The Big Con

Chapter 11: "Trust Me"

McGusset gathered them all in a small lounge, a single round porthole letting in a little light from the west. It was comfortable enough, except for its size—smaller even than Grunkle Stan's TV parlor in the Mystery Shack. Its furnishings were as meager: one wall of bookshelves crammed with paperback science-fiction novels, a small round coffee table spread with electronics magazines and physics journals, a TV with a strangely flat screen, an armchair big enough for McGusset's girth, and a small sofa on which Mabel, Dipper, and Wendy were crowded together. The overhead light burned in a kind of wire cage. All in all, it looked nearly like a prison cell.

Wendy looked furious. "Hey, man, you can't keep us here if we don't want to stay!" she said. "You just try and keep us your prisoners!"

McGusset looked worried. "I probably couldn't stop you," he said. "Let's face it, I'm in terrible shape. You-all're my prisoners only because there's not any easy way for you to leave—leastways, not until four this afternoon, when there's another tour. And if I ask them to arrest you, they'll do it. Technically you-all're trespassing." When Wendy started to object, he raised his hands to ask for silence. "But I don't intend to do that. I jest need some time t'think it out—and some more information. Tell me again, bein' specific, just how you-all come to be here."

So the three kids went through the whole story. McGusset repeated their names: "Dipper Pines, Mabel Pines. Wendy Corduroy. And you-all are really from that other reality, y' say? Tell me about th' trip here one more time, please. All the detail you can recollect." Again McGusset had them describe the Admiral. He found a photo and said, "Are you right sure of your man, now? Does this look like him?"

They studied it. Wendy said, "Well, it does and it doesn't, y'know? It's like that photo of me and my brothers. I mean, I know I don't look like that now. Like Dip says, our bodies somehow changed so's we look like you guys now. I mean, five fingers—freaky! Usually in Gravity Falls you don't get all five 'til you're like an adult."

"But this could be a version of the Admiral," Dipper said. "He's not wearing an admiral's uniform here."

"D.D. was a captain when that was took."

Dipper stared at the picture. "Features are the same, but—I don't know, rounder-looking. More solid somehow. See, the basic features don't change. At the Con all the fans of the show knew we were who we are—well, they thought we were cosplaying."

When McGusset looked confused, Mabel put in helpfully, "Cosplaying is when people dress up like their favorite characters from some book or TV show or movie. Except I saw one guy who was supposed to be Bill Cipher, but he was just in a yellow suit and top hat. He looked nothing like a nacho chip."

"Look, look," Dipper said, holding up his brown bangs. "See? See this birthmark? I have the same birthmark in Gravity Falls."

"It's real?" McGusset asked. "Not make-up?"

"Not make-up," Dipper said. "I've always had this in my world, and I have it here. The Big Dipper."

"Which is how he got his name, 'cause he hates his real name. It's M-"

"Not important, Mabel!" Dipper said.

"But why? Nobody here will ever tell anybody from Gravity Falls. Why can't I say—"

"Because if you do, I'll explain shipping!"

Wendy stepped in: "Cool it, Mabes."

"Okay," she said, crossing her arms and frowning.

"Look, Dr. McGusset," Dipper said, "are you convinced that we do know Admiral D.D. Skipper?"

"What's the D.D. stand for?" Mabel asked.

Absently, McGusset replied, "Captain Skipper? Dee Dee. On account of his parents wanted a girl."

Mabel made an explosive sound, a badly-covered laugh. "Oh, man, and I thought Dip had it bad!"

As if he hadn't heard, McGusset went on, "I'm forced to say that you-all must have met Captain Skipper. Or a version of him, I reckon. That's surprisin'. You see, not everybody in the real world has an equivalent in the Gravity Falls universe."

"Uh, 'scuse me?" Wendy said. "Gravity Falls is in the real universe, dude."

"Well, yeah, I 'spect it seems so to you-all. Anyways, what first set me off onto workin' on a teleportation was a viewer that I built in college. I was lookin' for an instantaneous way of transmittin' and receivin' images and sound. Radio waves only go at the speed of light, y'know. Fast enough fer ordinary transmissions, but imagine an interstellar spaceship a hundred light-years from Earth. It'd take a hundred years for a radio call from them to reach us, an' another hundred for th' reply to get back to them. Anyways, when I tested my transmitter-receiver out, I got glimpses of strange worlds. I thought at first I was lookin' at other places in our galaxy, but then after a while and a lot of viewin', it became plain that whole other laws of physics applied in some of 'em. I wasn't lookin' across the universe, but plumb out of it."

