A Rift in Space and Crime

by R E McLean

  “There wasn’t time.”

  “Alex. I’m a materials scientist. I understand objects in their normal form. You’re going to have to explain all this quantum stuff to me.”

  Alex put her hands on her hips, then frowned as they slid off the smooth fabric of her suit.

  “OK, so it’s all about probability. Quantum Physics says that nothing is certain, it just has a probability of being so.”

  “So it’s not certain that you’re standing here in front of me? In that rather fetching suit, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  Alex stiffened. “Don’t. It’s all about the very tiny, and the very large. Tiny objects—particles—and large numbers of them. When enough of them behave in a certain way that’s what we observe. But once we do observe it, the quantum field breaks down and the probability is fixed.”

  “What?”

  “Forget the theory. What’s happening here is something to do with the probabilities being messed up. That’s why things change form. Or state.”

  “Dead to alive?”

  “It’s possible. Like Schrödinger.”

  Sarita smiled. A patch on her suit glowed. She pulled out the bitbox.

  “Good news.”

  Alex approached her. “What is it?”

  “Two dots. Both moving.”

  “Lacey?”

  “And the kid who took her. I think.”

  “Pip.”

  “Pip.” Sarita looked up. She was inches away from Alex now. She smelled of bananas.

  “It might not be them.”

  Sarita raised an eyebrow.

  “He said something about his family. Told Lacey they’d abandoned him. It could be them.”

  “The dots are too small, too determined.”

  “How can a dot be determined?”

  “You know what I mean. Which one d’you think is Lacey?”

  Alex looked at the bitbox again. A faint map had appeared on its surface. It looked like a map of San Francisco. The Bay encroached further inland and there were different colored patches denoting neighborhoods. Fisherman’s Wharf didn’t exist in Silicon City, and the land where it should be was underwater.

  Both dots were moving over water.

  “Maybe they found our boat.”

  “You had a boat?”

  “We stole one. Left it moored up in the Bay.”

  Neither of the dots were anywhere near the point where she and Mike had left the boat. One was to the west of it, moving away. And the other was closer, heading across the Bay to where Oakland and Berkeley would be.

  “Let’s go for that one,” Alex said. “The one closest.”

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Just a hunch.”

  Sarita pocketed the bitbox. “OK. If you say so.”

  36

  Ringmaster

  Lacey’s legs hurt. She had blisters on her blisters and her ankle was twisting as she walked. She tried not to think about it.

  She sang to herself as she crossed the bridge—one hundred bottles of beer, which she’d soon amended to ten thousand bottles when she realized how long this was going to take.

  At last she reached the steps leading down on the other side. She tumbled down, clinging to the railing, and let herself fall in a heap on the ground.

  The air was warmer over here, with sounds coming from the trees.

  She squinted to look up at them: birds? But no, it sounded more like the kind of music her dad would listen to.

  She leaned against the bridge and looked around. A long footpath led along the shore, with objects dotted along it at regular intervals. Lamps, she imagined. Bright blue, flashing lamps.

  She rubbed her eyes. They weren’t lamps. They were blue popsicles, spinning and emitting shards of light like disco balls.

  She rubbed her eyes again. When she opened them, the popsicles were gone, replaced by a row of red telephone boxes, the kind she’d seen on the family trip to London.

  She closed her eyes. She couldn’t deal with this, not now. She needed to rest.

  “Hey.”

  Lacey stirred. She was dreaming of ice cream sundaes, piled high with strawberries and topped with so much whipped cream it defied gravity. And ten cherries on the top, balanced in a tower.

  “Hey. Who are you?”

  She brushed at the ice cream scoop that was poking into her hip. She grabbed it, eager to attack the sundae. It didn’t give.

  “Wake up.”

  She clenched her eyes shut, desperate to stay in the dream. She sniffed then gagged.

  She opened her eyes.

  A group of people had gathered around her.

  It wasn’t any ordinary group of people. They looked like rejects from a fancy dress party. One, the tallest, wore a gorilla mask and a red nose. Another wore a blue gingham dress and ruby slippers. She carried a small dog. It yapped at Lacey and she recoiled.

  She turned to see the person who’d been poking her with the ice cream scoop, which she now realized was a three foot long candy cane. The figure was short, wearing what looked like a purple ringmaster’s coat and a pair of trousers in a shade of green that reminded her of snot. She leaned forward to see that it was, in fact, smeared with snot.

  She pulled back.

  “Who are you?” the person in the ringmaster’s coat asked. “Ain’t seen you around here before.”

  She stood up. They pulled back.

  She hesitated, then took a step forward. They took two steps back.

  She smiled.

  “I’m Lacey. Who are you?”

  “I’m Fred,” said the person in the ringmaster’s coat. He pointed at the other two in turn. “This is my mum, Jackie. And my dad, Phil.”

  Lacey squinted at them. “Really?”

  The person calling himself Fred wrinkled his nose. “Course. Why would I lie about something so dumb as our names?”

  “You don’t look like a Fred, Jackie and Phil.”

