The Portal I parked my car in the shade between two sand dunes. Shutting off the engine, I savored the peacefulness, far from the city, the highways. Reed grasses sighed in the warm August winds sweeping inland from the ocean. Pacific swell rumbled upon the shore in the distance. I left my car, felt the cool sand upon my feet as I walked between the towering piles of sand. I passed the final dune, and the ocean came into full view, a lingering slice of orange sun thinning, vanishing below the horizon. Venus burned brightly in the twilight sky, and several brighter stars shone in the east. A seagull scurried across the sand and stopped, turning its head from side to side, pecking at something in the sand. Its beak struck with the sound of hollow metal. I approached the bird out of curiosity. It squawked at me and took flight, disappearing behind a sand dune. A smooth metal pipe, about three inches in diameter, with the luster of pewter, jutted from the sand. I knelt down and cleared the sand from around it, finally freeing the two foot tube. It was smoothly polished, its edges rounded, free of rust. The wind blew across it, producing a rich hum. I held the pipe level and brought it up to my eye. I saw a brilliant red flower blooming through the opposite end of the pipe. I lowered the pipe, saw only sand between me and the sea. There were no bushes, no flowers. I raised the pipe again and saw a grassy field. Inclining the pipe higher, I saw a darkly clouded sky, though I knew that the sky above me was perfectly clear. I was dumbfounded by this pipe -- hollow, with no lenses and mirrors. I looked through the pipe and tipped it toward the ground. Once again I saw the dazzling flower, then several others, all covered with dew. I leveled the pipe and swung it to my right. Though I was really standing on a sandy beach, a hilly, wooded landscape scrolled through the end of the pipe. I saw distant mountains, partly lost in mist, and a city with many stone buildings, including a cathedral. The city looked very old, perhaps medieval. I pulled the pipe away from my eye and saw nothing but clear sky, ocean, and sand dunes. I sat down, afraid to look through the pipe again, afraid I had lost my mind. Holding the pipe in one hand, I poured a handful of sand into the pipe. It never emerged from the opposite end! I continued pouring handful after handful of sand into the pipe, so much that I should have filled the pipe to overflowing several times over, but nothing emerged from the opposite end. I stood and looked through the pipe toward the ground. Tall grass and a pile of sand lay directly below me. The pipe had transported the sand from one place to another, one time to another! I realized this was no illusion. The pipe wasn't a magic toy, but a portal, a gateway to another place and time! Though the sun had just set at my location, the sky through the portal was bright as the sun burned off the morning mist. I heard a man shouting through the portal, his voice hollow and reverberating through the pipe. I swung the portal to the side until I saw an elderly, bearded man standing in the field. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted again as vapor poured from his mouth. I approached him by walking across the sand while holding the portal to my eye. I was moving through both worlds at once! As I came within twenty feet of him, he turned toward me and froze, his eyes dark and wide, his brow furrowed beneath bushy gray eyebrows. He hurried toward me, stopping several feet away to stare back at me through the portal. "Where have you been?" he asked. "I need more medicine! The plague has reached Montpellier, and we must halt its spread!" His mouth moved out of rhythm with the sound of his voice, as though his speech were dubbed. The portal device was translating his speech into English! It seemed he had expected my arrival, but I had no idea why. Someone else must have possessed the portal before me. Perhaps the old man was expecting my predecessor. I looked around myself on the beach, afraid I was being watched. Someone might come to reclaim the device. Convinced I was safe, I put my mouth to the portal. "Who are you?" I asked. I placed my eye against the portal, saw the look of shock on the man's face as he took a few steps backward. "You don't know me? You're a demon, not an angel!" he shouted. "By the power of Christ, I command you, spirit -- what is your name!" "I'm not a demon," I replied. "I found you by accident. Who came here before me?" "Spirits do not travel without purpose. You are an imposter, and I command you to leave me! Do me no harm!" I wasn't getting anywhere, and the old man was growing more frightened and guarded each time I opened my mouth. I decided on a different approach. "I am here in place of the one who came before me. I will help you. But first I must know -- what place is this, what year?" His face softened. "This is Montpellier, France. It is the year of our Lord, 1530. I must have the medicine! Quickly, before the plague destroys this town, like the others!" I had so many questions for him, but I was afraid to ask him anything else. My ignorance might cause him to flee and never trust me again. I couldn't resist learning more about him and the world I was experiencing through the portal. A terrible stench met my nostrils, and a thin haze of smoke blew between me and the old man. I turned into the smoke. Villagers were tossing large objects, covered with black cloth, onto a huge, burning