by Paul Melko
The crowd milled for a moment. John saw Rudy and Stan, their voices raised, shaking fists at the departing truck. Then Stan caught sight of the woman and the little girl, who had gotten the last of the soup. He jumped forward, running after the two who were walking slowly through the snow toward a bridge that crossed the Ottawa River.
John ran after Stan, knowing he meant to take their food.
There was a shot and the woman collapsed against the little girl, who slid over the side of the embankment toward the river. Stan shoved his gun back into his coat and grabbed the woman’s bag. The army officer, hanging on to the tail of the truck, watched dispassionately. The truck didn’t stop.
John slid in the snow next to the woman. Red welled from her wool coat, blackening the fabric, running onto the snow in bright rivulets.
“You shot her!” John cried.
Stan looked at him, shrugged, and walked away.
A small crowd of people gathered around them, peering down at the bleeding woman.
“Someone call an ambulance,” John said. “She’s been shot.”
An old woman laughed. “No ambulances, don’t you know?” She turned and walked off.
“Momma!”
John looked over the edge of the embankment. The little girl lay on the ice. He pointed at a young man standing in the circle and said, “You! Apply pressure here.” He reluctantly complied, pushing on the woman’s abdomen, trying to staunch the blood.
John slipped and slid down the embankment to the girl. He placed his foot on the ice slowly, then all his weight. It held, and he carefully stepped to the girl. Her leg was twisted oddly, and he knew she had broken it.
He lifted her carefully, then looked for a way up. Next to the bridge was a rocky trail, not too snowy, that led up the slope. He fell once, hearing the child cry out as he did, then managed to get to the top of the riverbank. The crowd was gone.
Even the man who’d been holding back the blood was gone, bloody footprints marking his retreat.
John laid the girl down next to her mother’s face.
“Momma?” she said pitifully.
The woman’s breathing was shallow, but she was alive. No ambulances, the old woman had said. Authorities looked the other way over killings for food. John was sure he could get no help in this universe for the woman.
And if she died, so would the child.
“Do you have a family, child?” John asked softly. She stared at him blankly. “Do you have a father or brothers or sisters?”
The girl shook her head. “No, just Momma.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kylie. Kylie Saraft.”
John tried to think back to the severed cat-dog carcass. The thing had dove at him and been clinging to his back as he fell. The slice had looked perpendicular to the beast’s torso, perhaps a meter behind John. That meant the device had a field of radius of one meter, at least.
“Hug your mother,” John said. Kylie looked at him for a moment, her eyes hard. John wondered what atrocities she had seen in her short life. Then she took John’s hand and slid against her mother’s body, groaning when her leg flexed suddenly.
John toggled the universe counter forward to 7539, slipped in beside the two on the ground. He pulled them as tight as he could. They felt like skeletons. He could easily feel the ribs of both of them, the bones in their arms.
There was no one in this universe for them. They’d been left for dead. No family, no medical help. If he didn’t help them, they would die. He had to do this.
Grasping them both, he pulled the lever.
“Jesus,” someone said.
John stood. The snow was gone, except for the bits that clung to his legs and the woman’s back. The daughter and the woman had come through with him. All of them, no bloody stumps. The field of the device seemed to have covered him, the woman and the girl, and a pile of snow.
“What happened to you, man?”
John turned to the students looking on. The woman was lying on a footpath that followed the Ottawa River; a half-dozen students stood around them.
“This woman’s been shot. We need an ambulance.”
“No way, man,” the student said. He wore black denim pants, a black jeans jacket. An earring dangled from his left ear, and a stocking cap, also black, covered his head. He looked around, as if he could find an ambulance that way.
“Does anyone have a phone?” John said. “This woman is bleeding to death.”
A female student, holding her books in front of her like a shield, pointed to a lamppost ten meters away. “Security phone’s over there.”
John ran over and picked the phone up. It began to ring immediately. “Campus security.”
“Yes. There’s a woman shot at this location. And a little girl with a broken leg. Send an ambulance.”
“Please state your name.”
“Is the ambulance coming?”
“Yes.”
John hung up the phone. The chill of the other universe had left him. It was a warm October day here. No food riots, no shootings over two cans of Campbell Chicken Noodle. He watched the crowd of well-fed students gather around the woman and her child.
The girl had sat up and was looking at all the strange faces, perhaps wondering where all the snow had gone. Within a minute, John heard the wail of sirens. He looked down at his blood-soaked jacket and realized he’d have to answer a lot of questions.
He pulled his jacket off, turned it inside out, and walked away. What more could he do?
He’d brought them to a universe where food was plentiful. Sure, he’d ripped them out of their home universe. But there was no one there for them. It was better for them in this next universe, John was certain, though he had no idea what this universe was like. It seemed close enough to his own. There would be Welfare and services for the two. They would survive. He’d helped them.
John Prime had done the same thing to him, he realized. Guilt and anger knotted his stomach. He’d saved their lives, damn it! He hadn’t kidnapped them. He’d saved them. It was nothing like what Prime had done to him.
