How to Save the Universe Without Really Trying

by John Cusick

  Lola wasn’t sure how to reply to this. “I . . . huh?”

  “The secret.” He said this in a tone at once hushed and snarling. “You’ve got a secret, haven’t you? Don’t lie.”

  Lola’s mind trilled through all the secrets she had or could possibly have. None of them seemed relevant to the situation at hand. She’d once stolen gum from Mr. Patel’s bodega. She secretly thought the Star Wars prequels weren’t that bad. She didn’t floss. What could he possibly mean?

  “Phin, what are you talking about?”

  “Teddy said—I mean,” he corrected, stumbling, “I dreamed or . . . had a vision or . . . went to this place when I was knocked out. And I saw Teddy. And he told me that you . . .” He trailed off, shook his head.

  “What? What is it?” said Lola.

  “Well, he told me you have this secret. And there are these things from another dimension, the Phan. Like with a P-h. And they’re teaming up with Bolus, this nasty guy who helps run my parents’ company, so they can break through into our dimension—and it’s all because of you. Because you’ve got some secret knowledge that they need. At least, that’s what . . . my . . . bear . . . said.”

  “Oh,” said Lola. “Oh,” she said again, hoping it would help somehow. It didn’t.

  She felt that uneasy, slightly seasick feeling you get when you find out someone has been talking about you behind your back, only a million times worse.

  Lola didn’t know what these Phan people wanted with her. How did they even know who she was? She certainly didn’t have any secret knowledge.

  “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Phin stared at her hard. Then his expression softened. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “Good,” said Lola.

  The engines hummed along, oblivious to the tense silence they were underscoring. Lola felt tears prickling the backs of her eyes again, and swallowed them. After a while she glanced at the back of Phin’s head, the pinch of his shoulders. She suddenly realized she wasn’t the only one having a frightening and confusing day.

  “Hey dummy,” she said.

  Phin looked around. “What?”

  “Boop,” said Lola, and booped him on the nose with Teddy’s paw.

  Phin blinked. He made the face of a boy who’s just been booped on the face with a teddy bear paw. (You know the one.) He cleared his throat, then looked back at his screen, trying, and failing, to suppress a blush.

  11

  MEANWHILE, IN THE SMOLDERING cavern that had until recently been the radically overpriced and underinsured Fogg penthouse, a lot of very unpleasant people gathered. They were all unpleasant to different degrees and in different ways. Four of them were unpleasant for being monumentally stupid. These four happened to be Bog Mutants, a species of dim-witted and soggy-brained gelatinous creatures bred for the sole purpose of performing menial, unpleasant, or dangerous jobs that nobody else wanted to do. These four Bog Mutants happened to work for an organization called the Temporal Transit Authority, and even as Bog Mutants go, they were dumb.

  All of them were named Jeremy. All Bog Mutants everywhere are named Jeremy. This keeps things simple, as all Bog Mutants look alike (even to each other) and it’s very difficult to tell them apart. Furthermore, all Bog Mutants everywhere are born—or, more accurate to say, they bud—from a single supermassive fungus core, which lives in darkness at the heart of a hollow asteroid not far from Alpha Centauri.

  This supermassive fungus core is called Mr. Jeremy.

  The fifth unpleasant creature in the room was perhaps the most unpleasant of all. In fact, all things being equal, the fifth unpleasant creature, who was now tapping his little foot and sniffling angrily, was, on last check, the most unpleasant thing in our galaxy. His name was Goro Bolus, 33.3 percent shareholder in the Fogg-Bolus Hypergate and Baked Beans Corporation. He had been tasked by interdimensional beings he’d never met to do a number of unsavory things, one of which was take over the Fogg-Bolus Hypergate and Baked Beans Corporation. This job involved subterfuge, kidnapping, and murder, three things that came easily to this nasty and egomaniacal little bean.

  “Well,” snapped Bolus, peering from behind his unflattering little spectacles. “Did you find anything?”

  “I found this,” said Jeremy, holding up a piece of debris that was in no way relevant to the investigation at hand.

  Bolus gritted his teeth. “Did you find anything useful?”

