The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

  Lunch didn’t come soon enough, and when it did, his mind wouldn’t focus on the words. Stephen King made it seem so easy. Prime had seen the movie twice, and he’d even skimmed the book. Writing The Shining should have been simple. He was taking every lunch hour to write, or rather remember. And there was no King in this universe. Prime had been sure to check. No way was the guy going to show up and accuse Prime of plagiarism. He should have brought a paperback edition with him.

  “Hey.”

  What had happened in Room 237?

  “Hey! Rayburn!”

  Prime looked up. A teenager he vaguely recognized was addressing him from the next table where he sat with a few friends, all his age.

  “You knocked up Casey Nicholson, didn’t you?”

  Prime ran cold. His hands twisted into fists.

  Carson. Ted Carson. Prime remembered him now. The asshole who had gotten him expelled from school, or rather Johnny Farm Boy expelled.

  Prime forced his anger down. He exhaled, then smiled. “Aren’t you Ted Carson? The famous Ted Carson?”

  Carson looked at him with confusion. “You know who I am, Rayburn!”

  “You’re famous!”

  “What are you talking about?” His bluster was fading away.

  “A lot of animals go missing in your neighborhood, I hear,” Prime said.

  Ted’s face paled.

  “You know anything about that? Seen any evidence, maybe?”

  Prime smiled as Carson ’s neck tendons stood out. His jaw was so tightly clenched he couldn’t speak. His friends cast glances at him; what had started as some gentle bullying had taken a turn they couldn’t understand.

  Prime could.

  “What are you practicing for, killer?” Prime asked softly.

  Carson broke the stare and glanced left and right at his friends. He stood and stormed off.

  “Screw you, Rayburn,” he shouted.

  Prime shrugged and laughed. He glared at the remaining pack of summer interns.

  “Well?” he said. “What do you want?”

  They turned away, and Prime turned back toward his novel.

  At quitting time, he felt his neck bristle and turned to see Ted Carson and a man with the same jowly face staring at him. Wouldn’t you know it? Prime thought. Ted Carson’s dad works at the plant too. Now he had two Carsons to deal with.

  CHAPTER 16

  His lab class was in the old physics building-Hermangild Hall-a stone edifice with wooden-floored hallways that echoed with voices and footsteps. John had traveled universes, but he still wasn’t too sure of himself in crowds. He was still a small-town kid at heart. He turned and counted room numbers, realizing his lab was in the basement. He found a stairwell, and as he descended, the smell of mold and dust tickled his nose. Naked bulbs were strung along the ceiling, and he was certain he was lost.

  “You look lost,” someone said.

  John turned to find a frizzy-haired woman standing in a doorway.

  “Looking for physics lab? You’re in the right place,” she said.

  “Uh, thanks,” John said.

  The room behind was fifteen meters long and five wide. Six black-lacquered tables were arranged in two rows, and a dozen students sat around them waiting for class. John found a seat at an empty table.

  He felt someone at his elbow and turned to find the frizzy-haired woman had followed him.

  “Can I sit here too?”

  “I guess.”

  She dumped her bursting backpack on the floor next to John, then sat. She held out her hand.

  “I’m Grace. Grace Shisler.”

  “John,” he replied, shaking. “Ray-John Wilson.”

  “Is your middle name Ray?” Grace asked.

  John blushed, embarrassed to have made a mistake with his alias. “No. It’s just… It’s irrelevant.”

  “Okay, John Ray, whatever you say.”

  John looked around for another table to sit at, but they were all full.

  “Hey! Henry! Over here!” Grace shouted. Half the class craned their necks around, and John blushed again. He hated standing out.

  Henry was a tall, gangly fellow, with dark hair and a slouch. He sat next to Grace and gave John a grunt in greeting.

  “Henry’s in Alcott,” Grace said. “I’m in Benchley. We met at one of those mixer things they give for freshmen. Imagine that, both of us engineering majors. What dorm you in, John Ray?”

  “It’s just John. Um, I’m off campus,” he said.

  “How’d you swing that?” Grace asked. “All freshmen have to stay in the dorm. You’re a freshman, aren’t you? This is freshman physics lab.”

  “I’m a freshman, but nontraditional,” John said. Without a high school diploma, without any sort of documentation at all, he’d been forced to take the GED and apply to the UT continuing-education program. If this universe had required any ID beyond his faked birth certificate, he would have been in big trouble.

  “Cool, nontraditional,” Grace said. Henry grunted. “What do you think of Higgins’ class? I did everything he’s covered so far in high school.”

  John nodded. The freshman physics class had been utterly useless to him, but there was no way he’d be able to understand the advanced physics he needed to master the device without starting with the basics. It was why he’d decided to attend the university, to understand enough to understand the device. But everything was so maddeningly irrelevant: engineering drafting, Electronics 101, freshman physics, European history, English! Of course, what school would offer a class on cross-dimensional travel? Maybe MIT.

  “I wonder what’s going to be on the quiz,” Grace said. “I hope it’s hard.”

  John glanced at her. She was smiling at him.

  “You want us to sit somewhere else?” she asked.

