by Peter Clines
“Really?”
“Lots of inventions went public before people fully understood them,” said Neil. “Three-quarters of the pharmaceutical industry is just mass-testing random compounds and seeing what kind of effects they have. When the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there were less than two hundred people in the world who understood all of the science and engineering behind the atomic bomb. No one in Washington did. But everyone understood the explosion.”
“We’ve made almost no progress,” said Arthur. “There’s something missing. Some element that’s just beyond us.”
Mike raised a brow. “How do you mean?”
“I have a premise,” he said, “a bare-bones one for another book, that certain ideas can only happen at certain points in history. We don’t see the sun the same way the ancient Egyptians did. We don’t see the night sky the same way the ancient Greeks did. We don’t see the ocean the same way the Vikings did. The scientific views of a time shape how people view things enough that once society gets past a certain point, it’s almost impossible for us to think in the same way.”
“I’ve heard similar ideas,” said Mike.
“Some key paradigm has shifted in the hundred-plus years since Koturovic wrote down his theories,” Arthur said. “Something about how we see the world. And it’s keeping us from fully understanding what he was saying.”
“It probably didn’t help that every now and then one of you came through the Door with slightly different research priorities,” Mike said. “Just enough to keep throwing things off, and adding to the sense of memory issues.”
Arthur raised his shoulders, and let them slump back down.
“Still, though,” Mike said, “three years? How’s that possible?”
“Fermat came up with his ‘last theorem’ in sixteen thirty-seven,” said Olaf. “It took three hundred and fifty years for someone to solve it again. That was a scribble in a margin. We’re dealing with almost nine pages of equations.”
“With nothing to back them up,” Arthur added. “As I said, most of his work was destroyed. I’d be amazed if there were thirty copies of his treatise left in the world. There’s no early research or further studies or later experiments. Koturovic’s almost a nonentity, historically. He dropped out of sight in England, reappeared briefly in America, and died in eighteen ninety-nine.”
“We just needed more time,” Jamie said. “We figured if we had more time, if we could run more experiments, eventually we had to find a pattern. We’d figure out how the equations work.”
Mike looked at her, and the ants carried out more images. Computer towers. Talking about code. Pages from different reports.
“Johnny doesn’t just run the crosswalks,” he said. “It’s analyzing them. It didn’t take you long to go over the code because most of his functions don’t involve running the Door at all.”
Jamie and Arthur both nodded.
Another moment passed.
“So,” Arthur said, “now you know everything. What happens next? Are you going to turn us in to Magnus?”
Mike shook his head. “I think the Door itself is the big issue right now.” He looked at each of them. “No one else should go through it, and we need to figure out how to shut it off.”
“Tough,” said Olaf, “since we don’t know how it works in the first place.”
THIRTY-SIX
“Okay,” Jamie said. “I might regret this, but can I ask you a question about her?”
Mike looked away from his terminal. “Her?”
“The other me?”
They were watching the Door again. Olaf was at Site B. Sasha was with them, checking the cables and hoses for the ninth time, to make sure something hadn’t been left connected.
“You can ask,” said Mike, “but I don’t know if I can answer.”
“I might be able to,” Sasha said.
“Why would she name the cat after a doctor?”
“What?” Mike yawned. They were all working on five hours of sleep. He hadn’t been too surprised when Jamie spent it alone in her trailer.
“Spock,” she said. “Why would a kid name their cat Spock?”
“I thought it was the Star Trek character,” said Mike, “not the doctor.”
“Pretty sure it was,” said Sasha. “You…she was a fan of the original series.”
Jamie looked at Sasha, then over to Mike, and back. “What’s Star Trek?”
There was silence on the main floor.
“You are fucking kidding me,” said Sasha.
“What?”
“ ‘Space, the final frontier…’ ” said Mike. “Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, the Enterprise.”
Jamie shook her head.
“Okay,” he said, “where’d you come up with Isis?”
“Assignment: Earth,” she said. “I loved it when I was little. I named him after the cat on the show.”
“Assignment: Earth?”
“Yeah, you know. The old sci-fi show. Gary Seven. Isis.” She tilted her head to the left. “ ‘Our mission is to guide mankind into the twenty-first century….’ ”
It was Mike’s turn to shake his head.
She stared at him. “Robert Lansing, Teri Garr, Julie Newmar. It ran for six or seven years. They made movies out of it. And a spin-off series.”
“Wait.” Sasha furrowed her brow. “You’re talking about the old Star Trek episode, ‘Assignment: Earth’?”
“Yes!” Jamie snapped her fingers. “That’s right. I always forget it was a spin-off.”
“But you’ve never heard of Star Trek?”
“No, no, no,” she said. “I remember it now. It was that spaceship show Roddenberry did for two seasons before Assignment: Earth replaced it.”
“So no Captain Picard?” asked Sasha. “Deep Space Nine? Wrath of Khan?”
Jamie straightened up. “The Wrath of Khan, yeah, of course.”
Sasha put her fists on her hips. “How do you have Wrath of Khan but not Star Trek?”
