Parallelities

by Alan Dean Foster

  They were able to eliminate the three cars with the variant license plates plus the one with the map pocket on the backseat. That left four, so identical that they might have been prepped for sequential scenes of automotive destruction by a Hollywood special-effects team.

  Mitch slid behind the wheel of the nearest. “I can’t tell any of the others apart. Might as well take this one.”

  “I guess that’s okay by me.” Max stood by the door. “Except that I’m driving.”

  Mitch smiled up at him. “Of course you are. Aren’t I already in the driver’s seat?”

  His counterpart was not amused. “Don’t start. Isn’t everything messed up enough for you as it is?”

  Himself stared back up at him. “Are you saying I don’t know the way back to the office?”

  “We’re not going back to the office.” Max’s expression was grim. “We’re going out to Boles’s. He said he might have a solution to my—to our problem. You ought to meet him anyway.” A thin smile split his face. “The reality of your presence will lend emphasis to the situation.”

  Unable to come up with a counterargument, a reluctant Mitch slid across the seat and allowed Max to take up position behind the wheel. “I’m used to dealing with perpetual motion fanatics and flat-earthers, but not some freak whose invention actually works.”

  “He’s no freak. Actually, he’s a pretty nice guy, for a rich SOB.” Max turned the key in the ignition and the Aurora roared to life. “I could like him, if he hadn’t screwed up my life so badly.”

  “Our life,” Mitch corrected him as Max pulled out and headed north.

  Utilizing a back service road enabled them to avoid the horn-blaring traffic that was crowding the main entrance to the zoo’s parking lot. There was no one around to challenge the Aurora’s right to use the restricted roadway. Every zoo employee had been called to do battle with the inexplicable outbreak of chimps.

  On the way out of Griffith Park, as they were heading for the nearest on-ramp to the Ventura Freeway, the Aurora passed a trio of the energetic primates scampering hell-bent for the hills of the mountainous park. Some unsuspecting hikers were in for an afternoon surprise, Max reflected.

  They stayed on the Ventura all the way to Malibu Canyon Road, having no need to cut back through the west side of the city. This being Los Angeles, traffic never entirely disappeared even at midday, but once they were past Topanga it finally began to thin.

  They wound through the mountains before heading down the other side toward the gleaming blue Pacific. Since Max was concentrating on the twisting, ancient road, it was Mitch who let out a start and sat up sharply in his seat.

  “Did you see that?” He was staring out the passenger’s-side window.

  “See what?” Max slowed, but kept his attention on the pavement.

  “Bighorn sheep. A whole damn herd of ’em!”

  Max had to grin. “There are no bighorns in Southern California. You know that. Where do you think you are? Colorado?”

  “Yeah, I know it.” Mitch settled back in the seat. “But I saw them.”

  “You saw ordinary, everyday, domestic sheep. Maybe this bunch was healthier than usual. There are probably several hobby herds around here. Rich folks in these hills keep every-thing from lions to llamas.” He broke off as he concentrated on making a tight curve without stressing the tires.

  Mitch glanced over at him. “There’s nothing wrong with our eyes, as you damn well know, and I’m as familiar with the hobby wildlife of Southern California as you are. I’m telling you, they were bighorns.”

  “All right, they were bighorns. Let me know when you spot the first grizzly.”

  “Don’t worry,” Mitch told him without a flicker of sarcasm. “I will.” He turned his gaze back to the window.

  They reached the coast highway without encountering any oversized bears or any more heavy-horned sheep, by which time even Mitch was beginning to wonder if he’d imagined the noble flock.

  They both saw the condor, however.

  It approached from behind, soaring over the front of the car, tracking the highway in search of fresh roadkill. His eyes wide, Max leaned forward against the wheel. Alongside him, Mitch did likewise.

  There was no question in either man’s mind as to the bird’s identity. Its wingspan was immense, far greater than that of the state’s largest buzzard. When it settled down to roost atop a telephone pole they could clearly see the svelte, hooked beak and domed, featherless skull.