  The taller one—Phil—stepped forward. “Don’t cast aspersions on our names, please. I’ll have you know this name has been handed down to me over the generations. I am in fact Philip Hardcastle the Third. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  He held out his hand. It was clad in a dirty red glove that smelled like he’d plunged it into a bucket of fish and left it there for a few days.

  She gripped it with her fingertips. “OK.”

  “So who are you?” asked Jackie. “How did you get here?”

  “I’m Lacey. Didn’t I already tell you that?”

  “You don’t look very lacy to me,” replied Fred.

  Jackie gave him a clip round the ear. “Don’t be rude.” She turned to Lacey. “He’s right though. You don’t have scrap of lace on you. And what’s your name?”

  “It’s Lacey.”

  “What is?”

  “My name.”

  “How can a name be lacy?” asked Fred.

  Lacey stared at them. “Lacey is my name. L-A-C-E-Y. Lacey.”

  Phil took a step back. “Ooh. Foreign.”

  “I’m American. From Illinois.”

  “What you doing here then?” asked Jackie. “Everyone got out years ago.”

  “Not you.”

  Fred grinned. “Nope. We stayed put.”

  “We had no choice,” continued Jackie, who looked less pleased. “Wasn’t our decision to make.”

  She shook her head at Lacey. “I still don’t understand what you’re doing here, all the way from Illinois.”

  “I was brought here. By someone called Pip.”

  Jackie threw a hand to her face. Phil staggered backwards. Fred snorted.

  “That little son—,” he said.

  “Fred! Mind your language,” snapped Jackie.

  Fred shrugged.

  “You know him then?” asked Lacey.

  “We know him sure enough,” replied Phil. “He’s our son.”

  37

  Wardrobe

  “Who are they?” said Sarita.

  “The
y weren’t around last time I was here,” replied Alex.

  They were crouched behind an abandoned car on the bridge, watching Lacey talking to three people so bizarrely dressed they would have been perfect candidates for employment in Sarita’s wardrobe department.

  “How did she find them?”

  “I don’t know, do I? I said I haven’t seen them before.”

  Sarita gave her a look. “No need to be antsy.”

  “Sorry.”

  Alex leaned back. She was tired and short of breath. Her skin felt tight and her legs seemed to have gotten shorter on the walk over. Sarita’s, on the other hand, had grown longer. She now towered six inches over Alex.

  Sarita brought out the bitbox. The dot that represented Lacey had stopped moving. The second dot had disappeared. There were no other dots.

  “How come they’re not on here?”

  “No idea.”

  “Come on. Give me your best physics theory.”

  Alex tried to think. Sure enough, her job before joining the MIU had been as a postdoc in UC Berkeley’s Physics faculty, working on the Cheshire Cat experiment. But it had nothing to do with real cats. And nothing they’d created in the lab had been as mind-blowingly odd as the things she’d seen here.

  “OK,” she said. “Here’s what I think. Whatever is causing all the anomalies has got to them too. It’s interfered with their quantum probability fields.”

  “Their quantum probability fields?”

  Alex shrugged. “I could be taking nonsense. This place might even have different physical laws from our world, although it’s unlikely. But that’s my hunch. It’s why the bitbox doesn’t register them. As far as its concerned they’re not definite enough to exist.”

  “You mean they haven’t made their minds up whether they’re real or not?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “Quantum physics brings that out in people.”

  “So is there a way we can make them decide to be? Real, I mean.”

  “Not that I know of.”

  Lacey stood and approached the group of people. There were three of them, and they looked like they’d escaped from the circus. Or maybe the circus had escaped from them.

  “Oh, rats,” said Sarita. “What if there’s more of them?”

  “More?”

  “If we can’t detect these people, who’s to say there aren’t hundreds of them? Millions?”

  Alex looked along the shoreline at the red telephone boxes that dotted the pathway. “It looks pretty deserted to me.”

  “Let’s hope so.”

  “So what now?”

  “Not sure. Let’s watch first.”

  The group of people had taken a couple of steps back from Lacey. She was talking to them. They looked nervous of her.

  Clever girl, thought Alex.

  Then one of them snorted. It was a throaty, low snort that reverberated off the buildings surrounding them.

  “Sarita,” whispered Alex.

  Sarita turned to her. She still smelled of bananas. Alex didn’t like bananas very much but maybe she could make an effort. “What?”

  “The buildings over here. They’re intact. Everything is. Trees, phone boxes. It all keeps changing, but it’s not demolished. Not like over there.”

  “You’re right. So if there was a quake, it was on that side of the Bay. It didn’t affect Oakland. The buildings look old, too. They haven’t been rebuilt.”

  “That makes no sense,” said Alex. “Why would Pip be over there if this side of the Bay has been rebuilt, or wasn’t affected at all? Why can’t we see any more people?”

  “Maybe it’s something to do with them. Look, they’re moving.”

  Sarita was right. Lacey and the others were moving away from them. The man had his hand clasped round Lacey’s upper arm and face pulled into a tight-lipped grimace. The woman was muttering something to the boy, looking over her shoulder toward the city.

  “What are they scared of?” asked Alex.

