by Melko, Paul
John reached into his shirt to activate the device. Then he misplaced his foot and slid on a patch of moss.
“I think we got him!” someone yelled.
“How the hell did he get away in the first place?”
“I dunno. You cuffed him!”
“Don’t blame me!”
Pain stabbed John’s ankle where it had slid out from under him, and it was so intense he had no thoughts except to sit there in the dirt and breathe.
“There he is!”
John turned to see the two running down the slope toward him. He reached in and toggled the device, transferring to Universe 7651.
* * *
John Prime looked up as Amos and Russell slammed open the barn door. They’d been gone no longer than thirty minutes.
“He’s still here!” Amos cried. Amos’s arms flailed and waved as he walked toward Prime then back again.
Russell just stood by the door and glared at Prime.
“Where else would I be?” Prime asked. “You cuffed me to a goddamn pole in your goddamn barn.”
“Check the cuffs,” Russell said.
Amos edged around Prime, as if he was scared that he might lunge at him. The man tugged at Prime’s cuffed hands.
“He’s still cuffed!”
“Sounds like you saw a ghost,” Prime said.
“It wasn’t no ghost,” Russell said. “You just got a brother or something.”
Prime knew what had happened. These two buffoons had stumbled onto Johnny Farmboy.
“How do you explain him disappearing into thin air?” Prime said.
“How’d you know?” Amos cried. Prime smiled. He hadn’t, but had guessed that John transferred out to evade the two, and he hadn’t waited to do it in hiding when confronted with a gun.
“Ghost, I said.”
“It was a ghost!” Amos cried.
“No such thing!” Russell said.
“Think how bad it’ll be if you kill me,” Prime said. Amos looked at him with mostly white eyes.
“Shut up, I said!” Russell yelled.
Prime stared right at Amos. “Don’t tell me you don’t hear those Confederate soldiers at night, moaning after their gold.”
Russell smashed his fist across Prime’s jaw. He hadn’t seen it coming. Russell swung the other way, and though Prime saw this one coming, he couldn’t move much. He rocked his face back with the blow, but it still hurt.
“Shut … up.…” Russell said through gritted teeth.
The two left him in pain and darkness, but as Prime leaned his aching head against the rough wood pole, he decided it was worth it.
* * *
John found himself on the same sloped hill in the same humid heat. He stood, grabbing a tree trunk for support, and stumbled toward the ranger’s office. Maybe Grace or Henry in this universe could meet him halfway to the transfer gate. He’d hate to go by bus all the way to Findlay.
He jogged, favoring the bum ankle, through the wilderness preserve to the campground. The ranger station was deserted, so he stuck his head into the open door and pulled the phone off the wall mount. He pulled out his cheat sheet of numbers, organized by universe, and dialed the shack by the quarry. Grace and Henry in 7651 had had the building wired for phone service.
The phone, however, beeped at him, and John realized the ranger’s phone disallowed long-distance calls. He jogged from the camp, down the main street toward the cluster of restaurants and bars near the main ferry drop.
There was a phone booth on the main drag. He pulled the door shut and rooted through his pockets. Then he pushed the door open again. It was too damn hot to be shut in a confined space. His hand had a fist of coins, but he had no idea whether they were 7651, 7650, or 7458 coins. Half of them were gold coins that he knew would never work.
“Damn!”
He tried a quarter and a dime at random and the phone clicked. He dialed the number at the shack.
“Hello?” It was Grace.
“Grace, this is John,” he said. “John-7650,” he added after a pause.
“Yes, I know which John,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I need a lift. I’m on Kelleys Island. I had to transfer out of 7458,” John explained. “Some crazy rednecks have Prime and they ended up pointing a gun at me.”
“I hate that.”
“No kidding. I need to transfer back to 7458 right away.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll send Henry with the car. He’ll be there in ninety minutes.”
“That should allow me to get the next ferry. I’ll meet him at the dock in Marblehead.”
“You got it,” Grace said. “I’ll have the gateway warmed up.”
* * *
John had to wait only forty minutes for Henry to show.
“I broke some laws getting here,” he said. “Let’s get you back to Findlay.”
“Let’s go,” John said. “But let’s not get pulled over on the way.”
“What happened?”
John started to explain.
“Wait, you found gold? Let me see!”
John handed Henry one of the coins. “This isn’t Union gold. It’s Confederate gold.”
“Gold is gold,” John said.
“Sure, it’s still gold, but this is worth more as a coin than melted down to gold.”
“You think?”
“Can I keep this?” Henry said. “I’ll try to find out what it’s worth on the open market here.”
“Sure, I have a handful.”
John continued the story.
“You think they have Prime?” Henry asked.
“They must.”
“And you must have scared the crap out of them transferring out like that,” Henry said.
“I hope they don’t do something rash,” John said. “That’s why I have to get back there quickly.”
“Right.”
They pulled into the quarry drive just before six.
Grace-7651 had a backpack ready for him.
