Parallelities

by Alan Dean Foster

  “You can go in a minute,” Boles told him. “This should only take a minute.”

  Max eyed the phantasmagoric farrago of indiscriminately interconnected electronics gear dubiously. “What should only take a minute?”

  Boles glanced up briefly from his work. “Making contact with the world next to ours.”

  “Next to ours?” Max didn’t bat an eye. He’d interviewed too many loony scientist/inventor types to be surprised by anything the affably chatty Boles had to say. “You mean, out in space?”

  “No, no.” Within the enclosed underground room both light and sound were magnified. “I mean next to ours. I am a great believer in the existence of parallel worlds, or paras, as I call them. Always have been. Over the past several years I have been constructing a device with which to prove my theories.”

  “Prove them, huh? Prove them how?” Max gazed yearningly at the doorway.

  “By making actual contact with one. With this …”

  By Alan Dean Foster

  Published by Ballantine Books:

  The Icerigger Trilogy

  ICERIGGER

  MISSION TO MOULOKIN

  THE DELUGE DRIVERS

  The Adventures of Flinx of the Commonwealth

  FOR LOVE OF MOTHER-NOT

  THE TAR-AIYM KRANG

  ORPHAN STAR

  THE END OF THE MATTER

  BLOODHYPE

  FLINX IN FLUX

  MID-FLINX

  THE HOWLING STONES

  The Damned

  Book One: A CALL TO ARMS

  Book Two: THE FALSE MIRROR

  Book Three: THE SPOILS OF WAR

  THE BLACK HOLE

  CACHALOT

  DARK STAR

  THE METROGNOME and Other Stories

  MIDWORLD

  NOR CRYSTAL TEARS

  SENTENCED TO PRISM

  SPLINTER OF THE MIND’S EYE

  STAR TREK® LOGS ONE-TEN

  VOYAGE TO THE CITY OF THE DEAD

  … WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?

  WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE …

  MAD AMOS

  PARALLELITIES

  Books published by The Ballantine Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.

  It was one of those special late June days that the Greater Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce tries to bronze and preserve for all eternity—as well as for the sake of civic advertising. Semitropically hot but not suffocating, multicolumnar traffic on the freeways actually free of vehicular stasis by nine o’clock in the morning, no major sigalerts, and the limpid turquoise sky brandishing a lovely pink tint thanks to a wispier-than-usual permeation of smog.

  Other than in his highly restricted capacity as a civic-minded citizen, Maxwell Parker could not have cared less about the current condition of the metastasizing megalopolis’s vaunted but frequently arteriosclerotic freeway system. As one of those fortunate folk who could commute from home to office on the overstressed but still highly preferable surface streets, he was immune to such vehicular concerns. All he had to do was drive the few blocks from his apartment building up to Lincoln Boulevard, cross the Santa Monica Freeway, turn right on Wilshire, and mosey his leisurely way up to Bundy Drive, occasionally shaking his head in empathetic but distanced wonder at the traffic reports that periodically interrupted the morning news.

  He would have preferred keeping the Aurora’s stereo set to one of L.A.’s innumerable small specialty FM music stations, but starting the day by listening to one of the several all-news channels was one way of getting a jump on work. After all, the news was his business. Or rather, a certain fringe element of it was. Max worked, unabashedly, in the journalistic freak zone. His job was to make the news—not read about it.

  Scrupulously avoiding eye contact with the haggard homeless hawkers of makework newspapers who crowded the median on Lincoln and haunted the street signals at the freeway overpass, he turned up Wilshire Boulevard. Maneuvering skillfully around a shambling, shaggy, vaguely anthropoid figure fervently hoping to force his energies upon the Aurora’s already speckless windshield, Max crossed Bundy and ducked smoothly down into the Investigator’s underground parking lot.

  As a prolific, inventive reporter whose current status vacillated between junior stringer and respected craftsman, his status was sufficiently ambivalent to qualify him for a comparatively convenient parking space, but on the lower level. Not only did he not mind having his car consigned to the concrete abyss, he preferred it. The deeper in the multilevel labyrinth one parked, the cooler one’s car stayed during hot weather, and the less it was subject to the unwanted attentions of visiting delivery vehicles.