  “Watch it!” Mitch yelled.

  Max jerked hard on the wheel, bringing them back into the northbound lane from which the Aurora had strayed. The blaring echo of a car traveling in the opposite direction briefly assailed their ears before fading rapidly behind them. Max found he was starting to sweat. So, not surprisingly, was Mitch.

  “What’s going on?” his passenger muttered darkly. “What the hell’s happening?”

  Max stared forward, his fingers tight on the wheel. “Bighorns and condors. We might see that grizzly yet.” He looked over at himself. “I have a feeling that we’re not where I belong anymore, Mitch. Or you either, judging by your reactions.” He thought long and hard before continuing.

  “I wonder if instead of creatures and things slipping from parallel worlds into mine, we’ve gone and slipped into a para world that’s just slightly different from the one you or I are used to. We’re not talking duplicates of existing people or critters anymore, but entirely new stuff. There are no bighorn sheep or condors in the Santa Monica Mountains.” He scrutinized the road, the houses they were passing, the power and telephone lines.

  “Everything else is the same, everything’s normal, except that in this slightly different para more of the indigenous wildlife seems to have survived.”

  “Wonderful. An entirely new predicament to worry about.” Mitch considered thoughtfully. “If that’s really the case, then it’s a better world than the one you or I live in.”

  “Maybe.” Max was hesitant to agree. “If those are the only differences. Actually, there’s only one I’m concerned about.”

  “What’s that?”

  Max met his double’s gaze. “What if in this parallel world there’s no Barrington Boles? We could be stuck here permanently.”

  Mitch sat back in his seat, staring out the window at the pavement ahead. It was the same Pacific Coast Highway that he knew so well, flanked by the same trees, the same fast-food restaurants, the same Malibu-trendy boutiques and shops. The same cars plied the side streets, driven by ordinary citizens intent on the familiar tasks of everyday life. Only in the Aurora was reality distorted, only in the minds of its passengers had it been displaced.

  “Well,” he observed finally, “if that’s the case then at least we know we’ll each have one friend. But I’m not sharing Lisa.”

  Max frowned. “Lisa? Lisa Sanchez from down in advertising? You’re dating her?”

  “Sure. Aren’t you?”

  “I’ve been trying to get her to go out with me for months. She always says she’s too busy.”

  “Not for me she isn’t.” Mitch grinned.

  “You smug son of a bitch. Tell me: How is she? Do we have a good time?”

  “A great time.” Mitch proceeded to explain exactly how. After all, it wasn’t as if he was revealing intimate secrets to a stranger. Or worse, spilling the details to a representative of his own newspaper.

  They were almost relaxed when Max noticed that something important had gone missing. Point Dume, to be precise. The small, rocky peninsula, a dominant local landmark, was nowhere to be seen. The Seabreak Motel sat where it belonged, as did the Malibu pier and its attendant restaurant and parking lot, but instead of rolling up against a thrusting cliff, the beach continued northward in a gentle, unbroken line.

  Mitch missed the distinctive geological formation as well. It was another indication of how radically different a para they had slipped into. But the highway continued to unwind ahead of them, familiar and unbroken. A sign showed that T
rancas and its attendant beach and community were not far ahead, exactly where they belonged. A peninsula had gone missing. Nothing to get excited about.

  “Wish we could lose a few other parts of L.A.” Unable to do anything about the situation in which he found himself, Mitch was doing his best to get into the spirit of things. “There’s a building full of lawyers in Beverly Hills I could do without.”

  “Why stop there?” Max was feeling a little light-headed. “Why restrict ourselves to the L.A. basin? Why not wish away Libya, or Iran? If there can be a para where there’s no Point Dume, why not one with no Hussein or Gaddafi?”

  “Or no U.S. of A.,” Mitch added. That thought sobered them up fast.

