The tau waves were strong that day, as the rain hit. Sheets of water rolled down the store windows and pounded the metal roof of the old arcade.

  The whole road was covered with a shimmering yer of water one centimetre deep, and it threw back the reddish-orange light that filtered through the dissipating fog, so that the whole ground and sky and the windshields of the parked cars shone with it. Droplets of water spattered on the window grating, and there was that omnipresent hissing noise you only hear when the generator is running full bst.

  I had nothing to do but sit in the dim arcade and watch my bike arc-weld itself to the fence. There was a fsh of blue light every few seconds and a sharp ionized pop. I could see steam rising off the hot bike seat through the grating and the rain.

  According to Professor de Rochambeau, this high-voltage phenomenon occurs because my bicycle uses "divergent technology," and does not have a suitable counterpart in the tau direction. Therefore, he has strictly cautioned me against taking it out of the storage box during the scheduled times. I follow his advice, for the sake of my bike, but Professor de Rochambeau doesn't follow his schedule.

  They'd had the tau waves on for almost three hours with no warning. Now the rain had come and showed no sign of stopping. The owner, Jack, had left a while ago, switching the breaker off so that the machines wouldn't stay on all night when the power came back. I was waiting alone in the stuffy, humid dark.

  Enough was finally enough. I wasn't going to let the rain keep me here all evening. It was time once more to give the good professor a piece of my mind.

  I shoved the door open against the wind, and was immediately drenched by the storm, rainwater running straight inside my jacket and down the front of my shirt. The world began to blur, since I had opened a gap in the arcade's Faraday cage. I smmed the door shut to protect the games and then ran down the wet sidewalk.

  The main road is always clear of force fields, but it's not sheltered well from the rain. It arcs down the side of the hill in wide curves, starting at the college at the top, looping through the pza and the main shopping area, and then running down in a more or less straight line to the pier and the beach.

  A few people were visible in the windows of the stores. One old man sat on his sheltered balcony and watched me and the rain go past. I thought I recognized him and tried to wave, but he turned away.

  I cut through a narrow alley to get some shelter from the storm. It had been clear before, but this time it was blocked by an invisible field. I tried to push through, which sometimes works, but after ten or twenty steps I lost my bance and slid back out to the mouth of the alley, shoes scraping over the wet pavement.

  Most of the people in this town aren't affected by these fields. They just walk straight through while I keep getting caught. It feels like the things exist to ruin my life personally. I really hate them.

  By the time that I reached the generator building by the pier, I was about as wet and cold as a spring storm could make me. I ducked under the barricade of the empty parking lot as the wind and rain blew through the gothic ironwork, and ran straight through the maintenance door, which hissed slightly as I passed through it.

  That's also something about divergence, I can only assume.

  I continued straight through the corridor wall and into the control room of the tau wave generator, where, as usual, the professor was arguing with his technicians.

  A dull iron chair sat on the huge metal circle at the centre of the generator, surrounded by yers and yers of jet-bck cable in an enormous coil. I could see a faint shadow in it, its face distorted in some expression I couldn't quite make out, silhouetted against the gring lights. It was there for a moment, and then vanished.

  "We've reached Total Divergence," said Technician Sam mournfully, leaning back from the control panel and returning the τ and λ levers to rest. "He's gone, Lucky."

  The generator began to spin slowly down, the reddish radiation dying.

  "My God! What a tragedy!" de Rochambeau excimed, tearing at his hair. "How could this have occurred? Now I owe the technician Hank twenty-five dolrs!"

  "Fifty dolrs, in fact, with the side bet."

  "How can you speak of lucre at a time like this, you ghoul! You who were betting on a man to die!"

  "You were betting on him too, Lucky!"

  "But I was betting on him to survive," shouted Professor de Rochambeau.

  I screamed as loud as possible directly into the professor's ear from behind.

  "Augh!" de Rochambeau yelled and leapt into the air. "It's you! How do you keep getting in here? What do you want? Why are you soaking wet?"

  "Listen, Professor, you left the tau wave generator on for three hours straight, and it wasn't even scheduled to run today! You owe me a bike that isn't welded to a fence! And I'm wet because it was raining."

  "I wouldn't say that I had left it on. Its continued activation was quite intentional. And," the professor added, "I think you'll find that I don't owe anyone anything at all."

  "Except me! You owe me fifty dolrs."

  "Yes, yes," the professor muttered with distaste.

  All this time, the generator had been winding down. The transfer brushes came to a halt beside the giant coils, and at that moment reality hiccupped and clicked back together. I found myself standing at a slight angle, and took a quick step left for bance. The professor noticed my disorientation and chose that moment to strike.

  "You see, young man," he began, "this is a major facility that is of vital importance to the economy. You cannot keep coming in here and arguing with me about our operational decisions. If we were a little unruly today, and I'm not saying we were, then it was due purely to, er..." The professor trailed off and waved at Sam.

  "...Polylinear phase subduction in the optical verniers," said Sam.

  "The new guy got caught on his way out," said Hank. "He couldn't make it back to the drop-off. We kept it open as long as possible."

  "His way out of what?" I said.

  "Ahem. The new phase subduction was arrested in the drop-off verniers," synthesized de Rochambeau. "It's very dangerous and you should leave."

  "Not until you repce my bike. You keep running the generator outside of the schedule. That's completely unacceptable from a public safety standpoint if you want to talk about safety. And actually I think what's more dangerous is how I keep running into those stupid force fields outside!"

