In the Deadlands by David Gerrold Page B

the other direction of infinity—inwardly.
    Ping.
    The little wheels reappear, spinning madly. I pick one at random and down we go, and—
    Ping.
    â€”it becomes a big wheel. I head for a spiral arm, zigzag around the exploding core, and—
    Ping.
    â€”pop out at a here in the middle of empty brightness. Rocky nothingnesses whirl about it. The wrong one. Not mine. Try again. So—
    Ping.
    And this time, here is a blue and red binary, a pinpoint of bright and a bloated crimson vagueness. Streamers of blood-colored gas spiral outward from the giant. The lesser-sized one would have been lost among them if not for its brilliance. But— This one isn’t mine either.
    Ping.
    Up and out again. An explosion, a never-ending one. Dazzling, sleeting, brighting, sheeting, flaring, flashing, glaring, shimmering, slashing intensity of light so thick you have to push at it to move. All around me. All around. We hung at the core of the supernova and—
    FLASHED.
    The wheel again, the great wheel. No, that’s the wrong direction. I wanted to go the other way. My God, how big is that thing anyway? Immense. No, tiny—tiny, tiny, remember! I am immense. Remember the outer blackness, how big it is and how big I am and never fill it. That wheel is only a mote of dust in the hungry sucking dark. I am as big to the wheel as it is to me. I am small and vast and—
    Ping.
    I remember and dive back into it. Back to the home world, right, Woozle?
    Woozle?
    Hey, Woozle—where are you?
    Woozle...?
    I’m alone in the vampire dark. Somewhere I’ve lost my—
    â€œWoozle!!”
    No answer.
    I plunge through the night, carefully retracing. Where did I leave her? Where did I let go? She was with me here. Flash. Here. Flash. Here.
    She was with me all the way. Or was she? She wasn’t. She wasn’t with me at all.
    Flash/Ping.
    Back down into the wheel. Back down. Home system, home sun, home planet. Yeah, that’s it. Blue-white streaked disc. Dive into it.
    I know what must have happened. She couldn’t keep up. Yeah, that’s right. She couldn’t keep up. So she went home without me. She went on home. Yeah, that’s what she must have done. Yeah, that’s it. She wouldn’t just run off on her own.
    Into the disc and down the long tunnel and the walls unstretch, become a room again, and I land on the floor and down.
    The room is empty. And alone.
    All of them were empty—
    AFTERWORD:
    Other people open doorways that take them away from us. Sometimes we can follow those journeys, sometimes we can’t. Sometimes we want to and don’t.
    I sometimes wonder where they went and if I should have followed….

Oracle for a White Rabbit
    HARLIE and I have been friends for a long time. He insists on creeping into books that are not supposed to be about him and making them about him anyway. In every case, he’s been a damned pain in the ass—because he keeps asking uncomfortable questions. HARLIE’s job is to create ethical dilemmas.
    This story is his beginning.
    It was the sixties. Some writers were arguing that the use of drugs enhanced their creativity. Others disagreed, arguing that tampering with your brain chemistry was probably not a good idea.
    Myself, I was something of an agnostic on the issue. (Yes, I did try marijuana in college, but I didn’t exhale.) But it didn’t take me long to discover that the use of marijuana was slowing down my typing speed from 120 words per minute to no words per month.
    At this remove, decades later, I’m clear that drug use is a self-centered activity. It’s about what’s happening in your own head, not what’s happening in the physical universe. It doesn’t make a difference in the real world. It doesn’t contribute anything to anybody else. If anything, it degrades a person’s ability to make a difference.
    But I didn’t know it that way then and I couldn’t say it as clearly