  The elite beach community of Trancas looked undisturbed, exactly as Max remembered it from his last visit. He was ready to believe they had slipped back into his own world until he saw the guard booth at the entrance to the gated community wherein dwelled the meddlesome Barrington Boles. The cubicle was painted a soft oceanic blue instead of the bright sunny yellow he remembered. But the guard was the same, as was the road that led to Boles’s hilltop aerie.

  “He won’t be surprised to see me,” Max explained as the Aurora ascended after they had been passed on through the barrier, “but you ought to give him a start.”

  “I hope the bastard faints and hits his head,” Mitch growled.

  “He’d better not,” an alarmed Max reproached his double. “We need that head. It’s our only chance of putting things right and returning to normal, to our own worlds.”

  He pulled into the circular drive, noting with relief as he did so that the house and grounds were unchanged. Even the flowers and the rest of the landscaping were exactly as he remembered them. Overhead, the sun bathed the surrounding hills in warm, hazy Southern California light. In the distance the Pacific shone deep blue. Under such conditions it was hard to stay angry at anything. A condor went soaring by overhead on vast black wings, reminding them why they were there.

  It was with great relief that Max heard Boles’s voice respond over the intercom speaker set into the wall next to the door. When the inventor appeared in the portal a few moments later, the anxious reporter managed to summon a smile.

  “Hello, Max. Nice to see you again.”

  “Not as nice as it is to see you.”

  The inventor frowned. “I don’t understand.” At that moment he caught sight of Mitch, who was standing slightly off to one side. The older man’s jaw dropped slightly but perceptibly. “I didn’t know you had a twin.”

  “I don’t.” Max gestured in Mitch’s direction. “But I have a para. As you should know.”

  “As I should …?” Boles halted, then stepped back. “I think you’d better come in. Both of you.”

  The den was just as Max remembered it. He sat down in a chair this time, leaving the couch to Mitch and the opposite chair to their host. Boles’s gaze kept shifting from one to the other.

  “This is incredible. Simply incredible.”

  “Yeah, that’s kind of how we see it.” Mitch helped himself to a handful of cashews from a dish on the big coffee table.

  “You’re sure you’re not twins?” the inventor inquired guardedly. “You’re not pulling some kind of elaborate gag on me so you can make a fool of me in your paper?”

  “Wasn’t I straight with you when I was here before?” Max looked longingly at the cashews.

  “Yes. Yes you were.” Boles still did not sound quite convinced. “But after the failure of the system I couldn’t keep from envisioning the ridicule a publication like yours could heap on me.”

  “Excuse me?” Max looked up sharply. “Failure? What failure?”

  “The inability of my device to produce the effect I claimed for it, of course.”

  It was comfortably warm in the room, just as it had been outside, but that did not prevent a chill cold as a death-creep from running down Max’s spine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Now who’s trying to pull a gag? Your machine worked exactly like you claimed it would. I’m stuck with this field or whatever it is unpredictably and erratically affecting the world around me. Ever since I left here I’ve been running into parallel people, parallel things, and parallel occurrences.”

  He gestured at his double, who was munching away happily on the contents of the nut dish.

  “We’re calling him Mitch, but he’s me in every respect. He’s not my twin, he’s a para. Until we can figure out a way for him to return to his own parallel world he’s staying with me. It’s not exactly an imposition. After all, we’re more than best friends.” He leaned forward slightly and stared hard at the would-be scientist. “So don’t sit there and try to tell me that your infernal device didn’t work. Mitch is living evidence to the contrary, and I can offer you plenty more.”

  Sincerity dominated the inventor’s reply, was writ large on his face. “This is just plain unbelievable. I’m telling you, Max, that you walked out of here a few days ago mildly disappointed in my failure but otherwise unaffected. As much as I’d like to claim credit for it, my setup didn’t work.”

  Max sat back and waved at Mitch. “Then how do you explain him, and everything else that’s happened to me? I’ve had to deal with para women, para burglars, para cars, and even para chimpanzees. Not to mention at least one alternate para world in which condors and bighorn sheep still thrive in Southern California. Everything keeps changing around me, and without warning. There are no condors surviving in Mitch’s para Southern California either, so that means that not only did he slip from his world into mine but that together we slipped into a third.”

