Parallelogram Omnibus Edition

by Brande, Robin

  Halli and I exchanged a glance. I would love to go to that party, but it all depended on her. She’d have to stay in Europe a few extra weeks, then travel to England, then we’d have to work out a way for me to come and go in secret—there were more details than Sarah could have imagined.

  “Um, I’m not really sure—” I started to say, but Sarah cut me off.

  “I’m afraid I can’t take no for an answer,” she said. “You simply must come—tell them, Daniel.”

  “It would be very nice,” he said to me. But I knew he understood the complications, too.

  “‘Very nice,’” Sarah repeated. “Not very enthusiastic for a man in the throes of love, but let me assure you I would die of happiness if you two could come. Please say you will. Please.”

  It was hard to resist her. Halli settled for, “We’ll try.”

  “Try harder,” Sarah answered. “I’ll be sending you the invitation.”

  She looked both determined and happy as she shouldered her pack and prepared to set off. She gave Halli and me both one more quick hug, then tugged on Martin’s sleeve. “Let’s let Dan have a moment,” she said. “Perhaps he’ll return the favor when it’s our turn to part.” She grabbed Martin’s hand and pulled him down the trail.

  “Good luck,” Martin called back to us. “Both of you.”

  As soon as they were out of earshot, Daniel turned to Halli and me. “Is it possible? Obviously I’ll do whatever I can to help in any way.”

  It made me so happy to hear that.

  “I don’t know if we can, Daniel,” Halli said. “I just found out I have some business to take care of, unfortunately. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take.”

  “We’ll leave it open, then,” Daniel told her. “You have my comm number. Call me as soon as you know.” He fixed his eyes on mine. “Try.”

  I nodded.

  Halli helped him with his pack. “Be careful with that ankle,” she told him. “Don’t undo all my quality work.”

  “Thank you,” Daniel said. “For the ankle, and—” He pointed at me. “Bringing her.”

  Halli smiled. “You’re very welcome.”

  She slapped him on the shoulder, like a coach sending in a replacement. And then that was it. He turned and set off down the trail.

  Halli and I stood there for a few more minutes, watching the three Brits make their way through the blowing snow. I didn’t know if that was the last I was ever going to see of Daniel, or if it was just a temporary separation. Even if it were just temporary, then what? It’s not like I’d solved any of the other problems. He still lived a universe away.

  But I was willing to put off that complication a little while longer if it meant I could be kissing him again in a few weeks.

  “I should get going,” Halli said. “Karl and I need to leave if we’re going to make it to the next hut by tonight.”

  We turned and began the walk back.

  “What business do you have to take care of?” I asked Halli. I tried not to sound too pushy about it, but if there were any way she might postpone whatever it was long enough for me to see Daniel again—

  Halli groaned. “Something with my parents. I don’t even want to think about it right now. I’ll tell you later.”

  Red paused for a moment to shake the snow off his fur. It seemed to be coming down harder now. I was glad I wouldn’t be hiking in it like the rest of them.

  Which reminded me.

  “So why did Martin keep wishing me good luck and telling me what a suicide mission you’re about to go on?”

  “It probably would be for him,” Halli said with a laugh, “but Karl and I will be fine.”

  She described a route they were going take, up and over the mountains to a hut several miles away. They’d stay there a few days, do some climbing and hiking in the area, then both head back to their respective homes.

  “And then will you see him again?” I asked her.

  “Karl? I doubt it.”

  “Why?” I said. “I thought you liked him.”

  “I do, but that’s how these hut romances go. You meet, have a fun time together, then go your separate ways.”

  A sick feeling settled in my gut. “Is that what this was?” I asked her. “The thing with Daniel and me? Just some sort of hut fling?”

  Halli gave me a sideways glance. “Audie, you saw him just now. What do you think?”

  The truth is I don’t really know how guys think. If I did, maybe I could have figured out how to make Will fall in love with me a long time ago. Not that any of that matters anymore, but I’m just saying.

  “I guess he likes me,” I said about Daniel.

  “I guess,” Halli agreed, bumping me with her shoulder. “Don’t worry so much. I’m sure you two will see each other again.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  I could see Karl in the distance, waiting in front of the hut.

  “I should probably go now,” I said. “Everybody’s waiting for me back at the lab.”

  “When will I see you again?” Halli asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably tomorrow morning—which is . . . tonight for you?” It was so easy to lose track. Saturday night was Sunday morning, Sunday morning was Sunday night . . . “Professor Whitfield has some experiments he wants to try tomorrow morning before I have to leave.”

  “Karl and I will be at the new hut by tonight,” Halli said. “I’ll find somewhere private for you to land.”

  We picked a few times when we’d try to meet, so I’d know where to look for her.

  We hugged goodbye. I was still thinking about Martin’s warning.

  “Please be careful,” I said.

  Halli told me what I’d heard her tell her mother a few nights ago, but without the hostile tone.

  “I’m always careful,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t still be alive.”

  65

  “Good, Audie, good,” the professor said when I’d reported on everything I’d seen. I told him it was all true—the way the mattress lager looked, what Halli and the others were doing, the red roof, the snow—all of it.

