The Door

The unnamed moon wasn’t really discovered, it was given a number and catalogued. The moon orbited a gas giant with a similar number in the same catalogue. The unnamed and numbered star the planet orbited was of course plotted long ago. The orbits of the planet and the moon were first plotted by an unmanned probe. The probe concluded - incorrectly - that there was nothing of note in the system. The system was left lonely for several centuries after the probe left. 

It wasn’t until a lone starship with engine troubles stopped in the system for maintenance. The ship’s troubles were common and uninteresting. The ship itself was an ordinary transport ship. While the engineering crew fixed the ship a few of the crew landed on the moon for some “fresh air” in their space suits. The three of them explored the moon and found a cave to explore. The cave itself was as uninteresting as the moon, the planet, and the star. It was what they found deep within the cave that was truly discovered, the Door. 

Three of the crew from the ship were exploring the cave together when they discovered the Door. They of course didn’t realize what it was at first. The lights from their suits fell across it and they did not see it for the marvel that it was. They saw a freestanding doorway in the middle of the cave. It was obvious to them that it wasn’t natural. It has been said that nature abhors a vacuum. This is false. Nature abhors straight lines especially when intersecting at right angles as the edges of this doorway was. The frame appeared to be constructed out of the rock in some manner all though it was perfectly smooth. Their lights bounced off it in the same way as the rest of the cave. In the middle of the door was a matte black door. Or so it appeared to them.

“Hey, check this out,” one of the trio said.

“Where do you think it came from?” 

That was when the first one tried to touch the middle of the door. That was when they discovered that the door was something more than just a door. 

The man reached out with his hand to touch it but his hand passed right through the blackness and disappeared. The man lost all sensation in his hand. He screamed as he was slowly pulled into the Door, not in agony but in fear. The other two tried to pull him back, but the steady pull of the Door was as inevitable as death itself. The Door pulled in his arm, disappearing it into its utter black. Soon the black was up to his shoulder. His head quickly followed, cutting off his screams. And then he was gone. 

The man was never seen again.

It wasn’t until a year later that the second ship arrived at the moon to investigate the wild claims of the other crew. The ship was little more than a simple scouting ship. A crew of five. The ship was designed for two things, speed and camouflage. It wasn’t a science vessel by any means. The crew was equally inept at science. None of them had any real science experience. Fortunately for them, they knew enough to keep themselves alive. 

After they threw a few rocks through the Door and saw them disappear into the black, they tried long bars of steel. They touched one end to the Door and then tried to pull it out, but they could not pull the bars back even the slightest inch. The slow and steady pull of the Door pulled the bars in one by one. That was when they knew enough to know they were out of their depth. They left the moon shortly afterwards to report what they had discovered. Unlike the transport ship’s crew before them, they recorded their experiences with the Door. They brought back the recordings with them. Even with these recordings, there were those that were sceptical. 

The scepticism over the scouts report took several years to overcome. Even then the exploration of the Door was given a low priority. It was several more years until a ship and crew was given the mission to explore the Door. The ship that was finally given the mission was named the Endurance. It was one of many ships bearing that name. It was the unique identification number which differentiated the ship from the others. The ship had a crew of seven most of whom actually had science backgrounds. 

The Endurance landed on the moon a little ways from the cave entrance. The crew of the ship gathered their gear and followed the route the first exploratory ship through the cave. They quickly found the Door, standing solemnly as if waiting for them.

“It sure doesn’t look like much,” one of the crew commented before they started to set up their equipment. They set up floodlights to illuminate the small cavern the Door occupied and recording equipment which would be able to detect the slightest of movements. 

“I’m not getting any light or radiation coming from the Door.”

“Did you check to make sure that thing is working? Everything emits some radiation.”

“I’m aware of that. I’ve checked that it’s working twice now.”

One of the crew was a geologist, he was working with the archeologist and the engineer, studying the frame of the Door. They studied it closely under the best microscope of the time and found it to be no different from the rock of the surrounding cave. Except, when they tried to scrape off a sample from the frame for a closer look, they found they were unable to remove even the slightest amount from the Door. They were unable to determine why they were unable to damage the Door’s frame. Eventually they took a hammer to the frame but were unable to cause any damage to the Door.

All the while, the crew was careful not to touch the black surface of the Door. 

After learning only more perplexing questions from their initial investigation, the crew turned their attention to the black of the Door. The first test was to simply toss a rock through the Door. They all watched the slow motion replay which only brought more questions. As soon as any part of the rock broke the surface of the Door, it disappeared while leaving the rest of the rock intact - at least until the rest of the rock fell into the black. 

The next thing they tried was a chain which was attached to a winch capable of pulling several tons of weight. The crew touched one end of the chain to the Door and quickly brought tension to the chain. It was strange to see the chain simply end in the middle of the Door, as if held in place. They turned on the winch, slowly bringing it up to full power, but they never pulled the chain out even a single nanometer. They had to pull the emergency release on the chain before the steel snapped. They watched as the chain was slowly pulled into the Door. 

The next test was an attempt to see if what passed through the Door was instantly destroyed. They used a pipe through which they could pump air. There was a bend in the pipe so that it was shaped like a J. They turned on a pump on the long end of the J and began to pump air through the pump. They then touched the middle of the bend to the Door. Pressure quickly began to build. Air was not being allowed out. That meant that the pipe was still intact. When the short end of the pipe passed through the Door, the pressure was released as the air once again found a way out of the pipe. So what passed through the Door wasn’t destroyed - at least not right away. 

There were many other experiments and redundant checks over the next month, but in the end the team of scientists were unable to find out anything more significant about the Door. They had spent over a month investigating the Door and had little to show for their effort. They left the Door behind, leaving it as one of the great mysteries of the universe. 

The Door was alone for over a decade after the crew of the Endurance left it behind. The story of its mystery grew over the years. Many studied the recordings of the experiments. Some were looking for evidence of a fraud. Others for understanding of this mystery. 

It was the one from the Endurance crew which visited the Door. He came alone in a small vessel. He had been one of those which had carefully studied the recordings. He had concluded that someone may survive the trip through the Door. He came and stood in front of the Door for hours, staring into the black of its abyss before saying, “I have to know.” He stepped through the Door and into the abyss. 

The mystery of the Door grew over the decades. As with all great unsolved mysteries, the mystery surrounding the Door took on an almost religious tone. It was over three decades since the man from the Endurance crew had stepped through the Door that the first of the Pilgrims followed him. Over the next century dozens of Pilgrims found their way to the Door. Some kept their nerve and stepped through into the mystery of the unknown and some failed and left in disgrace. The century that followed saw a rise in the number of Pilgrims. Their numbers grew so that they came in crowds, to march through in groups. The centuries that followed saw the numbers of Pilgrims steadily decline as the Door came to be feared for none returned which past into its black abyss. After a millennia the recordings the crew of the Endurance were all corrupted or lost. After another millennia past, the Door was just another myth. Time marched on and the Door was lost in the memory of humanity. 

The Door waited patiently to be discovered anew once again. 

The Door is patience. 

The Door is hunger. 

The Door is Death.