American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She looks at the lens. She is not sure why, but she is sure it has moved. Perhaps only minutely, but she’s positive it’s changed.

  Is it a lens, she now wonders? Or is it an antenna, communicating with someplace very, very far away…

  And perhaps when she was staring at it before, she somehow activated it, and it made some kind of connection to… wherever it is Coburn is, the poor bastard. She is not sure how she could do such a thing, yet she feels it’s true.

  She looks down at her notes. She did not realize it, but she was desperately scribbling down everything he said in his final moments. Scrawled at the bottom of the paper in pink slashes is:

  SIX SIX TWO SIX

  It was something he wanted her to know. Something important. Maybe a frequency? Or a code to something? She guesses she’ll have to find out.

  Mona sighs. “Well, shit.”

  It takes her a couple of hours of fruitless, frustrating, aimless searching to find it. Or she thinks it does. It’s hard to tell time in here. What little power is coming out of the generator doesn’t reach a lot of the offices, so it’s just Mona and her flashlight, roving through the dim mess, scouring room after room of decaying, modernist clutter. Conference rooms. Stationery closets. Bathrooms with brown streaks on the walls, the remnants of ancient flooding.

  Then, in the western part of Coburn (as, after all, the good doctor said something about the longest hallway on the west side), her beam falls across what looks like a white wall. She very nearly passes it by when she realizes there’s a faint outline in it, like that of a box or a panel…

  Or a door.

  She walks to it and realizes she’s right: there’s a thick metal door here, painted the exact same color as the rest of the wall. She runs her hand along its edges, trying to find a handle or a button, but there is nothing.

  She steps back and examines it. Curious, she kicks it. It’s solid as all hell, but she’s sure it’s hollow on the other side.

  There’s a room there. Maybe this is what Coburn was directing her to. But how to get in? The door is heavy enough to be a vault door, which would explain the six-six-two-six combination he told her about, but she can’t find any place to punch or enter it in.

  Frustrated, she glances around. The door is innocuously placed behind a rather small, barren cubicle, probably that of a lower-end employee. She looks at the desk, which is fairly uninteresting: pencils, graph paper, a beat-up typewriter, some pictures on the wall. Then she looks at the pictures.

  One is of the guy’s family—wife, two kids, the wife sitting in a tire swing. She doesn’t recognize any of them. Then her eye falls on another picture, but this one’s a black-and-white photo of what looks like the stuffiest, most interminably boring man on earth. He’s bald with a thick, droopy mustache, tiny spectacles, and dead, tired eyes.

  There’s an inscription at the bottom. It reads: MAX PLANCK.

  Maybe Coburn wasn’t saying plank at all. Then she remembers something from high school: Planck’s constant. That’s a thing, isn’t it?

  “Six-six-two-six,” she murmurs. She thinks, then lifts the picture up off the wall.

  Set in the wall behind it is a tiny brass combination lock, like one for a briefcase, with four little shining wheels with tiny numbers inscribed on them. Mona turns them until they read 6-6-2-6.

  There’s a soft clunk from behind her. She returns to the white door, and finds it’s moved forward about a centimeter, enough to get her fingers around. She pulls it open.

  On the other side is a surprisingly large room with walls covered in wooden cubbyholes. Inside are three old film projectors, about a dozen tape players and recorders, and an absurdly huge box of batteries. Hanging from the ceiling by small chains is a sign reading RECORDS.

  “Huh,” says Mona. She walks in and starts looking through the cubbies.

  There are hundreds and hundreds of binders here. She flips through a few. They’re all figures and transcripts of not only experiments, but discussions about experiments, and meetings about discussions about experiments, and on and on and on. She never had any idea that science involved so much writing. Everything in this lab must have been carefully recorded somewhere, somehow, from the figures that went into the studies, to those that came out of it, to the model, make, year, etc., of all the equipment involved (even the batteries, for God’s sake, which apparently they made here specifically for the experiments).

  Why lock all this up? Why should they be so secretive?

  Well, they would have to be, she thinks, if what they were recording was incredibly, incredibly important, or expensive, or dangerous. And after talking to Coburn (or the picture of Coburn) she thinks that it might’ve been all three.

  Mona looks at the film projectors. This would explain why her mother had so much film in her attic. She must’ve gotten a hookup at work.

  She looks at the film canister labels. They all sound fairly boring or obscure, except for one, which bears the rather unprofessional label of SUCCESS!!! She pops the top off of the lid, and sees the film is intact.

  She tests the wall socket, and finds that the generator is apparently putting power through to here. Since she’s now a damn expert on loading projectors, she feeds the film in, turns the projector to face one of the blank walls of the records room, and starts her up.

