by Pam Stucky
“Can we help look? What are we looking for?” asked Ben, his eyes sweeping over the contents of the room. Boxes of all sizes filled the shelves, and shelves filled half the room. The open area of the storage unit was strewn with a random assortment of furniture: a couple of tables, some wooden chairs, and several strange-looking instruments Ben guessed might be related to Milo’s work.
“An archaeological dig I did long ago here on Lero,” said Milo distractedly. “It was from a place so old …” He lost his train of thought as he searched more and more boxes, methodically taking off lids, scanning the contents quickly, and returning everything to its place with the care of a man whose work depended on the ability to be meticulous.
“A dig?” said Eve, a look of deep thought on her face, as she struggled to remember what it was her father was sure she couldn’t have forgotten. She scoured the boxes for clues, but her gaze remained blank.
“Aha!” cried Milo, pulling a dusty file box off its metal shelf. He set the box on a small table and took off the lid. Inside the box were more boxes, labeled in Leroian with scrawled handwriting. Milo started rummaging through them, finally pulling out individual boxes so he could reach the others underneath.
When he got to a small charcoal-black box, about the size of a fist, he stopped.
“Dark galaxy,” he said triumphantly but reverently. His eyes were shadowed with a look of the long-lost past. He gently pulled the box out of the larger file box. “From one of my early digs. We’d only been married a couple years, your mother and I. You were not more than one.”
“That would be about … oh, twenty months, on Earth,” Eve quickly calculated for the others. “A toddler.”
“Your mother would come out to the dig all the time; it wasn’t too far from home. She’d bring you and a picnic, come for lunch or the evening on those long summer nights. This was from a dig of one of the early settlements on Lero, from millennia before the people of Napori moved here. An ancient civilization; the oldest we’ve found yet.” He smiled, lost in the memory. “Mostly we found the usual things. Pottery, weaponry, bones. But at one home, we found some unusual items—items we’d never seen anywhere else, before or since. Including an unusual stone. It was your mother’s favorite. She called it the ‘dark galaxy’ stone. She thought it looked like a galaxy had been trapped inside of it. You played with it all the time,” Milo continued. “I told your mother it was too precious to be a toy, but she said nothing was more precious than you.”
Eve warmed with her father’s words, memories flooding her mind and tears filling her eyes.
Milo opened the top of the box with a flourish. The others stood by, holding their breaths in anticipation. Milo solemnly lifted the top layer of tissue paper and peered underneath.
“What?” he gasped. His dismay growing, he rummaged through all the layers of tissue, dingy with time and dust. Whatever treasure had once nestled inside the tissue paper was gone. Milo’s face fell. “It’s gone!”
“No!” said Eve, taking the box from her father’s hands. She removed the layers of paper one by one, shaking each to ensure she didn’t miss anything, but her search was fruitless.
Deflated, Eve sat down on a dusty chair. “Where could it be?”
“What made you think about ‘dark galaxy’ anyway?” asked Milo. One by one, he pulled out the other boxes within the file box, checking within each to make sure the stone hadn’t somehow been misplaced.
“I remembered a code I’d once seen,” said Ben, and then he explained the rest: the “read this second” code; the clues they’d found of “dark galaxy,” “water,” and “magnet.”
“Do any of those other words mean anything to you?” asked Emma, helping Milo put the contents of the file box back into its careful order. “‘Water’ and ‘magnet’ are so vague; they could mean almost anything. We were really hoping ‘dark galaxy’ would help.”
“Well, just because the rock isn’t here doesn’t mean the clue doesn’t help,” said Charlie. “Maybe Kata took it herself? Who else would have access to this storage unit?”
Milo found another chair and moved it to sit next to his daughter, resting an elbow on the table and his chin in his hand. “Me, and Kata, I guess. She still knew the code. I didn’t know she had the key to the whole building, but she might have. Lots of people do. It had to be her. No one else knew it was here.”
“So that’s a clue then, too. Maybe she wanted you to know she took it,” said Emma. “Do you have any pictures of the stone? Maybe that would help?”
