The Broken Universe (14 page)

“I need your help,” John said.

“You look like…”

“I am you, just not from this universe,” John said. He smiled as he said it. The last time he had tried to confront a version of himself, he’d wanted to use violence and lies. This time, he was telling only the truth. “Step over here and I’ll explain.”

John-7458 looked back down the hall, and then shrugged. He had no shoes on, but he followed John to the middle of the lawn.

“Go on.”

“There are a lot of universes out there,” John said. “I’m from one like this one, but a little different. I have a device that allows me to travel between universes. Right now, another version of us is in trouble and we need to drive to Kelleys Island to help him.”

“That’s … ridiculous.”

“I know. I felt the same way when I figured all this out,” John said. “I know that you’re skeptical. I know you don’t want to believe me, but you can come with me and have the adventure of your life, or you can let me borrow your car, or you can turn me away.”

“My car?”

“Like I said, I need to get to Kelleys Island, as soon as possible.”

“This makes no sense!”

“Yeah, it’s tough to comprehend,” John said. “Did you go to college last year?”

“Yeah, University of Toledo.”

“Did you study physics?”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Was Dr. Wilson your advisor?”

“Yeah, he was. How do you know all that?”

“Did you meet Grace and Henry?”

“They were a year behind me, but I know them. She’s kinda weird.”

“Are you dating Casey Nicholson?”

“Uh, well…” John-7458 blushed.

“It all happened to me too,” John said. “Only it was another universe, and slightly different because I have this device.” He lifted up his shirt.

John-7458 bent low to look at it. He peered at the device, its buttons and switches.

“Show me,” he said.

John nodded.

“Okay, put your arm around my shoulder,” John said. “Tell your parents not to worry.”

John-7458 turned back toward the house, where his parents stood in the doorway.

“I don’t know what’s about to happen,” John-7458 said. “Maybe nothing, but if something does, don’t worry.”

John added, “We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

He put his arm around John-7458’s shoulder and pressed the button, taking them back to 7651.

The house disappeared, replaced by the empty field where John’s house should have been in 7651.

“Oh my god!” John-7458 cried.

“Calm down, it’s okay,” John said. “Let’s start walking over this way.”

“Why? Take us back!”

“We need to walk over here to get back. Come on.”

John-7458 stood there as John walked off across the road toward the quarry. Then John heard him run to catch up.

“What’s that building?” he asked. “The quarry by my house is abandoned.”

“It usually is,” John said. “We have a fixed transfer gate in that building to get us back to your universe.”

Grace and Henry popped out of the shack.

“Hey, John and John,” Grace said. “Is he convinced?”

“Henry, Grace?” John-7458 said. He seemed a little wobbly on his feet.

“Not quite yet,” John said.

“So there’s a third one of us,” John-7458 said, “who needs our help?”

“Yeah, I’ll explain things on the way to Kelleys Island. You ready?”

“I don’t know. It seems so far-fetched,” he said. “But…” He spun around, looking at the building, staring back at where his house wasn’t. He finally nodded, coming to some conclusion. “Okay. I guess you can borrow the car,” he said. “But I’m driving.”

Grace smiled. “Let’s get you back to 7458 so you can catch the last ferry.”

*   *   *

John found himself warming to John-7458 as his doppelganger drove him across the back highways of Ohio in the hope of catching the last ferry to Kelleys Island. He’d always had an adversarial relationship with the other John, John Prime. He’d been unable ever to like that version of himself. But John-7458 was far more amiable, far more likeable. John had always thought it was the long months on his own that had hardened Prime, but now he wondered if he was just a slightly different John Rayburn from birth. John-7458 shared John’s own fascination with the universe and his general optimism. Prime and he had never meshed in that way.

“So why don’t you just use the one gate as a two-way communication device?” John-7458 asked.

“What?”

“It swaps the space between the two universes, doesn’t it? I mean what’s in one universe on the platform transfers with whatever’s in the same spot in the other universe, right?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” John said. “But you have no way to know for sure if you’re going to cut something or someone in half when the gate is powered up.”

