Regarding Ducks and Universes (27 page)

I
burst through the door. Arni was standing on the other side, nursing a finger. The bright red stain by his feet was slowly spreading in all directions away from the upturned can on the floor. There were dark green specks in the red.

“Damn it,” Arni repeated. “I burnt my finger on the can. Hi, Felix.”

“What,” I said, “is that?”

“Tomato soup. I should know better. I pulled the top off and the can heated too quickly. I didn’t have time to put it down.”

“Why are you having—tomato soup, did you say? With basil, it looks like, and fire-roasted tomatoes?—why are you having soup for breakfast?”

“We don’t keep breakfast food on hand, only late-night snacks.” A drawer on his desk was open and I could see rows of cans and what looked like popcorn bags.

“How can you think about food at a time like this, Arni, when we don’t know what’s happened to Professor Maximilian?” Bean was hunkered down on the denim couch with her legs drawn against her chin.

“Hey, I came straight in without eating breakfast. I’m hungry.”

The door opened behind me and bumped me in the back. I moved out of the way to let Pak in. He was carrying his bike, careful to avoid the steaming red patch on the linoleum. The bike’s front tire was flat.

“Pak, what happened?” Bean and Arni asked in unison.

Pak set the bike against his desk. “A shard of glass on the road.” He bent down to secure the bike to the leg of the desk, as if someone might take it even in its damaged state.

“No, last night, with the professor,” said Arni, who was at the sink wrapping a wet tissue around his finger.

“Was Professor Maximilian taken away to give a statement about the bookmark? Or was he”—Bean’s voice wavered—“was the professor arrested and sent to a work camp?”

Pak shook his head.

The office door bumped me again and this time I moved all the way over to the couch and sat down next to Bean, who slid over to make room for me.

Professor Maximilian waited until the office door had swung shut behind him, then announced, “Hello, kids.”

His blond hair and eyebrows seemed a little wild, as if he hadn’t slept all night.

“D
o you kids have any tea? I need something to refresh me.”

The professor stepped over the steaming tomato-soup patch and perched on one corner of Arni’s desk, his legs not quite touching the floor. Arni looked down at the tomato-soup mess, thought better of it, and instead went to the samovar and filled a mug. He handed it to Professor Maximilian. “It’s cold, sorry. Yesterday’s. We haven’t had a chance to make a fresh batch.”

“Ah, thank you, Arnold. That should do fine.” Despite his demeanor, telltale bags were visible under the professor’s eyes and he sat hunched forward, like it was an effort to keep his shoulders up.

“What happened?” I asked as Arni threw a handful of napkins down onto the spilled soup. I watched them turn red.

“As you know—strong tea, this, Arni—as you know, the plan had been for either Max C or me to give up the Y-day bookmark. Unfortunately the DIM agents showed up before Max C and I had a chance to decide which one of us would get the two bookmarks. I am not sure why they came a day early—”

“They probably overheard our conversations,” Arni interjected. “Via a book in Felix’s possession.”

I sent him a displeased look. It wasn’t my fault that I was too trusting of literary presents.

“—a book, you say, interesting—anyway, the DIM agents knocked sharply on the door of my—of Professor Singh’s lab. Immediately I knew who it was, even before I saw their green uniforms. It was the kind of knock that startles you any time of the day, even in the middle of the afternoon. I turned off the equipment and let the agents in. They introduced themselves as Agent Sky and Agent Filbert.

“Max C and I had been about to toss a coin, so to speak. We had agreed to write down ‘heads’ or ‘tails’ and exchange the notes. Matching results—both notes reading H or T—he’d get the two bookmarks. Mismatched results, I’d get them. Turning off the equipment suddenly and irrevocably severed the link to Universe C.”

“A bit must be exchanged,” Pak explained from his desk behind the couch, “every 1.2 picoseconds to keep the link open. Communication traffic between A and B takes care of that usually.”

“Wait a minute,” I interrupted the professor’s story as the reality of what Pak was saying sank in. “The connection between A and B can be lost without a way to get it back? I didn’t know that.” Realizing that I’d sat down with my backpack still on my back, I took it off, careful to keep it upright because of the sourdough starter jar inside. I wasn’t sure how much sloshing around was permitted.

“All thirty-three crossing points would have to fail at once. Highly unlikely,” Pak dismissed the issue.

“So there we were,” the professor raised his voice slightly. “Two unfriendly DIM agents, one bookmark, a forlorn cactus near Pak’s computer, and a note with nothing written on it yet.”

“I happened to be in the bathroom during all this,” Pak explained, as if that was somehow a failing of his biological self.

“Agent Sky wanted to know if there was any unauthorized research going on. Regulation 19 was mentioned. The best course of action, I decided, was bold-faced denial.” The professor straightened his back. “No, I said to her, no unauthorized research. We can debate the ethics of that later.”