The ambulance pulled up and two EMTs began working on the woman. Moments later a university police car arrived.
John continued walking. He needed someplace to clean up. Ahead of him was the field house. He assumed it would have a locker room. Maybe he could fake his way in as he had at the Physics Library in the earlier universe. His shirt and jacket were soaked in blood. His shoes were soaked with melted snow and squeaked as he walked.
The field house was an old building adjacent to the quad he had walked through to get to the Student Union. McCormick Hall was there; he saw the telescope observatory rising above the other buildings.
There was no one barring his way into the locker room, so he slipped in and found the showers. There were a couple guys changing clothes, but no one noticed him.
John stripped down and hung the device on a hook in the shower alcove. Then he wrung out his shirt and coat. Red swirls circled the drain and disappeared. He used his hands to wash the streaks of blood off the shower curtain.
Afterwards, he dried his clothes as best he could on the hand drier. He would have preferred a washing machine, but at least the blood was gone. As he leaned against the hand drier, he wondered what would happen with the woman and her daughter. He hoped that they would, if not understand, at least cope with being in another universe. Just like he was doing.
As he walked across the quad from the field house to McCormick Hall, John was taken aback by the juxtaposition of this same grass field with the one in the other universe. The trees weren’t gnarled and hideous here; they still held a bouquet of colorful leaves, as students flung Frisbees or lounged around, on one of the last warm days of the year. Some of the students were even wearing shorts, and John compared these well-fed, fleshy children to the boney, malnourished people of the last universe. There the clouds roiled; here the sun shined.
He decided not to feel guilty about bringing the woman
and her daughter here. If he could, he thought, he’d bring everyone from that universe here. The inhabitants of that universe thought they had to live with the world as it was, but they didn’t. Here was a universe with food to spare. Did they realize that salvation and plenty was in the universe next door? If he had a device that was large enough, one that worked right, he could transfer thousands of people through.
A large enough device, he thought. If he had a device that worked, he’d get himself home. He looked for the physics building. He had what he needed to confront Wilson now.
CHAPTER 10
McCormick Hall looked identical. In fact, the same student guarded the door of the Physics Library, asked John the same question.
“Student ID?”
“I left it in my dorm room,” John replied without hesitation.
“Well, bring it next time, frosh.”
John smiled at him. “Don’t call me frosh again, geek.”
The student blinked at him, dismayed.
His visit with Professor Wilson had not been a total loss. Wilson had mentioned the subject that he should have searched for instead of parallel universe. He had said that the field of study was called quantum cosmology.
Cosmology, John knew, was the study of the origin of the universe. Quantum theory, however, was applied to individual particles, such as atoms and electrons. It was a statistical way to model those particles. Quantum cosmology, John figured, was a statistical way to model the universe. Not just one universe either, John hoped, but all universes.
He sat down at a terminal. This time there were thirty hits. He printed the list and began combing the stacks.
Half of the books were summaries of colloquia or workshops. The papers were riddled with equations, and all of them assumed an advanced understanding of the subject matter. John had no basis to understand any of the math.
In the front matter of one of the books was a quote from a physicist regarding a theory called the Many-Worlds Theory: “When a quantum transition occurs, an irreversible one, which is happening in our universe at nearly an infinite rate, a new universe branches off from that transition in which the transition did not occur. Our universe is just a single one of a myriad copies, each slightly different than the others.”
John felt an affinity for the quote immediately. He had seen other universes in which small changes had resulted in totally different futures, such as Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the electric motor. It almost made sense then that every universe John visited was one of billions in which some quantum event or decision occurred differently.
He shut the book. He thought he had enough to ask his questions of Wilson now.
The second-floor hallway seemed identical, right down to the empty offices and cluttered billboards. Professor Wilson’s office was again at the end of the hall, and he was there, reading a journal. John wondered if it was the same one.
“Come on in,” Wilson said at John’s knock.
“I have a couple questions.”
“About the homework set?”
“No, this is unrelated. It’s about quantum cosmology.”
Wilson put his journal down and nodded. “A complex subject. What’s your question?”
“Do you agree with the Many-Worlds Theory?” John asked.
“No.”
John waited, unsure what to make of the single-syllable answer. Then he said, “Uh, no?”
“No. It’s hogwash in my opinion. What’s your interest in it? Are you one of my students?” Wilson sported the same gray jacket over the same blue oxford.
“You don’t believe in multiple universes as an explanation… for…” John was at a loss again. He didn’t know as much as he thought he knew. He still couldn’t ask the right questions.
“For quantum theory?” asked Wilson. “No. It’s not necessary. Do you know Occam’s Theory?”
John nodded.
“Which is simpler? One universe that moves under statistical laws at the quantum level or an infinite number of universes, each stemming from every random event? How many universes have you seen?”
John began to answer the rhetorical question.
“One,” said Wilson before John could open his mouth. Wilson looked John up and down. “Are you a student here?”
