Pinball

Steven Denver is a writer struggling to find a plot for his next novel, the success of which -- or lack of -- will mean the continuance or the demise of his career.

But when he stumbles upon a strange green whirlpool near his home, he discovers that it is a gateway through space and time.

Exploring the Gatespace beyond leads him into worlds unknown and adventures that defy the imagination, perfect fuel for the creativity of an author...

But there's just one complication... will he ever make it home to write that book?

PINBALL

Alan Seeger

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Second edition

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

To Sammie…

So glad I found you.

“Nothing could go wrong because nothing had... I meant ‘nothing would.’ No — then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations — conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.”

― Robert A. Heinlein,
The Door Into Summer

“Once confined to fantasy and science fiction, time travel is now simply an engineering problem.”

—

Dr. Michio Kaku,
Wired Magazine,
Aug. 2003

“Time travel. It's a cornucopia of disturbing concepts.”

— Ron Stoppable,
Kim Possible

PREFACE

I’ve been a writer since I can remember; I used to make up stories and fill spiral notebooks with them back when I was eight or nine years old. Then at the age of fourteen, I started writing songs, and that pretty much took up all my time for the next thirty years or so, with the exception of the odd tale (and sometimes they were very odd tales indeed) now and then.

I’m pretty much fascinated with the subject of the future; when I was a little kid, I read about things like the great Comet Halley, last seen in the year my Nana was born, 1910, and due to return in 1986. I did the math and realized that I would be a doddering old man of 27 when that occurred. I was very excited about the prospect of seeing Halley, and I was very disappointed when 1986 came and went without my having seen so much as a wisp of its tail. I did sort of make up for it in early 1997, though; I happened to be outside doing some work in my yard in rural Oklahoma one evening when I glanced up and caught sight of Comet Hale-Bopp, hanging there in the northern sky, as pale and diaphanous as a ghost, its twin tails clearly visible — the pale, yellowish dust tail and the bluish gas tail.

So anyway — back to the future (see what I did there?). Here we are in the two thousand teens, and while we do have the hand-held computer tablets that give us access to petabytes of data at our fingertips — a concept I imagined in the early 1970s — we
still
don’t have Star Trek-style transporters, faster than light space travel, hotels at the L
or L
points of Earth’s orbit… hell, we don’t even have Jetsons-style flying cars. What a letdown. Oh, well.

Anyway, one of my greatest regrets is the loss of a story I wrote in my late twenties that was called “Swappers™.” It was set in the future (duh!) and concerned a technological achievement that allowed two people to swap bodies, essentially — person A’s consciousness into person B’s body, and vice versa, for a period of time. This was done for all kinds of reasons; work-related (perhaps person A had skills that were needed in a place where his health didn’t permit him to go, so person B volunteered his extremely fit and athletic body to do the task), sports-related (an elderly or disabled person Swapping her mind into the body of a 20-year old in order to go skiing, or scuba diving, or spacewalking), or even sexual (once again, person A with a body ravaged by age or disease swaps into person B who is in the prime of life in order to go out and party like it’s 2499). Soon there were commercial enterprises called “SwapShops” where a person could go to rent a body for a specified period of time; soon, however, abuse was rampant as people figured out that a Swapped body was the ultimate disguise for those who wanted to commit a crime, and other people who had some sort of physical shortcoming would conveniently fail to return, absconding with their new, studlier or shapelier Swapped body.

It kind of sounds like I have told you the entire story that I claimed was lost, but in truth the original story, written in longhand in a spiral notebook that has since been lost to the sands of time, was much, much better.

At any rate, at long last, here is something that I have dared to put out for public consumption. I hope that you enjoy it.

Alan Seeger

January 27, 2013

Table of Contents