Road Less Traveled (20 page)

“What exactly is going on here?” Carter asked Allison as she and Russell guided him to a spot right in front of the main console and then lifted his arms so Allison could tug his shirt loose and Zane could apply more shockingly cold sensors to his chest, stomach, and back. He really hoped they didn't want to place any lower than that, because while he'd had fantasies about Allison removing his clothing, this definitely did not match any of them.

“It's the anomaly,” Allison explained, waving some sort of device around him and causing a hum and a beep to emerge from each sensor she neared. “What knocked Dr. Russell's input arrays out of whack, and caused the two universes to begin drawing closer. It's you.”

“Me? Oh, that's just great.” Carter sighed, and slumped slightly. “First I don't even exist in the other Eureka, and now I'm the scapegoat in this one? How is this my fault?”

“I didn't say it was your fault, Carter,” Allison corrected him, her tone a little gentler now than it had been when he'd entered. “You didn't do anything wrong.”

“Quite the opposite, actually,” Russell pointed out, giving him a warm smile. And this time he was sure Allison's moving closer and reaching across his chest to adjust one of the sensors on his neck wasn't just her prepping him for whatever they were about to do. “You saved my life, remember? That was incredible.”

“Happy to be of service,” Carter replied, smiling back, and getting a sharp tug on the sensor from Allison in response. “Hey, careful there!”

“Sorry.” She didn't sound it in the least. “But, yes, you were your usual heroic self, throwing yourself into danger without a second thought. Unfortunately, the shock you received did something to you, and the energy surge itself is what altered the programs and the inputs to create the situation we're now in.” She explained how he had been present, or nearby, or recently there, with every appearance of someone from the other side, and Carter shook his head.

“I'm nobody in the other world,” he said with a little laugh, “and here I'm apparently the center of everything. Swell.”

“All synced up and ready to go,” Allison told Zane, ignoring Carter's little self-pity party. Zane nodded and typed into his ever-present notepad, activating some sort of program. Carter felt as much as heard the sensors increase their hum and vibrate ever so slightly against his skin.

“Commencing scan,” Zane reported, eyeing his screen. “We should be getting preliminary readings any second. Whoa!” Allison and Russell both stepped over beside him, and Carter craned his neck. No one had actually said he couldn't move, but he was assuming that was the case. “Check this out!”

“What's going on?” Carter demanded. “Am I about to explode or something?”

“Definitely
or something
,” Allison reassured him. “You're giving off massive electromagnetic readings, but the frequencies are strange. Very strange.” She frowned. “I'd venture to say ‘otherworldly.'”

“You've been magnetized,” Zane elaborated. “Somehow, that charge must have zapped you, made you into a living input array. Your body was set to absorb energy from the parallel reality Russell had targeted—the same one we're looking at, and slowly colliding with, now. That's why people from the other side keep breaking through around you, or where you've just been. You're drawing them to you.”

“I'm a magnet for the other world?” Carter tried to process that. “So why haven't I been sucked through to that side, then?”

“That's a good question,” Russell admitted, brushing her hair back from her forehead as she thought about it. “Probably because the process began on this side, not that one, so you were already grounded here. And because you're from this reality, even if you're carrying energy from that one. This world had a stronger pull on you, so you stayed here, but with the link we'd created from the demonstration, you were able to draw others across—only as phantoms at first, but eventually with more and more solidity. And less and less dependence upon your presence, as the links grew stronger and the worlds drifted closer.”

“I'll bet the fact that you weren't there in the other Eureka added to the effect,” Zane suggested. “Nature abhors a vacuum, right? And Carter was a living, breathing vacuum as far as the other reality was concerned. He wasn't there, but he was here, so he was throwing off the balance. And he was pulling in energy from that side, but he couldn't draw his other self over because his other self wasn't there. So he started sucking in his surroundings instead.”

“You make me sound like some cartoon villain with a giant crazy straw,” Carter muttered. “Slurping up the countryside and then, I don't know, spitting it out into a little bottle I can stick on my shelf.”