Milo nodded. He reached for a file folder tucked into the side of the box they’d been looking through. Inside the folder, an envelope bulged with photos and papers. Milo flipped through the images until he found the one he was looking for.
“I give you the dark galaxy stone,” he said, handing the photograph over to Emma with a flourish. “The only one we’ve ever seen on Lero, that I know of.”
This time, it was Emma who gasped. “I know this stone!” she said. “It’s a black opal! They come from Australia! I’m sure that’s it!”
Charlie leaned over his sister’s shoulder to look at the picture. “How do you know that, Em? It’s pretty, I’ll give you that. But you haven’t been to Australia. Where did you see this?”
A pink tinge flushed up Emma’s neck. “Well, what with all the rocks we dealt with last time we were here—the wishing rocks that open the elevator, and all these stones on our bracelets—” she said, running a finger over the tiny but life-giving and life-saving rocks embedded in the bracelet around her left wrist, “I just got curious. I read up on rocks on the internet. I saw the black opal stones, and I remember them because they’re so beautiful and so rare. I thought the same thing your mother did,” she said to Eve, “that some of them look like they have galaxies or nebulas trapped inside. They come in all sorts of colors, some more red, some more blue and green, but all with that dark background, all with the sparkles of light and color and fire inside. I know that’s what it is. I’m sure of it.” She handed the picture to Eve.
“Black opals? From Australia? That’s on Earth, right?” Eve said, forgetting that with rare exception, most places Emma knew were, in fact, on Earth.
“Southern hemisphere,” Ben offered. “Near the bottom of the planet. From our perspective that is, I guess. From their perspective they might say their side is up and ours is down.”
“Pretty far away from Dogwinkle Island,” said Charlie, “but maybe worth a visit! Do you think your mom was trying to tell us to find her in Australia? It’s a big country, isn’t it, Emma? How would we even start to look for her?”
“It’s a huge country,” said Emma. “About as big as the United States. But, lucky for us, the black opals are pretty rare. There’s really just one main place you can find them, and that’s about it. A little town called Lightning Ridge.”
“Lightning Ridge? That’s our destination, then! But …” Charlie hesitated. “Australia is a long way away.” He looked at Ben. “Does Dr. Waldo have something that will get us there fast? Not the pigeons, I know those just take you to a pre-designated spot.” The last time they’d visited, many of the teens had had the opportunity to try out the device Dr. Waldo called a “pigeon,” named after a homing pigeon, because it would only take you to one place—usually home. “That Dark MATTER thing we tried blew up when we used it. Does he have something else? Something that won’t blow up or spread our atoms all over the universe?”
“Maybe Emma can get us there?” Eve said with a laugh, not knowing anything about Dr. Waldo’s findings about Emma’s telomeres.
Charlie quickly spoke before Emma had to explain anything about how the travel may have shortened her life. “Not again! That was crazy. Let’s check with Dr. Waldo first.”
Ben, Dr. Waldo’s acolyte, called Dr. Waldo’s number and put the phone into speaker mode. As the call rang through, he smiled. “Interuniversal phone calls. Who would have ever thought? Craziest thing of all of things.”
&n
bsp; The phone rang and rang. Dr. Waldo had not set up any sort of voice mail just yet, being busy with other tasks. The ringing continued. Finally, a raspy voice answered.
“… Hello?” Dr. Waldo’s voice carried across the millions of miles in barely more than a thin whisper. “Hello? Are you there? Help me!”
The phone went dead.
chapter four
“Did he…?” said Charlie. “Was that Dr. Waldo?” His brow furrowed in concern.
“I think it was,” said Emma. “But that didn’t sound good. Try calling back, Ben. He seems to be in trouble!”
Ben was already redialing Dr. Waldo’s number as the others spoke. The scientist’s phone rang a dozen times without answer.
“We have to help him!” said Eve. She pulled out her own phone and speed-dialed Dr. Waldo. Again there was no answer. “This isn’t good,” she said, shaking her head. “Can we … I don’t know, trace the call?”
“He didn’t call us, we called him,” said Charlie. “Can we reverse trace? Figure out where he answered from? Ben? Do you know?”