“It was the second Assignment: Earth movie, when they tried to stop the Eugenic Wars. Ricardo Montalban came back and played the same character from that Star Trek show. They had to dye his hair black so it’d match the old episodes.”
Another moment of silence spread itself thin across the main floor.
“The universe you come from sucks,” said Sasha. “I’m going up to the booth to check the main readings again.”
Jamie settled back in her chair and sighed. She flipped a quarter off her thumb, caught it, and worked it back to her thumb again. It spun into the air two more times, and she blew air out of her nose.
Mike glanced at her. “Problem?”
“Well, yeah. Apparently I’m stuck in an alternate universe where there’s no Assignment: Earth.”
“That’s all?”
She looked at him. “What are we doing?”
He tilted his head. “Us?”
“It’s not on!” she said, waving a hand at the rings. “The power’s not on, the coils are cold, there’s no magnetic flux past the standard residual. We can’t shut the Door down when everything already says it’s shut off.”
Mike shrugged. “And yet…”
“It’s open,” she agreed. “We didn’t know why it opened at all, and now we’re trying to figure out why it’s staying open, even though we’ve got no idea what made it happen.” She waved a hand at the screen.
He studied her face. “And…?”
“And the only damn thing I can think of is that I’m not smart enough to figure this out, but she’d probably know the answer already.”
“She?”
Jamie smacked the quarter out of the air with two fingers, and it clattered onto her workstation. “The one who had a cat named Spock. The one who’s supposed to be here. The…the real one.”
He shrugged. “You’re not that different.”
“You’re not really good at this whole comforting thing, are you? You’re just supposed to hug me, maybe squeeze my butt,
and—”
“Not different in the important ways,” said Mike. “The Jamie I met, the one who was here before you, she could be a little bitter. I think she thought that motorcycle crash was the defining moment in her life, that it was why she ended up working with computers rather than doing, I don’t know, something else. I think she regretted it sometimes. Like she’d been forced down a path instead of having a choice.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. But you didn’t have the crash. And you still went into computers. You still decided using your mind was the best way to go in life. Because that’s who you are.”
She swept up the quarter and flipped it into the air again. “I take it back,” she said. “You’re better at this than I thought.”
“I have moments.”
“You do.”
“If it’s any consolation, I think you may be a bit smarter than her. You seem to get your mind around things a lot faster.”
“My ‘mind.’ How polite of you.” She took the quarter between two fingers and flung it at him. It whizzed through the air, hit him in the arm, and chimed to the floor.
“Okay,” he said, “I deserved that.” He bent down, scooped the coin off the floor, and pushed it into his pants pocket.
“Hey,” she said. “Quarter. Mine. Give it.”
“You gave it to me.”
“I threw it at you.”
“Same thing,” he said.
“Not quite.”
“This is not the way to get your butt squeezed.”
“If I have to pay you to squeeze my butt we’re both doing something wrong.”
He slid the coin free and tossed it to her. She caught it one-handed, switched it to her thumb, launched it back into the air, and caught it again. “Is Mike sleeping alone tonight?” she asked the quarter. She glanced at him. “Call it.”
“There’s more to this than a coin toss, right?”
“I don’t know. We’ll see what the coin says.”
“In that case, tails.”
“An ass man. Good to know. Don’t get your hopes up.” She flicked the quarter into the air, snatched it as it dropped, and slapped it onto the back of her hand. “Tails?”
“Still, yes.”
“Are you using super-memory powers?”
“Yeah, they let me predict it before you tossed the coin.”
“Wiseass.” She looked at the coin. “And a thief. Give me my quarter back.”
“What?”
“You’re sleeping alone.” She held up the quarter. “Fake.”
He peered at it. “It is?”
“New Amsterdam?”
Mike frowned and held out his hand. She reached out and pressed the coin into his palm, letting her fingers glide back along his.
The quarter showed the familiar outline of New York and the Statue of Liberty. The curving text was identical to all the other state quarters he’d seen, except this said NEW AMSTERDAM.
“Where’d you get this?”
She smiled. “You just pulled it out of your pocket, Mister Photographic Memory.”
“Is this one of the quarters we threw through the Door?”
Jamie shook her head. “It’s just pocket change. I’ve been carrying it around for a couple days now.”
“Did it come through the Door with you when you crosswalked?”
Her brow furrowed. “I don’t think so. Pretty sure I got it over at 7-Eleven yesterday morning.”
He reran the past few minutes in his mind. The coin had been facedown on the floor when he’d picked it up. It had said NEW YORK then.
When he pulled it out to toss it to Jamie it had been in his peripheral vision. His fingers blocked some of the surface, and the diffuse light of the main floor made it hard to pick out details. But he could see enough. NEW YO was visible for almost a tenth of a second. The ants moved forward with a dozen slices of time until he caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty as the coin spun toward Jamie.
“This isn’t the coin I threw you,” he said.
“Yes it is.”
“No,” he shook his head, “it isn’t. I gave you a New York quarter.”