  “You slipped into a third, all right,” Boles agreed readily. “And in this one, my machine did not work. Don’t you see?” he finished earnestly.

  Max finally did, and the shadow that he felt falling over him darkened. He and Mitch were in still another parallel world, all right. Only in this one, Boles’s device had not worked, did not work. Which meant that he was not talking to the same Boles who had told him “he had an idea” on how to fix things and to come back Tuesday. That Boles was waiting on him in his own, original world, waiting futilely for a reporter who had gone slip-sliding away to show up at his house. He could not try out his corrective idea because the subject on whom it was to be tried had gone away—to a parallel world in which the inventor Boles had yet to succeed.

  Obviously, Max now realized, he had to return to his own world line and to that particular Boles, or at least to a para in which Boles’s device worked. But how? He did not know how he had slipped from his original world into this one, much less how to get back. Were parallel worlds like an enormous deck of cards that existed in a continuous state of shufflement? How could he gain the attention of the dealer, or was the effect purely random? It was already clear that he had no control over his movements between worlds. He could only hope that he would wake up one day and find himself in one where Boles knew what he was doing.

  What if the para effect wore off while he was still in this world, still accompanied by the unlucky Mitch? Would they both be stuck forever in whatever para Fate happened to drop them in, like a spinning coin finally bereft of its momentum? If that happened then both of them would simply have to cope. But he did not want to cope. He wanted home, wanted his own world back, a world wherein he was the only Max and condors did not roam the skies above the absent Point Dume.

  One thing was plain enough. Much as he might want to, this para of Barrington Boles could not help him.

  “Do you know how my para self worked out the final settings?” Boles was asking him. “What about the final parameters of the distortion arc?”

  Max sighed tiredly. “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. I didn’t think the damn thing would work, so I didn’t pay attention to any of the operational details. I thought all the lights and electrical discharges were real pretty, and that was about the extent of my formal observations.”

  “Too bad.” Boles turned reflective. “Though it is
encouraging to know that in another world I succeeded. If you could tell me how, maybe I could duplicate the results here, and then figure out a way to get you back to the world line where you belong.”

  “It probably wouldn’t matter.” Max stood. “The frequency of shifts, the intensity of the effect, seems to be increasing. By the time you got it worked out I’m likely to be in another para altogether. With luck, one where you knew what you were doing.”

  Shaking his head slowly, Boles rose from his chair. “I have a feeling none of my selves knew what they were doing. If they did, you wouldn’t be here. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry, hell!” Max took a step toward the inventor. “I ought to strangle you.”

  Mitch hurried to intervene. “Don’t even think about it. Kill him and you might affect every other Boles up and down the line. Then we’ll have no chance of putting things right.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

  “I always am.” Mitch smiled reassuringly. “Aren’t we?”

  It was a bad idea anyway, Max decided. Though older, the inventor was bigger and in much better shape.

  “You can stay here if you like while I work on the machine.” Boles was trying his best to be encouraging.

  “No thanks.” Max turned in the direction of the front door. “This place gives me the creeps. You give me the creeps.” He gestured expansively. “Lucky me. Now the whole world gives me the creeps, and I don’t even know which one I’m in. Stay here? I’d rather camp out in the shadow of Chernobyl.” He turned to leave. Mitch hurried to follow him.

  “Don’t mind him,” he told their host in passing. “He’s just upset. As am I.”

  Boles followed them toward the door. “Pardon my questions, but surely you understand my fascination with the success of my other self. Tell me, do you feel the same emotions simultaneously?”

  “Pretty much. We are the same, after all, except that he’s locked into this field, or disturbance, or distortion, and I’m just kind of a fellow traveler. He’s the tornado sweeping between parallel worlds, and I’m one of the pieces of debris that’s been sucked up and dragged along in his wake. Sooner or later the tornado will run out of energy and fall apart. When it does, I hope it drops me where I belong.”