The Gemini Effect

by Scott Jarol

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Go where? We’re not finished yet.”

  “We’ll finish later.”

  “Mr. Bruder is going to be really angry, and not just at you.”

  “Tell him I fell in the muck and had to find a place to wash up.”

  “But that would be lying.”

  Zeke laid down in the dirt and rolled down the hill. “Now it’s not a lie.”

  “Yuck,” said Nate. He gagged and forced back an urge to vomit. By the time he looked up, Zeke was long gone.

  Chapter 6

  Doc’s Workshop

  For the third time, Doc thumbed through the calculations on his battered slide rule. Better to be safe than to accidentally start unraveling the fabric of space—again. He angled the mechanical calculator against the lantern light to make out its worn markings.

  Ever since Albert Einstein chalked out his famous equation, E = mc2, scientists have known that matter (m) and energy (E) are just two different forms of the same thing, like ice and steam are both forms of water. And c2, the speed of light squared—a very large number—told them that a little bit of matter packed enormous quantities of energy.

  Einstein’s work led to the invention of nuclear power, which was celebrated as a source of limitless energy—for a while. Unfortunately, the process of releasing the energy from a tiny chip of each atom leaves the rest of the atom behind as dangerous radioactive waste. To create a cleaner alternative, scientists like Doc (better known in the scientific community as Dr. David Freeman) and his friend Dr. Dimitris Kapopoulos dedicated their lives to finding a way to tap the energy of an entire atom, leaving behind no radioactive waste to contaminate the air, land, or water.

  But their obsession, Doc reflected, had shattered their lives.

  Doc tucked the QuARC under one arm and hopped across the four-foot gap between the two parked railroad cars. Their cozy quarters trailed two abandoned freight cars where Doc had set up his workshop and laboratory. Their private little train wasn’t likely to be going anywhere any time soon. Besides lacking a locomotive, after thirty motionless years its wheels had rusted to the steel rails.

  Schrödinger tumbled out of his dog bed and scrambled for the door. He slinkied down the three steps hanging off the rear platform of the faded red caboose they used as their sleeping cabin, living room, and kitchen. After one of Doc’s experiments had nearly cost Schrödinger his tail, the little dog had learned it was best to keep his distance. Yet he also knew it was his job to keep an eye on things, so he followed the deep ruts he’d plowed like a snow gopher back to the workshop in the first boxcar and stationed himself on the wide wooden ramp outside the open cargo door.

  Inside the dark workshop car, Doc punched a square red button attached to the wall. Outside, three rotating windmills that had been spinning like pinwheels in the evening breeze creaked and strained to generate the requested electric current. Equipment scattered around the room twinkled to life, little of it contained in any sort of case or frame. Circuit boards crusted with components hung among tangles of wires only Doc could fathom.

  Doc adjusted a cluster of knobs, checking their settings against the numbers on his slide rule. Twelve needle-thin violet beams from pipes spaced precisely around the room converged on a point four feet above the floor. Doc tweaked the settings until the beams formed a piercing droplet of light. He watched it swell to the size of a baseball and then slipped between the light beams to inspect the various gauges around the lab. His skin tingled in the cold, crackling air, and the fringes of gray hair escaping his cap floated on invisible streams of electrons.

  From his station outside the workshop, Schrödinger sniffed for intruders and scanned the surrounding meadow under the last streak of light edging the empty horizon.

  Doc stepped carefully under and over the beams, making his way to the wide side door of the freight car, where Schrödinger has been keeping watch. He inhaled deeply.

  “You dig that, Professor?” he asked the little dog, pausing to savor a distant memory. “Spring may drop soon.”

  Schrödinger, of course, could smell many things, none of which suggested spring to him. At the distinguished canine age of eight years, he hadn’t been alive long enough to be familiar with the concept of fair weather.

  The climate had rearranged itself dramatically during the early part of the twenty-first century. Ironically, rising average global temperatures shifted prevailing ocean currents and wind patterns, accumulating more heat in the tropics while ushering in a mini-ice age further north and south.