heap. Corpses... A priest stood near the fire, chanting as flames leapt into the sky. They must have been burning plague victims. From what I knew of medicine, antibiotics might be an effective way of combating the disease. I had an old penicillin prescription in the medicine cabinet at home -- perhaps that would help. "I can give you more medicine. Meet me here in three hours." "Yes! Yes, of course! Thank you, wise one!" I drove home as quickly as possible, grabbed the remaining antibiotics, thirty capsules in all. These might be enough to cure a couple people, if that. I wasn't a pharmacist, so I didn't have access to large supplies of medicine. There was nothing more I could do, short of revealing all of this to someone who might be able to supply more medication, much more... I returned to the shore and ran along the beach with a flashlight. I thought about the ethics of helping the old man. Since I was interacting with the past, I might be changing history. Any modern medicines the old man had obtained were centuries ahead of 1500's technology. They would seem like miracle drugs to someone in the distant past. I would rewrite history with every plague victim the old man saved. Perhaps I should have thrown the portal into the sea, left this place and never returned. I could have left Montpellier to deal with the plague according to the laws of nature. Then I remembered the huddled villagers, tossing one body after another onto a burning heap, thick with the stench of black smoke. As the moon peeked above the horizon, I resumed my hike to the same stretch of beach. Once there, I looked through the portal. The morning mist had burned off. The crowd had departed, a heap of smoldering ashes in their place. The old man sat near me in the field. I walked toward him, calling through the portal. He stood and approached me. I wondered what I looked like to him, on the opposite end of this conduit through the fabric of time and space. "I have some medicine," I said. "Hold the bag open." He did as I instructed. I tilted the portal and emptied the bottle of pills into it. The capsules slid, tumbled through the metal pipe, then disappeared into silence. The old man watched me expectantly. "I must have much more!" he said, pleading. "Please, you must give me what I need! Thousands will die!" "I don't have any more right now," I said, wanting to help him further. Then I remembered something important. "I can tell you how to combat the plague, to prevent its spread." "Yes, wise one," he said, awaiting my next word. "Fleas are the main carriers of the plague. They bite people, who then become sick and die." "Fleas?" the man asked, unbelieving. "Your cities contain many rats. The rats are infested with fleas. If you kill the rats, the plague will subside." "The streets are littered with garbage. Rats move in packs, through houses, fields -- everywhere." "Killing the rats is the key," I said. "Aren't there rats in the city? Strays? You could even let housecats into the streets." "They are minions of the devil, harbingers of evil. We shun them, cast them out from our cities." "That was unwise," I said. "Cats will prey upon the rats. When the cat population shrinks, the number of rats carrying the fleas increases dramatically. This allows the plague to spread as it has." "Surely not! Because of rats and fleas, we are dying?" "Yes." I wondered how I could obtain more medicine. I wasn't a pharmacist. I thought of pretending to be sick, to secure a prescription for antibiotics. That, plus some free samples from my doctor... But this would be fifty, maybe sixty pills in all. It wouldn't make any real difference to a city. Perhaps I could find a physician, explain all of this to him, hoping to enlist his help in supplying more medicine. I dismissed this notion quickly. I feared the portal and all that it might mean, both for the past, the present, and the future. I couldn't risk revealing this to anyone else. The portal would be a powerful weapon in the wrong hands. "I have no more medicine," I said. His vacant stare pierced the centuries, penetrated my soul. I didn't know what else I could do to help. "Will the plague pass?" he asked. "Is there hope for our future, and that of our children?" "It will pass," I said. "The future holds much promise, many powerful events and discoveries which will shape human history." "Tell me about them!" he pleaded. He was trembling, down on his knees, begging me for words of hope for humanity. I was flooded with ideas, too quickly to relate all of them to him. There was the settling of the New World, the births and deaths of nations, wars, discoveries in every field of knowledge, political, social, and spiritual enlightenment. I didn't know where to begin. Just as quickly as the ideas had begun pouring through my mind, they stopped. I realized it would take a long time to explain the future. Most of what I wanted to say would be very difficult to make sensible to him -- the moon landing, for example, the advent of computer technology, the proliferation of new forms of government, particularly democracy. Then it hit me -- I could bring him books! Sources of knowledge he could read and digest slowly. All the texts I had were in English, but I sensed his keen intelligence, his education. He would find a way to translate them and make sense of them as best he could. Just as I was glimpsing the past, he would see into the future. I would give him knowledge, not medicine. It was the best I could do. "I