Now That You're Here (Duplexity, Part I) (27 page)

After checking again for the white van, Mac leads the way across the darkened driveway to the shop. We follow in silence. The night, the sky, everything feels like it's spinning too fast.

Mac unlocks the shop door. After we're all inside, he closes it again and switches on the lights. We file past the nearly completed entertainment center Warren and I worked on that Saturday afternoon. Sheet metal now covers the frame we helped weld, and the doors are lined with forged scrollwork. Looks amazing. Mac keeps moving, though, and we follow, continuing on toward the off-limits back room. My heart pounds so hard I swear it's going to beat out of my chest.

“About a year ago I had this idea,” Mac says, unlocking the door, “that I should try to replicate the transport technology, based on memory. Crazy, right?”

The door swings open.

“Here it is.”

He switches on the light and steps back for us to enter. The blue tarp still hangs across the top and over the sides. Without being asked, we all work together to pull it down. Then we stand back and stare.

The transporter is large enough for a full-grown man to stand inside, but smaller than the entertainment center in the other room. Two curved metal walls form an oval with open sides, and the inside of each wall is covered with holes about the size of a pencil eraser. Attached to the outside of one wall is a panel of controls. Knobs and dials and monitors. I run my hand along the polished metal. It's incredible.

“Does it work?” Warren asks from the other side of the unit.

“Of course it works.” Mac walks over to the control panel. “Which is why Principal Murray is so unhappy with me.” When he sees our confused faces, he explains, “The receiver unit is currently housed in a rarely used storage closet at school.” He turns one of the dials. “The fact that it works is also why I need to disappear. The feds are onto me. If I'm going to finish this work—and get it right this time—it'll have to be somewhere far away from here.” He flips a switch, then walks to the door. “I'll be right back. Don't touch anything.”

As soon as he's gone, Warren does the geekiest celebration dance I've ever seen. He grabs me by the arms and exclaims, “This is so awesome!” before going to drool over the transporter some more.

Danny stands beside me. “My mind is blown. How about yours?”

I shake my head. “It's all so…” Before I can put my scrambled thoughts into words, I hear the generators start up outside. Danny follows me out the door, into the main shop. Mac is already on his way back inside.

“Where are you going?” he says. “The show is in here.”

We follow him into the off-limits room just in time to see him shoo Warren away from the controls. Mac pulls out his cell phone. “I set up the receiving unit with remote technology so I can control it from here.” He presses his finger to the screen and types with his thumbs. “There we are.” He turns a dial on the console. The transporter hums louder and blue lights pinprick the inside panel.

Danny's grip on my arm startles me. One look at his face and I realize what's happening.

He's jumping.

“No!” I grab him by both arms. “Mac!” I yell. “Turn it off!”

Mac sees Danny's reaction and races back to the control panel. The lights of the transporter dim and the hum quiets until the only sounds in the shop are the rumble of the generators and Danny's ragged breathing. I watch his eyes until they focus on me again, then wrap my arms around him.

Mac stands still, like he's so lost in thought he's forgotten how to move. “Can't be. Not possible.” He pulls a records log from a nearby cabinet and scans the pages. “And yet, there it is.” He presses his finger against the log entry. “The first successful transmission happened two Fridays ago. A Macintosh apple left this shop and materialized in the utility closet at Palo Brea. The same day he jumped universes.”

“Maybe it's a coincidence.” Even as I make the suggestion, though, I realize I don't believe in coincidences. Not anymore.

Back in the house, Mac paces the living room while Danny recovers on the couch. He looks like a train wreck, his face so pale it scares me.

“Clearly the transporter is causing some kind of disturbance,” Mac says. “But what kind? And more importantly, how?”

Warren flips through the pages of his notebook. “Could it be a wormhole?”

Mac continues to pace, considering Warren's suggestion. I lean over to Danny and whisper, “Did you see anything that time?”

He shakes his head. “Not now.”

I wish he'd just tell me. Like anything would surprise me at this point.

“Wormhole…
wormhole…” Mac stops pacing and holds up his hands like he's imagining a large picture on the wall. “If I could just…Then we'd…” He snaps his fingers. “Be right back.”

He disappears down the hall, then yells, “Warren! Come give me a hand.”

After some banging noises and a small crash, the two slide a whiteboard into the living room. They lift it onto the loveseat and secure it at the corners with stacks of books.