  “What about this?” said another Jeremy, offering a comb. “You could use it to comb your little beard.”

  There was a sixth person in the room, who, by comparison, was less unpleasant than the others, but still wasn’t the kind of gal you’d want at your birthday party. Her name was Gretta. She was tall, and smartly dressed, and wore very stylish glasses, and carried a sophisticated tablet on which she was taking notes. Her skin had the pale glossy sheen—and shade—of lime pudding. She was, to the best of her or anyone else’s knowledge, the only female Bog Mutant in existence, and furthermore she was, for reasons no one had ever adequately explored, extremely intelligent.

  Gretta was also the director of the Temporal Transit Authority, the organization whose sole reason for being was to locate and capture time travelers—of which there had only ever been one. Like Bolus, Gretta knew her direct superiors were strange interdimensional beings with unfathomable motives of their own. Unlike Bolus, Gretta wasn’t motivated by blind greed.

  “Readings indicate there was a massive discharge of quantum energy in this vicinity less than two hours ago,” she said, scrolling through her tablet’s interface. “It was most certainly the girl.”

  “Hmm.” Bolus stroked his wispy little beard. “And the Kill-Robot?” The robot’s fate wasn’t all that important, but still, the thing had been expensive, and you don’t get to run a multizillion-dollar corporation without knowing how to get a good return on an investment.

  “Its electronic brain must have been fried in the shock wave, hence its . . . well, rather optimistic leap,” said Gretta.

  (The Kill-Robot had, apparently, thrown itself out the escape hatch in an attempt to pursue its target, and now lay in several hundred pieces on the rocks below. Kill-Robots aren’t particularly intelligent, but are at least supposed to know they can’t fly. The sales rep from the Quazinart Home Appliance Company had apologized for the malfunction, and had asked Bolus if he’d tried turning the Kill-Robot off and then turning it back on again. Bolus had the sales rep vaporized, and found the process immensely satisfying.)

  “Which one of you actually saw the girl?” Bolus asked, addressing the quartet of Bog Mutants.

  “Um,” said one, “I think it was Jeremy.”

  “Are you sure?” said another. “I thought it was me.”

  “That’s what I said,” said a third, who was so dim he didn’t even realize he wasn’t the Jeremy who spoke in the first place.

  “That one,” said Gretta, pointing to the littlest of the Jeremys. This Jeremy had recently been sloshed out of his uniform by an Earth girl with very quick fingers, and by the time his brothers showed up to pile him back in, some of his less viscous bits had evaporated. He now stood a few inches shorter than the rest, which was convenient for singling him out, but awfully embarrassing for him.

  “My boy,” said Bolus, grinning and patting Jeremy on a soggy shoulder.

  “What about him?” said Jeremy.

  “Tell us how you met the girl,” said Gretta, who didn’t like Bolus touching her agents.

  Jeremy shrugged, his body rippling in his suit. “Well, er, Mr. Bolus, sir, me and the boys were just sitting around drinking coffee and playing pinochle”—Jeremy looked very much as if he wished he were still doing just that—“when the call came in. Illegal temporal dislocation,” he said, sounding out the long and difficult phrase. “Someone had to take the call. Figured it was a false alarm. Those happen every hundred years or so. Teleport goes weird, or someone
forgets to wind their watch and then it’s oh look out fellas, we got a time traveler! Usually the person of interest is disintegrated for wasting Authority time. But still, no harm, no foul!”

  Bolus’s menacing grin tightened like a vise. “Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t disintegrate this one, officer, because this time traveler is the real thing. The only time traveler ever, and that makes her very important to our benefactors.”

  Jeremy scratched at his ear. A bit came away and became part of his finger. It seemed like he’d just been told he’d done a good job, so he smiled.

  “We should take a look at the security footage,” said Gretta, tapping a few keystrokes on her tablet.

  There was a click and hum and then a poorly rendered cowboy appeared on the wall-mounted video screen. “Well, slap my face and call me Fanny, hello there everybody! Sure getting a lot of visitors today!”

  “Security System,” said Gretta. “I need—”

  “Name’s Bucky!”

  “Hey, a cowboy!” said one of the Jeremys, and clapped.