will bring you knowledge of the future, tomorrow," I said. "Meet me here." "I shall be here, wise one," he said, bowing as he tightened the drawstrings on the sack. He turned and hurried off across the field, toward the city. I sat down, listened to the roar of surf as the stars moved slowly overhead. I held the portal tightly in my hands, wondering who had created this magical device, enabling me to see across the centuries to a medieval town in the French countryside. I wondered who had come before me, and whether one or more people would return here to reclaim it. If the portal could see across time, then perhaps it had been created by someone from my own future, sent through time, or lost in time by its creator. Despite its small size, the portal was a device of incredible power. I got home and emptied my bookcases of history, from the age of the Dinosaurs through the present year. I had several large picture books on the history of technology, and I added those to the pile. Most of the books were hardbound, all of them written in English. I tore the hardcovers from the books. I would have to roll the books tightly to slide them through the portal. After eating dinner, I loaded the books into several large bags and set off for the beach. During the drive, all I could think about was the portal, how it got there, what it's original purpose had been. I couldn't imagine that someone just left the portal on the shore. A major storm had struck the area two days earlier, and perhaps the huge surf had dredged the portal from the bottom and washed it up on the beach. I arrived at the beach at sunset. I scouted around the sand dunes but saw no one else in the area. Returning to the car, I slung the bags over my shoulder and walked to the proper location. Through the portal, I saw the old man already waiting for me. I called out to him, and he approached. I began to roll up each book and slide it through the portal. He was glancing through some of the pages as I continued to hurry the books back through time. After sending him the books, I rolled up the sacks and shoved them through as well. "How far into the future will I see, by reading these books?" He was marveling at the color pictures, the fineness of the paper, the smallness and perfection of the print. "To the year 1999," I said. "And beyond that?" he asked. "There isn't any history beyond that which I can show you." "The turn of the millenium," he whispered. He stood watching me with a look of shock. I felt his agony, over the plague and the chaos it brought to his world. I wanted to help him more than I already had, but every time I looked through the portal, every page of history, every pill I gave to him made me doubt myself. What was done was done. I couldn't reverse the history I had already changed. Yet the whole process -- my interference in the order of things, was unnatural, immoral. I turned and left before my resolve softened. I heard him shouting to me, so I clamped my hand over the end of the portal and ran for my car. During the drive home, I listened to news on the radio. I heard a story, about a physician named Dr. Tyler who had been missing for days now. Some of the wreckage from his boat had recently been recovered by the Coast Guard. The boat had disappeared in the severe storm earlier that week. Huge plastic bags full of drugs had been found in the wreckage. The drug contents had been identified as penicillin. The boat had been within several miles of the beach where I found the portal. I knew at once that Dr. Tyler had possessed the portal before me. He would have had the will and the means for getting plague-fighting antibiotics into the hands of the old frenchman, perhaps himself a physician of his time. I wondered how much Tyler had changed history, or whether this was an alternate timeline, a different universe that we had both affected through the portal. I returned home and hid the portal in the basement until I could decide what to do with it. Powering up my computer, I decided to perform a web search, using the words "France", "plague", and "Montpellier". Several dozen entries about a 16th century physician, visionary, and prophet topped the search results, Michele de Nostredame. Nostradamus! I quickly followed a path to a biography of the famous physician, and it all made sense to me. I had already played a part in rewriting history. Though Tyler had given Nostradamus medicine capable of defeating the plague, I had given him knowledge of almost five centuries of future history. Nostradamus -- the only physician of his time recorded to have successfully cured victims of the Great Plague. Visionary and Prophet -- a man who foresaw the future, the airplane, the rise and fall of Hitler, World War II. Amongst his prophecies, a warning about the changing of the millenium, the year 2000, the year when the world would end. Of course! I had given him no history beyond the current year, 1999, and Nostradamus had presumed it was the last year in history! I realized I had one last part to play in this. I had to hide the portal where no one would ever find it. I set off the next day and traveled far into the desert. I drove off the road, climbed into the hills and found a crevasse between the rocks. I dropped the portal into the dark chasm and returned home. Perhaps the rightful owners of the portal would someday find it through the maze of past and future possibilities, the fabric of space and time. But my role in its history was complete.