"Oh," Mabel said. "That's why when I stuff my grappling hook inside my sweater here it's all bulgy and heavy instead of just sort of disappearing until I need it?"

"Yeah," McGusset agreed. "That's what some people call hammerspace. In our world it don't exist but in cartoons. When a cartoon character needs a great big sledgehammer, he reaches behind him, and there it is, out o' nowhere. In your world, I guess it lets you store stuff like your grapplin' hook—"

"Or my axe," Wendy said, pulling it from its sheath.

"Right, or your axe—why you even got an axe?"

"I live in the woods," she said. "Plus my dad's a lumberjack."

"Oh, well, that kinda makes sense. But—a grapplin' hook?"

"Every girl should have one," Mabel said firmly.

"Well, maybe you got a point. Where was I? Oh, yeah, I got glimpses of your world in my viewer all that time ago. Forty-odd years now. I even saw a sign that said 'Welcome to Gravity Falls.' An' I recognized a few faces, not many, but two or three over th' years who looked like caricatures of people I knew in th' real—in our world, I mean. There's a kind of echo of our worlds in each other, though it don't work all the time, I think. But how in th' blue-eyed blazes did your Capt—I mean Admiral Skipper know anything about our world?"

"Maybe he's like us, but in reverse," Dipper suggested. "Maybe he got pulled through the dimensions and wound up in Gravity Falls, with his body changed to look like people there."

McGusset sighed. "Naw, I can't buy that. I'd like to, but—well, the fact is—uh." He broke off and looked distressed. "See, Skipper was an old friend of mine from way back. His family is really rich on our earth. Mine was poor. But after college I went on to serve four years in the Navy. He was just a lieutenant then, and I was a communications and information warrant officer. But we talked each other's language, y' might say, liked the same books, had the same kinda wild ideas. When my hitch was up, I went into computers in civilian life, but Skipper an' I kept in touch. Back in '80 he called me an' told me about this theoretical teleportation idea an' asked if I'd come in as a special consultant. I did, I wound up designin' the tech, an' he was gonna be th' information officer. He was a Captain by then."

McGusset levered his bulk up from the chair and paced—three steps forward, three back in the small stateroom. "Guess you know how it turned out. Him an' me, we weren't on th' ship. We were in an observation vessel a hundred yards off. Time come for th' experiment to begin, an' somethin' went bad haywire. Purple flickerin' light. We could see sailors jumpin' off the Mistral. Heard horrible screams. Skipper told me to try to get th' thing under control. While I worked on the tech, he took a launch an' went over single-handed to help out best he could. Then there was a tremendous explosion, only with no sound—an' then nothin'. Jest th' ship rockin' there empty."

"That sounds horrible," Mabel said.

"It was, gal. The observation boat went over an' picked up seventeen sailors, all of them burned, all of 'em out of their minds and babblin'. Got on the ship. The trans-dimensional generator was cyclin' on low-standby. Nobody livin' on the ship. All we found were dead, their bodies mangled. But we could jest account for thirteen that way. Thirteen or maybe fourteen. I mean bad mangled. Anyways, forty-five of the crew, includin' all the officers, were missin'. So was Skipper. I never see him again. That was in spring of 1982, and I never see him from that day to this."

He sank back into the chair. "Aw, man. My hope was, these missin' sailors might be hung up in th' Between. I wanted to pull 'em out if I could, right what I done wrong. But if these here voices are theirs—I don't know. I just don't know." When he looked up, his eyes gleamed with unspilled tears. "This Admiral Skipper, yours I mean—he never mentioned me?"

Dipper teetered on the edge of a lie. If I say yes, maybe McGusset will listen to us! But seeing the man's miserable face, he said, "Honestly, no, sir, he didn't. But—but I think he meant for us to follow the ghost. I think somehow he knew we might—might wind up here, where we could get in touch with you."

"Dude," Wendy said, "Dipper didn't tell you this, but dig it: We, like, materialized in your old warehouse. Had your name on it and everything."

"My big workshop," McGusset mused. "Up in th' hills. They haven't torn it down?"

"Still there," Dipper said. "But the electricity's turned off. Everything's chained up. It's all empty."

