He sped towards the azure hole formed by the fluffy white clouds watching his instruments closely. He needed to maintain 178 miles per hour and enter the portal at the exact center. A tedious task for most pilots since most planes nowadays tended to stall at 150 mph. This plane was designed with this in mind. It would not stall until it reached 200 mph. It also had a new autopilot devices that would accurately calculate the exact center of the ever-changing cloud formation until the plane actually entered or the clouds broke formation.
This gateway system was not perfect and not reproducible yet. The science was why he was doing this. He discovered one such portal when he was just a young man flying his granddads Cessna 185, a water plane. He was seventeen. It took him almost three years to figure out how to return.
He learned their language, their history (some of it anyway) and their world. It was much like ours; the landmasses were in the same places. The governments were completely different, they actually got along, helped each other out. They looked exactly like us, human, except the bridge of their nose. It was a continuation of the skull, which continued down to form the tip of a nose then angled back to join with the upper jaw. Almost like a beak. The rest of their physiology was the same as ours. Their technology was slightly behind ours though as if they were learning from our technology that happened to come through to their side.
Finding a cloud portal proved difficult, since they were so fleeting. His plane was intact and he was able to use their fuel so he flew a lot. He did not stray too far from the area he had come through. He figured that the cloud portals had to have a positional anchor point of some sort. As it was, his return was as much luck as it was science.
Upon his return, he described what he had found to his parents and local authorities, both of which dismissed out of hand as some sort of delusion. At least until the government came to take him away. After they heard his story, they began to ask very specific questions about coordinates and airspeed when crossing from each side. Of course he did not know how fast, he just knew that he was pushing the limits of the Cessna when he saw the hole and decided go through it. Although he did know where he went through he did not know the exact coordinates.
They asked if he see anything strange while making the transition. He told them it had been almost three years and he had been through alot but he did not remember anything else. The land looked the same. He assumed he was still in this world. It was not until he landed did reality sink in.
