Hari said, “Soooo…if we go by that, dare we assume a periodicity somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, eighteen hours?”

“We can dare. The trucks made a delivery here yesterday afternoon and again this morning. I don’t know the exact times off the top of my head, but the interval seems like roughly eighteen hours and—hey, wait. Uh-oh.”

“Don’t do that.”

They were already trapped on an alien landscape. She didn’t need to hear Uh-oh.

“My tablet downloaded the latest signal report right before we entered the passage. It says all of the reported signals, including two-thirty-sevens, have synchronized their frequencies with the Prime Frequency.”

“Why does that rate an ‘uh-oh’?”

“What if synching with this Prime Frequency means two-thirty-seven won’t open the passage anymore?”

Hari’s heart clenched. “Now who’s Debbie Downer?”

“Sorry.” He pointed to the dashboard clock. “It’s noonish back in our world. We’ve been here, what, half an hour? That means—if signal two-thirty-seven still opens the passage—”

Hari whacked him on the arm. “Do not mention that again. I’m serious.”

“Okay, okay. If we’ve got the interval right, that means the mountain wall will open at five or six a.m. or thereabouts.”

The wind rocked the SUV.

“Let’s just hope we don’t freeze to death before that.”

He stared at her. “Seriously?”

“Very seriously. Because I can’t see how we have eighteen hours of running time in the gas tank.”

He held up the foil packet. “But we do have this super-duper reflecting survival blanket. We can turn on the engine and the heater intermittently and maintain our body heat under this.”

Hari watched askance as he began unfolding the foil blanket. “You’re talking about snuggling under that?”

He laughed. “Well, we don’t have to ‘snuggle,’ exactly, but we should stay close. Shared body heat is a tried-and-true method of surviving the cold. They say Eskimos sleep with their huskies on cold nights. On a regular cold night they use one dog; when it’s colder they bring in a second dog; and a three-dog night is the coldest of them all.”

She couldn’t resist. “So I’m a dog?”

“No-no-no! I didn’t—”

She waved off his explanation. “Kidding. I guess it’s a good thing then this Tahoe has a bench seat up here.”

“You haven’t asked, but yes, I have heard of Three Dog Night.”

“Name one song.”

“‘Joy to the World,’ so there’s hope for me yet.” He handed her a corner of the foil. “Get under this—up to your chin and tuck your feet up under you while I skootch over.”

As their shoulders bumped, she said, “Don’t get any ideas.”

“Oh, believe me: Being stranded on another planet is not my idea of a first date.”

“Yeah, you really know how to show a girl a good time.”

FRANKIE

P. Frank Winslow pulled page sixty-two out of the typewriter and added it to the pile, then leaned back and considered the stack of pages he’d typed. Averaging two hundred-fifty words per page, that came to 15,000 words. In less than one day! In all his years of writing he’d never done that. Never even come close.