The time was a little after eleven o'clock in the morning and my head still hurt from a hangover. I set my coffee cup on my desk and closed the door to the spare bedroom, which I use as my radio shack, and then I sat down in the chair at my desk and turned on my old side-band transceiver. The rig took a while to warm up, so I put on my reading glasses and looked for my log book among the other books and papers that cluttered the top of my desk. I then saw the black rock, which I had found the day before, where my wife, Peggy, must have laid it on the edge of my desk, so I picked up the smooth flat rock to get a closer look at it.

The oval rock was about six inches long and one inch thick, and there were eight small dents in one of its flat sides. Four of the dents were on each side of a thin crack that seemed to run through the center of the oval rock.

Believing that I could break it into two pieces, I took hold of the rock with both hands, and, as the tips of my fingers slipped into the small dents, I was enveloped in a black cloak of darkness, and I was falling!

I reached out to grab a hold of the desk, but the desk wasn't there. My butt hit the floor and I rolled over on my side. My head felt like it was going to split open with each beat of my heart, and my butt hurt like the devil.

Spitting dust from my mouth, I yelled out, "What the hell happened?" and my voice was very loud in the deep black silence that surrounded me. In less than a second, I heard echoes of my voice as my words began to bounce back at me from all directions.

I sat up quickly, for I knew that something was very wrong; then, I realized that I was naked. I felt around in the darkness for my clothes, but I could feel only the deep dust, or powder, that covered a smooth flat surface that wasn't the floor in my home. I got to my knees and felt of the dusty surface farther out while I turned in a circle, and found only the oval rock that had slipped from my fingers when I had grabbed for the desk.

I clutched the rock in one hand and called out again, "Can anyone hear me?", but all I heard was the echo of my words as they were repeated over and over again. I heard, however, the echo of my words from one direction a little sooner than the others, so I thought that there had to be something closer to me in that direction.

I stood up and called out, "Hello!". When I heard that echo again, I turned toward it and slipped one bare foot out ahead of me through the ankle deep dust to feel the smooth surface and, with my arms waving in the space ahead, I stepped in that direction like a blind man. At the time, I thought I could be blind.

I lost my balance after a couple steps, so I got down on my hands and knees and crawled forward over the dusty surface. I expected to run into something at anytime, or the surface not to be there the next time I reached out to feel it, but I yelled out again and again to hear that echo.

After a while, I couldn't hear that echo anymore, but I kept on crawling forward. It seemed like hours before I touched the smooth, flat, and warm surface of a solid upright object and stood up to lay my shivering body against it.

The air around me wasn't cold, but I was shivering as if it was. Maybe I was shivering from the shock of falling from the chair in my home to this dark mysterious place?

The smooth warm surface of the object felt good to my naked body and it soon calmed my shivering. I couldn't move from where I was because I imagined that I stood on a narrow ledge beside a large rock. The rock was on the side of a high mountain with a long, narrow, dusty slab of smooth rock that stretched out away from me to where I had fallen to this dark place.

A few moments later, I shook the vision of that scene from my mind and decided that I had better find out where I really was, or I would go crazy standing there in the dark imagining all sorts of things. Laying my back against the object, with my right hand stretched out ahead to feel it, I slipped my right foot along the dusty surface. Then, I slipped my left foot forward to stop it beside my right foot as I slid my naked body along the smooth surface of the warm object. I still had the oval rock in my left hand because it was the only thing that kept me from believing that this was only a bad dream.

As I slid along the object, I thought of what had happened the day before when I had found the rock:

I was working as an Ironworker on a small building project in the suburbs of a large metropolitan City. I had just sat my 180 pounds of muscular body down on a steel beam to eat my lunch when my two blue eyes spotted a black rock among the white gravel that had just been delivered to the job site.

Since I had begun to build a fishpond beside my patio, I had kept my eyes peeled for odd shaped rocks to place around it; therefore, I raised my husky 5 foot 11 inch frame and stepped over to the pile of gravel to inspect this rock.

After wiping the dust from the flat, oval, hand-sized, black rock on my pants leg, I wiped the sweat from my brow with one of my callused hands. Then, I ran my hand back over my gray hair, and strolled back to my lunch box to place the rock at the bottom of the box under the remainder of my lunch.

By the end of the day, I had forgotten all about the rock because Friday was my fiftieth birthday, and I had invited some of the men who had worked with me to a steak and beer party that I was having on my patio that night.

I guess my wife, Peggy, had found the rock when she cleaned out my lunch box that evening, and she had taken it into my ham radio shack and placed it on top of my desk.

