the five minutes they drove through it, Joe estimated the temperature rose until it was at least a hundred-twenty degrees, and it was dark out.  That made him shiver a little, wondering when Iowa had been a lifeless desert, and trying not to let his brain hurt too much at the idea of riding at nighttime for five minutes before emerging into daylight.

“If I was a man with a weaker stomach,” said Morgan, “I’d be feelin’ sick about now.”  As it was, the man looked a little green around the gills, anyway.

The Toyota they were following stopped ten minutes later on a patch of ground that had Joe staring in disbelief.  The earth looked like a patchwork quilt sewn by baboons and colored by a blindfolded dog.  It was easy to see the exact place, because it was an area of blasted, burned sand about six inches across.  “Electricity,” Captain Thompson murmured, shaking her head slowly.  “Must be to do that the earth...but look—are all these jagged splinters different time periods?”

They were.  Shaking a little, Joe knelt down, one foot on a stretch of blacktop, one on a patch of mud, and felt the ground.  One patch of earth, perhaps a foot wide, was freezing cold.  One patch had grass sprouting up.  One patch was the desert sand, and was teeming with a kind of greenish ant Joe had never seen in his life.  A tree sprouted out of one of the larger bits, with loose branches scattered nearby, as if another tree had only partially made it to this time period.  The patches of land were at all elevations, some looking like crazy cliffs, some looking like sunken trenches.  One area, perhaps five inches wide and three long, was an impossible column of water at least fifty feet high.

“That’s impossible,” whispered Joe.

McDougal had gotten out of his own car, looking around in fascinated delight.  “No, it’s not!” he said a laugh.  “These areas are bound by whatever it is that’s fractured the time continuum!  That water...the rest of that water covers these lands in another time, but only that bit there had been brought to us!  But we’re not a part of the land, so we can move freely.  Like those ants that are crawling over your shoes, Joe.”

Startled, Joe looked down and let a yell as several of the little beasts marched up onto his sock and stung him even through the thick material.  He cursed and stumbled back, stomping his foot and shaking the bugs off.  “Vicious little creeps,” he hissed, using a nearby mud puddle to get the rest of them off.  When he was finished, his leg was covered in mud, but there were no ants. 

“You know we can’t just let things stand this way...don’t you?” asked Frank.

McDougal looked at him, his expression dying down into a troubled frown, and he didn’t answer.  He knew full well things couldn’t stay they way they were, but it was obvious that he didn’t want to admit it.  To him, this was a wonderful field trip, an opportunity he couldn’t bear to let go.  Joe could sympathize!  Who didn’t want to know what happened in different time periods?  If there was a way to identify the various dates, and to contain the effect safely, it would be a huge leap forward in science!  No more speculating and carbon dating.  But what they had was a disaster, instead.

Joe walked slowly over to the sliver of water, expecting it to crash down on his head at any moment, and slowly reached out a finger.  It went right through, and Joe could only gape, feeling the warmth of the water, smelling faint brine, and watched in amazement as a small fish swam by.  It wasn’t like sticking his hand in a waterfall, but like poking it into the surface of mostly still water that was somehow turned on its side.  “Okay this is just messed up.”

“What’s it like?” asked one of the scientists. 

“Well...weird.  Come and feel for yourself.”  With a sudden, impish grin, Joe contemplated the water before him, shrugged, and plunged right into it, face first.  For a second he saw Frank’s expression of alarm, heard him start to shout, “No, Joe!” and then he was in, suddenly floating—floating!—in the salty water!  He was alarmed himself for just a moment, before he leaned forward and stuck his head out of the other side.  For a second the rest of his body kept floating up, but he lunged forward to fall onto a patch of grass, laughing and soaking wet. 

“You mad little brat!” Frank exclaimed, but he was laughing too as he came over and helped Joe up.  “Crazy...I swear...I guess that’s one way to beat the summer heat.”

“It’s definitely not anything I ever did before,” said Joe.  “I guess...I guess that water was a sea that covered this place when there were no polar ice caps?  Man, talk about a time share.”

“Or perhaps,” said McDougal, “a time in the future when there are once again no ice caps.  Global warming causes them to melt, a phenomenon we are experiencing now.”  And if that wasn’t a chilly idea, nothing was.

The seven of them spent some time examining the various climates, not yet worrying what to do about it or what was going to happen next, but only indulging in their curiosity.  Even Frank had to admit there was no harm in it, and if McDougal and his group got it a little bit out of their systems, perhaps they would be far more inclined to listen to reason.

Joe thought later that they all should have been paying more attention, but even Captain Thompson and Lieutenant Morgan had gotten caught up in exploration.  The first quiet shuffling sounds weren’t even noticed, and when the hairs on the back of Joe’s neck stood straight up, he wasn’t sure why.

By the time McDougal looked up and shouted a frightened warning, the bests were already upon them; Joe jerked his head up at McDougal’s shout, sudden, sick panic flaring in his mind.  Three of them, huge cat beasts the size of tigers, with fangs longer than any cat Joe had seen outside of illustrations.  No one had any time to react before the beasts attacked.

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