  The modest but modern glass-sided high-rise was home to other enterprises besides the paper, from the ubiquitous law offices that migrated constantly in search of more prestigious addresses, to fledgling film producers unable to afford locations close to the studios, Beverly Hills, or the better parts of the San Fernando Valley.

  The top six floors and most of the parking spaces belonged to the corporation that owned Max Parker’s employer, the International Investigator. A youthful but energetic competitor of other weekly tabloids like the Star, and the World, the Investigator had carved out a niche for itself by emphasizing the newly grotesque as opposed to the traditionally bizarre. Its computer-generated graphics were lively, its layout fresh, its prose florid, its weekly quota of insupportable but nonlitigious accusations slyly incendiary. It was a paper on the way up, its circulation steadily increasing, and always on the lookout for enthusiastic, moldable, and generally unprincipled young talent.

  Max considered himself lucky. Still only in his late twenties, he had already succeeded in dumping whatever ethics and integrity he might have once possessed in return for scads of filthy lucre and a modicum of fame within the field. Unlike some of his less fortunate coworkers, he had been blissfully free of scruples for several years, dating his freedom from the morning he had taken his carefully collected bonuses and used them to move from the dump he had been sharing with a hopeless would-be screenwriter and a short-order cook into a prime one-bedroom Santa Monica beach apartment. By the end of the first week he knew in his heart that the location and setting were worth any number of abstract moral principles.

  He smiled to himself as the aged but still serviceable elevator carried him upward. The owners didn’t have to put more than the minimum back into their hugely profitable old building. Given its location, people would have lined up to rent the small but cozy apartments if they had come without electricity, telephone, or running water.

  The California summer sun was out and the UCLA coeds would soon be emerging from hibernation, shedding their heavy winter coats in favor of freshly molted thong and net swimsuits. Though it was still midweek, he was already looking forward to the weekend.

  “Hey, Max!” Phil Hong was a hyper would-be movie reviewer who lived beyond his means by cadging loans from the gullible and uninformed, his relatives as well as his coworkers. Around the office he was known, not always affectionately, as Phil No-dough. Executing a feint to the left while accelerating to his right, Max put a move on the eager younger writer that, if he had been dribbling a basketball in a college game, would certainly have made the Monday-night-after highlight film on any local station.

  “Sorry Phil—I’m late for the morning bull session. Talk to you later, man.” Leaving a slightly bedazzled Hong gaping foolishly in his wake, Max lengthened his stride. He paused only long enough to say good morning to Calliope Charming, manufacturing idle small talk sufficient to gain him a decent gander at her estimable cleavage before moving on.

  The not-quite-the-top-floor-but-the-people-who-met-t
here-were-still-considered-of-moderate-importance-to-the-success-of-the-business conference room boasted a long window with a pleasant, if not sweeping, view of the Santa Monica Mountains. The stunted chaparral that clung forlornly to those smog-swept slopes was barely visible through the increasingly turgid brown atmosphere. As the sun rose higher in the sky, the atmosphere heated up and the ozone gremlins awoke to their noxious toil. What had begun as a Chamber of Commerce day was rapidly becoming little more than a fading morning memory.

  The room contained a long conference table; chairs fashioned of shiny, fine-grain plastic; insistently throbbing air-conditioning; and small green garbage cans that were already half full. He greeted his colleagues cheerily, swapping unforced insults and convivial small talk with the ease of long practice, before sliding into a chair and removing his laptop from its satchel. Hatcher (oh blissfully apropos moniker for a tabloid scribe!), who concentrated on sports-related scandals and turpitude, used pen and paper. So did the excessively slim but unmodelish Penelope Nearing. Their concession to tradition impressed no one.