(A Ham is an Amateur Radio Operator.)

After many dragging steps through the deep dust, I felt a small dent in the smooth surface of the warm object with my right hand. I put the oval rock under my armpit and turned to feel the dent with both hands.

The dent in the object was about the size of the rock, and the dent was oval also. There were eight small bumps in the dent, four on each side of center. I thought they would probably fit into the dents in the rock. I took the rock from under my arm and, feeling the edges of the oval dent with one hand, I placed the rock above the dent and slid it down until it fit over the bumps. The rock snapped into the dent and changed to a bright glowing white oval.

I jerked my hands away, and I almost fell down as a shudder ran down through my stiffened body. My heart skipped a beat, then beat a little faster to pump blood into my stiff muscles.

Staring at the glowing white oval that had been, until just a moment ago, a smooth black rock, I thought, "It sure isn't a rock now, so it has to be some type of man made device to glow like that!"

The white light was just bright enough to see that my hand was red as I reached out and touched the right side of the glowing oval. That side of the white oval changed to blue and a bright light flashed on around me. I glanced quickly to my right and left, then I turned and was shocked by what I saw.

A flat red plain stretched out away from me for many miles to a wall of darkness on the horizon. A glowing white sky above changed to blue clouds a mile, or so, out in front of me, and the blue clouds stretched outward to high walls of darkness that surrounded the red plain on all sides.

I turned around and saw that the blue and white oval hung suspended on a non-reflecting wall of darkness. The wall went straight up into the white sky, and the wall of darkness ran to the right and left for many miles to the walls of darkness that surrounded the red plain.

Below the blue and white device were a few spots of glowing-blue showing where I had kicked the red dust around, so I got down on my hands and knees and cleaned off a small area. The smooth surface glowed brightly as if it was made of blue light, and I felt that if I stepped on it I could fall into it, so I stood up and kicked some red dust back over the blue surface to ease my fear.

I then inspected the glowing oval device while I brushed the red dust from my naked body. But the red from the dust wouldn't come off and it made me look like the devil.

I reached out and touched the wall of darkness and it felt warm and smooth. I then touched the oval on the side that was blue, and, as that side changed back to white. I was surrounded by darkness. Only the all white oval was left glowing in the blackness around me, so I quickly touched the right side of the oval again, and the light in the sky and the dusty plain returned.

"The device must be a light switch, but how can it turn out the light in the sky? Maybe the white light above me isn't the sky at all? It could be just a very high ceiling, but I know that those are blue clouds moving across the sky out there. I'm sure of that!"

Turning back to the oval device, or switch, I touched the left side that was still white, and the oval changed to all blue, but the lights stayed on. I saw something out of the corner of my eye, so I looked back over my shoulder and there was a shimmering blue curtain that blocked the clouds from my view.

The blue curtain reached from the white sky to the red plain, and it stretched from the wall of darkness that was a few miles away to my right to the wall of darkness that was about the same distance away to my left. The shimmering blue curtain looked to be about a mile or so away in front of me.

"This has got to be some kind of giant enclosure, but why so big?" I said, "Now I'm starting to talk to myself. Nevertheless, I believe that the walls of darkness must be mile high walls and the white sky is the ceiling of this giant enclosure. But where did that shimmering curtain come from? Why would anyone enclose so much empty space? How did I get here? Where is this place anyway? I sure need someone to answer a few of my questions!"

I turned my attention back to the blue device that was stuck to the non-reflecting wall of darkness, and, after a few minutes of touching it, I could turn the lights off or on and make the shimmering blue curtain appear or disappear. Also, by touching the device in the center, it would fall out of the brown dent into my hand, and the device would be black again.

I began to think of this enclosure as a giant warehouse, and the shimmering blue curtain as the warehouse door. I also began to think that the oval device was a key. It had to be the key to my finding out where I was and how I was going to get back to my home.

Leaving the lights on and the giant warehouse open to the blue clouds, I touched the oval in the center, and it turned black as it fell out of the depression into my hand. I then turned and walked back along the wall of darkness. Following my earlier tracks in the red dust to where I had first touched it, and looked out at my zigzag tracks in the red dust that would lead me back to where I had fallen from my home to this place.

The glowing blue floor showed through the red dust where I had crawled along the floor's smooth surface, so I followed the tracks out to where I had rolled when I hit the floor, and there were no other tracks that led to that spot.