“Uh, no. I’m in high school,” John admitted.
“I see. This is really pretty advanced stuff, young man. Graduate-level stuff. Have you had calculus?”
“Just half a semester.”
“Let me try to explain it another way.” He picked up a paperweight off his desk, a rock with eyes and mouth painted on it. “I am going to make a decision to drop this rock between now and ten seconds from now.” He paused, then dropped the rock after perhaps seven seconds. “A random process. In ten other universes, assuming for simplicity that I could only drop the rock at integer seconds and not fractional seconds, I dropped the rock at each of the seconds from one to ten. I made ten universes by generating a random event. By the Many-Worlds Theory, they all exist. The question is, where did all the matter and energy come from to build ten new universes just like that?” He snapped his fingers. “Now extrapolate to the nearly infinite number of quantum transitions happening on the Earth this second. How much energy is required to build all those universes? Where does it come from? Clearly the Many-Worlds Theory is absurd.”
John shook his head, trying to understand the idea. He couldn’t refute Wilson ’s argument. He realized how little he really knew. He said, “But what if multiple worlds did exist? Could you travel between the worlds?”
“You can’t; you won’t, not even remotely possible.”
“But-”
“It can’t happen, even if the theory were true.”
“Then the theory is wrong,” John said to himself.
“I told you it was wrong. There are no parallel universes.”
John felt the frustration growing in him. “But I know there are. I’ve seen them.”
“I’d say your observations were manipulated or you saw something that you interpreted incorrectly.”
“Don’t condescend to me again!” John shouted.
Wilson looked at him calmly, then stood.
“Get out of this office, and I suggest you get off this campus right now. I recommend that you seek medical attention immediately,” Wilson said coldly.
John’s frustration turned to rage. Wilson was no different here than in the last universe. He assumed John was wrong because he acted like a hick, a farm boy. He was certain John knew nothing that he didn’t already know.
John flung himself at the man. Wilson ’s papers scattered across his chest and onto the floor. John grabbed at Wilson ’s jacket from across the desk and yelled into his face, “I’ll prove it to you, goddamn it! I’ll prove it.”
“Get off me!” Wilson yelled, and pushed John away. Wilson lost his balance when John’s grip on his jacket slipped and he fell on the floor against his chair. “You maniac!”
His breathing coming hard, John stood across from the desk from him. John needed proof. His eyes saw the diploma on the wall of Wilson ’s office. He grabbed it and ran out of the office. If he couldn’t convince this Wilson, he’d convince the next. He found an alcove beside the building and transferred out.
John stood clutching Wilson ’s diploma to his chest, his heart still thumping from the confrontation. Suddenly he felt silly. He’d attacked the man and stolen his diploma to prove to another version of him that John wasn’t a wacko.
He looked across the quad. He watched a boy catch a Frisbee, and then saw juxtaposed the images of him tripping and not catching it, just missing it to the left, to the right, a million permutations. Everything in the quad was suddenly a blur.
He shook his head, then lifted the diploma so that he could read it. He’d try again, and this time he’d try the direct approach.
John climbed the steps to Wilson ’s office and knocked.
“Come on in.”
“I have a proble
m.”
Wilson nodded and asked, “How can I help?”
“I’ve visited you three times. Twice before you wouldn’t believe me,” John said.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before,” he said. “You’re not one of my students, are you?”
“No, I’m not. We’ve never met, but I’ve met versions of you.”
“Really.”
“Don’t patronize me! You do that every f-” John stopped himself, then continued slowly. “You do that every time, and I’ve had enough.” His arms were shaking. “I don’t belong in this universe. I belong in another. Do you understand?”
Wilson ’s face was emotionless, still. “No, please explain.”
“I was tricked into using a device. I was tricked by another version of myself because he wanted my life. He told me I could get back, but the device either doesn’t work right or only goes in one direction. I want to get back to my universe, and I need help.”
Wilson nodded. “Why don’t you sit down?”
John nodded, tears welling in his eyes. He’d finally gotten through to Wilson.
“So you’ve tried talking with me-other versions of me-in other universes and I won’t help. Why not?”
“We start by discussing parallel universes or quantum cosmology or Multi-Worlds Theory, and you end up shooting it all down with Occam’s razor.”
“Sounds like something I’d say,” Wilson said, nodding. “So you have a device.”
“Yeah. It’s here.” John pointed to his chest, then unbuttoned his shirt.
Wilson looked at the device gravely. “What’s that in your hand?”
John glanced down at the diploma. “It’s… your diploma from the last universe. I sorta took it for proof.”
Wilson held out his hand, and John handed the diploma over. There was an identical one on the wall. The professor glanced from one to the other. “Uh-huh,” he said, then after a moment, “I see.”
He put the diploma down and said, “My middle name is Lawrence.”
John saw that the script of the diploma he’d stolen said “Frank B. Wilson” while the one on the wall said “Frank L. Wilson.”