As I shimmied down the cave passage, I thought how good It was good to be away from the stench of male. None of those big penises could fit down here.
A steady wind blew from behind, whooshing past my body in this particularly narrow section. I felt the pressure on my ears and kept on going.
Eventually, I emerged into the central Sucking Chamber, where my team of scientists, all female, had gathered. All of us were breathing heavily and showing some discomfort from the reduced pressure. I looked over at the barometer, and indeed it had dropped a bit since yesterday when we had widened the crack with a drill.
“OK, let’s proceed.”, I ordered.
We gathered up the modified diving suits and put them on, pairing up to check each other’s seals and make sure the air was flowing. These suits had been originally designed to resist ten atmospheres of external pressure when diving underwater. We had modified them to handle one atmosphere of internal pressure against a vacuum.
Arrayed around us were the twenty-seven metal doorways, each an altar where generations of females had laid offerings to the Ancient Gods who had forged the doors. Except, as my team had discovered by spectroscopic analysis, these metals were just steel alloyed with various rare elements, and we were already having some success in replicating it in our experimental foundry. We also realized that this metal was not quite eternal and the famous sucking of the Door of the Spring God was actually caused by a crack that, according to the historical record, had only started nine hundred years ago.
I turned to this cracked Door of the Spring God where, in an act of defiant sacrilege, we had used a diamond-tipped cutter to slash a hole through the door. I led the group and stepped through the hole into the small chamber beyond. My team followed. Ahead of us was another door, also with a crack, slightly widened by our drill, outlined by a rime of frost where the air whistled through.
We deployed the oiled canvas cover over the hole behind us and heard it thunk shut as the air pressure secured it in place.
We all watched the barometer, and as predicted the pressure started to drop. I felt my pressure suit inflate and stiffen around me. The incidental sounds of our party gradually quieted and then faded to silence. I looked at the barometer and saw that it was zero.
I felt a shudder of excitement. This was confirmation of the astounding hypothesis that beyond the second door was a vacuum that was of such immense volume that it never was filled by the nine century’s steady flow of air through a crack. What could that be, deep beneath the ground? We knew from seismography that there was no evidence of any large voids in the depths of the world. Finally, we were going to solve the mystery.
I raised my front limb in silent command and the diamond-tipped cutter started to dig into the second door. While it worked I looked around at the small chamber sealed between the two doors. Like in so many sacred places scattered around the world, there was the undecipherable writing of the Ancient Gods, and the inscrutable boxes full of elaborate metal patterns that we were just beginning to understand as long-dead devices that had manipulated electrical current in some complex way.
The cutter finished cutting the four cuts and a person-sized rectangle fell away into the space beyond. There was no sound in the vacuum, but I felt the vibration through my feet as heavy metal hit the ground beyond.
I walked up and gingerly poked my head through, There was a large room, full of devices of the Gods, but dominated by one singular sight: a hemisphere of stars about one person-length in diameter. I stared for a while, mesmerized, and then clambered through the cut opening to get a better look. I approached the hemisphere, which looked like a large decorative silver bauble reflecting a starry sky, except there was no sky here to reflect. My team followed me in, and we arrayed ourselves around, silently contemplating and trying to understand. As we moved around, the patterns changed as if it was reflecting the sky. Then one of my students come over to me, excitement on her face. She pressed her helmet against mine, so we could talk despite the vacuum.
“Don’t you see? It’s not a reflection. It’s a doorway.”
Without warning, she went right up to the surface of the hemisphere and before anyone could stop her she placed her front limb on it … and it went straight through. She pushed the front part of her body in, and it looked like a distorted reflection in the bauble. Then I saw she was falling in, and a look of alarm spread over her face. I rushed forward to grab her back leg but it slipped away from me, and she was fully inside the hemisphere.
I gestured for someone to hold on to my back legs, and I lunged forward into the hemisphere and felt nausea and a sense of falling. But there was the student floating in a void. I grabbed her back leg and looked behind me. Now the hemisphere looked like a distorted reflection of the room I had come from, with one of my team reaching out of it and holding three of my back legs.
Quickly they pulled us back in and gravity returned, pulling us to the floor. The student had vomited in her pressure suit and was in some distress, so we quickly retreated into the space between the two doors, placed a second oiled canvas over the hole we had cut and pushed at the cover of the outer door to release the seal and let the air rush in.
The student ripped off her helmet, but was oblivious to the vomit on her face, and screamed in excitement.
“It’s a doorway. It’s a doorway. It’s a doorway to outer space.”