  John blushed for a third time. “No. I’m just-”

  “-a little introverted?”

  “A little. Not used to all this.”

  “Well, just sit back and relax,” Grace said. “Leave the driving to me. I’m helping Henry acclimate to college too.”

  John glanced at Henry, who shrugged silently.

  Grace was forced to, if not be silent, then at least keep her volume low as the teaching assistant explained the lab for the day. It was all about velocity, acceleration, and momentum. They dropped wooden disks down a ramp and measured the time it took for the disks to travel the length of the board at various angles. Henry worked the stopwatch, Grace recorded the times, and John dropped the disks. John was surprised to look up at the end of the class and find they were the last ones there, having worked through the ancillary material on friction.

  “That was pretty cool,” Henry said, the only opinion he had uttered all day.

  “Yeah!” Grace said.

  “It’s like a pinball machine,” John said.

  “A what?” Grace asked.

  “Pinball,” he said. “The ramp is like the play field. The disk could be the ball. If we added bumpers and paddles…” He trailed off.

  “What?”

  “What are you talking about? Pinball?” Grace asked.

  “Oh,” John said. “Never mind, something I saw as a kid… in Las Vegas. Hard to explain.” He realized he’d found one of the anomalies that he had been tripping on now and again since he’d arrived in Universe 7650. Like the weird soda names: Pepsi and Dutch’s. He was used to Zotz and Coke. And saying, “Good health!” when someone sneezed instead of, “God bless you.” There was no pinball in this world.

  “Oh, Vegas,” Grace said. “Hey, you want to eat with us at the dining hall?”

  John checked his watch. It was past five.

  “Thanks, no,” he said. “I have dinner at my apartment.”

  “Sure. Apartment food,” Grace said. “I understand.”

  “See you next week,” he said.

  “Yeah, see you,” Grace said.

  Henry grunted.

  John pried up the boards in the closet while the water for his ramen no
odles boiled. He withdrew the lockbox, dialed the combination quickly, and opened it. The device was wrapped in a lambskin cloth.

  It had taken him a while to stop wearing it, to put it aside. The day he had, he’d realized he was going to be staying in this universe for a long time. He took out the rest of the items in the box: a jeweler’s tool set, a magnifying glass.

  He realized that he needed one more thing now: a notebook. He and Henry had copied the numbers that Grace had written down during their experiment into their own notebooks. John Prime had had his own notebooks, but John hadn’t bothered. He realized now that he needed to document everything.

  He brought the magnifying glass close to the edge of the device, looking for some detail, some hint. He ran his finger across the edge. The metal was smooth and cold. There were no warm spots anywhere on the device.

  John wished he had been nicer to Henry and Grace, but it scared him to befriend anyone in this universe. These people were all shades and shadows, copies of themselves, one of a billion identical people. What good was it befriending them? He was leaving one day.

  The kettle whistled. He carefully packed the device and his tools away. There was a comfort in deciding to follow a meticulous scientific method in his analysis of the device. Sooner or later it would yield its secrets.

  CHAPTER 17

  “So explain this pinball thing you saw in Las Vegas.”

  “Why?” John said. He glanced at Grace from across the air table. They were doing a linear momentum problem in two dimensions: floating disks on an air table and bouncing them together.

  “Henry wants to know,” Grace said.

  “Is that so?” John asked Henry.

  Henry shrugged.

  “He says he did a literature search on ‘pinball’ and couldn’t find anything,” Grace said.

  John shook his head. “Would you launch the slug?”

  Henry let the slug-the moving disk-fly. It zipped across the table toward the target disk. The camera overhead flashed four times. It whirred and dispensed a flimsy paper photograph of the disks twice before and twice after the collision. From that they would be able to calculate the linear momentum transfer between the two disks. John retrieved the target disk and replaced it with a disk twice the mass.

  “Why are you checking up on me?”

  Grace actually looked confused, and John realized he was being paranoid.

  “We’re not checking up on you! We’re just-you know-interested,” she said.

  John sighed again. He should have changed lab partners after the first lab, but instead he’d stuck with Henry and Grace. He also should have kept his big mouth shut about things that were common in his universe and not here. Of course it was hard to know what those were until he got a blank stare in return, which meant it was better to not talk with anyone at all. But he was stuck with these two.

  “It was just a game, not for betting, and there probably was only one of them ever made,” John said. “And it was a long time ago, which is why you didn’t find any reference.”

  “Explain,” Henry said.

  The slug hit the heavier disk and the camera flashed.

  “Inclined plane, ball bearing, flippers,” John said. “You bounced the ball off the scoring things until the ball slipped past you.”

  “I don’t get it,” Grace said.

  “Yeah,” Henry added.

  John found himself explaining pinball while they bounced more disks together. They worked through six weights of disk, as well as three mystery weights, which they had to calculate via the equations of momentum.

  “I’m gonna have to see it,” Henry finally said, which was the most John had ever heard him say in one conversation.

  “Well, we can’t go to Las Vegas!” John cried, frustrated.

  “We can build one,” Grace said. “Henry and I are on Lab Squad.”

  “Lab Squad?”