Russell stared at him for a second, then started laughing. Allison and Zane just chuckled and shook their heads. “You've got quite the flair for the dramatic, Sheriff!” Russell told him, her warm tone making it clear that was a compliment.

“Oh, yes, he's a real ham,” Allison agreed dryly. “You have no idea.” Her tone was a lot less warm.

“Okay, so I'm some sort of reality magnet.” His arms were aching, so he slowly lowered them a little, then waited for a second to see if anyone yelled at him to get them back up again. Nobody said anything, and he let them drop to his sides with an audible groan that drew more chuckles from the peanut gallery. So nice having such an attentive audience. “And it's not my fault, but I'm at the heart of this whole ‘worlds colliding' issue. What does that mean?”

“It means we've isolated the triggering event,” Zane answered, “and now we've got complete readings on you and the energy you're absorbing, so we have something to work with.” He tapped on his notepad, then hurried over to the main console and started entering figures there. “I should be able to whip up a reconstruction of the accident, and that'll give us the data to calculate exactly how far off the arrays were from their original parameters.”

“From there,” Russell jumped in, joining him at the computer, “we can work out what variation of my program was created by the energy surge, and hopefully work out an equation that will correct the deviation and reverse the damage.”

Carter stared at them blankly. He hated it when people dropped into geek-talk, which at Eureka was about 80 percent of the time. Well, okay, 90. “You want to try that one more time, for the guy with all the electrodes?” he asked.

As was often the case, Allison helped him out. “It's like following somebody else's directions, taking a wrong turn somewhere, and getting lost,” she explained. “We know what Russell's formulae were, and what result they were supposed to produce—a window into another reality. We know what we got instead—a link to that other world, a bridge that's quickly becoming a door. Now, with the readings we just took from you, we have a pretty good idea of exactly where we are.”

“So you can use that to backtrack, figure out where we took the wrong turn, and then course-correct,” Carter finished, catching on. “A jolt or two in the right direction, and the two worlds move apart once more, and everybody's safe.”

“Exactly.” He felt like he'd just given the right answer on a pop quiz.

“Nice.” Carter looked over to where Zane and Dr. Russell—and the other Russell, who'd been quiet during the exchange but was clearly studying the same information on the computers in her version of the lab—were hard at work. Then he looked at Allison, who was watching them like a hawk. “I'll just get out of the way and let you guys do your work,” he offered, edging toward the door. He was still worried they might decide they needed more out of him—like vivisection.

“That's fine,” Allison agreed, still watching her people crunch numbers and fiddle with equations. “I'll give you a call if we need you.”

“Great. Thanks.” He started to go, then stopped. “Just, don't make it sound so much like the end of the world next time, okay? Unless it really is, of course.”

She glanced his way and smiled. “Fair enough. I am sorry about that. We wanted to get to work as soon as possible, because the longer we wait, the closer our two worlds get and the more we're in danger of them colliding.”

“I understand. But you could have told me that. I'd still have come running.” Her smile was wider and warmer this time, saying that at least some part of her knew why he answered so quickly when she called, and Carter felt himself blushing a little. “Anyway, I'll see you later.” He still needed to make that call to Mrs. Murphy about her privacy fence.

“Right.” He was almost out the door when she stopped him. “Carter?”

“Yeah?” he turned back, heart pounding again.

But her grin now was devilish. “You might want to take off the electrodes before you go.”

“Okay, explain to me again exactly what you're doing,
and why.” Jo crossed her arms over her chest and gave Fargo her best “I'm losing patience here” look.

For once, he was too busy to notice her attention, or to get flustered by it. But that was because, like all true geeks, Fargo's first love was science, and she had the power to distract him from anyone else. Even Jo.

“I'm calibrating this voltmeter,” he explained, not looking up from the device he had half disassembled on his workbench. They'd come here after leaving Dr. Russell's lab, at Fargo's insistence. He hadn't really explained why, except to say that he had an idea and now he had what he needed to test it out.