  The raucous chatter terminated when Kryzewski lumbered in and took the chair at the head of the table. It was as if a raven had somehow bought a ticket to a convocation of crickets. Not only at the offices of the Investigator but within the greater tabloid universe as a whole, Moe Kryzewski commanded a good deal of respect as well as admiration. In the elegiac prose of an esteemed contemporary, it wasn’t so much that the senior editor knew shit from Shinola as the fact that during his more than thirty years in the business he had been consistently able to sell the former as the latter.

  Flipping open the laptop, Max fingered a few keys. It was middle-of-the-line, six months old, and would be outdated in another three. At that time he would have to buy a new one. Not because the one he now owned was insufficient for his needs. In point of fact, a two-year-old edition of the same machine would have been more than adequate for the work he did. But it was important to keep up appearances. In the tabloid business the appearance of the writer didn’t matter nearly as much as the appearance of his laptop.

  After insuring that the requisite files had been brought up to where he could get at them quickly, he looked out into the respectful silence. Eager, venal expressions transfixed the faces of his colleagues. He was confident his own was no less.

  “Well, what have you lazy pricks and prickesses got for me this morning? There’s a weekend edition to fill and we ain’t got shit to put into it. Longstreet!” Kryzewski barked.

  The reporter in question looked up from her palmtop. Her delicate fingers were small enough to manipulate the tiny keys, and to minimize mistakes she had filed her nails down short as a longshoreman’s. Around the office she was known as “Longstocking,” as in Pippi.

  “It’s been a slow week, Moe. My boy in Florida tells me some cracker’s hauled a six-legged gator out of the ’glades.”

  The editor snorted. In the old days he would have been filling the room with cigar smoke: carbonized essence of Havana. But this was contemporary Los Angeles. In his day Moe Kryzewski had battled crooked union bosses, corrupt cops, angry politicians, and homicidal movie stars, but not even he could stand against the nicotine police.

  “Photo op, no story,” he commented curtly. “Got anything else?”

  Longstreet pursed her lips. “L’Elegace’s new summer line for the ladies features soft transparent plastic tops over Vassarely-styled printed skirts and culottes.”

  “Angling for a trip to Paris?” Kryzewski grinned. “Sorry, Charlie. If readers can see naked French tits in People, why should they want to read about it in the Investigator?”

  Longstreet looked crushed, but not to the point of giving up. “There’s a rumor going around that one of L’Elegace’s senior models is supposedly sleeping with Anais Delours.”

  Kryzewski perked up. “Isn’t she the one who’s married to Phillipe Boison, the director? The guy who makes all those interminably boring flicks about French adolescents growing up, and all that crap?”

  Longstreet nodded. “It’s just gossip going around.”

  “Gossip my prostate! Get on it. When you’ve got the story done let me know and I’ll tell Travel to cut you a ticket. To ‘verify sources.’ And you’d better do some work this time instead of hanging out in Montmartre trying to pick up the overage graduate students who drift over from the Sorbonne.”

  Longstreet mustered as much indignation as she could manage. “I do not pick up college boys.” Her mouth subsided into a fey smile. “They pick me up.”

  “Whatever. Just pin a source or two to the board. I want it by next week.”

  The session continued in that vein, the writers laying out their respective story ideas, the majority of which were immediately shot down by Kryzewski. Too old, too thin, not involving enough, insufficiently provocative, hard news, too expensive to research, inadequate glamour, no buzz—Kryzewski could kill a story with a cocked eye. Though everyone at the table was open to all possibilities, each writer tended to specialize in one area, from sports to entertainment, crime to consumer goods, politics and politicians to miracles and popular music.

  Having been dragged kicking and screaming through several science courses while he was at university, and having been injudicious enough to commit this fact to print in the form of a line in his résumé, Max had been assigned to the wonderful world of weird science by default. Faced with a fait accompli and no accomplices to pass it off on, he had chosen to accept the appointment and run with it—or at least hobble. The result had been some singularly notable stories whose popularity with the paper’s readers had surprised and delighted everyone from himself on up.