  “Bucky,” said Bolus. “Do you remember me?”

  “Why, I sure do,” Bucky said with cheerful country enthusiasm. “You’re the fella who overrode my security protocols so that big feller with all the guns and stabby parts could get in. Howya doin’?”

  “We need to see the security footage of this afternoon,” Bolus explained.

  “Specifically the girl who was here,” Gretta added.

  “Well, no problem, just two shakes of a donkey tail!”

  The image flickered, wobbled, and was replaced by a screenshot from earlier that afternoon. Two children cowered behind a countertop. One of them Bolus knew well—the son of his idiotic partners, the interminably-on-holiday Foggs. The other was a girl. Just a girl. A girl his associates—Bolus called them his “associates” when in fact they were more like his lords and masters—had been awaiting for a very long time.

  “There,” Gretta said, tapping the image. “Is that her?”

  Jeremy hesitated. Being praised earlier had been a first-time thing for him, and he really wanted it to happen again. But he wasn’t sure which answer the little bean man wanted to hear.

  “That’s her,” he said hesitantly, “that’s the girl. She’s quick too.” Jeremy waited for praise, but none came. He tried adding more detail. “Uh, her name’s Passport.”

  “Passport, eh?” Bolus tugged at his beard. “Well Ms. Passport. We are going to see each other very soon.”

  A little while later Bolus and Gretta were alone in the elevator as it fell away from the penthouse.

  “This could be it. After all this time,” said Gretta. Her entire life had been dedicated to the cause of the Temporal Transit Authority, and now that her purpose was nearly fulfilled, she felt a strange mixture of elation and wariness. Neither of these things showed on her smooth and impassive features.

  “Make sure you wipe the security system’s memory,” growled Bolus. “None of this can get back to me.”

  Gretta tapped her tablet. “It’s done.”

  “Send out a press bulletin. ‘Fogg Penthouse Destroyed by Gas Leak’ or something. Very tragic.”

  Gretta rankled. She didn’t like Goro Bolus, the creepy little bean man with his creepy little beard and ugly glasses. And she especially didn’t like him ordering her around. But working with Bolus was part of her job, and it wasn’t her place to question her superiors. The Phan needed Bolus, just as they needed Gretta and her army of Jeremys.

  “I have a report from the penthouse’s manifest as well,” she said. “The escape pod is a Volvo Rescue Wagon, outfitted with a Majulook SuperFake cloaking device. I’ll send out an all-points bulletin. Perhaps the local authorities will spot them.” She hesitated. “What are you going to do about the Foggs?”

  Bolus grinned. It was unsettling. “Barnabus and Eliza have no doubt received an alert their apartment was destroyed and will attempt to contact their son.” He steepled his little fingers. “I’ll reach out—as a concerned friend. Let them know their boy’s gone completely mad with shock, and possibly gas poisoning, and is quite likely,” Bolus added with a wicked sneer, “hallucinating.”

  “That’s . . . a good idea.” Gretta had to admit the little bean was ruthlessly cunning.

  “Of course it’s a good idea. Our time has nearly come, my dear. All the planning and waiting, the searching and scheming. Soon we will have our reward.”

  “Duty is its own reward,” said Gretta.

  “Well, you’re welcome to it,” said Bolus. “I have bigger things in mind.”

  Though he was a small creature, Goro Bolus’s brain was considerably more powerful than those of most other life-forms he was likely to meet. His neurons fired billions of times per second, calculating, planning, rejiggering his schemes to best utilize the recent events.

  But there was something puzzling about this whole situation.

  “What are the odds, Gretta,” said Bolus, “what do you think the odds are that the very girl you’ve been tasked with finding should appear in the very home of the very boy I need to kill?”

  “Seventy-six billion to one,” said Gretta, showing him the results on her Probability App, “In the ludicrously unlikely range. But then, the forecast did call for a partly-to-super-unlikely weekend.”

  Bolus shook his head, pondering this. “It’s almost as if the universe is trying to make things easy for me.”

  He laughed a pompous, chortling little laugh. Goro Bolus was smart enough to appreciate such phenomenal luck. He was also the sort of jerk who actually believed he deserved it.