  Schrödinger poked his cold nose over the threshold into Doc’s workshop and surveyed the obstacle course of exotic hazards. What caught his attention today was a housefly circling in through the open door. Schrödinger’s sensitive ears homed in on the insect’s buzzing wings as it flew a circuit of the compartment, darting past the glowing sphere of light and weaving among the needle thin-particle beams, narrowly escaping vaporization. Schrödinger had seen many airborne creatures follow the irresistible glow into oblivion, their passing marked by a pop and a puff of smoke.

  Doc ducked under and through the beams to reach the orb, careful not to look into its blinding glare. Directly beneath the orb, he tethered the QuARC’s loose-ended leads to a bundle of colored wires. He checked each connection with a pen-sized probe dotted with a row of pinpoint indicator lights.

  After ducking back through the beams, he reached up to a sagging shelf and used his good hand to pull out a box made of lead, the most common metal dense enough to contain or block subatomic particles. He unclipped a key ring from his belt, snapped open the padlock dangling from the box’s latch, and lifted out a gleaming gold Buddha statue about the size of two stacked fists.

  He placed the figure on the floor inside a chalk circle near the sphere of light. Shifting rainbows shimmered across its surface.

  “Right on,” he said. “Better step back, Professor. Here goes.”

  He hopped over to the other freight car, where he unpacked an identical Buddha from an identical box and stood it on the floor of that freight car within an identical chalk circle.

  “Let’s dial it in, Professor,” he called to Schrödinger. He liked to include Schrödinger. Just because his paws lacked opposable thumbs was no reason for him to feel left out.

  Doc took one last look around, like a pilot making a final safety check, and returned to the workshop car.

  “Okay, Professor, let’s see if Zeke’s gadget can suck in enough juice for our little Buddha to become one with himself.”

  Schrödinger didn’t need the warning. He’d already retreated a few steps down the ramp, taking refuge at a point far enough to allow him to leap to safety yet close enough to let him monitor the situation.

  Doc rotated a knob on a box suspended among the tangled control circuits. A slip-up now would make Schrödinger’s precautions pointless. The mass of the Buddha statue contained enough potential energy to relandscape the entire continent.

  The light bubble expanded to envelope the Buddha, covering its surface with a bristling aura of undulating threads, like electric fur.

  “This time it will work, I’m almost nearly positively certain. Let two be one,” he proclaimed, like a wizard casting a magic spell.

  Outside, the windmills groaned. Twisting tendrils of light radiated from the first Buddha, coalesced into a horizontal beam, and shot across the gap between the freight cars through matching peepholes Doc had sawed through the walls. A second set of beams bathed the second Buddha statue with violet light, reflecting streaks and halos around the room.

  The fly, attracted to the shimmering corona in the main workshop, began to orbit the sphere and statue. Unaware of the insect’s presence, Doc scrutinized the quivering needles on his meters and followed the wavy white line tracing geometric patterns on a six-inch circular screen.

  But Schrödinger tracked the fly as it spiraled inward and then halted in midair, as if trapped in a spider’s web. Schrödinger tilted hi
s head and sniffed for the familiar tang of fried fly, which never came.

  The intensifying blue aura enveloped the suspended fly, who found his paralysis disconcerting, especially in midair. The light-shell wrapped his bulging eyes and abdomen, spiraled along his antennae, and cloaked his motionless, outstretched wings.

  In the other freight car, the faint outline of a second fly materialized, as if projected by the first. Filaments of light traced the contours of the new fly’s abdomen, head, legs, and antennae.

  Old Fly contemplated his somewhat confusing perspective. He felt as if he could see in all directions, as if he had suddenly grown thousands of extra eyes on the back of his head. This could have been a great tactical survival advantage for an insect; however, considering he was completely immobilized and exposed, the onset of superpower vision only intensified his anxiety.

  Like the flies, the two Buddha statues became transparent. Then the second statue faded. Protons, neutrons, and electrons streamed toward each other, merging until only one remained.