  “So now you’ve proven to yourself you can do it,” he said. “And it was easy, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it was,” I realized. Once I stopped telling myself I couldn’t really do it.

  “Beginner’s success,” the professor reminded me. “So are you ready to take it a little further?”

  “How much further?” I asked.

  “You’re going to like this,” Albert said. He’d crowded into the sound-proof room with us to hear my report. Now he stuck around for the rest.

  “You need to start by understanding something,” Professor Whitfield said. “Remember what I told you about cognitive dissonance? How your brain fights against accepting something that violates its deeply-entrenched beliefs? Well, sometimes you have to fight back. You have to let go of some of your beliefs and be willing to approach the world with a fresh mind.”

  “Okay,” I said, not really understanding what he was getting at. “In what way?”

  “Some of the laws of physics aren’t really laws,” Professor Whitfield said. “They’re just habits—habits of thinking. We believe the physical world will always act consistently in certain ways: objects will fall downward when we drop them, items like chairs and tables will feel solid to the touch, physical matter can’t be moved instantaneously from one location to another just by thinking it there—all habits. You’ve already disproven one of those by transporting yourself from one universe to another.”

  He had a point there. That was definitely a habit of thinking I’d had to rethink.

  “And so what you’ve already done tonight,” Professor Whitfield said, “is discard another particular habit of thinking. You were able to see what was happening in a remote location at our same time. That shouldn’t be possible, but it was. Correct?”

  “Correct,” I said.

  “Now then,” he said, “I’d like you to apply that same fresh mind to
all your beliefs about time. Do you think you can do that?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Can I?” Albert butted in. “So the professor’s right: what you just did when you looked over at Halli’s universe should technically violate the laws of physics. But you still did it. And what we’ve found is that you can also use the same skill not only to see a remote location, but also to see a remote time.”

  My heart sped up. “You mean, like looking ahead into the future?”

  “I did it,” Albert said. “It wasn’t hard at all.”

  “Albert was a great test subject,” Professor Whitfield confirmed. “We asked him to identify the person who would be sitting in seat 101, row J, in a theater in London, at a performance two weeks from when he did the experiment.”

  “Two weeks?” I said. “You can do that?”

  “Albert’s gone the furthest so far,” the professor said. “Usually we ask people to look just a few days ahead—it seems more comfortable for them.”

  “Comfort’s boring,” Albert said.

  “But two weeks?” I asked him. “You could really see that far ahead?”

  “Described the man right down to his bald head, big mustache, and grease stain on the left side of his shirt,” Albert said proudly.

  “I had a colleague in London who took the man’s picture,” Professor Whitfield said. “Albert was dead-on.”

  “So . . . you think I could really do that?” I asked. I still didn’t feel quite convinced.

  “If you let go of your habit,” Professor Whitfield said. “And know that it’s possible.”

  “There’s nothing special about time,” Albert said. “Just like there’s nothing special about location. It’s all just information. You’ve heard that theory, I’m sure—that the whole universe is made up of nothing but information. We think we’re seeing objects, but it’s really more like pictures showing up on your computer screen. Those aren’t real physical objects you’re seeing—you can’t hold them or touch them. They’re just collections of data, translated by the computer into images we can understand. Now think about the whole universe being like that.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Professor Whitfield was right: we do like our own habits of thinking. I liked thinking the chair I was sitting on was real. I didn’t like thinking of it as just a collection of numbers and data. Although anyone who’s spent any time studying physics knows solid objects aren’t solid anyway—they’re collections of subatomic particles vibrating and colliding and doing anything but sitting still, just being a chair. But a person can go crazy trying to live a normal life and always thinking too deeply about those things.

  Still, I understood Albert’s point.

  “No different,” I said.

  “No different,” Albert agreed. “If you can do one, you can do the other. And you already know you can do location.”

  “Beginner’s success,” Professor Whitfield reminded me.

  It looked like I was going to go check out the future.

  While Albert returned to the observation room to set up all his sensors, the professor and I worked out a timeline.

  “So how far ahead do you think I should go?” I asked him.

  “It’s up to you,” he said. “Two days, three days, a week—whatever sounds most comfortable.”

  I don’t know what it was—just a feeling. A prompting of some sort. But something made me choose three days.

  I did the calculation. Three days ahead would be Tuesday night in my world, Wednesday morning in the Alps. “So I should sit here and try to see Tuesday night?”

  “Yes, and then go over there Tuesday the way you normally would,” the professor said, “and confirm whether what you saw was true.”

  I sat back and took a deep breath. It all seemed unbelievably wild. If I thought quantum physics was amazing before, I obviously had no clue. What Professor Whitfield and his students were doing was far more exciting—and scary—than I ever imagined. And yet here I was, about to try it for myself.

  “Okay,” I said. I sat up straight and held the pencil in my hand. Then I closed my eyes. “Ready?”

  66

  Snow. Lots and lots of snow.

  Of course, I could be making that up. That was my main concern: that I’d just be imagining something, pretending to myself I could see the future when of course I really couldn’t.