  "That is scientifically impossible, as I keep telling you," the professor murmured. "Tau waves do not generate the sort of science-fictional force field nonsense you are describing, and if they did, the phenomenon would happen to us here in the generator room, not outside to a foolish young man in an alley on Pier Street."

  "Why not try him in the chair and see?" suggested Hank in a bored tone. At this novel suggestion, the Professor's eyes shot wide open and a huge smile appeared on his face. Hank cpped his hands over his mouth, but it was too te.

  "Hmm, yes! Quite right! Young man, please climb into the," said de Rochambeau and paused for a moment, "diagnostic... chair. Gentlemen, please assist me!"

  "Wait, hold on. Hey! I just saw a guy evaporate from there!"

  Hank and Sam heaved a deep sigh, picked me up one on each arm, and carried me over to the chair at the centre of the huge apparatus as I tried to wriggle free. None of the three of us seemed very happy about it.

  "All right, young man, now sit in the chair and we shall see."

  I elected not to. Hank shrugged and looked over at the professor.

  "We don't have any restraints on that thing?" de Rochambeau muttered.

  "It's all been volunteers so far," Hank said, looking fairly unhappy at the direction things were going.

  "Please just sit in the chair," pleaded de Rochambeau, sitting now at the controls. "It is unbelievably harmless. You will feel only a slight pressure." As he settled in, his foot came down on a pedal, setting off a loud and brief siren bst from the roof. He pulled it away immediately. "My god, who hooked that up down here?"

  Sam wearily replied, "You did, sir. You said that the operator needed direct access to the siren in case he observed a dampening effect, sir. You had us hook it up."

  "When did I do that?"

  "In 2013, sir."

  "Eight years? And you have just been operating the machine all this time while trying not to step on the pedal? I should raise your sary."

  "Yes, sir."

  The ancient ndline phone on the wall rang suddenly. Professor de Rochambeau leaped out of his seat and rushed over to it.

  "Yes?" de Rochambeau said, with uncharacteristic trepidation. "Er, yes, sorry about that, Mrs. Wallen, we did pick up certain signs of the cstic phenomenon, but it seems to have been an issue with the instruments. There's no danger at present."

  Something was said on the other end.

  "Better to be safe than sorry, ma'am, I'm sure you'll agree?"

  Another pause.

  "No, ma'am, we do not expect a recurrence of the Northern Disaster at this time. You'd be the first to know. Thank you. Yes. Sorry to wake you."

  The professor hung the phone up on the wall and turned back to me. "All right. The chair? Please? That was the prime minister, you know."

  I took a deep breath and sat in the chair.

  "Il l'a fait!" de Rochambeau cried, and jumped back into the seat at the controls. After an appropriate length of time to savour the moment, he nudged the tau lever slightly down, causing the massive brushes to spin slowly around me.

  The entire world faded into a blur of shadows and washes of red-orange light, and I felt intense nausea. The whole effect was much, much stronger in the chair. Hank and Sam watched me with a mixture of guilt and sympathy.

  The professor cpped his hands in glee and pushed the lever back to zero. "Incredible! An incredible degree of susceptibility to the tau wavelengths! Forget the mayor: young Rowan is our next candidate! And we send him today!"

  Technician Sam groaned in misery.

  "Yes, you have your wife to get back to. Fear not! I will not keep you here past your allotted time. I, the great physicist Lucien de Rochambeau, will personally operate the controls of this glorious machine. What is the threshold now, thirty degrees?" The professor tapped a gauge.

  "I've been leaving it until about fifty," said Sam, discouraged. "We haven't been having much luck tely, and I think it's better to give them more time..."

  "But we did have that one success, did we not?" chuckled de Rochambeau. "I shall pull it at thirty. And then we shall see. Hee hee hee hee hee."

  "You're the boss," said Sam with a sigh. "Good luck, kid. Try to keep things under control."

  "No, let me do the talk," said de Rochambeau, turning around in the chair. "Now listen closely, young man. You are being entrusted with a tremendous responsibility. Your actions may determine the fate of our whole world, and even our reality itself. Do you understand me? Nod if you understand."

  I shook my head.

  "Good. This machine is about to send you into a shadow world, what could be called another dimension. It may seem deceptively familiar, but it is in fact a very dangerous pce. You must gather as much information as possible of any kind before returning home, but you must also be careful not to give yourself away."

  "Why?"

  "Because if you do, young man, the inhabitants will try to kill you."

  "Uh..."

  "We can track your progress from here and assist you, but only to a very limited extent." The professor tapped the gauge. "I will pull you back if things go wrong."

  "I mean, okay, I guess? I still don't understand what's happening?"

  "All right. Now, let's get you over there." The professor swung back to the controls and nudged the tau lever up slightly once more, with the same disorienting effect, like looking through a kaleidoscope pointed at the sun. The whole room was a blur.

  "How much higher does it need to go? No, you're practically there already. Amazing. You should absorb enough tau to jump soon, even at the minimum level." The professor reyed this information to me as if I would be happy about it.

  I heard Sam's voice saying, "Um, Rowan, are you okay there?"

  "I'm fine, it's just nausea," I said, huddled over.

  "Yeah, that's pretty normal. Sorry about that, dude."

  "Oh, by the way, you're a girl in the other dimension, so keep that in mind," said the Professor.

  "What?" I said.

  There was a snap.