“Smoke bombs, mace, knife, food,” she said. “Did your money work?”
“It seemed to,” John said.
“Do you need more?”
“No, I’m okay.”
“Do you want a gun? We have one.”
John paused. “No, I guess not. No guns.”
“How are you going to get to the island?” Henry asked.
“Bus, I guess.”
“But you’ll miss the last ferry,” Grace said.
“It’s at ten o’clock,” Henry said. “Or it is in this universe.”
“Can we afford to lose twelve hours?” Grace asked.
John shook his head. “I don’t want to.”
“Can you get a car in 7458?” Henry asked.
“I don’t have a license or an address in 7458,” John said.
“How about we transfer through the car?” Grace said.
“No way it’ll fit in the transfer zone,” Henry said. John remembered the Jeep from the EmVis compound. When they’d escaped 7650 to 7651, they had been squatting behind a disabled Jeep. Only part of the Jeep had come through to 7651.
“If not a car, how about a motorcycle?”
“I can’t ride a motorcycle,” John said.
“Maybe you should learn,” Grace said. “You could take it everywhere. You’d be the cross-dimensional hog rider.”
“Uh.”
“We need some sort of transportation,” Henry said.
“Well…” Grace said.
John looked at her, knowing instantly what she meant.
“He’s there, but…”
“Prime needs us. He needs you, or rather all of you.”
“Let’s hope he’s home,” John said.
“Let’s hope.”
Grace powered up the machine and John transferred through to 7458.
CHAPTER 10
Twice John had passed by the house that sat across the road from the quarry. Twice he had averted his eyes, as if knowledge alone of his doppelganger in
7458 would contaminate him.
Now he walked toward the house with purpose. He paused after crossing the road, in the same copse of trees he’d knelt in months before when he was going to do to the one-armed John what Prime had done to him. But waiting there in the evening sun for some sign or portent seemed wrong. He had no time for skulking.
Instead, he just walked toward the house.
The Trans-Am was in the gravel driveway. No way would Dad or Mom have that for a vehicle. John-7458 existed here, and he was at home.
John patted his keys in his front pocket. Maybe his keys to the Trans-Am would work. Maybe he could just take the car. No, an ally would mean as much as a car.
He stood at the shut front door, at the screen door that he remembered from a past life.
John knocked.
He heard someone stomping down the front hall. He heard his mother in this universe call Bill’s name and say something indistinct. A shadow moved across the rectangle of the door.
“John! What are you doing knocking? The door’s unlocked.”
“Mrs. Rayburn,” he began.
“Always fooling around! I thought you were in your room.”
“Your son is in his room, Mrs. Rayburn.” He remained on the front stoop, though she had left the door open.
She turned then and stared at him. Her eyes ran up and down his length, noting the clothes she had never bought or washed. She raised her hand to her mouth.
“John!” she cried, but not to him. She directed her shout to the back room where John-7458 probably was messing with electronics or reading a physics book.
“What, Mom?”
“Come here, please.” Her voice was shaky.
“Coming.”
John-7458 appeared from the back of the house. He glanced at the screen door, stopped, and did a double take.
John nodded, then stepped back so that he was off the stoop and out of sight.
John-7458 appeared at the door.
“Who … who the hell are you?” he asked.
“I need your help,” John said.
“You look like…”
“I am you, just not from this universe,” John said. He smiled as he said it. The last time he had tried to confront a version of himself, he’d wanted to use violence and lies. This time, he was telling only the truth. “Step over here and I’ll explain.”
John-7458 looked back down the hall, and then shrugged. He had no shoes on, but he followed John to the middle of the lawn.
“Go on.”
“There are a lot of universes out there,” John said. “I’m from one like this one, but a little different. I have a device that allows me to travel between universes. Right now, another version of us is in trouble and we need to drive to Kelleys Island to help him.”
“That’s … ridiculous.”
“I know. I felt the same way when I figured all this out,” John said. “I know that you’re skeptical. I know you don’t want to believe me, but you can come with me and have the adventure of your life, or you can let me borrow your car, or you can turn me away.”
“My car?”
“Like I said, I need to get to Kelleys Island, as soon as possible.”
“This makes no sense!”
“Yeah, it’s tough to comprehend,” John said. “Did you go to college last year?”
“Yeah, University of Toledo.”
“Did you study physics?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Was Dr. Wilson your advisor?”
“Yeah, he was. How do you know all that?”
“Did you meet Grace and Henry?”
“They were a year behind me, but I know them. She’s kinda weird.”
“Are you dating Casey Nicholson?”
“Uh, well…” John-7458 blushed.
“It all happened to me too,” John said. “Only it was another universe, and slightly different because I have this device.” He lifted up his shirt.
John-7458 bent low to look at it. He peered at the device, its buttons and switches.
“Show me,” he said.
John nodded.
“Okay, put your arm around my shoulder,” John said. “Tell your parents not to worry.”
John-7458 turned back toward the house, where his parents stood in the doorway.