  And since I knew it was snowing already, it made sense that I’d still see that.

  Still, I described the scene to the professor, just like he asked me to.

  “It’s windy,” I said. “Very, very cold. The snow is coming down much harder than . . . before.” I hated to say, “three days ago,” because that only reminded me how crazy this idea was. It was easier to just pretend it was all happening in the present.

  “Do you see Halli?” Professor Whitfield asked.

  I squinted. Even though my eyes were closed. But the snow was so thick, I had to strain to find her.

  There she was. Wrapped up in her heavy coat with the hood cinched tightly around her face. Trudging slowly down the trail, really fighting against the wind.

  And there was Red—poor Red! Pushing into the blowing snow, so much of it coating his face and fur it looked like he was already frozen stiff.

  I didn’t see Karl. Maybe he wasn’t with her anymore.

  But then I heard Halli shout something, and I thought I heard a male voice shout back. The wind was so loud, I couldn’t make out any of the words. It looked miserable out there. I wished Halli had gone down with Daniel and Sarah and Martin three days before. I wished she were anywhere but in that blizzard.

  Halli leaned over and wiped some of the snow out of Red’s eyes. He shook himself, trying to fling some of the wet and cold off his body.

  “What is she doing now?” the professor asked.

  “She’s just trying to get down the mountain,” I said. “She’s going very slowly—like she’s trying to be careful. Oh, and now I see Karl.”

  He was on the hillside above her. The trail was narrow, and snaked back and forth in switchbacks. Halli and Red must have been going more quickly, just trying to get it over with, and Karl was bringing up the rear. That’s who she must have been shouting to before.

  “It’s really steep,” I said. “I’m afraid she’s going to slip.” I watched each step that Halli took, cringing at the idea that her boot might hit a patch of snow or ice, and send her plummeting over the edge. I wished I could have been there to help her, but at the same time I was grateful I wasn’t. For all I knew, I would have been the one slipping, and she’d have to make some desperate attempt to save me.

  “Can you pull back a little further, Audie?” the professor asked. “See where they are in relation to the rest of the mountain?”

  Somehow I backed myself up and rose more above the scene. Professor Whitfield was right—I could see a lot more.

  “There’s a town down below. But it’s really far. I think it’s going to take them a long time, if that’s where they’re going.”

  “Do you see any shelter around them?” the professor asked. “Somewhere they can stop?”

  I scanned the area, and my heart started beating faster. Nothing. There was no place for them to escape from the snowstorm. They had to keep hiking, and it looked like it might take them forever.

  “I hear something,” I said.

  I tried to listen harder. It sounded like thunder, maybe, or a low, deep rumble. Something that almost vibrated my insides, it felt so elemental and powerful.

  Then I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye. Something that didn’t look right, but that my brain couldn’t process right away. It was because it didn’t belong in that picture, what was happening. I think my mind wasn’t ready to believe it.

  It felt like it happened in slow motion, but I think it was just the opposite. Maybe the action was instant, but my brain slowed it as much as it could while it tried to catch up and understand.

  I whispered t
he truth to the professor. “It’s an avalanche.”

  It began high up the mountain above them. The snow simply broke off in one enormous sheet, and started thundering down the hillside.

  “They’re going to get hit!” I shouted out. “Run!”

  Halli looked up and shouted something to Karl. They both took off in a panic, trying to outrace the avalanche before it could reach them.

  But they couldn’t do it. It all happened too fast. I saw Karl’s feet shoot out from underneath him. He flailed his arms to try to catch his balance, but it was no use—he was already being swept along, like a swimmer pulled over a waterfall. And then the avalanche came straight for Halli and Red.

  She looked up. She didn’t even have time to scream. She dove on top of Red to protect him, but they were both about to die, and she knew it. She knew it, and I knew it.

  “HALLI!”

  “What’s happening?” the professor said.

  “HALLI!”

  Time went so slowly, I could watch it frame by frame: the avalanche taking Karl, the roiling power of it reaching Halli, the snow just barely touching her back, and in a split-second more, it would sweep her and Red off the mountain.

  Do something! DO SOMETHING! my insides screamed at me. I didn’t know how to help her. There was no possible way. This was the end of everything: of Halli, of our friendship, of everything we could have been to each other in the future. All of it swept away in an instant. An instant I had to watch unfolding and knew I couldn’t control.

  And that’s when I realized something. I may not be as physically strong as Halli, able to cross the Gobi desert or climb Mount Everest or dodge piranhas in the Amazon. I don’t know how to fix a damaged ankle or speak a dozen languages. I don’t even know how to make a simple order of pancakes.

  But I do know something, and that’s physics. And maybe I could use it to save a life.

  Because finally I remembered. That thing that I’d been struggling to grasp, that idea that kept eluding me. It was something Mr. Dobosh taught us in class. Something about the properties of light.

  For a long time physicists thought light was made up of particles. Then one of them showed that light was really a wave. And then Einstein showed it was both: particle and wave, depending on which instruments you used to look at it. But it could never be both a particle and a wave at the same time—in a way, it was the instruments that made it commit.