by Ward Wagher
“What is it?” Mrs. Wallace asked as she slipped over next to him.
“Harmonic coming,” he replied. “A big one.”
The characteristic buzzing sound intruded into the room as the other gathered next to him.
Mrs. Wallace turned pale. “I cannot pop out,” she said through clenched teeth.
Edgar started typing madly.
“Ed, what are you doing?” Quintan yelled.
“I kept the stored procedure to retrieve someone from out of time. We never tested it, of course, but I think it will reverse what originally happened. Maybe we can stop the harmonic.”
“How can you know that?” Sally asked.
“I do not know that,” he yelled. “But look at the chart. This harmonic is already close to going off the scale. If we do not do something we are dead anyway.”
He looked over at Mrs. Wallace, who had placed both hands on the tabletop and seemed to be trying to dig her fingers into the surface. She looked back at him and nodded. “Do it!”
He pulled a couple of virtual icons into the window above his desk and then slapped the initiator to start it. The comp-term hesitated for a moment, then a flashing Program Error indicator popped up. The buzzing grew harsher and the number of people in the room suddenly nearly doubled. The only person without a double standing next to them was Mrs. Wallace.
Sally moaned. “It’s too late.”
Edgar quickly pulled up the program and tried to read it through the doubled characters. He had to fix the error. He felt himself lose consciousness….
INTERLUDE 3
The root and branch structure of the multiple universes ensured that reality was collected in groups so similar that an individual who was moved between them would struggle to see a difference. Even the ruBracks paid careful attention to the various universes and they often traveled between them. Some of the universes that derived from an earlier branching, however, were very different.
The harsh ululation of electronic music spilled into the night air as Edgar and Sally Forsenn stepped out of the Eros Club on to the fifty-eighth level of the commercial block in downtown Urbana, Illinois. The heavy rain earlier in the evening had swept some of the petrochemical stink from the air, leaving the result almost breathable.
They had mutually decided to take a night away from the frustrations of their research at the Illini Quantum Physics Laboratory and get a fresh start the next day. The frantic coupling with multiple partners at the club had sated her desires while her mind nibbled away at the challenges their project at the lab presented. Unfortunately, Edgar was prepared to carry on for hours yet and held the hand of a teen-aged boy he was bringing home from the club with them.
Because she was preoccupied with the details of their trans-universal portal theory, Sally was a bit surprised when Edgar grasped her arm and pulled her to a halt. She otherwise would have likely knocked over the rather seedy looking beggar that stepped in front of them.
“God’s Word commands the man to have one wife in harmony and fruitfulness.”
“What?” The skinny man’s words seemed incongruous and Sally, and she shook her head as she looked more closely at him.
“God will surely judge the world because of its sin,” the man continued. “He calls on all men to repent and submit to the Lord Christ.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” Sally barked.
“Come on, Sally,” Edgar said, “let’s get away from this nut. He probably is infected with something.”
They brushed past the itinerant and continued walking. As they headed towards the slideway Sally periodically looked back and wondered to herself why the man’s words ate at her heart. He was a vagrant and likely unhinged.
In the early morning hours, Sally stared at the ceiling and mentally tugged the complex temporal equations into place. She glanced over and smiled at Edgar, who snored softly and was intertwined with the evening’s entertainment. She eased out of bed and slipped over to the window. Their jobs at the lab entitled them to an apartment on the outside of the massive block and marked them as part of the elite in American society. Unfortunately, the window only displayed the other towering monoliths where most of the three million inhabitants of Urbana slept.
She quietly dressed and left the apartment to return to the lab, because the answer that had eluded them for months was now clear in her mind. She had the answer to the technical details that had bedeviled them. She was now sure the Forsenns would be remembered as the team that had solved Earth’s population problem.
The repeated failures over the previous four hundred years to develop any type of interstellar transportation resulted, in this case, of an Earth that had grown massively overpopulated. Governments and scientists both were concerned as the population approached the twenty-billion mark. The growth had resisted all efforts to limit it.
The Forsenns were specialists in temporal theory and had developed it from its rude beginnings. They had concluded that they lived on a world of rather low probability. Every calculation they built indicated that animal life should not have evolved on Earth, let alone humans. Their equations that theorized multiple parallel universes, when combined with the low probability of animal life indicated that there were hundreds of Earths which were barren. Edgar and Sally worked to develop a portal which would allow them to relieve the pressure on Earth’s population by marching the teeming billions through the portals into virgin, empty planets.
Sally slipped into the dark laboratory that she and Edgar had left a scant six hours before. Sitting down at her desk, she slid the keyboard over to where she could type most comfortably. She pushed the switch to turn on the cathode ray tube and display the login to the lab network. Electrical power was expensive and it was simply common sense to use as little as possible. Flipping another switch, she turned on a tiny light bulb that projected onto her work area.
She typed in her password with a clatter of mechanical keys and watched the screen. After a few moments, it displayed the message in pale green letters:
Welcome to the Illini-Urbana VTAM Network – (c) 2480 IBM Corporation.