“Sure, it’ll take some coordination,” John-7458 said. “You would just have to schedule a time that the gate will be activated. Every three hours on the hour. Use some atomic clock to coordinate the universes. Then Grace and Henry in 7651 cycle through all the universes over an hour period. They send things through, and whoever is in the remote universe—me, for instance—would get what they had on the platform and they’d get what I had on the platform.”

“It would save me having to ferry people back to 7651 every day,” John said.

“But I like the idea of having gates in a lot of universes,” John-7458 said. “It ups the chance that you could find something useful. The combination grows as the handshake number.”

“The handshake number?”

“Sure, two people, A and B, in a room,” John-7458 explained, “there’s only one way they can shake hands—with each other. Add one more person, C, to the room, and now A and B can shake, B and C can shake, and C and B can shake. Add one more person, D, and you add three more shakes. One, three, six, ten, fifteen, and so forth.”

“Oh, I see,” John said. “You end up with forty-five combinations by the time you get to ten gates.”

“And if each universe has a small chance of a variation with every other one, you have a bigger chance of finding some exploitable difference,” John-7458 said.

“Yeah, but I hate the word ‘exploitable,’” John said.

“Like finding Confederate gold isn’t exploiting the universes?”

“We need seed money,” John said.

“Sure, and once you have seed money, what do you plan to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know,” John-7458 said. “I can see it in your face.”

“I want to … I want to help people,” John said. “I don’t know why this technology isn’t known by everyone. Who is suppressing it? Why don’t we see travelers every day? Why aren’t the Pleistocene universes used to grow food for all the people that need it?”

“I knew you had some ideas,” John-7458 said. “If you need a recruit to man the station here in 7458, count me in.”

John looked over at him. “Yeah, you seem like a solid fellow.”

*   *   *

They found themselves behind a slow dump truck on a double-lane county road leading toward Marblehead and the ferry dock. John was certain they wouldn’t make it, but John-7458 urged the Trans-Am into the parade of oncoming headlights, passing the truck with a chorus of car horns. They turned into the ferry driveway just in time, a minute before ten.

The ferry was deserted, just a few locals catching the last trip to the island. John sat tensely in the car while they made their slow way across Lake Erie. John-7458 stepped out, however, and stood in the night air.

“You see this?” he called through the window.

“Yeah, this morning and this afternoon,” John said.

“Not the lights then. Come on, John. We’ll not get there any faster sitting in the car.”

“Yeah.”

John opened the door. The smell of water, a strong fishy smell, invaded his nostrils then was swept away by the wind. The ferry bounced over the waves, rising in the chop, and then settling slowly down again. John inhaled and felt his body relax.

They were going to make it. John Prime was safe for the moment. He had to be. No yokels were going to stop that sly dog. No way.

As if knowing what John was thinking, John-7458 said, “You got here as fast as you could.”

“Yeah.”

“If you’d taken the bus, you’d be in Toledo still.”

“Thanks for helping, John,” John said.

“You know my price,” John-7458 said. “I get to man this outpost of Pinball Wizards, Transdimensional.”

“You got it.”

“So, what’s the plan when we get there? Do we even know where he is?”

“No, but I think I know how to find out.”

They climbed back into the car as the ferry approached the dock. In the shelter of the island, the waves faded and the bouncing ebbed. They slid into the dock with a grace one wouldn’t expect from a hundred-meter barge.

John-7458 eased the car off the boat and onto the local road. They neared the first four-way stop.

“That one,” John said. “That bar.”

John-7458 pulled the car into the first parking space he could find, right across from the bar that was blasting country and western.

“The Shaft?” John-7458 asked.

“We’re looking for locals. That one looks like a local bar. Sounds like one too.”

“You want me to come in? People might remember us if we look alike.”

“Doesn’t matter at this point,” John said.

He pushed the door open and the music blared out. Yeah, it looked like a local crowd. Not the suntanned touristy people he’d expect on the weekends. No, these were the local residents of Kelleys Island letting loose on a weekday.