  “All the freshmen got a letter last year about Lab Squad,” Grace said. “You must have thrown yours out. Lab Squad is the coolest student group in the engineering school. We help the senior and grad students in the lab with their work, and we get to do our own experiments during off-hours. We have keys.”

  “I didn’t get that letter,” John said.

  “Oh, right, you’re a nontraditional student,” Grace said. “Good thing you know us. We can create a pinball project, and you can help us build a pinball… device.”

  “Pinball machine,” John said automatically.

  “I like ‘pinball device’ better,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” John said. “We’re not doing it.” Anything like that, any exploitation of technology from across universes, felt too much like John Prime and his schemes for John to stomach.

  “It’s just a-,” Grace began.

  “No.” John slammed the disks into their slot in the box. He shoved his notebook into his backpack and left the lab.

  He wasn’t going to become like Prime. There was no way John was doing something like that. Cross-dimensional trade. No way. Prime was an exploiter. He was a user, and John wasn’t anything like that. And why were Henry and Grace pushing him? It was better if he just switched sessions and did lab on Mondays. He couldn’t get too close to anyone in this universe. He was leaving, as soon as he figured out the device.

  He found himself in the Student Union, cutting through to get to the far side of campus where his apartment was. A word on a bulletin board caught his eye: “ Findlay ”. It was a ride share board. Someone needed a ride to Findlay, for gas. John had planned to go see Bill and Janet the next weekend anyway. He read the name on the board: “Casey Nicholson.”

  His hand hovered over the tab with her phone number on it. Oh, no, he thought. Not her.

  He reached out and tore her phone number away.

  CHAPTER 18

  That Friday, John drove his car over to Benchley Hall, one of the undergrad women’s dorms, but the U in front of it was jammed with cars. He parked at a student lot about a kilometer away, then walked back.

  He was nervous, and he chided himself for it. She didn’t know him; he didn’t know her. The Casey he knew was far away. She was John Prime’s now for all he knew. Prime certainly had shown interest in her.

  But this Casey was an unknown factor. She might be completely different from the one John remembered. She might have the same name but a totally different genetic makeup. She might be dark haired and short, not the tall blonde he knew. She might be mean-spirited. She might be a lesbian. She might have a boyfriend.

  She probably did have a boyfriend, a pretty girl like her.

  John brooded as he walked the last hundred meters.

  This was all a mistake, he was sure. He should be minimizing his problems, not adding to them. What would he say to her? We shared a class, but you don’t remember me. I had a crush on another version of you. He’d sound like a total wacko.

  The front atrium of the dorm was a madhouse of people: It seemed like everyone was going home for the weekend. Laundry and luggage were piled everywhere. John found the house phone and dialed Casey’s extension.

  “Hello?” someone said, definitely not Casey. Benchley Hall was all quads, so Casey shared the room with three other women.

  “Is Casey there?”

  “Is this Jack?”

  “Uh… no. I’m her ride to Findlay.”

  “Oh, right. She’ll be right down.”

  He hung up wondering if Jack was her boyfriend. Jack was probably on the football team. Or he was a medical student. Or he was a professor in the music college. Not any of whom John could compete with. Not that he would. She wasn’t his Casey.

  He stood by the elevators waiting. She got off, carrying a green duffel bag. Her hair was blond and bobbed, one of the current styles in this universe; he was glad she wasn’t wearing a beehive. She wore baggy dungarees and cowboy boots. Her coat was a lettered jacket from Findlay High School. Casey looked just like he remembered.

  “Casey?”

 
“John?”

  “Yeah. I’m your ride. Can I carry your bag?”

  She hitched it up her shoulder and said, “No. I got it. Let’s go.” They fought their way through the throng at the door. “This is worse than move-in day,” she called over her shoulder.

  “Johnny! Johnny!”

  John turned at the shrill voice.

  “Hey, Johnny,” Grace said. She wore a shirt that said: “I’m Not Dead Yet.” She had hold of the inside door behind him.

  John looked back at Casey, holding the outside door, looking back at him, and then over his shoulder at Grace.

  “Hey, Grace,” he said, trying to not match her shrill, piercing tone.

  “Did you hand in your lab notebook?”

  “Yeah, I did,” he said, turning again to look at Casey. She looked back at him with a smile. “I’ll see you later,” John said to Grace.

  “Okay. Happy Freya Day! Bye, Casey!”

  “Right.”

  Casey nodded and turned away. Then they were through and into the crisp evening air.

  “How’d you know it was me coming off the elevator?” she asked.

  “Your jacket.”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, looking down at the jacket. “As close as Findlay is, you’d think more people would be from there here at the university.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But not many people in my class went on to college.” She looked at him. “You go to Findlay High?”

  “Uh, no,” he said. “But I know people who did.”

  “Where’d you go then?”

  “School in Columbus. I know people in Findlay, though. That’s where I’m heading for the weekend.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  “Bill and Janet Rayburn. They’re my aunt and uncle.”

  “Yeah?”

  “On McMaster.”

  “Yeah, I know them. They go to my church. They’re over by the abandoned rock quarry. I’ve been there. The quarry, I mean.” She looked around the U outside the dorm. “Where’d you park?”