Ben had been staring at the phone, as if it would somehow give him answers. “We can try,” he said, uncertainly. “But I think it’ll only work—or even have a chance of working—if he was on a planet or in a universe we’ve already catalogued at the Hub. We’ve catalogued a lot, but, you know, infinite universes and all. We haven’t catalogued all of them.”
“Well, we have to try,” said Milo, who was quickly packing up all the boxes and replacing everything back where it belonged on the shelves. He took one last look around the storage unit with resolve in his eyes, and not just for Dr. Waldo. “Let’s get back to the Hub.”
They retraced their path out of the maze of storage units and piled into Milo’s car outside. He zipped the vehicle along Lero’s empty roads back to the hillside in which the elevator was hidden.
When they arrived, Ben jumped out of the car before the others even had their seat belts off, and ran ahead into the hillside. He had the elevator door open and waiting when the rest of the group arrived. They huddled inside the small space, all of them mentally willing the door to close faster. When it did, Ben immediately opened the door on the other side that led into the Hub.
“Is Dr. Waldo here?” he called out to anyone within hearing distance as he rushed into the space in which everything was possible. “Has anyone seen Dr. Waldo?” Ben and Milo both ran off to talk to any scientists they could find.
“What did Dr. Waldo say again?” asked Emma as she, Charlie, and Eve raced to Dr. Waldo’s work area. As scattered as Dr. Waldo was, his work space was surprisingly organized. The long, black lab table was more functional than fashionable, with various instruments neatly aligned at crisp right angles. Dr. Waldo’s dark computer desk (designed to look as though stars were embedded within its depths) was clean but for his computer, a jar holding a few pens, a note pad, and a neatly stacked set of black mesh desk trays, each filled with an assortment of papers.
Once again, as at Eve’s mother’s house, they had no idea what they were looking for, but they felt they had to try. “What were his exact words?” Emma poked tentatively at papers in the desk trays, not wanting to disturb anything private but also not wanting to abandon the scientist in his time of need, wherever he might be.
“‘Help me,’” replied Charlie, flipping through the note pad to see if anything was written on any pages further down. “I know he said ‘help me.’” Charlie awakened Dr. Waldo’s sleeping computer. An on-screen version of Rupert, the two-dimensional elephant, swept the computer screen with its trunk, indicating a field where a password must be entered to continue. Charlie sighed.
“Something like, ‘Are you there? Help me,’ is what I remember,” said Eve. She randomly opened and closed drawers, but it seemed most of Dr. Waldo’s work was locked safely inside his computer, protected by the digital pachyderm.
Emma was deeply disturbed. Not only did she want to find Dr. Waldo for his own sake, but she had big questions about her mind and her travel for which she needed answers … or at the very least, someone to whom she could talk about it. She knew she could talk to Charlie, but for some reason she felt the need to shield him from her fears. She wasn’t sure he could handle the truth. He was so protective of his sister; she didn’t want to scare him unnecessarily. And Ben, she could talk to him; after all, he’d been studying and working in the Hub for months. But she wasn’t quite ready to let him know how scared she was. No, she needed Dr. Waldo back, for her own selfish reasons. The realization of her own self-absorption embarrassed her, but it was a fact.
“We have to find him,” said Charlie, watching Emma’s mind whir and guessing at the thoughts within. Emma only nodded.
Ben trotted up to the group, out of breath from running all over the Hub. “No one has seen him since yesterday,” he said. “He hasn’t checked in, and no one knows where he went.” He sat on the edge of Dr. Waldo’s desk.
“Same thing I heard,” said Milo, who had rejoined the group just after Ben. “No one knows. Okay, Ben, let’s see if we can trace him somehow. You know how to do that?”
“Like I said, it’ll only work if it’s somewhere we’ve catalogued. But we can give it a try,” said Ben.
“Let’s try,” said Emma. “We have to at least try.”