“I don’t know what’s about to happen,” John-7458 said. “Maybe nothing, but if something does, don’t worry.”
John added, “We’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He put his arm around John-7458’s shoulder and pressed the button, taking them back to 7651.
The house disappeared, replaced by the empty field where John’s house should have been in 7651.
“Oh my god!” John-7458 cried.
“Calm down, it’s okay,” John said. “Let’s start walking over this way.”
“Why? Take us back!”
“We need to walk over here to get back. Come on.”
John-7458 stood there as John walked off across the road toward the quarry. Then John heard him run to catch up.
“What’s that building?” he asked. “The quarry by my house is abandoned.”
“It usually is,” John said. “We have a fixed transfer gate in that building to get us back to your universe.”
Grace and Henry popped out of the shack.
“Hey, John and John,” Grace said. “Is he convinced?”
“Henry, Grace?” John-7458 said. He seemed a little wobbly on his feet.
“Not quite yet,” John said.
“So there’s a third one of us,” John-7458 said, “who needs our help?”
“Yeah, I’ll explain things on the way to Kelleys Island. You ready?”
“I don’t know. It seems so far-fetched,” he said. “But…” He spun around, looking at the building, staring back at where his house wasn’t. He finally nodded, coming to some conclusion. “Okay. I guess you can borrow the car,” he said. “But I’m driving.”
Grace smiled. “Let’s get you back to 7458 so you can catch the last ferry.”
* * *
John found himself warming to John-7458 as his doppelganger drove him across the back highways of Ohio in the hope of catching the last ferry to Kelleys Island. He’d always had an adversarial relationship with the other John, John Prime. He’d been unable ever to like that version of himself. But John-7458 was far more amiable, far more likeable. John had always thought it was the long months on his own that had hardened Prime, but now he wondered if he was just a slightly different John Rayburn from birth. John-7458 shared John’s own fascination with the universe and his general optimism. Prime and he had never meshed in that way.
“So why don’t you just use the one gate as a two-way communication device?” John-7458 asked.
“What?”
“It swaps the space between the two universes, doesn’t it? I mean what’s in one universe on the platform transfers with whatever’s in the same spot in the other universe, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” John said. “But you have no way to know for sure if you’re going to cut something or someone in half when the gate is powered up.”
“Sure, it’ll take some coordination,” John-7458 said. “You would just have to schedule a time that the gate will be activated. Every three hours on the hour. Use some atomic clock to coordinate the universes. Then Grace and Henry in 7651 cycle through all the universes over an hour period. They send things through, and whoever is in the remote universe—me, for instance—would get what they had on the platform and they’d get what I had on the platform.”
“It would save me having to ferry people back to 7651 every day,” John said.
“But I like the idea of having gates in a lot of universes,” John-7458 said. “It ups the chance that you could find something useful. The combination grows as the handshake number.”
“The handshake number?”
“Sure, two people, A and B, in a room,” John-7458 explained, “there’s only one way they can shake hands—with e
ach other. Add one more person, C, to the room, and now A and B can shake, B and C can shake, and C and B can shake. Add one more person, D, and you add three more shakes. One, three, six, ten, fifteen, and so forth.”
“Oh, I see,” John said. “You end up with forty-five combinations by the time you get to ten gates.”
“And if each universe has a small chance of a variation with every other one, you have a bigger chance of finding some exploitable difference,” John-7458 said.
“Yeah, but I hate the word ‘exploitable,’” John said.
“Like finding Confederate gold isn’t exploiting the universes?”
“We need seed money,” John said.
“Sure, and once you have seed money, what do you plan to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You do know,” John-7458 said. “I can see it in your face.”
“I want to … I want to help people,” John said. “I don’t know why this technology isn’t known by everyone. Who is suppressing it? Why don’t we see travelers every day? Why aren’t the Pleistocene universes used to grow food for all the people that need it?”
“I knew you had some ideas,” John-7458 said. “If you need a recruit to man the station here in 7458, count me in.”
John looked over at him. “Yeah, you seem like a solid fellow.”
* * *
They found themselves behind a slow dump truck on a double-lane county road leading toward Marblehead and the ferry dock. John was certain they wouldn’t make it, but John-7458 urged the Trans-Am into the parade of oncoming headlights, passing the truck with a chorus of car horns. They turned into the ferry driveway just in time, a minute before ten.
The ferry was deserted, just a few locals catching the last trip to the island. John sat tensely in the car while they made their slow way across Lake Erie. John-7458 stepped out, however, and stood in the night air.
“You see this?” he called through the window.
“Yeah, this morning and this afternoon,” John said.
“Not the lights then. Come on, John. We’ll not get there any faster sitting in the car.”
“Yeah.”
John opened the door. The smell of water, a strong fishy smell, invaded his nostrils then was swept away by the wind. The ferry bounced over the waves, rising in the chop, and then settling slowly down again. John inhaled and felt his body relax.
They were going to make it. John Prime was safe for the moment. He had to be. No yokels were going to stop that sly dog. No way.