“That’s the coin you gave me.”
Mike frowned. He set the quarter down on the workstation. Tails up, so NEW AMSTERDAM was visible.
He looked up at the rings. The red lights were still out of sync. His eyes drifted down to the white lines painted around the platform. Olaf hadn’t been able to draw a new safe zone because there was no magnetic field to measure.
Jamie held her hands out, palms up. “I couldn’t’ve switched it. It was in plain sight the whole time.”
“I don’t think you did,” he said. He slid the coin back into his hand and stood up. “I think we need to get off the main floor.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because I’m nervous, and I think we need to get away from the rings right now.” He moved away from his workstation and tugged her out of her chair.
Her eyes went from the rings to the line and ended on his fingers wrapped around the quarter. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah.”
Inside the rings, Site B flickered. Then the room beyond the Door went dim. Red light continued to pulse out from the other side of the rings.
They reached the big door. He pulled it open and pushed it shut behind them. “Is there a way to disable the card reader?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wait here. Don’t let anyone go in.”
Mike ran to the front desk. “Hey,” said Anne. Her hair was pulled back in a flawless braid today. “What can I do for—”
“We need to make a sign. Right now.”
Her mouth twitched. “I can make something up in Office and—”
“No. Right now.”
Her eyes brightened a bit. She tugged open two drawers. A collection of Sharpies came out of one, a cardboard envelope for Priority Mail came out of another.
“Tape?”
Anne reached back into the second drawer and came out with a heavy roll of packing tape on a red spindle.
Mike tore one of the envelopes open along its seams. He flattened it out on the desk, blank side up, and wrote DANGER with one of the markers. He underlined it three times and then added DO NOT ENTER. “Thank you.”
“No problem.”
He scooped up the sign and the tape and jogged back down the hall to Jamie. He covered the card reader with the sign and held it in place while she taped. She leaned back, took in a breath, and shouted “Arthur!”
He appeared out of the cross hallway as she finished taping. “What—” He paused to wheeze out a breath and suck in more air.
“Problems,” said Mike.
“It’s growing,” Jamie said.
“We need to seal off the other building,” said Mike.
“What do you mean? How are the rings growing?”
“Not the rings,” said Jamie. “The Door.”
“The Door,” said Arthur, “is inside the rings.”
“Not anymore,” she said. She stuck her hand through the packing tape and wore the roll like a bracelet.
Arthur shook his head. “That’s not possible. It has to be contained within the rings.”
“Why?”
“The field’s generated within the rings, so it can only…Ahhh.” Arthur bit down on his tongue.
“Yeah,” said Mike. “We need to find Olaf and Neil. We need to make sure all the doors onto the main floor and Site B are locked solid.”
“I think Olaf’s already over at Site B,” said Arthur. “He was going to check readings there.”
Jamie glanced at the stairs. “What about the control room?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably safe.” He looked at the big door. “If the field’s reaching the control room, it’s reaching out here into the hall.”
“How do we know it isn’t?”
Mike glanced at her. “For now we just have to hope.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Arthur spr
ead the blueprints across the conference room table.
Mike sifted through them. “This is for both sets of rings?”
“The two sets are identical,” said Sasha. “We used the same blueprints for each one.”
“Are they?” asked Mike. “No other little secrets or hidden changes?”
Arthur shook his head. “We might not know why the Door works on a scientific level,” he said, “but the engineering behind it is honest.”
He nodded. “Did Site B get locked up?”
“I thought Olaf did it,” said Neil. “He was over there, too.”
Olaf shook his head. “I didn’t.”
“Are we sure it’s dangerous?” asked Sasha. “I mean, swapping quarters, that’s more of a party trick, right?”
Mike looked at her. “You want to end up wherever radioactive Bob came from?”
“No.”
“Then it’s kind of dangerous.”
“How can it be growing bigger?” said Jamie. “I mean, it took me two days to wrap my head around the rings working without any power.”
“It can’t,” said Neil. “That’s the whole point of the rings. They focus the fields.”
“But the rings aren’t doing anything as it is,” said Jamie.
“Hang on,” said Mike. “Safety first, yes?”
“Yes,” said Arthur after a moment. “Of course.”
“Who wants to go make sure Site B’s locked up?”
“I’ll go,” said Sasha.
“No,” Neil said, “I’ll do it.”
“You should be part of this discussion,” Arthur said.
Neil shrugged. “Anything I know Sasha knows. Besides, I could use the fresh air.”
“Are you okay?”
“No. Not sick. Just…” He looked at the blueprints. “This is all making my head spin a bit. The fresh air will be good for me.”
“Okay, then.”
“I’ll take one of the bikes. I’ll be back in ten minutes, tops.” He stepped out into the hall. A moment later the sounds in the hallway shifted as the front door opened and drifted closed.
Mike closed his eyes. The large blueprints called the ants out like a picnic. They added the new design specs to the model of the rings he’d built in his mind, filling in final details and labels. “Let’s forget how,” he said. “For the moment I think we can all agree how is beyond us, yes?”