  In his skilled hands a report that started out as a straight piece on the CERN collider in Switzerland would end up informing readers not that a new subatomic particle had been discovered, but that gremlins had sabotaged the apparatus to prevent physicists from opening a door to Hell, or that bosons and mesons were really different species of elves moving at high speed, which was why humans could not see them unless they chose of their own accord to slow down—or could be trapped in the accelerator.

  From a reporter’s standpoint it was reassuring to be able to turn in stories knowing that nearly one hundred percent of those who read them understood absolutely nothing about their scientific underpinnings. Max preached bullshit to the ignorant, who were ever ready to accept the outrageous as gospel provided it was described in words of more than three syllables. Wasn’t that, after all, what science was all about, and didn’t folks know what was really going on in this country, and wasn’t it his, Max Parker’s, job to tell them the real truth? As opposed to the fake truth, which was usually embodied in unreadable, incomprehensible government reports?

  When the piercing glare of the senior editor finally focused on him, he was ready. The screen of his laptop glowed with multitudinous absurdities, any one of which he was ready to promulgate as the absolute truth to a gullible public. The people wanted to know, and the Investigator was ready to tell them. So was Maxwell Parker.

  “Evan Thibodeux of Avery Island, Louisiana, has caught a mermaid.”

  Kryzewski rolled his eyes. “Pictures?”

  “Not yet.” Max smiled confidently. “Binky Chavez, our photo stringer out of Houston, is going to check it out and get back to me some time tonight or tomorrow. If the photos are usable I figure it’s worth at least half a page.”

  Kryzewski nodded approvingly. “We’ll make ’em usable. That’s what computer photo touch-up programs are for.” He looked momentarily wistful. “Wish we’d had a couple of those around in the old days. Half a page, you got it. We haven’t had a good mermaid story in years.”

  Farther down the table, Stu Applewood piped up. “Wonder if anybody’s got a Cajun recipe for blackened mermaid?”

  “Oy, that’s good!” added Brick the Brit from his chair. “Maybe it’s a black mermaid. Then we could run a recipe for blackened black mermaid.”

  “The Japanese would
do her as sushi,” put in Deva Singh-war. “The Japanese will eat anything.”

  “Full page, maybe.” Kryzewski was clearly warming to the story’s potential for exploitation. “Half for the story, half on how unscrupulous chefs around the world have been serving mermaid to unsuspecting customers for years, and passing it off as shark.” The editor was almost enthusiastic, a rare state of being. Beneath the envious stares of his associates, Parker swelled with a sense of accomplishment. “What else you got for me, Max?”

  Parker searched his “new” file. “Truck farmer in South Jersey claims to be able to grow tomatoes with the face of Jesus on them.”

  “Great.” Dyan Jefferson had just had her tres chic rows done by a hairstylist recently immigrated from Windhoek, Namibia, who week after week brought forth for the edification of all who might gaze upon his favorite client yet another new and wondrous prodigy of coiffure. “People will be able to slather their dead cow burgers with holy ketchup instead of holy water.”

  Jefferson was a notoriously militant vegetarian. It exposed her to a certain amount of ridicule around the office, which she handled with aplomb. And the occasional a-punch.

  Ignoring the chuckles and wisecracks, Kryzewski wrestled briefly with the proposal before giving it the thumbs-down. “Can’t use it, Max. But don’t throw it away, file it. Two weeks ago we had the face of Jesus in the oak tree in South Carolina, and the week before that it was the Polaroid from New Mexico. The Star just did a story about a crucifix in Guadeloupe weeping real tears, and there was something out of Italy about a month ago on blood liquefaction.” He scratched at his chin. “It’s too soon for your take. Christ’s a little overexposed right now.”

  Max melodramatically pushed the Save button. “It’s filed, Moe.”

  “Fine. What else you got?”

  Parker considered the screen. “A local source I’ve used before told me yesterday that there’s a Mary Collins in Toluca Lake who’s convinced she’s found a medium capable of contacting and conversing with her dead son.” He looked up from the laptop. “Cost me, but I got her address. The medium’s supposed to show this afternoon.” He checked his watch. “Three o’clock.”