"How in the hell did I get here?" I shouted. I was surprised that I never heard the echo of my voice. I shouted out again, but there was no echo, "This place has changed since I turned the lights on," I said, then

I turned to look at the huge wall of darkness, and I could just barely see the brown spot on it where the small oval dent was. The dent was less than a hundred yards away from where I had fallen into this place, but I had crawled through the dark to the wall almost twice that far.

"If I could have seen it when I fell here, I would have saved myself a few hours of crawling through the dark. My being here must have something to do with this oval key because it is the only thing I have now that I had with me before I fell here."

I took the oval key in both hands and placed my fingers in the dents at each end, but nothing happened. I turned around and looked out across the red plain at the wall of darkness that was on the outside the entrance into this giant enclosure, and I thought that if there was a way out of that place, the way had to be out there under that cloudy sky. So, I started to walk through the red dust toward the wall of darkness that was out beyond the blue clouds.

I counted my steps as I walked, and I stepped out of the red dust onto the glowing blue surface of a huge plain, that stretched out into the darkness, at what I figured to be a half-mile. At one mile, I was under the edge of the white ceiling where it met the cloudy sky that reflected the light from the glowing blue plain.

I was figuring that one of my strides was about three feet, and I divided three feet into 5,280 feet, which is a mile, so 1,760 strides would be a mile, or close to it.

I was walking over an ocean of blue light. At least, that's what it looked like. When I had stepped off two miles, I thought I could see an arched opening at the bottom of the wall of darkness ahead. As I got nearer, the arch got higher and wider, and part of the blue plain continued on through the arched opening. At 7,000 steps, or about four miles, I stepped under the glowing white ceiling of the very high, and very wide, arched tunnel that went through the sky-high wall of darkness.

The glowing blue surface continued on through the wall of darkness and stretched off into the black night to a narrow point as if it was a very long highway. I began to walk through the tunnel, and I counted another half mile before I came to the other side of the wall that disappeared upward, and to the right and left, into the blue fog that hung above the glowing blue highway.

I sat down on the blue highway to rest the sore muscles in my legs, and I thought that my legs shouldn't have been as sore as they were because I had walked farther than that on the job every day, but they sure were sore.

As I lay my head back against the black wall of the tunnel, I closed my eyes and thought of the events that had happened that morning before I fell to this place:

I had gotten out of bed with a hangover, so I sat on the edge of my bed holding my aching head in both hands while I tried to remember what I had drunk the night before. I knew full well that I had drunk too much beer because I now had a dull ache in my gut. A few moments later, I raised my sore body and limped to the bathroom, and I said to myself, "Caleb Thorn, you're getting too old for this!"

After my morning constitutional, I shaved my face and brushed my teeth, and that made me feel a little better, but my head still hurt, so I stepped back into the bedroom and got dressed. Then I left the room and headed for the kitchen to get some aspirin.

My wife and daughter were sitting at the kitchen table when I walked into the kitchen, and I said, "Good morning," as I went over to the sink to get a glass of water.

"Good morning, Daddy!" my 22 year old daughter, Gale, said cheerfully.

"Morning, Caleb," Peggy said as she glanced at the clock on the wall, "How do you feel this morning?" She sounded a little bit disturbed.

"Pretty good!" I lied.

Noticing that it was after eleven o'clock, I realized that I had slept a little later than I usually do on Saturday mornings, but I don't usually stay up all night drinking beer as I had done that Friday night. I got the aspirin from the cabinet above the sink and swallowed two of the small pills with a full glass of water. Then I put the bottle of aspirin back in the cabinet and poured myself a cup of coffee from the pot beside the sink.

"Peg," I said as I turned around to look at my wife, "I have a schedule at eleven-thirty on forty meters, and I'll be busy in the radio shack for a few hours, so don't let anyone bother me, okay?"

(40 meters is one band of frequencies that all Amateur Radio Operators can use to communicate with each other.)

Peggy looked up at me and said, "You are going to clean off that mess on the patio, aren't you?" she was giving me that "I'm not going to do it!" look.

"Yes," I said, "I'll do that this afternoon, Honey. I don't want to miss my schedule with Jack this morning."

"Okay," she said, "but make sure you get it done, today!"

"I will," I said. I walked over and kissed her and my daughter on the cheek and left the kitchen to go to my radio shack.

"It's been.... Hell I don't know how long it's been since I fell here, but Peggy has already taken a fresh cup of coffee to my shack and found that I'm not there. I guess my clothes are there, though, since I don't have them here. She'll be scared and worried because, in the thirty years that we've been married, I've never gone anywhere without first telling her that I was going."