I tried to imagine what it would be like if kitchen user guides, whose creation was already governed by Regulation 10 (workplace information), were suddenly deemed illegal or if I needed permission every time I began a new one, and felt a rising indignation. (And I didn’t even
like
making kitchen user guides all that much really.)

“Good for you,” I said. The students nodded in agreement.

“I claimed I was servicing the apparatus,” the professor went on. “That if the Singh vortex generator wasn’t attended to every thirty years, it would spontaneously turn on and start to twitch and shake and shoot out min iature Singh vortices that would float around the room and out the window and waft through the campus and the rest of San Francisco, along the way changing everything they encountered to information and swapping it with strange and unknown objects from faraway universes.”

“But that’s not true?” I asked, somewhat concerned.

“The spontaneously turning on part isn’t. I further assured them that the servicing procedure was simple and would be over in an hour or two, if they cared to come back. Unfortunately the DIMs elected to stay and watch the servicing of the equipment. They told me they were going to inventory the lab, my office upstairs, and the offices of my graduate students afterward. They did not ask about the bookmark.”

“Maybe they didn’t overhear us talking about it, then,” Arni said.

“I told you,” I said, “I told you that I didn’t have
that
book, the spy book, with me when we found the bookmark in the middle of the
other
book, the art book—”

“What
did
they overhear, then?” Bean frowned.

“Well,” I admitted, “I had Franny’s book with me on Monday when you came into my health center room, Bean, and told me I was the prime candidate for universe maker. Sorry.

“It was also in my possession,” I added as Bean opened her mouth to speak, “in Carmel—Wednesday, was it?—when you pointed out the banana and duck pacifiers in photos 13A and 13B.”

She was looking a little worried. “You don’t think I’ll get in trouble, do you?”

“So they know we are looking for the prime mover,” the professor shrugged. “It’s not a new idea—Passivists have been saying for years that people create universes. DIM’s objective is that the idea stays just that, a mocked assertion by a fringe group. Arresting us would legitimize it. Much better to simply remove evidence from our path—take Photo 13 off the photoboard, wipe Monroe’s computer, that kind of thing. The DIM agents watching me in the lab did not seem to know about any of that, however. I got the feeling they were sent to rattle me a bit, serve as a warning. The clamp on the flow of information extends to their own organization. It’s one of the reasons it takes them so long to do anything.”

The professor finished off his tea in one big gulp, shuddered, then went on. “So there we were, Agents Sky and Filbert leaning against the lab wall silently watching and I with a note in my hand with nothing written on it yet. I decided to go ahead with the original plan—though there was the small problem of needing a new universe to put the plan into action. What I did was this. I wrote ‘H’ down with my right hand and simultaneously turned the vortex generator back on with my left. The event radius was small, barely surrounding the generator, but one never knows with these things. All sorts of weird things could have happened, like Agent Sky or Filbert walking over and saying something of importance—I know, not likely with DIM agents—and thus managing to
be
the event the device picked up on. In any case, I got lucky—the bifurcation was achieved and my H universe and the corresponding one in which I had written ‘T’ linked. I had a new Universe C, or better yet, Universe D.

“I was confident that the person at the other end of the link now knew exactly what to do.” The professor paused, Wagner-like, for effect. “I placed my bookmark in the Inbox/Outbox to be sent to Max D. After two minutes, I looked inside the cylinder, expecting to see the bookmark gone. It wasn’t. For a moment I thought that the equipment had malfunctioned, then I realized what had happened.” The professor pursed his lips. “It was
his
bookmark that was sitting in the cylinder. We had exchanged them. Apparently he too thought he was giving up the bookmark. I sent his bookmark back, he sent mine back. I gave up and placed newspaper shreddings in the cylinder and waited for him to send me his bookmark. There was nothing. He too was waiting.

“At this point Pak tried to come back into the room but was prevented from doing so by the DIM agents.”

“It was a bit startling, to say the least,” Pak said. “They asked my name, told me that a calibration was in progress and that no students were allowed due to the sensitive nature of the material. I figured the smart thing to do would be to get on my bike and leave.”

“It was,” Professor Maximilian said. “As for me—it was clear Max D and I needed to have a detailed exchange of notes to clarify matters. However, it’s one thing to write ‘H’ or ‘T’ and claim you needed it to test the device, and another thing entirely to exchange wordy notes. As I stood there deciding what to do, one of the purple flower buds detached itself from Pak’s mother’s cactus. It landed in the thick layer of dust on the table. I picked up the flower, and the disturbed dust—thirty-some years of dust accumulation is a lot of dust—made me sneeze. And that’s what gave me the idea.”

