The Broken Universe

by Melko, Paul

  “You’d think he would remember that,” John said.

  “You’d think.”

  “Psychological conditions,” John said. “What do you think that means?”

  “If you were shot and ripped from your universe, you might have some problems too.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “Oh, hush. You had to do it. For her sake.”

  “I know,” John said. “What now?”

  “I think we need to talk to Joe Cursky. And we should check the white pages at the main library while we’re here,” Casey said.

  “Right.”

  The university library only had white pages for Lucas County, and there was no Saraft listed at all. But there was a number for Joseph Cursky and one for the news office at The Toledo Barker newspaper.

  From the pay phone at the student union they called the news office. It was only a little after noon on a weekday.

  “Barker News, how may I redirect your call?” a voice said.

  “Joe Cursky, please,” John said.

  “Mr. Cursky is on assignment. Would you like to leave a message?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Do you think he’s at home?” Casey asked.

  “What does ‘on assignment’ mean?” John asked. He dialed the number they had for Cursky.

  “Yeah?”

  “Joe Cursky?”

  “Yeah, who’s this?”

  “Joe Cursky the reporter for The Barker?”

  “Yeah, who the hell is this?”

  “I’m looking for Melissa Saraft.”

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “She was shot on the University of Toledo campus two years ago. Her little girl broke her leg,” John said.

  There was a pause. “Yeah, she had some problems. I remember. Thought she was abducted by aliens or from some other universe. Something crazy.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “How the hell would I know?”

  “Anything would help us.”

  Cursky sighed. “Yeah, right. Who are you?”

  “We’re friends of hers, we’ve been trying to reach her.”

  “She didn’t have any friends. She didn’t have any family. Total blank slate. Figured she was on the run from the mob or something. Made her crazy. I remember now. She made up a weird story about nuclear war. She was in a hospital for a while. I talked to her a couple times.”

  “Any idea where she is now?”

  “So you can take her back to whatever she ran away from? No way, bud.”

  “I helped her get away the first time,” John said.

  “You did? Then what’s the real story?”

  “I can’t say,” John said.

  “Then neither can I.”

  Cursky hung up the phone.

  * * *

  They tried the main Toledo library, but the white pages included only major Ohio cities. There was no Melissa Saraft in Columbus, Cincinnati, or Cleveland.

  “Maybe this is hopeless,” John said.

  “Don’t say that. We’ve only just started to look,” Casey said.

  “Ah, well. I’ve screwed up royally this time.”

  “Because you saved her life? Because you did everything you could?” Casey said. “Stop kicking yourself because you did the right thing. I’ve never known someone to linger and mope on the past so much. You should be worried about what you can do, not what you can’t change.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk,” John said. “But I can’t think of another thing that we can do. No one is going to tell us where she is.”

  “We could call the local hospitals. We could search for her records in the psychiatric facilities.”

  “If Joe Cursky didn’t tell us anything, no medical facility will.”

  “Maybe we ask the police,” Casey said. “Just tell them we’re looking for an old friend.”

  John nodded. “We can try that.”

  They left the library and found a serviced apartment complex not far from downtown. They booked a room for a month and from there Casey called the precinct nearest the University of Toledo, fabricating a story of an old friend searching for Melissa.

  “I guess that’s the best we can do for now,” John said.

  “For now. You can check in for messages as needed.”

  They left the hotel, drove down to Findlay, returning their rental car. Then they rode their bicycles to the quarry site and transferred back to the Home Office.

  * * *

  John entered the fenced-off area of EmVis with mixed feelings. It was Pinball Wizards’s property now. But it was the same secret complex where Grace and Henry had been held captive. The place where Grace had been tortured. The place where Grace had killed Visgrath.

  The guard plaza was empty and the gate was open, but a team of workers were pulling up the tire deflation devices. This is where their Jeep had shuddered to a halt, where they had made their last stand before transferring to 7651.

  “Does anyone know where Grace Shisler is?” John asked the workers.

  “Yeah, she’s in the far building over there.” The worker pointed to the building where Grace and Henry had been kept in cells.

  John walked through the parking lot. He pushed through the doors. The bullet holes were gone. The double doors opened onto the lab/torture chamber where they had found Grace. It was empty.

  “Grace,” he called.

  He hoped she would not be lingering here. Perhaps he should suggest that the building be razed to the ground. Or sold.

  “Grace!”

  “In here!”

  Down a hallway, John found a series of doors, all of them with dark rooms behind, until the last. Inside Grace stood over a transfer device.

  “Look what I found,” she said.

  John glanced at the device, and then looked closer at Grace. “You shouldn’t be here alone,” he said.

  “Because of all the bad memories that might jump out and yell, ‘Boo!’?” Grace said. “I’m a big girl. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world to be tortured by an evil warlord from another dimension.”

  “Grace, don’t push me off with sarcasm,” John said.

  “Or what? You’ll get all tough with me?” she said. “Slap me around and show me some tough love.”

  “Grace.”