"All empty. Huh. The last of my equipment was prob'ly taken out by the Navy. I kept a back-up generator goin' there in case the one on the Mistral broke down. In fact, I moved it onto th' Mistral after she was decommissioned. Th' Captain's estate bought the ship an' moored it here. I asked if I could get th' job of watchman an' caretaker, an' since I'd been a friend of Captain Skipper's and worked real cheap, I got it. Moved my spare generator out here—they'd took apart the one we'd used. Built a replacement, an' that's the one runnin' right this minute, and I also built another backup, it's on th' ship too. So my keepin' one of them goin' for thirty-odd years has got th' sailors and my old friend hung up. That what you're tellin' me?"

Dipper said, "Sir, I'm being completely honest here. I don't know what I'm saying. I only know that the—ghosts, the spirits, the entities, whatever, that are trapped and can't find their way need you to turn off the machine. That's what they begged us to do. I think that's what the Admiral wants you to do, too."

McGusset nodded miserably. "Had to have been two of 'em. My Skipper was jest a Captain when he bought it. But maybe—there's a kind o' resonance, y'know. Maybe your Admiral has some of my Captain in him." He lowered his gaze for a minute or so. Then he looked up and said, "Come with me. You can see it."

They followed him down another companionway—he barely fit the narrow space—and into a room from which the low thrumming sound came. It smelled acrid, like electricity and something burning slow and steadily. An array of computers, without monitors, stood in ranks twenty wide and three high on shelves across the width of the compartment. A metal table along a second wall held six monitors, three of them on. The three gave different readouts and showed sine-wave graphs, green and red and squirming like snakes.

The rest of the room was taken up by a cobbled-together looking conglomeration of parts and electronics. It produced the hum—or half of it did. The other half was cold and silent. "That's th' backup," McGusset explained. "It kicks on, off its own power, if the other'n acts up. Never has so far, though. I test the backup once a week."

"What happens if you turn the main machine off?" Dipper asked.

"That's jest it, boy. God knows. The field will collapse—you ain't aware of it because it's beyond human sensory detection, but there's a durn powerful trans-electromagnetic field pulsing through the whole ship. I turn the machines off, the field collapses in on itself—an' then—well, I don't know. It may be the men who vanished will come back into existence, alive and well and the same age as they were thirty and more years ago. Or they could show up, age instantly, an' die horrible deaths. Or if they're truly lost in th' Between space they might get released an' find their way to their eternal rest at last. Or—nothin' at all. I don't know. I ain't been able to find the mathematics to predict an outcome."

"Try it."

McGusset stared at a console. "All I have to do," he said, "Is throw the switch on that control. It'd shut it all down. But I'm scared. I don't know what-all will happen, boy. But I'm pretty sure that anybody who's still on this ship has a good chance of not survivin'."

"But we can't leave," Mabel said. "We're your prisoners."

"Naw, naw, I take that back. I release you," McGusset said. "When the next tour comes this afternoon, you-all can get on the ferry. I'll fix it for you. Late tonight, when you-all're safe ashore—I'll cut th' power."

"No," Dipper said.

"What?"

Dipper took a deep breath. "If that happens—if the field collapses and we're not inside it—I don't think we can ever get back to our own world, sir. I'm pretty sure we have to be here so we can go back through the Between or whatever it is. We went through one glowing portal thing on our world to get here. We have to be wherever on this side the one will open to return."

"You got nothin' to back that," McGusset said.

"One thing," Dipper said. "We've been there before."

McGusset looked at all three of them. Wendy stepped up and put her hand on Dipper's shoulder. Mabel gripped his hand in hers.

"You all feel that-a way?" McGusset asked.

"Yeah," Wendy said. "What Dipper said goes for us, too."

"We have to be together," Mabel said very softly. Then, in a choked voice, she said, "Dipper, I'm sorry I've been bugging you so much. It's just—I've been trying to hide it, but I'm so scared!"

"Mabel," Dipper said with a smile, "never stop bugging me! You wouldn't be you if you did!" To McGusset, he said, "We want to be here when it happens. Shut it down, Mr. McGusset."

The fat hand hovered over the control. "I got so much on m'conscience already—I jest don't know."

"Trust me," Dipper said.

McGusset closed his eyes. He closed his fingers on the switch. Then, barely whispering, he said, "I trust you, Dipper Pines," and cut the power.

Mabel said, "Hey! He's cosplaying m—"

And in a brilliant purple flash, the world went away.