The professor jumped to his feet from where he was perched on the corner of Arni’s desk and crossed the room to the whiteboard. He picked up a marker and sketched an outsized human nose and what looked like rain bursting forth from it. “When you sneeze, you see, droplets spread away from your face in a short-lived burst. The sneeze clears the sneezer’s air passages and serves to spread infectious droplets and help the virus find a new host.” He turned around to face us. “So I thought—that’s the problem, I’ve been thinking too small. What I needed was more droplets, a critical mass.”

“I’ll take some tea,” I whispered to Arni, thinking, only a lunatic or an experimentalist in the grips of a promising experiment would refer to creating a completely new Universe D as thinking small.

Arni passed a mug to Bean, who passed it on to me.

“I also realized,” Professor Maximilian continued, “that Max D may or may not have just sneezed himself. I quickly penned a short note and placed it in the Inbox/Outbox. Then I waited, periodically giving the DIM agents more details about the disastrous consequences of not servicing the vortex generator properly. Finally I received a note back from Max D, discreetly read it, and disposed of it. We were in agreement. Think, kids. How would you prove there are universes beyond our two?”

“Er—bring in viewers to watch the process of linking to a new one?” Bean said.

“Think bigger.”

I croaked, “Sugar, please,” having tasted the tea, or, more precisely, the dregs of yesterday’s tea.

Arni passed a handful of sugar cubes down. “Get three alters in the same room,” he said.

“Not bad, Arnold,” Professor Maximilian said from the whiteboard. “No one would blink at seeing a person and his alter walking down the street, but three identical persons—now that would surprise quite a few people. Triplets aside, three alters prove three universes exist. Ten alters prove ten universes exist. A hundred alters—well, you get the idea. I’d like to see what DIM would do if a hundred copies of
me
”—he thumped his chest lightly with one hand—“marched down Market Street. It’s a pity we can’t attempt a human crossing in Professor Singh’s lab. Because the idea only works with people, not things, of course. What would you kids say if I showed up with a dozen Rosetta stones or a hundred Mona Lisas?”

“That you have a very good forger working for you,” Bean said.

“Exactly. With a little effort and ingenuity you can copy a document, fake a painting, paint another Beetle pink to match Bean’s car. To be convincing it has to be either people—or
information.
”

Pak sat up in his chair.

Professor Maximilian twinkled at him. “Each of us has secrets, little or big. No one but Pak here knows the combination to his bike lock. If I walked over to your desk, Pak, and entered the sequence 31-4-15 into your lock, you’d be—”

“Quite surprised,” Pak finished the sentence for him.

“Pak D, who came into work earlier this morning than our Pak did, kindly supplied me with the lock combination so I could demonstrate the point.”

“I had a flat tire,” our Pak said.

The professor accepted a refill of his mug from Arni. “Thank you. I decided to test my idea on the DIM agents. I turned to them and said, ‘Agents Sky and Filbert, would you assist me by thinking up a question relating to an event from the recent past, just before you came in, perhaps? I require this to test the logic feature on the device.’ There is no such thing as a logic feature in Singh’s equipment,” the professor added for my benefit.

“After a minute or two of deliberation, Agent Filbert cautiously approached and handed me a note. He had written:
Where did I dispose of my piece of gum just before I entered this lab?

What idea did I get watching this?
his partner Sky had added below.

The professor partook of more tea. “I sent through the note with the agents’ questions and soon received a reply from Max D and
his
agents:

“Nowhere—you swallowed it.

“Microphone embedded in food—good for up to sixteen hours of listening time before being flushed away.

“‘Ah, the logic feature seems to be working fine,’ I said to the two DIM agents.

“I now knew that the idea would work,” the professor continued his story. “Agents Filbert and Sky, somewhat puzzled, were beginning to show signs of impatience, so I volunteered that I had a newly discovered historical document to turn in. They consulted briefly whether a bookmark, even a Y-day one, constituted a document, before deciding that indeed it did and perhaps took precedence over finishing the inventory. The end result was that they drove me to their bureau where I filled out the necessary paperwork and left the bookmark, along with an art textbook belonging to Felix’s parents.”

“You left my art book? But I wanted to take it back with me,” I complained, trying to sit up on the denim couch but merely managing to sink into a different spot on it. I had poured smoothie on
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?
and now I had lost
Stones, Tombs, and Gourds
. Except for the glass jar in my backpack, I would be leaving Universe B empty-handed.

“Sorry. While at the DIM bureau I took the opportunity to point out that similarly abandoned and forgotten books may harbor bookmarks or other Y-day items that an unscrupulous researcher could use for his own ends, say to try to legitimize the ideas of the Passivists. Highly unlikely that DIM officials would find anything of the sort, but it will serve as a distraction. They were typing up a report as I left.