When I opened my eyes, I noticed that I could see the outline of some trees on the other side of the wide blue highway, and I realized that it wasn't as dark, or as foggy, as it was before.

"Maybe the sun is coming up? I sure hope so. But, if the sun is just now coming up here, I'm on the other side of the world from my home!"

As the darkness faded into daylight, I could see the tall trees that bordered both sides of the glowing highway all the way out to as far as I could see through the rising fog. As I stood up, I just about fell back down as my stiff and sore muscles gave way under my weight. I caught myself against the wall of the tunnel and stretched my legs, then I walked to the edge of a wide grassy area that ran to my right between the black wall and the green trees on the other side of the grass. I could see that the green grass continued on along the shoulder of the blue highway, and the grassy shoulder of the highway was about fifty feet wide.

I was on the right-hand side of the highway as I stepped up onto the soft, wet, grass, and the cool wetness of it felt good on my bare feet. As I walked along beside the blue highway toward the tall trees, a cool breeze raised goose bumps on my naked skin. The breeze also carried the scent of pine and juniper as well as the musty smell of rotted wood to my nostrils. Then I heard the birds singing their morning songs, and I felt the pangs of hunger because I knew that they would soon be flying off to find their morning meal, and my finding a meal would not be so easy.

I turned to my right when I reached the tall trees, and, as I walked on the grass beside the low underbrush, I saw some of the birds as they flew away from their nests, but I didn't recognize any of them. I kept looking into the underbrush for the trace of an animal trail that might lead me to water. Then, after walking a few hundred yards, I heard the faint sound of water gurgling over rocks in a stream.

I stopped and listened. Then I headed into the woods toward the sound that seemed to come from close by. As I walked under the high limbs of the trees and through the short underbrush, I saw a few squirrels that were jumping from limb to limb above me. They were much larger than the squirrels I had seen before, but I knew they were squirrels because of their big bushy tails.

The gurgling sound got louder. I almost fell into the stream as I stepped between two bushes. I caught myself in time by grabbing hold of them. The stream wasn't very wide, but it was too far down in a deep ditch for me to reach, so I jumped across the ditch and followed the stream until I found the place where the water ran across some rocks. The stream was wider here, so I stepped out onto some of the rocks, knelt down, and washed my hands, but I couldn't wash off the redness from the dust, so I bent down and drank from the running water.

My thirst quenched, I stepped back onto the bank of the stream and sat down on the soft grass, "Now, if I had some food, I would feel better about this situation."

When I rubbed my hand across my stomach, I looked down and realized that I no longer had a potbelly as I had before.

"Gee-golly damn. I didn't think I was here long enough to lose weight, but I sure have lost my belly."

Hearing a sound above me, I looked up and saw one of the squirrels playing in the trees across the stream from me. It had a nut in its mouth as big as an orange, so I watched to see where the squirrel was getting the nuts. After a minute or so of watching the squirrel, I had the tree spotted, so I got to my feet and waded across the shallow stream.

The tree wasn't too far from the stream, but, when I found it, the nuts, which hung from the branches, were too high to reach. A few nuts were scattered around on the ground, so I picked up two of them and carried them back to the grass beside the stream. After peeling away the outer husk, I used a sharp rock to break open the top of the nut, and I dug the nutmeat out with a stick. The nutmeat tasted delicious and I ate all of it. Then I used the empty shell as a cup to drink water from the stream.

The empty shell gave me an idea of how I could carry water and food with me as I went about finding out where I was. I went back to get a few more nuts and stripped the husks from them; then, I opened the tops with my sharp rock, dug the nut-meat out, placed the nut-meat on large leaves, and tied the leaves together with a piece of small vine. I used a longer piece of vine to make a sling to carry the leaves with. Using another piece of vine, I tied the empty shells together and filled them with water from the stream.

Since the leaves were large enough, I tied some of them to another vine to make a skirt around my waist. I took another leaf and made a pouch to put the oval key in and tied it to the vine around my waist. With my nakedness hidden, I felt a lot better.

Picking up the vines of nut-meat and water shells, I put them over my shoulders and followed the small stream back to the wide grassy area between the high wall of darkness and the tall trees. The strip of grass was about a hundred yards wide, and it ran between the wall of darkness and the green trees for as far as I could see to my right and left. The fog had dissipated, and I felt very small standing under the awesome height of the black wall, so I turned to the right and walked quickly toward the arched opening, in the side of the high wall of darkness, and toward the wide blue highway.