  Sarita shook her head. “The quake. The quantum stuff.”

  “It makes no sense. Why haven’t they rebuilt? Where are all the casualties?”

  Alex closed her eyes, flicking through everything she’d seen. The odd quantum effects. The storm Pip had created in his anger. The way he’d thrown them from one world to another.

  “Is it Pip they’re scared of? Is that what everyone’s escaped from?”

  “You’re the one who met him.”

  “None of this makes any sense. But we need to go after Lacey.”

  The bitbox pinged. Sarita looked toward Lacey and her captors, then down at it.

  “We’re about to find out,” she said.

  38

  Clown

  Lacey couldn’t be sure if she could trust these people. They looked like they might be more at home in an episode of Sesame Street than here in Oakland.

  But they would protect her from Pip.

  She tried to ignore the hand on her arm and shuffled away from the bridge with them. If this was Pip’s family, maybe they could create those portals too. Maybe they could get her home.

  “Stop!”

  She turned.

  Pip stood in the spot where she’d been moments ago. His hair was wild, shifting in the wind that came off the water. His face was smeared in dirt and his mouth was twisted in anger. Jackie gave an involuntary moan.

  “Pip,” called Phil. “Leave the girl alone.”

  Pip approached. He held his hands up in front of him.

  “He’s about to create a—” said Lacey.

  “We know,” said Fred. “We know what he does.”

  Lacey turned to him. “How does he do it?”

  A shrug. “Not sure. But it started after the earthquake.”

  “Is that why this place is a mess? How long ago was this earthquake?”

  “Ten years.”

  “But he can’t have been more than a baby ten years ago.”

  Fred shook his head. “He was eight when it hit. He’s an adult now, but he still looks like a kid. Even the superhero outfit is what he was wearing that day. It was his birthday, we did fancy dress.”

  “What about you?” She looked Fred up and down. He looked about her own age, maybe a year or so older.

  “I’m his younger brother. It didn’t affect us the same way.”

  Phil and Jackie had left them now and were approaching Pip. He stood, quivering, staring at them. His hands were still.

  “Why haven’t they rebuilt? Where is everyone?”

  “They can’t. The quake was centered over there, on the university. It was no ordinary quake. Every time they try to rebuild, it just—shifts. It’s hard to describe. But things change. They turn from one thing into another. The closer you get to the university, the odder it gets.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “We couldn’t leave him. But we couldn’t be with him either. This is Mom’s idea of a compromise.”

  “Why can’t you be with him?”

  “Duck!”

  He fell to the ground. Lacey looked past him to see a bolt of lightning heading her way. She stumbled to the ground and it flew over her head, stirring the air above her.

  “What was that?”

  “A quantum energy bolt.”

  “A what?”

  “Dad did some research. He tried to get into the Physics building. That’s where it was centered.”

  “And?”

  “There’s no way in there. The whole building’s in a state of flux. Shifts in and out of existence randomly.”

  “So where did he do his research?”

  “He got into the University library. Found some old books. Books, huh? Who’d have thought it.”

  Lacey knew what he meant. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d opened one. Even her mom was gradually switching to digital.

  “So don’t you have the internet?” she asked.

  “What do you think? Stay dow
n.”

  She dipped back down. Toward the bridge, silhouetted by the growing dawn, Pip and his parents seemed to be fighting. Pip was flipping bright circles of light at them. Jackie was yelling at him, seemingly stopping the discs of light with the power of a mother’s anger.

  Lacey wondered how long they could hold him off.

  “This is all my fault,” she said. “I have to help.”

  She started walking toward them. She held her arms out in front of her; why, she had no idea, but it made her feel safer. Like holding a pillow on your lap during a scary movie, just in case.

  “Stop!” she called.

  Pip froze. He turned and smiled at her, a rictus smile that made her think of clowns.

  Lacey hated clowns, had done ever since her parents had wallpapered her room with images of them as a child. She’d had nightmares about them. Clowns laughing at her; clowns eating her cat; clowns turning up at school and telling everyone how scared of clowns she was.

  “Pip, leave them alone!” she cried, advancing. Her palms were sweaty and her chest felt like someone had put a balloon in it and blown it up. “They’re your family!”

  “Not any more, they ain’t!” he cried. “They abandoned me!”

  She felt the air stir. Another of those storms was appearing over his head. This one consisted of spinning rainbow shapes. Within it, patches of darkness tossed and tumbled. She heard a rumble.

  “Don’t do this!” she yelled.

  “Not your business, Lacey!” he called back, twisting his arms to form a large disc of pink light that he held in midair.

  She advanced on him. Jackie was giving her a leave it alone glare. She ignored it.

  “Pip, please,” she said, her voice lower. “I’m sure you can work something out. You said you were lonely.”

  He turned to her, leaving the growing discs trained on his mother.

  “Pip is lonely, stupid. Their damn fault.”

  “Philip Hardcastle the fourth! You mind your language, young man!” Jackie cried.

  “Pip,” said Lacey. “If you stop doing this, maybe you can be with them again. I’m sure there’s nothing you can’t—”