Chapter 3

The incessant sound of the door buzzer permeated the room until even Buck was wide awake. He rubbed his eyes and stiff neck.

"I'm coming," he hollered toward the door.

He stumbled across the apartment to open the door. Wilma smiled at him broadly. "Morning!" she said cheerfully.

He looked at her briefly before sudden realization hit him. "The flight!" he almost screamed.

He rushed back into the apartment and grabbed his flight suit. "Be right back!" he said as he rushed into the bathroom. Wilma entered the apartment and allowed the door to close silently.

"Buck, are you alright?" she called through the closed bathroom door. "It's not like you to oversleep and be late for a mission."

"Yeah, I'm fine," a muffled voice sounded through the door. "I was just having a dream that was so… realistic."

"About what?"

The door opened and Buck came out dressed in the same white uniform as Wilma. He simply smiled sheepishly. "Oh nothing important. Shall we go?"

Together they traveled to the top-secret hangar beneath the Directorate building. When they entered the private space port, they instantly saw a single starfighter sitting in the middle of the hangar. Several men dressed in white lab coats circled the starfighter while one stood near the ladder to the hatch. He carried an electronic clipboard filled with information on the prototype. When Buck and Wilma entered the hangar, he turned to face them. Impatiently he waved at them.

"You must be my pilots," he said when they were close enough to hear.

"Yes, I'm Captain Rogers."

"Colonel Deering."

He nodded once as he looked back down at his clipboard. "You're late."

Buck glanced at the watch Princess Ardala had given him recently. "Really? I have two till."

"Then your timepiece is wrong," the old man stated matter of factly. "I am Doctor Avery. Please allow me to introduce you to your controls."

He started up the ladder. Buck glanced at Wilma and shook his head. "Who spit in his Cheerios?"

"I can hear you, Captain."

Wilma smiled and waved Buck to climb the ladder. He shrugged his shoulders and climbed up into the spacious cockpit, followed closely by Wilma.

"Who is going to be the pilot?" Avery asked.

Buck raised his hand. "That would be me," he said as he started toward the command chair at the left of the cockpit.

"You'll want this seat then, Captain Rogers," Avery said, indicating the seat to the right of the cockpit.

Buck furrowed his eyes, but didn't reply. He changed directions to sit in the right hand seat as Wilma took the seat to the left. Buck leaned over to whisper into Wilma's ear.

"Must be a British model."

"British?" Wilma asked.

"Drives on the right instead of the left," Buck explained. "You know: British."

"What is 'British'?" Avery asked.

Buck simply rolled his eyes. "Nothing."

Avery nodded impatiently. "I assume you are familiar with the controls of a starfighter?" he asked indignantly.

Buck nodded. "Yeah, I've flown a couple here and there," he answered. "Never a British model, though," he added under his breath.

"Good. The controls for this starfighter are almost identical to your ordinary starfighter, with only a few modifications. For this experiment, we will have two ships. You will be flying this one which is equipped with the experimental device and we have another pilot flying a normal starfighter which will monitor your progress from a visual distance of a thousand meters. How much has Doctor Huer told you about this prototype?"

"Just that you're trying to make it invisible," Wilma replied quickly.

"Both visually and electronically," Buck added.

Avery nodded. "Yes. We will have someone following you in a starfighter to monitor you visually and we will also be watching you electronically from here. Now this little device here…" Doctor Avery rested his hand on an unfamiliar piece of equipment situated evenly between the two seats. "This is the real experiment. There is a gauge here that Colonel Deering will want to keep her eye on while the Captain flies the ship. This instrument here is the key to this experiment. In the laboratory we have had overwhelming success in making objects disappear when we activate this."

"Is it safe?" Wilma asked.

"If I didn't feel it was safe, then I wouldn't allow the two of you near it. Combat pilots are a rare commodity in New Chicago. I wouldn't unnecessarily risk losing two of our best. Now of course we haven't tried anything quite to this scale of experimentation yet but we believe all the calculations are correct. When this gauge reads 'eighty-seven', the copilot will pull this lever all the way back like this."

He yanked on the lever until it rested horizontally with the arms of the seats. "Nothing happened," Buck noticed.

"Of course not," Avery smirked. "This gauge reads zero. Nothing is going to happen until the gauge reads eighty-seven."

"So where are you hiding the flux capacitor?"

Avery looked at Buck blankly. "The flux… what?"

Buck shook his head, smirked. "Never mind."

"What does this gauge measure?" Wilma asked curiously.

"I don't want to confuse you with technical talk which would only serve to confuse you from the main part of your mission. Just suffice it to say it is measuring our success for this mission." Avery looked up to see another figure walking across the hangar. "Ahh, the rest of our crew is here."