She typed the command to list the library that contained her recent work. She opened the editor and loaded the set of calculations she had been working on with Edgar and quickly typed in the final two equations. She touched her lower lip with her tongue and reviewed the code. Yes, it was correct.
Returning to the command prompt, she typed in a request to the Peoria Atomic Pile for a priority routing of electricity. The experiment would demand power and a lot of it. A message returned, asking for authentication. She pulled a slip of paper from her pocket and typed in the lab director’s private key. Arnold Gingery left things like that lying on his desk all the time. It was no problem for her to make a copy. And he probably would decide he had forgotten about authorizing the expenditure when he was eventually asked.
She pulled the cover off of a molded Bakelite magazine and studied the ten flexible disks nestled inside. She slid open a hatch on the terminal controller next to her desk and clipped the magazine into its socket. She then typed a command on the keyboard and pressed the Enter key. With a buzz and a ker-chunk, ker-chunk, ker-chunk the machine started writing her program to the diskettes. After six or seven minutes, the job completed and she ejected the magazine from the terminal controller. She took the magazine and stepped across the lab to the IBM Series One machine controller. It was dark in the lab, but she could have done this with her eyes closed, it was so familiar.
She latched the magazine into the drive and slid the door closed. Then she flipped two switches on the front of the tall, narrow computer. The fans whirred as the machine powered up. She stopped and mentally reviewed her work and decided it was good. The light behind the IPL button came on when she pushed the button, and she heard the reader begin to process the diskettes.
The lights in the operational area of the lab came on automatically as the program loaded and began running. She stepped over to the railing and w
atched as the ten tetra-cyclotrons began spooling up. Through the windows, she would see the flat ground outside of the lab building where the Forsenn Portal into the first parallel universe would materialize – if all went well.
The tetra-cyclotron was an invention of Edgar’s. The electro-mechanical device contained a ten-ton rotor that spun in a vacuum. As the rotor sped up, it generated an electro-gravitic field which intensified based upon the speed of the rotor. This prevented the centrifugal force from causing the rotor to fly apart and would allow the temporal modules on the perimeter to exceed the speed of light. This produced the field that they would manipulate into the interstitial portal.
With a whine, the machines spooled up and gradually the whine faded out of hearing as the rotors spun faster. She continued to watch and saw blue light gathering around the devices. The light grew more intense until she could not see the machines in the cloud of light. Outside a filmy mist formed in a vertical circle just above the ground. The ghostly fumes reflected the lights around the field. The vapor in the circle began moving into a tight whirlpool, then suddenly cleared. In the circle, she could see what she knew had to certainly be another universe. The sun was shining through a heavy forest. There were no buildings in sight.
Sally clapped her hands together in joy. She had succeeded in creating the trans-temporal portal. She and Edgar would be famous. They would save the world. She jumped up and down in her happiness and studied the portal as it firmed up. She glanced quickly to either side to make sure the movie cameras were recording the scene. She knew the telemetry would be pouring hundreds of kilobytes of data into the mainframe. There would be months of study to understand exactly how everything worked.
Her breath caught in her throat as the portal suddenly seemed to tunnel out away from her. Through the portal in the other universe she saw a second portal form, and then a third. The process accelerated as dozens of new universes appeared and immediately portals formed in them. She ran over to the terminal connected to the Series 1 and quickly logged in. She frantically typed in the command to dump the program and hit the Send key.
She heaved a sigh of relief as the tetra-cyclotrons began to wind down. The main feed from the Peoria Atomic Pile disconnected and the blue light disappeared. She walked back over to the railing, now walking on shaky legs. The portals kept generating! There were now dozens, even hundreds of successive portals. There were so many she could no longer resolve those in the distance. What had happened?
As the background noise of the machinery quieted down she became aware of a buzzing sound, which grew in volume. She continued to watch the portal and now it seemed that blue light was reaching out from her portal and growing towards her. She became very frightened. For some reason, she thought about the strange man they had encountered in the walkway the night before. Was there a God and was He reaching down to judge her? Her rational mind told her this was nonsense. But, still…
Like a billowing fog, the blue light flowed out of the portal drifted through the windows of the lab. It drifted across the floor and through the air. She stepped back as it came across the railings and enveloped her. It had a pleasant tingling sensation. Perhaps this was a minor side-effect. The buzzing increased and now she felt as though she was being pulled apart. Okay, this was not so pleasant.
In the center of the portal, the tortured bonds holding the matter in the universe together were sundered and the matter flashed into energy. The chain reaction moved faster than the shock wave and enveloped the Illini-Urbana Quantum Physics Laboratory. Sally Forsenn was torn apart by the forces she had unleashed, and it happened far, far more quickly than she had time to sense.