They followed Ben to his work station. When Ben had first started working at the Hub, Dr. Waldo had designated an empty, open space as Ben’s work area. Ben’s first task had been to “build” his own desk, chairs, and other furniture, all through the power of his intention. It took Ben three tries before he had a usable desk and a chair that didn’t collapse under his own weight, but he was as proud of what he’d created as if he’d built it with his own hands. The desk was about eight feet long and three feet deep, made of a dark mahogany wood. Stylish but simple brushed-metal handles adorned well-crafted drawers that flanked the desk on either side. The chair was made of the same wood, in a complementary style.
“Is that real wood?” asked Emma, running her hand over the smooth surface.
“I don’t know, to be honest,” said Ben. “I don’t know if I killed a tree to make this. I hope not. What I like to believe is that somehow I called together molecules that wanted to be a tree, or maybe used to be a tree, and they came together to form this masterpiece.” He smiled, and tapped a button on his computer keyboard to awaken the computer from its slumber.
As Ben opened programs and rapidly entered information into the computer, Charlie studied the desk more closely. “These drawer pulls,” he said. “They look like our bracelets.” Mirroring the bracelets they each wore, several small stones were embedded in the brushed metal of the drawer pulls. “There’s the amber one, that helps us breathe,” said Charlie, pointing at the stones in turn, “and the translating stone, the clear one … you have all of them! I love it!”
Ben beamed. “Exactly the idea,” he said. “Different stones on different drawer pulls, but they’re all there. I figure if they help us in the universes, they might help me in my work, too. At least I hope so.”
As the young man spoke, a whirlwind of numbers flashed across his screen. The computer searched within its own files to see if some connection could be made between where Dr. Waldo was when he answered his phone, and anywhere the scientists had been before. After only a few seconds, the whirring stopped. Coordinates appeared in a new window on the screen.
“Did it find him?” asked Emma. “Where’s Dr. Waldo?”
A pallor fell over Ben’s face. “It looks like … he’s in the ghost universe.”
“The ghost universe!” said Charlie. “You mean where Eve and Emma went? With the other Charlie?”
“Same universe,” said Ben, his fingers racing over the keyboard as he gathered more information from the depths of the Hub’s computer network. “Same universe, that is, but a different planet. Not the same one they went to, I don’t think.”
“You don’t think?” said Eve. “But you’re not sure?”
“No, I’m sure. Not the same planet. I’d know if it were the same planet. It’s the same universe, but it’s a planet we haven’t catalogued before. Somehow … the computer already knows this planet, though. I don’t get it.” Ben said.
Emma recalled her own trip to the ghost universe, to a planet where she’d nearly gotten lost, or worse. “We have to try to find him,” she said, but the idea of going back made her throat tighten and her heart rush. She could vividly recall how Dr. Waldo had once warned them of the dangers of going to the ghost universe, and they had not gone there intentionally. Why was he there now? He, who had told them in no uncertain terms that spending too much time there could lead to their not being able to return? Why had he gone there, and was he stuck now?
“He must be stuck there,” said Ben, echoing Emma’s thoughts. “Thus the call for help. He needs us to get him out of there.”
“I don’t know if Emma should go back,” said Charlie. “Wasn’t she allergic to the ghosts? She should stay here. I’ll go.”
“If I’m allergic, you probably are, too,” said Emma defiantly. “You aren’t going without me. I got myself out of there before, and if I have to I can do it again.”
Charlie shook his head at Emma. “No, Em. It’s too dangerous.”
“Wait,” said Eve. “What about the vaccine from the parallel Earth? Ben, you said that the other Charlie had brought a sample of it? But you didn’t know if Dr. Waldo had done anything with it yet?”
Before she could say anything else, Ben rushed off again, this time to Dr. Waldo’s secondary lab area—one farther away from other people, where he performed the more dangerous experiments. As the others caught up to him, Ben was quickly but carefully rummaging through all the vials on one of the desks. “If it’s here, it would be in this tray, I’m sure of it,” he said under his breath. “Dr. Waldo can seem scatterbrained, but when it comes to his science, he’s meticulously organized.” One by one, he pulled each vial from the wire mesh cage that held them, read its label, and returned it to its holder.