  Meanwhile, undetected by Doc, New Fly came into focus in the other boxcar, a transparent image of a fly with all its tiny internal organs rendered in fine blue detail.

  “Congratulations, Professor,” said Doc. “It worked.”

  Doc worked his way back through the beams and held up the Buddha like a trophy.

  “Zeke’s gadget did the trick!” He spit on the corner of his shirttail and polished the statue. “Now we’d better get ready for Willis’ arrival. I bet we won’t have to wait long. If this didn’t get his attention, I don’t know what will.”

  With the sole of his shoe, he rubbed away the chalk circle from the floor. “We probably lit up their instruments like the Fourth of July fireworks we used to watch when I was a kid.”

  Schrödinger hardly noticed Doc’s enthusiasm. He stepped two paces forward and barked, tilting his head. Doc reached down with one lanky arm and scooped him up just in time to keep him from crossing one of the particle beams.

  “Careful, Professor. You don’t want to turn into a barbequed wiener dog.”

  As far as Schrödinger was concerned, things were already headed for disaster. He had a problem to deal with and no way to explain it, a frustrating side effect of dealing with humans. What was the point of having such large heads if they couldn’t smell or hear anything?

  He fixed his gaze on the fly and telegraphed a repeating series of three sharp barks.

  Doc followed Schrödinger’s sight line to the glowing insect.

  “Okay, that’s bad,” said Doc. “You should have said something sooner.”

  The twin flies, although in a state of suspended animation, could clearly see that something unusual was happening in one of the rooms around them. Being flies, their instincts predisposed them to suspect it was not something they were likely to enjoy, as flies tend to assume about any situation in which many things are moving every which way.

  Doc breathed slowly and deeply to achieve a state of calmness. He had to think this through.

  Unlike the Buddha statues, flies could, well, fly. If they flew, they could easily run into each other. These two creatures, though they looked like perfect doppelgängers, had a crucial difference. They were both aspects of the same fly, but they were composed of opposite forms of matter. If the two quantum opposites ran into each other, their out-of-phase masses would cancel out, releasing enough energy to vaporize everything and everyone for three hundred yards in every direction.

  “Peace, Professor,” said Doc, nodding back at the flies. “Welcome our guests. Let’s not spook them.”

  Doc lowered Schrödinger to the floor and patted him on the head. The fly he could see must have a doppelgänger in the second freight car. He’d need to catch them both.

  Timing was critical.

  * * *

  New Fly too sensed that something was odd, but it took him a moment to put his antenna on it. No longer a phantom facsimile of a fly, New Fly had fully formed into a faithful reproduction of Old Fly. That didn’t particularly strike New Fly as strange, since for all practical purposes, he thought he was Old Fly. In fact, in his fully formed state, he felt relieved that things were returning to normal.

  What still baffled his speck-sized New Fly brain, however, was his midair suspension. If flies knew anything, they knew flying—and at least as much about its close cousin, falling. New Fly’s brain was wired for aviation, and he knew that unless his wings were beating, he should be headed downward.

  Strange.

  * * *

  Impatiently, Schrödinger stepped toward the doorway, then back again when Doc signaled him. Schrödinger was losing interest in obedience. He was dealing with a situation, and as far as he was concerned, it was time for action.

  He coiled up every muscle fiber in his body and torpedoed—in the dachshundian manner, something between charging and bobbling—toward the fly.

  “Professor!” Doc shouted at Schrödinger.

  Too late.

  Schrödinger’s sausage-shaped torso cut through three beams. He squealed and twisted in midair as they singed smoldering lines in his fur. His little body flopped to the floor.

  Thrown out of sync by the interrupted beams, the light bubble flashed with blinding intensity and then vanished. Hundreds of indicator lights twinkled among the jumbled circuits, casting dancing shadows all around them.

  “Schrödinger!” Doc shouted. “Are you okay?”

  Schrödinger rolled to his feet, taking a hunting stance, firm-footed, chest forward, tail straight and motionless.

