The Broken Universe (28 page)

Then the tape ended abruptly.

“What the hell was that?” he said aloud.

*   *   *

John Prime ran the video back and forth repeatedly, trying to determine the size, distance, and speed of the aircraft. Was it actually coming toward the camera? Had it seen the camera? Or was it just out flying on a beautiful day?

It was clearly not flying by aerodynamic lift. It was too big and too slow and the wings too stubby to fly like an airplane. Ultimately the length of time the craft was on the video—less than five seconds—made it impossible to know for certain.

He debated for a long time about sending the device back and taking another set of videos. But by the time he decided that he would, it was too dark. And the cameras wouldn’t film well at night.

But was it coming toward the camera? He had to know if the thing had somehow spotted his camera device. He was struck with the thought that Universe 1214 was listed in Corrundrum’s notebook as a universe to avoid.

He’d try again in the morning.

He locked up the lab and drove the fifteen kilometers to the quarry site. He owned the entire area now. Or rather Pinball Wizards, Transdimensional, did. But in this world that was him. There was no Grace or Henry to meddle with his work.

He waved to the security guard as he passed through the gate. No more kids would be swimming in his quarries. Prime wondered what Gabe, Dave, and Trudy thought of guarding an abandoned quarry and its one new building twenty-four hours a day. Probably nothing as long as the paychecks came every two weeks and they could read their paperbacks in the guard shack. The perfect job.

Prime saw the satchel on the transfer zone from 7650 as he unlocked the door. Probably more corporate notes and votes for him to sign and return. Awesome.

Checking the time, he pulled the satchel off the transfer zone. As expected, a dozen requests for information, thirty requests for synchronization, two votes, and a note from Grace Home on the current state of the Grauptham House takeover.

The information requests were for new data from his universe: prices, dates, people, places. The sync requests were things that the Henrys tracked in their computer looking for arbitrage possibilities. He had brought the sources he used most commonly to answer both of those: the Almanac, the Findlay newspaper, the Toledo newspaper,
The Wall Street Journal,
and the Montgomery Wards catalog.

Some he couldn’t do right there, such as the court records from Columbus on one Simon Otralsky, serial killer and rapist. Grace Home was after another murderer. She’d done it a dozen times already, finding uncaught felons in one universe using information from another. If Otralsky had been caught and imprisoned in 7533, then Grace could use his court case to find corroborating evidence in any other universe. Grace Shisler, pan-universal detective.

He finished what he could with the information on hand, then waited for his scheduled time and transferred the satchel to 7650. There Henry would collate all the other data he received from the settled universes for whatever devious plan he had in mind.

It was nearly six when he arrived home. Casey had prepared lasagna, which he dove into, though with not quite as much abandon as baby Abby did.

“Daddy? Noodles!” she said.

“Yes, noodles!”

“Anything in the packet?” Casey asked.

“About a hundred requests and two votes,” Prime said. “Your ballots are in the briefcase.” She unsnapped the briefcase and grabbed her ballots. Absently eating her meal, she read the packets.

“Oh, John wants to settle 7535 with people from 7538,” she said.

“Who from where?” Prime said. He hadn’t even read the ballot before marking it “Yes.”

“He wants to move people from the nuclear winter universe, 7538, to the Pleistocene universe, 7535.”

“There’s no money in that,” Prime said quickly, angry that he’d voted yes without actually reading the measure. “Sounds expensive.”

“He’s trying to do something good.”

“How can he move billions of people from one universe to another?”

“Not all of them, honey,” Casey said. “Just the ones that are desperate.”

“They are all desperate in that universe,” Prime said. He banged the table and Abby looked up at him from her lasagna with big eyes. “Why does he have to fix everything?”

“John? Because he does.”

“What will helping those few people do in the long run?” Prime said. “What will finding one more murderer in an infinite list of murderers do? There will always be suffering. There will always be another killer to slice another throat.”

