portal n.

If I stepped between the columns, could I return to the human sphere by a reversal of my precipitation therefrom? And if so, by what inconceivable beings from foreign time and space had the columns and boulders been established as the portals of a gateway between two worlds?

Portrero, still stumbling, still clutching vainly in air, pitched forward into black shadow and vanished in the nothingness of the dark shaft that was a portal to a waiting world.

I went nearer the stone temple, and a huge doorway loomed in front of me. Within that portal were swirling shadows that seemed to dart and leer and try to snatch me inside that awful darkness. I thought I saw three flaming eyes in the shifting void of a doorway, and I screamed with mortal fear. In that noisome depth, I knew, lurked utter destruction—a living hell even worse than death. I screamed again. The vision faded.

A mirrored panel slid aside and revealed the lighted interior of the stowaway’s lodgings with a magical effect, as if a four-dimensional portal had opened among the trees into another region of space.

Long ago, my people…first went from our world into yours through the Portal my ancestors had learned to open. They first peopled your Earth! [Ibid. 40/2] Let them go back through the Portal to their own world!

I walked to one side of the machine and stared at the wall directly behind the frame. It was a normal wall and I should have seen it from the front. Instead, I was looking at something right out of this world. There were trees and a rolling plain…. I forgot them as I saw the people.…. ‘Can they see us?’ ‘Only if they look directly at the portal.’ ‘And we can get to them?’ ‘Certainly.… More current is needed in ratio to the mass of the object passing through the portal.’

He did not come with us. He was sent through the time portal to another period in history much later than this one. If I am to find him, there is only one possible avenue. Zarabeth, will you show me where the time portal is?

Is this the portal to my own world? [Ibid. 13/2] I have to go there. It is there that the portal to my own time line exists. Without it, I must remain here forever.

Nuel is working on a mysterious project that seems to open on alternate realities, but there’s a hitch, and Nuel volunteers to go through the portal and try to fix it from the other side. Once there, he finds a world much like Earth.

The girl is still able to pass through a portal in a painted rock into the spirit world.

How in the name of cold sweat and stomach cramps had we created an intradimensional portal from a simple storm-calling chant? After a couple of beats, my brain shifted out of shock and into more practical questions: Where did the portal lead? I had no clue, but by the look of it, it sure wasn't a beachside resort.

We have wormholes and portals stretching almost halfway around the galaxy…. We are not and never will be ‘caged in’. Stop thinking in pre-spaceflight terms.