Buck looked out the hatch to see Twiki and Doctor Theopolis rushing toward the starfighter. Buck quickly left his seat and helped Twiki up the ladder and into the cockpit.

"Hey, Doc. You coming too?"

"The development team thought it would be wise to have someone monitor conditions inside the experimental field as well as the external sensors," Theo replied.

"The development team?"

"Beep-be-de-de-beep: he just wanted to come along."

"I thought it would be a good idea to have someone along to monitor life signs, possible atmospheric changes, course changes… anything that could advance the …"

Buck chuckled. "Sure, Theo. The more the merrier. If you were planning to come along, why do you need Wilma and me?"

"As much as I hate to admit, some things still need a human hand and intuition. If something were to go wrong, you and Colonel Deering are more than capable of overcoming obstacles that I or a drone couldn't."

"Beep-be-de-de-beep: I think that was a compliment, Buck."

He rolled his eyes, grinned. "Now I know something's up!"

Doctor Avery stood and headed for the ladder. "I believe everything is ready. Are you ready, Captain?"

"Sure thing. I'm ready to fire up the DeLorean."

Avery cocked his head to one side. "Excuse me? What's a DeLorean?"

Buck closed his eyes for a moment. "I'm ready when you are, Doc."

"Very well."

Avery left the cockpit and returned to the control room just off the hangar. Within moments the starfighter was zooming over the vast desert east of New Chicago.

"Everything is reporting as normal," Avery announced over the radio.

"Everything feels good here," Buck said. "This flies just like a regular starfighter."

"The gauge is reading twenty-five," Wilma reported.

Buck turned briefly to face Theo. "So what's going to happen when this thing hits eighty-seven and we disappear?"

"Presumably nothing."

"Presumably?"
"This is the first time we've attempted this with a live human, before."

"A live human?" Buck repeated.

"We experimented with droids and they all performed admirably with no side affects or detriments. This is the first time with a human."

Buck nervously returned his eyes to the front of the cockpit. "That really instills me with a ton of confidence," he muttered.

"Don't worry, Captain Rogers. All the laboratory tests and mathematical computations indicate that it is perfectly safe for all involved."

"You're not helping my confidence any."

"Buck, the gauge reads seventy."

He glanced at Wilma. "Are we gonna be heroes for this?"

"If this works, we'll go down in history, just like Doctor Huer did for being the first Earthling to successfully navigate the stargate."

Buck glanced back at Theo. "You're at least going to owe me a dinner for this."

"Beep-be-de-de-beep: and a movie," Twiki chimed in. "With dessert."

Buck furrowed his eyes. "No thanks, Twiki. That's not an image I needed."

"Beep-be-de-de-beep: Heh, heh!"

"Eighty-five… eighty-six… eighty-seven…"

"Oh, man, this is heavy," Buck muttered as he closed his eyes for only a moment. "Okay, Wilma… throw the switch!"

She hesitated for a moment as she stared at Buck. He silently nodded once. "Here it goes," she said as she threw the switch to its horizontal position.

Suddenly the cockpit became filled with electrical discharges and static. Sparks flew all through the cockpit from console to wall and back to console. Buck fought the controls desperately to maintain course of the starfighter. The viewscreen almost instantly fogged up as the cockpit filled with smoke from the electrical discharges. The ship began to rotate as Buck slowly began to lose the battle for flight control.

"Buck! What's happening?"

"I don't know!" he yelled above the noise in the cockpit. "I can't see a thing! Instrumentation is going haywire! I'm flying blind! I can't be sure, but I think we're losing altitude! We're going down! Prepare to eject!"

The ship spun around several times until both pilots began to get dizzy. Wilma glanced behind her. Buck heard her gasp and turned to look at her.

"What is it, Wilma?"

"Buck! Theo… Twiki… they're… gone!"

"What do you mean gone?" Buck couldn't afford to look behind him as he continued to fight for control.

"Gone! As in they are no longer in the cockpit!"

"Where are they?"

"I don't know!"

Buck took a deep breath. "We'll have to worry about that later! I'm losing the ship! Prepare to eject!"

Wilma turned back around to face forward. "I'm ready!"

Buck slammed the palm of his hand on the ejection button. The canopy of the starfighter instantly blew off and both pilots were sent into the atmosphere. Buck continued to rotate in the air for several moments before the parachute deployed. He turned himself around to watch the starfighter completely disintegrate into the surrounding atmosphere. His eyes widened in disbelief as the ship simply vanished into thin air. He let his head droop forward dejectedly.

"Oh, man. I hope they don't take that out of my salary."

Then his eyes widened again. The ground below him was not a desert. He cocked his head to one side. He was floating to the ground in the middle of a massive forest. He glimpsed Wilma floating nearby but only one thing kept running through his mind: "Where in the world am I?"