The chain reaction spread across the planet like a grass fire before the wind. The city of Urbana and its three million inhabitants flashed into energy. The wave of destruction spread out from Earth across the solar system. The sun briefly gathered itself into a super-nova before its mass converted completely into energy with a far vaster detonation. The very fabric of the universe was torn apart. It appeared to roll up like a scroll. The shock wave, which crowded the speed of light, was left far behind by the wave of violence which exceeded the speed of light by millions of times. In fact, the very laws of physics were rendered invalid and moot by the destruction.
Sally’s first thought was that she had been caught in the blast. She screamed in terror and torment at what she had caused. She was joined, as she now realized, by the terror and torment of billions, who were suddenly thrown from a disintegrating universe into something far more appalling. Why, oh why had she not listened to the words of that strange little man on the walkway in downtown Urbana?
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Edgar Forsenn opened his eyes and looked up. The lab appeared to be normal and… he wasn’t dead. He looked down at his shaking hands and at the ceramaplast worktop. No, things were not entirely normal. Where Mrs. Wallace stood were a pair of deep indentations where her fingers had dug into the ceramaplast. One time Forsenn had attempted to scratch the surface with a stylus and was unsuccessful. Once again, he was reminded that Mrs. Wallace was not human.
“Well...” he sighed. “That was interesting.”
Quintan pulled himself to his feet and walked quickly over to Edgar’s workstation. “Ed, what just happened?”
“There is no reason that we should not all be standing before the Maker’s throne, at this moment.” Mrs. Wallace said. “I must confess, in hindsight, to being disappointed.”
“Ed, is the temporal trace apparatus still running?”
Forsenn shook himself and punched a couple of icons floating in the air above his station.
“Yes, it is. And it is significant. Take a look at the graph.”
He pointed to the scrolling chart that the tracker produced. “You can see where the harmonic was climbing. Then, just before it hit the discorporation threshold, it slammed in the other direction. It went completely off the lower scale.”
“For that, we can be thankful,” Quintan said. “But, I wonder what happened.”
“Can you predict the next harmonic?” Mrs. Wallace asked.
“I was not able to predict this one,” Forsenn said. “However, the underlying pattern is as quiescent as I have seen since we started tracking it. I think we may have months to work on this. I would say that it is even possible that whatever that downward spike was, it may have solved our problems for us.”
“That would be a serendipitous result if it were so,” Mrs. Wallace said. “However, I shall confer with the other ruBracks and perhaps with the Tasker.”
With that, she popped out. The other three looked at each other.
“I wish I could travel like that,” Quintan said.
“If you did you would probably look like Mrs. Wallace,” Sally said.
“Perish the thought!”
§ § §
The paladin was a gravely worried man. Twice during the previous month, global events occurred, which he knew frayed the fabric of the universe. The badly frightened populace of the planet was demanding from the leaders and scientists the answers to what was happening. Fortunately for him, there was no obvious epicenter to the events, so he was able to keep the quantum physics lab working in secret. In fact, no one had traced the events to quantum level fluctuations. He wondered if the universe was headed towards the end of all things, and worried about standing before the throne of the Creator.
The paladin’s private secretary stepped into his office. This was unusual, the man was a stickler for routine and normally communicated via the comp term.
“What is it, Cleo?” the paladin asked.
“A Woogie is here to see you, Sir,” the rotund little man said.
That would clearly break the routine. When Woogies decided something was important enough to bother humans, they would simply show up for a meeting. Their judgment of importance was usually accurate. The Woogie followed Cleo into the paladin’s office.
“We have a problem, human,” the being said through its vo
coder.
The paladin stood up. “I guess we’re having a meeting. And you are?”
“The Woogie is Shuurely. But that is not important right now.”
The normal carefree demeanor that characterized the Woogies was in abeyance. The paladin decided this was a serious Woogie.
“Suppose you talk to me, then.”
“The Woogie is talking. Human need to listen.”
“I’m listening,” the paladin said.
“Woogieverse is quaking. Scientists in the palindrome unbalanced the balance. Paladin needs to quit palling around and fixture. Woogies are all frightened.”
He carefully reviewed what the Woogie had just said and made sure he understood. Even when obviously terrified, the Woogie still managed to fracture the Anglo language through its vocoder.
“I’ve gotta ask you this, Shirley...”
“Shuurely,” the Woogie corrected.
“Sorry. Shuurely. How did you find out about my scientists? That is a closely held secret.”
“Woogies are not stupid. The Forcep has tinkered with temporal things in Urbana-danna-banna.”
“Do the Woogies understand temporal theory?” the paladin asked.
“Understand enough to know the danger. Woogies learned long ago not to finangle-dangle with fabric of the Woogieverse.”
“Can you help?”
“Woogies can fix.”
The paladin had worked his way back to his chair and sat down. Now he leaned back as he considered the Woogie’s offer. The Woogies had developed a star-faring civilization hundreds of years, perhaps a thousand years, before man had ventured forth from Earth. He had experienced it personally and up-close. He also knew the pink quintapods tended to look at things a bit differently than humans. Many people considered the Woogies to be slightly insane. On the other hand, Woogies tended to view mankind the same way. And considering the chaos at the Urbana Quantum Physics Laboratory, they had good reason.