“What can one person do?” Casey said. “Is that what you’re asking? Well, we’re all not just one person, are we? You’re a John, one of a million. I’m a Casey, one of a million. If you and I help just one person, we’ve helped two million people. That’s a lotta suffering we’ve eradicated.”

“It’s all about the karma, is it?” Prime said.

“Yes, it is.”

“I’d prefer to worry just about our own,” Prime said. “You, me, and Abby.”

“We’re all fine, aren’t we?” Casey argued back. “We have everything we need. It’s time to worry about others.”

Prime shook his head, but he said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” To himself he added,
But I’ll still worry about my family and myself first.

*   *   *

John Prime went to his secret lab—he laughed as he named his destination—early the next morning, eager to try again with a reconnaissance of Universe 1214.

He found himself sweating as he powered up the transfer gate again. His hands were weak as he turned each camera on. They were marked this time—N, S, E, and W.

Stepping back, well away from the effective sphere of the gate, he checked the transfer coordinates and turned the gate on. This time, he’d decided, he’d let it go for two minutes, instead of one. The camera mechanism disappeared. He caught a whiff of something metallic. He wondered for a second if he had burnt out a circuit. The seconds ticked away on the stopwatch. At sixty seconds he found himself wanting to transfer it back early.

The next minute ticked as slowly as a week.

At two minutes he triggered the gate again, and the mechanism reappeared. That same smell hit him, stronger now, something burnt, something metallic.

His hand stung. The cameras were freezing cold. Prime dropped the camera unit on the lab bench quickly, where it clattered. A sheen of frost was on the exposed metal.

“What the hell?”

The temperature was a cool fall day, but there had been no chance of frost this morning. Not in his universe.

He took the northern camera and pressed play, tapping the keys quickly with his fingers to avoid the cold.

The camera flickered, and then the image firmed up. The hill was there, but the frame was empty. No snow on the ground. Where had the cold come from?

He turned on the camera pointed east. Grassland, off-color due to the shine of the sun into the lens. Near the end, he thought he saw some shadow cross the frame, but it was impossible to tell with the sunlight bleaching out the image.

Prime played the camera facing east. It showed nothing but the same brown grass and blue skies. No flying machine. He’d been foolish to think he’d see it again.

He played the last camera, the one pointed south.

“What the—!”

The silver airship was right there, ten meters away, and next to it stood a silver humanoid shape. It was too small to be an actual human in a suit, at least by comparing the thing to the same tree in his universe. Unless it was a midget in a suit.

As he watched, the head slowly rotated, and long, oval eyes stared toward him.

Not him, he thought. The camera.

It took a step toward him, lifting its arm. Something flashed, and then it took two more steps.

John Prime found himself wishing the scene would change, the film would end, that the two minutes would end suddenly. Even though he had the cameras in his hand right now. Even though everything he saw was in the past.

The robot—it had to be some mechanical device—stopped just a meter or two from the camera. Right at the edge of the transfer zone. It raised its hand, as if to speak, as if to communicate, and then it disappeared. The image was replaced by the south wall of his Quonset, his own face rushing forward to grab the device.

“What in the world was that?”

Prime rewound the video and cranked the volume.

The sound of wind on the microphone. The light tap of metal on dirt as the robot walked forward. No sound as its arm rose. Then something, some word that he couldn’t recognize because it cut out too quickly.

It was trying to communicate.

Prime’s mind marveled at the technology. To have that, to control that sort of technology! Maybe he could trade with the robot. Or control the robot. Or get ahold of the flying machine.

His own universes, the ones that Pinball Wizards played in, seemed so mundane. Of course there were universes with more advanced technologies—mainline universes, is what Corrundrum called them. He’d called these United States of America universes—Yankee Doodle universes—backwaters. Other universes clearly had better technology. And that was how he’d gain an edge. Not Pinball Wizards, him, John Prime.

He moved the cameras around. He aligned one of them to point to the south, while the second would point its screen in the same direction. One would record, the second would play his message. He removed the other two cameras.