Fortunately, Jo was no dummy. “You're using the readings Zane gave you,” she guessed, and fortunately Fargo was too busy to see her little smirk or hear it in her voice. “You've got the Thunderbird's energy signature now, and you're adjusting the voltmeter to track that one frequency specifically.”

“Exactly!” Fargo grinned. He loved smart, sexy girls, and Jo was both. And she'd sounded a little bit impressed, too, which was even better. If he could use the voltmeter to locate the Thunderbird, she'd be blown away. And then maybe she'd forget about bad-boy Zane and realize who the true genius was around here!

“Done!” Fargo detached the wires that ran between the voltmeter and his laptop, and then quickly but expertly put the device back together. His people skills might need a little work sometimes, and his experiments did have a bad habit of blowing up in his face, but he was good at the mechanical side of things, and reconfiguring a voltmeter was child's play—now that he had the frequencies to tune it to. He conveniently ignored the fact that Zane had been the one to provide them. He didn't want to give his archenemy any more credit than necessary.

“Back to the scene of the crime?” Jo asked as Fargo hefted the rebuilt voltmeter. It was shaped much like a TV remote, except that the top end was wider and had a small screen inset across the front.

“Yeah, we'll try to pick up the trail there,” Fargo agreed. “Then we'll follow it and see where it goes.” He allowed himself a small smirk. “Piece of cake.”

 

“I think it's our best bet,” Zane was saying as Allison
wandered back into Dr. Russell's lab. Much as she would have liked to stay and participate in their discussion the whole time, she did still have other duties to attend to. Especially now that they'd set up the front conference room as their “detainee center,” or, as they were calling it, their “visitors' lounge.” Every parallel Eurekan who appeared was invited to the “visitors' lounge” to have something to eat and something to drink and to relax while waiting to slip back across the narrowing gap between the two worlds.

Fortunately, most of them had been quite reasonable so far—they were all Eureka residents in their own world, and the majority were GD employees, so they knew about experiments gone wrong and about the importance of obeying safety protocols. It helped that Nathan had issued orders to comply once Allison had gotten him the information about their plan. Even so, some of the otherworldly residents had been a bit stubborn about recognizing her authority. Especially Mayor Herrera.

“It's crazy,” Russell argued, shaking her head. Her twin nodded agreement in the monitor. “That's not even real science, it's crazy super-science. You're basing it on gut instinct and half-formed theory and old movies instead of hard data.”

“No, I'm using the data,” Zane insisted, tapping his notepad's screen. “I'm just . . . applying it more creatively than usual. But it still makes more sense than anything else we've got going.”

“What's the problem?” Allison asked, stopping in front of them. She noticed absently that Dr. Russell's techs were nowhere to be seen. Russell had probably sent them home for now. This was the theoretical work, and they wouldn't be needed until she decided to implement a plan that required additional eyes on the boards. If it came to that.

“I've got an idea,” Zane announced, giving her the little grin he always bore when he had just hatched some half-baked scheme. Which usually wound up working—when it didn't make matters a hundred times worse.

She sighed. “Let's hear it.”

“It's simple.” He rubbed his hands together. “We're in this mess because Carter's been magnetized, right? He's pulling the other Eureka toward him, one bit of energy at a time.” Allison nodded. “So we just reverse the charge. Boom!” Zane thrust his hands apart. “We push the other universe away, because now Carter's repelling it instead of attracting it. The link between our two worlds gets weaker and weaker as it stretches further and further. And he's pouring the other side's energy back into it, shedding it and pushing it away from here. When they're far enough apart, the bond snaps”—he made a quick tearing motion—“and our two worlds settle back into their proper places, nice and separate like they always were before. We can still observe it, thanks to the properly aligned input arrays, but we're now a safe distance apart again, and we stay that way.” He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back, clearly pleased with himself.