  Gretta shivered.

  12

  IN THE EARLY DAYS of Earth’s space program, the planet’s first major spaceport was in Newark. Great launch towers cast their shadows across Newark Bay, and interstellar cruisers crisscrossed the sky over Brighton and Bayonne. High above, Earth’s first fully operational hypergate hung like a shimmering hoop earring, its eye a swirling, bubbling, reddish-brown vortex of baked beans.

  Then came the Great Pork Fat Meltdown of 2415. A glitch and some bad wiring caused the hypergate’s reactor core to go nuclear. The explosion reduced most of New Jersey to a smoldering radioactive wasteland, destroying electronic equipment and every last digital record on the planet. Humanity was returned to the Dark Ages, and it took nearly a generation for the world’s technology to be redeveloped.

  Another consequence of this disaster not often acknowledged was that the millions of alien species who’d been tuning in to Earthling television broadcasts suddenly lost their signal and were unable to find out, ever, how their favorite shows ended. It was as if a million viewers across the galaxy cried out . . . as their programs were suddenly silenced.

  Earth’s next spaceport was built on Luna (where there was less to destroy, should something ever go wrong again). As humanity spread across the galaxy, New Jersey—now looking a lot like the surface of the moon—remained uninhabitable until the Fogg family, intent to prove that the radiation had long abated, built their personal skyscraper on its ruins. Phin’s home stood as a monument to the disaster, as solitary as its lone occupant. That was, until today.

  Phin explained all of this to Lola as they approached the moon’s glittering surface. The spaceport spanned thousands of miles, encased in a great transparent dome so large Lola could make out clouds and weather systems swirling beneath its surface. Suspended above it all was the hypergate. Hundreds of miles in diameter, the enormous space ring rotated slowly in the dark, its rim aglow with tiny lights. Within its ring a great whirlpool of baked beans seemed to tunnel through space itself.

  “Beautiful,” said Lola.

  “Yes,” said Phin, trying very hard to seem like he saw this sort of thing all the time. “I guess it is, isn’t it?”

  He punched a few buttons on the console and the Rescue Wagon began to descend.

  “Aren’t we going through the hypergate?” Lola asked.

  “No, we’re too small. It’d be like�
�—Phin struggled to find a twenty-first century metaphor—“like trying to take a scooter on a freeway. We’d get torn apart. We’ll need to board a larger vessel.” He adjusted their descent, pitching their nose lower. He was slowly getting the hang of this driving thing, which was much more fun (and really, less complicated) than the online simulators. “That hypergate is going to take us so far from Bolus and his army of jerks, they’ll never find us.”

  “But where will we go?” Lola asked.

  Phin waggled his eyebrows at her. “Anywhere we want.”

  Lola tried not to smile, then gave up trying. Anywhere.

  Down, down they fell, toward the dome’s commercial traffic gate. For the first time since they rocketed out of the Fogg penthouse, Lola felt a bit of vertigo.

  “Don’t puke,” said Phin.

  “Shuddup,” said Lola.

  “Seriously, don’t puke in here.”

  “Stop saying puke!” said Lola, and shut her eyes.

  Just then the pod filled with a deafening sound, a horrible tinkling, ringing, thunderous melody pouring out from hidden speakers all around them.

  “What’s that?” Lola said, her nausea forgotten.

  “Oh no,” said Phin. “No no no.” His fingers whirred over the controls. “How do you block it? End end end!”

  A message began to flash on the windshield. It read Incoming . . .

  “What is it?” Lola shouted. She searched the sky above them, the crisscrossing lines of space traffic below, searching for whoever or whatever was attacking them. “Is it a space torpedo? Are we going to die?”

  “It’s not an attack!” said Phin. “It’s . . . a ringtone!”

  Lola gawped at him.

  “A what?”

  Phin swallowed. His expression chilled her to the core.

  “My parents are calling.”

  With a trembling finger, Phin pressed a small green icon marked Answer.

  The noise stopped. Time seemed to hold its breath. Lola expected small holographic images of Phin’s parents to appear on the dash, since that’s what happened in sci-fi movies.