  She reached up and wrapped an arm around his neck. “Or maybe you can take me to some distant universe, some place with dinosaurs, and nurse my soul back to health.”

  “Grace!” He lifted her arm off his shoulder.

  “You’re welcome any time at the Grace and Henry commune, by the way.”

  “You know Casey and I are engaged.”

  “She’s welcome too.”

  “You think you’re smart, don’t you, Grace, changing the subject like that? You think you can deflect my attention by invoking some farmboy prudery you think I have? Won’t work.”

  “Meh, I have many defense mechanisms,” she said. She nodded at the transfer gate. “Does it work?”

  “Let me look,” John said. He let himself be distracted by the device. It was so crude compared to what they were building now. A diagram and pictures of his original device lay on a table nearby.

  Already the team had come up with enough design simplifications and advances to make this model seem an antique. Perhaps the most bizarre change was a self-destruct mechanism attached to each transfer gate. “In case someone tries to steal it,” Henry had explained.

  He followed the circuitry. It was close, but he noticed several subtle problems, capacitors backward, circuit boards only partially soldered in place.

  “Nope, no way,” John said. “And this building is actually a little below the natural grade. They could have ended up stuck underground if they used it here.”

  “Fitting,” Grace said. “So there was no way any of them got out of 7650 to warn Charboric after we moved it from the barn.”

  “No.”

  “So,” Grace said. “Where’d they go? Which unive
rse?”

  “Why do you need to know?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “Grace, we don’t need to know where they went.”

  “Yes, we do. There’s a lot of universes out there, and we don’t want to be running into the Alarians again.”

  John tried to see some deviousness in Grace’s request. He’d heard the bile in her voice when she spoke of the Alarians. But what she said was true; they didn’t need to go running into them again somewhere in the multiverse.

  “We need to know,” she said again.

  “I’m not disagreeing with you,” John replied.

  “We need to make sure we never find them again!”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not going to march on them with an army of Graces!”

  “Of course not.”

  “Stop agreeing with me!”

  “Okay.”

  Grace laughed, and John joined her. This time he reached around her neck and pulled her close. She didn’t shy away as she once would have. She pressed in close to him.

  “I’m a nut, aren’t I?”

  “Since I first met you in freshman physics lab.”

  She laughed again. “Yeah. True.”

  She squeezed him for a moment, and then pushed him away.

  “It was Universe 2219,” John said.

  “That seems far away,” Grace said. “2219. Good.”

  John nodded at the gate. “We should dismantle it.”

  “I’ll have Henry come down and take it apart,” Grace said. “We can probably use the parts.” She laughed. “I still think we’re a little podunk company. We have millions of dollars at our disposal. Did you know that?”

  “Yeah, I realized as I walked in that we own all of this building,” John said. “Or rather, you do.”

  “Yeah, me. I hadn’t told my parents, but they saw it on the news. They think there’s another Grace Shisler out there.”

  “Do we know how much money we have? The accountants are done with the audit?”

  “Not quite yet. But the coffers are anything but empty,” Grace said. “Even though the company was riddled with misogynist assholes, Gesalex couldn’t fail to make money.”

  “They were running out of ideas,” John said, remembering how Charboric had tried to coerce new ideas from him when the Alarians realized he was a universe traveler. It wasn’t until later that they found out he was from a universe as backward as the one he’d ended up in.

  “Yeah, but the patents for a dozen things are still in play,” Grace said. “They just divvied the ideas out in increments for years. And their diversifications would have kept them fat and happy for decades, if not forever.”

  “It’s a wonder they wanted to leave,” John said.

  Grace nodded. “Makes you wonder what’s in Universe 2219.”

  “No, not too much,” John replied.

  “Yeah, not too much.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Prime turned on the four cameras, one at a time. They were digital video cameras that one of the Henrys had found in a universe around 6000, able to record hours of digital footage on small cartridge tapes. The film camera he remembered from his family holidays was nothing like these beauties. His dad had a clunky reeled monstrosity that created scratchy, off-color home films. These were pristine and better than the television in this universe. Of course there was nowhere to play the tapes in this universe except in the same camera that recorded them.

  The gate was powered up and the cameras—lashed together to a wooden frame to keep them pointed in the four cardinal directions—sat on a platform. He checked his universe destination—1214—and powered the machine. The platform disappeared.

  He started his stopwatch.

  After sixty seconds, he reactivated the gate.

  The platform reappeared. He reached to grab it and accidently tipped it. Prime lunged at it before the cameras smashed into the concrete floor. He didn’t want to ask for new ones. One of the Graces might notice and wonder why. It wasn’t his job to experiment with gate technology. He was the manager of this universe, not assigned to lab duty. No, it was better that no one else knew of his experiments.

  Or the fact that this was an unauthorized gate.

  He placed the camera structure on the nearby lab table and turned each one off.

  “Damn!”

  He’d forgotten which one was facing north. Some scientist he was. He tried to remember which way it was pointed when it toppled and which way he placed it on the table. But he didn’t know.

  He’d mark the directions next time.

  “Let’s see what 1214 has to offer,” Prime said.

