Pinball by Alan Seeger

he done? He’d been such a fool to attempt to explore the void — the Gatespace, as Randolph called it. His mind whirled and his stomach churned. He felt sure he would lose the few bites of zobi he had eaten. Randolph reached over and put his hand on Steven’s shoulder.
    “Don’t be alarmed. I know what you are thinking,” he said. “You are under the impression that you have lost your loved ones. But you don’t yet fully understand how the Gates work, my boy.” Steven looked up at Randolph, waiting to hear more.
    “If you traverse the Gatespace again, and exit the Gate that you originally entered, which leads back to where you are from, you will be back in your own time again. The Gatespace permits travel through time as well as space,” Randolph explained. “However, know this: time does flow at different rates within and without the Gatespace, so you may discover that more time has elapsed than you are aware of, but generally it is not of a sufficient difference to cause any real harm.”
    Steven took a bite of the pink bread; it was be quite good, as was the sky-blue cheese. When he took a sip of the mug, he discovered it was a golden wine of some sort, with a sweet fruity tang, quite delicious. He realized he was extremely thirsty and drained it dry. Randolph smiled and took the mug to refill it.
    “I think I know what you mean about the difference in time,” Steven said. “The first time I went into the… the Gate, I felt like I was in there for a couple of days, but when I finally came out, my family said only ten minutes had gone by. The second time, it seemed like I was there twenty minutes, but to my family, I had been missing for two weeks.” 
    Randolph nodded sagely. “Time ebbs and flows in the Gatespace like the ocean tides, or like the weather. Time does not actually pass for you while you are inside, however — that is why you sometimes see beings from millennia past in there, and were they to emerge from a Gate, they would be as alive and well as the day they entered.”
    Steven frowned. “Can’t something be done to rescue them from that void?” he asked.
    “Many of us have debated that very question for years,” Randolph replied. “They’re not in any danger, as I said; it’s as if they are simply stored away,”
    “In cold storage,” Steven interjected.
    “Precisely. The overriding question is, were we to attempt to, as you ask, rescue them, how would we ever get them back to their own place and time? We have no way of knowing which Gate is the correct one, and while I see that you have come up with what I perceive as a rather ingenious way of propelling yourself through the Gatespace,” he gestured to the cans of compressed air which Steven had set on the table, “normally, persons who venture into the Gatespace are ill-equipped for the journey, often stumbling into a Gate unexpectedly. I understand that there is a group of what I believe you would call aeroplanes that has been floating in the Gatespace for decades of their native time. They flew into a Gate while on some sort of military excursion, I gather.”
    Steven sat in deep thought for several minutes. “So where do the Gates come from? Are they natural phenomena?”
    Randolph sat back in his chair. “Most of them are simply tears in the fabric of what I believe scientists of your day call space-time. We had a visit from a physicist a few years ago who hailed from considerably further into the future than we are, even here in Centra, and from what he was able to teach me — and my understanding is severely limited — there are a number of civilizations that have learned to create Gates on command by means of technology, but they take a huge amount of energy to create, let alone maintain. The naturally occurring ones, however, last for indeterminate times, sometimes mere minutes.” He saw the alarm on Steven’s face, and hurried to reassure him. “I wouldn’t worry, my boy. You mentioned that this was your