John took a spot at the bar next to a whiskered older fellow. John-7458 stood beside him. John was worried that the bartender would card him; he was only twenty. But the man just nodded when he asked for two beers.

The guy on the stool next to him looked John and John-7458 up and down.

“You two fellers twins?”

John was glad he’d had John-7458 come in with him. It made starting a conversation easier.

“Yeah, we are.”

“You two should wear the same outfits!” John realized the man was drunk.

“Yeah, not since we were kids,” John said.

“Sure, sure.”

“Listen, we’re looking for people,” John said. “You a local?”

“Yeah, sixty years a local!” he proclaimed. “I’m a handyman, fix the bed-and-breakfast places all over the island. Also have a water truck that I use to fill up people’s cisterns.”

“So you know just about everyone on the island?”

“Just about, unless they have piped water. The only people with piped water is everyone in these couple blocks downtown!”

“Then you gotta know who I’m looking for,” John said. “Two guys, a little bit yokel—no offense—one is named Russell and the other is named Amos.”

“Oh, you mean Russ and Amos Smerndon,” the guy said. “They have a house out by the forest preserve. Near the beach and the glacial grooves.”

“Yeah, over there. They inherited some money, didn’t they?”

“Money? I don’t think so. They don’t work much of late. Used to do handy work like me, but they don’t bid the jobs against me anymore. I thought they was just lazy.”

“Where do they live now?”

“Old white house off Titus Road.”

“Right up against the forest preserve?”

“Yeah, that’s the place.”

“Thanks, man. Let me buy you a beer,” John said.

“Yeah, Russ and Amos are usually here this time of evening,” the guy said. He turned around on his stool and John panicked, wondering what he would do if the two were there in the Shaft. But the guy just shrugged his shoulder. “Naw, they ain’t here.”

John paid for their beers and he and John-7458 left the bar.

“Glad they weren’t there,” John-7458 said.

“Would have been interesting.”

Before getting into the car, John found the same telephone booth he had used that day in 7651.

“It’s 3290 Titus Road,” he said, consulting the phone book.

They drove slowly toward the forest preserve and past it onto Titus Road.

“I feel as if I’m about to get in a fight,” John-7458 said.

John nodded. His stomach was tense too, filled with butterflies, and he felt hyperalert.

“This might get rough,” John said.

“For them!”

John felt a bit of the tension ebb away as he laughed.

“There it is.”

John-7458 slowed the car, noting the dark drive that disappeared into the woods.

“There’s a pull-off up ahead,” John said.

John-7458 eased the Trans-Am onto the dirt berm. He flipped off the lights and the two looked at each other.

“Flashlight’s in the trunk,” he said.

“I have one in my ready bag,” John said.

They stood by the car for a moment, both of them listening to the crickets and waiting.

“Ready?” John asked. “You can wait here, you know.”

“No, I’m going,” he replied. “As if you could stop me.”

“Yeah. I know how it feels to be in your shoes.”

“You said it.”

They trotted up the gravel driveway, eyes open for some sign of human presence. There was nothing, no lights at all. The white of the house loomed ahead of them. No lights shined in the windows. No porch light, not even a mosquito light.

John paused and John-7458 knelt beside him. Then he motioned him to follow him around the edge of the yard. He remembered another building beyond the house, a barn or shed.

The ground was lumpy and he almost fell in the darkness. On the other side of the house was a small barn, and a light was on within. The windows were papered over, but the door didn’t fit squarely against the earth, where feet had worn away a path and the light slipped out from under it. As they watched, shadows danced within.

Someone was in the small barn.

They continued around the edge of the yard so that if someone emerged from the barn, the two wouldn’t be seen. Now they were close enough to hear voices, someone shouting.

They crouched and crawled on hands and knees closer.

“He’s not gonna say anything,” someone said.

“He’ll talk,” someone else said. “Won’t you, punk?”

There was an incoherent reply.

John and John-7458 shared a worried glance.

“Tell me, punk. Why you digging for our gold?”

“Piss … off.…” The words weren’t clearly articulated.