  He picked one of the four video cameras at random and rewound the tape. He hit play and watched as the camera jiggled. He caught sight of himself turning toward the control switch. Then concrete walls were replaced with blue skies.

  He’d had his sanctuary built on a parcel of land outside of Findlay, away from the quarry, away from any land he knew that Pinball Wizards owned. It was in the middle of farmland that he had bought at a cheap price. He’d had contractors build the Quonset hut on a flat bit of land, exactingly defining how the building would be built. No grading, concrete floor, industrial power. He was sure the builders had been perplexed. But he didn’t care. Prime had enough cash to pay for it to be built exactly as he wanted it.

  Brown grass and blue skies, exactly the view to his west from this building. A cloud slowly wafted closer. Otherwise, the scene in the video was motionless, a picture. Prime paused the camera and carried it outside. He walked around the building until his view of the west horizon was identical. There was a difference. A big difference. The huge power transmission tower wasn’t there in the video. The horizon in the video was clear. He walked back into his lab, closing the door against the cold.

  It had been simple to build his own gate. He had millions of dollars in cash now. And as much petty cash as he needed from the coffers of Pinball Wizards, Transdimensional. He just had to ask and Grace would send him gold. In Universe 7651, he’d watched closely as John and Henry had gathered the materials and built their new gate. Sure, he didn’t have the college classes they did, but he was as smart as John was—exactly as smart—and the plans weren’t a secret. He’d made a copy of the originals in 7651 in the middle of the night when the other three had been asleep. And he’d looked at the plans for the new designs that John and Henry were coming up with: the larger effective sphere, the cleaner controls for the field radius, the remote circuitry, allowing better timing on start and stop. He hadn’t bothered with a self-destruct device, something that John was insisting on now. Farmboy wanted to keep the technology out of the hands of anyone who might be snooping on them.

  Corrundrum’s journal was his most-prized extra-dimensional artifact, though he had the things that Billy Walder had given them, the things he and Superprime had found on the mummified corpse: a ring, a wristwatch, and an Ouroboros pendant. He and Farmboy had examined the three items, but had deemed them useless. The wristwatch was dead, the pendant just a simple chain and figure. The ring—when Prime had put it on—had pricked him with a bit of rough metal, though when he’d gone to file it down, he’d been unable to find the burr. Still it tickled him to wear the ring; it fit his right ring finger cleanly, and he wore it all the time.

  Prime focused on the natural landscape shown on the video. Was Universe 1214 a Pleistocene one? Empty of human inhabitation? If so, why had Corrundrum marked it down? A world without humans was hard to exploit. But he found he didn’t care so much about exploiting universes for money.

  That was the funny thing. Now that he had all the cash he needed, he didn’t care for it. Now that he could market any idea from any other universe here, he didn’t really care to. Corrundrum’s notebook perplexed him, mesmerized him. 1214 was one of the numbers he had seen over and over in the book.

  He played the second camera, the one that had to have been pointed north. Most of the frame was stuck on a hill, the same hill beh
ind his Quonset. Nothing moved, except the brown leaves on the ash trees.

  The camera to the east showed the decline to the road in his universe, only there was no road in 1214. It was just more grassland.

  He expected nothing else from the southern exposure. He sighed. The problem with the transfer gate was that it didn’t allow transfer to some other location in the remote universe it opened to. He was stuck sending objects between the corresponding spots in both universes. If he wanted to explore some other location with his apparatus, he’d have to build the transfer gate somewhere else.

  Or he’d have to build some sort of roving camera that traveled about and came back after a certain time.

  Or he’d need an accomplice. A dangerous situation, if ever there was one.

  The last video was just about over, and he had given in to the fact that he’d have to try something else to explore 1214 or give up, when he caught sight of something in the sky.

  It caught the sun as it banked. But had only short stubby wings. And it moved very slowly.

  An aircraft of some sort, coming toward the camera?

  The aircraft grew closer for a moment. It was just a kilometer away and seemed to be coming in for a landing.

  Then the tape ended abruptly.

  “What the hell was that?” he said aloud.

  * * *

  John Prime ran the video back and forth repeatedly, trying to determine the size, distance, and speed of the aircraft. Was it actually coming toward the camera? Had it seen the camera? Or was it just out flying on a beautiful day?

  It was clearly not flying by aerodynamic lift. It was too big and too slow and the wings too stubby to fly like an airplane. Ultimately the length of time the craft was on the video—less than five seconds—made it impossible to know for certain.

  He debated for a long time about sending the device back and taking another set of videos. But by the time he decided that he would, it was too dark. And the cameras wouldn’t film well at night.

  But was it coming toward the camera? He had to know if the thing had somehow spotted his camera device. He was struck with the thought that Universe 1214 was listed in Corrundrum’s notebook as a universe to avoid.

  He’d try again in the morning.

  He locked up the lab and drove the fifteen kilometers to the quarry site. He owned the entire area now. Or rather Pinball Wizards, Transdimensional, did. But in this world that was him. There was no Grace or Henry to meddle with his work.