  “You nearly sliced yourself up like baloney,” shouted Doc, angry but relieved to see him still in one piece.

  Old Fly and New Fly found themselves free from their containment fields. Blood pulsed into their muscles and wings as they revved up for flight power. They looped and tumbled through the air like aerobatic clowns.

  Doc dove for Old Fly, sweeping the air with his red cap. Old Fly dodged him and spiraled upward.

  In the darkness of the second freight car, New Fly detected the flickering glow of indicator lights through the holes where the now-extinguished particle beam had come from. He darted straight through to the workshop car and entered into orbit.

  Schrödinger leapt up in noodling pirouettes to alert Doc to the presence of the second insect. Doc’s heart skipped at least two beats. He wheeled around and zeroed in on New Fly.

  Meanwhile, Old Fly, still skimming along the ceiling, spotted the gray rectangle of fading dusk framed by the open door. He arced toward freedom. New Fly, detecting another oasis of lamplight, turned the opposite way and exited through the smaller door leading to the caboose.

  Doc couldn’t close both exits simultaneously, so he rushed for the cargo door. He would have made it if Schrödinger, who was still trying to corner New Fly, hadn’t scrambled between his legs and tripped him. As Old Fly watched the lumbering land-beast collapse to the floor beneath him, nearly crushing Schrödinger, he made one last course correction to catch an air current rushing out the open portal and disappeared into the evening sky.

  “Professor, we’re not swingin’ to the same groove, my canine compadre,” Doc said. He picked himself up and rubbed his bruised shoulder. “We have to find that dizzy bug. Let’s try the Zen way, Professor. Be the fly. You dig? If you were him, where would you split to?”

  Schrödinger leapt through the cargo door, logrolled down the ramp, shook off the snow, and ran to the caboose, where New Fly had begun sampling the rotting buffet clinging to empty cans and kitchen paraphernalia. Schrödinger took a position in the corner and locked on to the intruder.

  “Good work, Professor.” Doc spun the lid off a jar of pickled beets and emptied it into a bowl.

  New Fly landed on top of Doc’s head.

  “Now where did he go?” he asked Schrödinger.

  Schrödinger fixed his gaze above Doc’s eyes. Doc winked at Schrödinger, then slowly and quietly turned the jar upside down and raised it over his head. He snapped it
down sharply on his balding crown, trapping the fly securely and unhappily inside.

  “Knuckles! That was a nasty crack to the dome.”

  With a sniff and a two-step, Schrödinger confirmed the capture. Doc slipped the lid between his scalp and the rim of the jar and twisted it snug.

  “Well, my friend,” he said to New Fly, eyeballing him through the distorted glass, “you’re now our guest. You and your other self must never meet again. I regret that this will be your home for the remainder of your short life.”

  He pushed aside a stack of papers and set the jar securely in the center of the caboose’s only table. Perhaps he should squash the unfortunate creature now, saving it from the torture of imprisonment, but he couldn’t bear the thought of taking a life—any life, even so humble as a dung-eating insect. No, the two flies would eventually expire naturally, and he would make sure their tiny corpses were disposed of far enough apart to prevent contact detonation.

  “Time to find your other self,” he told New Fly.

  Schrödinger paced back and forth outside while Doc improvised an insect net by unstuffing his pillow and tying the empty cloth bag to the end of a broom handle.

  “Getting dark—better hurry. Lead the way, Professor.”

  Chapter 7

  Outside Doc’s Workshop

  By the time Zeke had hiked to the junction of the main road and the rutted path that led to Doc’s makeshift home, the sun had set and the brightest stars dotted the darkening sky. Clear nights felt coldest. He needed to get the QuARC and go back for Mom before she froze. They’d need to find a warm place to stay for the night.

  Doc lived at the far side of a meadow sheltered only by the withering branches of crippled maple trees. Camouflaged in the dusk, Zeke approached the three railroad cars perched on the fossilized spine of abandoned train tracks.