“This is more like it.” Mac uncaps a marker. “Can't think without a pen in my hand.” He draws a green line down the center of the board. At the top of one side, he writes DANNY and on the other, TRANSPORTER. “Now,” he says, turning back to us, “if we can figure out the correlation between Danny and the transport system, perhaps we can find a way to send him back home.”

“How about to keep me here?” Danny asks.

Mac looks surprised. “Is that what you want?”

“Yes.” Danny's face looks strained, but he squeezes my hand. “If I can.”

Mac nods, his fingers uncapping and recapping the marker. “Well, then. Appears we have our objective.” He turns back to the board. “Let's generate some theories.”

Just after midnight, the whiteboard is full of scribbled words and symbols. One side is about me, my symptoms, my jump here. Mac writes on the other side, which is all about the transporter and how it works. “As you can see,” he says, “while it's a complex system, the process of teleportation is really quite straightfo
rward.” He writes WORMHOLE across the green line separating the two sides and finishes with a question mark. “But how it could possibly cause a reaction resulting in Danny jumping worlds is not—”

“Incredible,” Warren says. “I can't believe the government destroyed such technology.”

Mac waves the marker like a scolding finger. “Not destroy. Defund. There's a big difference. I doubt the government ever disposes of anything.”

Eevee sits on the edge of the couch beside me, leaning forward on her elbows. Her face is serious, still. If we weren't trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe right now, I'd grab a pencil and draw her. Instead, I etch her image in my brain. The way the light hits her cheek and casts shadows down her neck. The way her hair spills over her shoulder. How her eyes can change from intense to playful so fast it gives me whiplash.

The other Eevee was all intensity. Sure, our encounter at the museum only lasted a few minutes. But there was an edge to her, a hardness that I haven't seen in this Eevee sitting here. Which explains why that Eevee had no problem turning me in to the authorities.

Maybe I should just tell her what I saw in the last jump, about the other her.

I reach over and tuck her hair behind her ear. She turns to me and smiles, but goes right back to theorizing with Mac and Warren. How would she react? What good would telling her do? It would crush her to know the other Eevee betrayed me. It's best she doesn't know. At least not about that.

“The connection must be electromag
netism.” Eevee points at the whiteboard. “The EMP. The transporter. Both involve electromag
netics. That's got to mean something.”

“But the EMP happened in his universe,” Warren says from the moving box he's using as a chair. “Why would electromag
netism there affect our world here?”

“Well, it affected
me,
” I say. “And I'm
here
. Maybe it carried over somehow? Maybe I brought it with me?”

“Electroma
gnetism changes how electrons behave,” Warren says. “Is it possible the EMP affected his electrons, and the motion of traveling from there to here continued that effect?”

“Movement,” Mac mutters, staring at the whiteboard and tapping the capped marker against his chin. “Movement.” His eyebrows lift. He writes WAVES on the board and doodles scientific symbols as he continues to speak. “Electroma
gnetic waves carry the vibration of an electric charge from one atom to the next. What if the electromagnets in the transporter are creating waves powerful enough to disrupt our gravitational field?”

“Warping the fabric of space-time,” Warren says. “Cool.”

Mac doesn't respond. He's looking at me. “We're talking about parallel realities here. Parallel universes. Danny, are you aware of anything like this happening in your world? Anything in the news about electromag
netism or issues with gravity?”

I think back to my world, two weeks ago, before everything turned upside down. The familiar fears about my family, Germ, the other Danny begin to creep in, but I push beyond that, try to focus on the stuff going on in the background. When was the last time I even watched TV? I shake my head. “I can't think of anything. But then, I don't really watch the news. It's not very reliable.”

Warren rolls his eyes. Eevee kicks his moving box.

“It's okay,” Mac says. “I just didn't want to overlook anything.” He returns to the whiteboard.

“You okay?” Eevee whispers.

Fear continues to bleed in through my defenses. “Just thinking about home.”

She squeezes my hand.

“If that's the case,” Mac says, “if the transporter is warping the fabric of space-time…” He draws two parallel lines horizontally. “It's possible that wave pattern is causing the two worlds to connect.” He erases a section of the top line and redraws it so it dips down, touching the bottom line.

His eyes are distant, the wheels in his head turning. “And what's another name for an opening or connection in space-time?”

With the red marker he circles the word WORMHOLE
.