He started recording, waited twenty seconds, then said, “Hello, I am John Rayburn. I’m interested in a trade of technology. How can we communicate?” He repeated it once. The second recorder would record as before.

He set the recorders on top of it, and sent it through quickly. He didn’t want the robot to leave!

Thirty seconds, forty-five seconds, sixty seconds. That was enough!

He powered the system back up, jumped forward to grab the cameras, and jumped back just as quickly. A black box, a half meter on each side, stood next to his video cameras.

“Was it that easy?” he said. “A trade for nothing? Just giving me stuff?”

Then he saw the red ticking symbols.

“Oh shit!”

He turned and ran, diving out the door of the Quonset. He ran for his life, dodging behind his car, where he knelt, one arm covering his head.

Sitting there, cowering behind his car, he felt like a fool.

It wasn’t a bomb. The robot was probably just reconnoitering him as he was reconnoitering it.

“Damn,” John Prime said.

He stood and started for the Quonset, just as it exploded into a fireball that bounced him down the gravel drive and into the soggy, wet ditch.

CHAPTER
23

John checked for messages at the hotel in Universe 7539—Melissa Saraft’s universe—every couple days. There was no word from the police. Searching the phone books for all the major municipalities in Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana turned up nothing. A second call to the local precinct was met with a curt, “We looked, but there’s no file. Sorry.”

Finally John called Joe Cursky again.

“Yeah?”

“I really do need your help finding Melissa Saraft,” John said.

“Who?”

“Melissa Saraft, shot on the University of Toledo campus two years ago.”

“You again? I don’t have time to help you find her so you can bug her.”

“It’s important!”

“So is my cold beer.”

“Listen,” John said, searching for some way to get his attention. “Her story was true.”

“What story? Nuclear winter? I think I’d notice that.”

“No, she’s from another universe. I brought her here to save her life and now I need to find her.”

The phone clicked dead.

*   *   *

They tried other precincts and police headquarters. No one seemed to have a record of the event or the case.

“This is useless,” John said.

“She can’t have just disappeared,” Casey said.

John smiled at the joke. They stood in the sitting room of their suite of rooms, reading the latest letter from the police. No record of the case, try the Hill Bottom precinct. Only they already had.

“I can’t think of what else to do,” John said.

“Hire a private detective,” Casey said. “It’s the only thing we haven’t done.”

“We haven’t searched 7538.”

“Too dangerous,” Casey said. “You know it is. And what chance have we to find a woman who disappeared two years ago in a world where the army stands by while people kill each other. At least life is valued here.”

“You’re right,” John said. “I wanted her to be the first. To have the chance to go back or be a part of New Toledo. But I guess we go forward without her.”

“How many of the Alarian women are going to do it?” Casey asked.

“Nearly half of them,” John said. John had made the offer in person, traveling to the camp in 7601. He’d told them his plan to populate 7535—the Pleistocene universe—with refugees from 7538—the nuclear winter universe.

“But you all are refugees too,” he’d said. “The offer is open to you all. You can go wherever you want to go. Any universe you want. Here or 7650 or anywhere. But if you want to start the colony in 7535—New Toledo—then that is open to you too. All of you.”

“There’s no one there?” Clotilde asked. “No humans at all?”

“I don’t know for certain, but there are no Amerinds or other inhabitants in North America,” John said. “I don’t know if there is anyone in Europe or not, but the fact that there is so much megafauna makes me believe the world is unpopulated with humans.”

“So no men either,” Englavira said.

“Well, not yet.”

“Hmmm.”

“I have a job here,” one of them said—Liuvia. “I like it here.”

“You don’t all have to go!” John said.

“Well…” Clotilde said. “We’re used to each other.”

“We’ll talk about it,” Englavira said.

In the end, the group had split in half, with half choosing to stay in 7601 and the other half choosing to emigrate.

“They’re taking classes,” John said to Casey. “Camping, hunting, woodcraft, frontier skills.”

Casey laughed. “Really?”

“Yeah, we think we can start before winter,” John said.