  As before, there’s no audio. Just dingy, yellowed images fluttering across the wall. She fiddles with the lenses until they resolve.

  The film shows the big, metal-walled room with the lens. Dr. Coburn is in front of the camera, standing so he’s blocking the lens from view. He’s dressed in a brown coat with elbow patches, and he sports a tremendous beard (very late-seventies, Mona thinks). He looks a little nervous, his eyes flicking about, his fingers rising up to adjust (and readjust, and re-readjust) his tie. Someone must say something to him from off camera, because he perks up, appears to say, What? Oh! and steps aside so that the camera has full view of the lens.

  Only now there are two lenses: the second arm of the contraption, which looked so conspicuously empty, now has the missing mirror, or lens. A great deal of wires run down out of the top of the arm to somewhere off camera, probably behind whoever’s filming.

  Coburn is muttering quietly to someone, again off camera. He nods at them, eyebrows raised—Are we ready? He nods again, then clears his throat, smiles stiffly, and, after a pause, begins addressing the camera.

  Of course, Mona hears none of it. She has to sit and wait for him to get through his whole spiel, which takes about five minutes. While Coburn talks, some assistants or scientists come in and hold up sheets of paper or boards with the date and time written on them, as well as a test number. Coburn, still stiff as starch, awkwardly gestures to them. Then he begins pointing back to the lenses.

  Coburn reaches into his pocket and takes out a bright red ball, about the size of an orange. It’s a croquet ball, Mona sees. Then, still talking, he takes out a knife and makes a long scratch down the side. He walks forward to the camera, holding the ball out (the operator has to hurry to adjust the focus) so that the viewer can see the scratch: it’s shallow and made in the shape of an S. Then he walks back to the lens, and the camera zooms in and follows him (along with a boom mike that floats into view now and again).

  There are two small metal tables on opposite ends of the round metal room, with the lenses in the middle. Coburn places the ball on the left table, square in the middle, where it’s marked with a big X of black tape. He points to it, and talks to the camera a bit. Then he points across the room, and the camera whirls, eventually settling on the table on the right-hand side of the room. This table is empty, but also has a big X of tape. The camera zooms out and refocuses on Coburn. He talks at the camera a bit, and points at the lenses hanging from the ceiling. The camera zooms in to study them.

  It appears that age did not touch the remaining lens at all. Its twin is the same: they are both perfect, maintaining a queer sheen even in the dingy light of the metal room.


  The camera zooms back out. Coburn is advancing, gesturing to the room, then to his staff, who are still off camera. He looks excited, anxious, terrified as hell. He points off camera again, bows, and exits stage right. From the shadows Mona sees on the ground, it looks like all his people are leaving too. Then it’s just the camera, still rolling, filming a wide angle that captures the table on the left with the croquet ball, the lenses in the middle, and the empty table on the right.

  Mona sits forward. Obviously, it isn’t safe for people to be in the room with whatever’s about to happen.

  She keeps staring at the room. Nothing happens. Then, slowly, the lenses rotate, so that one points at the table on the right, and the other points at the table on the left. A light on the base of the arm, near the ceiling, flicks on. There’s a long, long pause, more than five minutes long, ten minutes long, more. Mona wonders what sort of SUCCESS!!! this could be.

  And then it happens.

  It takes her a minute, but she notices something’s wrong with the curvature of the walls on the sides of the room. She can’t tell which way they’re curving now… is the right side of the room curving in, completing the circle as it should? Or is it somehow curving away? It’s so bad her eyes begin to hurt. After a lot of blinking, she thinks she’s got it figured out: when she looks at the left side of the room, she gets the uneasy sensation that she’s actually seeing both it and the right side of the room at once; likewise, when she looks at the right side, she feels like she’s also seeing the left side of the room. It’s as if someone took two film negatives and laid them one on top of the other.

  Then she notices something else odd. There is a shadow in the center of the empty table on the right. But it appears to be a shadow projected by nothing, hanging loose like the shadow from Peter Pan. It looks a little like the shadow of a ball… perhaps a croquet ball.

  Then, slowly, like someone gradually increasing the light on a lamp, something faint and red begins to appear in the center of the table on the right.

  Mona looks at the table on the left. The croquet ball is still there. But when she looks back at the table on the right, she sees something. It’s not exactly a red croquet ball, but something a lot like it, like its ghost, if croquet balls could have ghosts.

  It keeps growing brighter. And then there are two croquet balls, each sitting on its own table.

  The light on the arm of the lenses flicks out. And when it does, the curving walls overlaid on one another vanish, along with the ball on the left-hand table. Which leaves only the croquet ball on the right-hand table, which doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

  After a pause, Dr. Coburn bounds into view with a Geiger counter in hand. He remembers himself, and assumes the stately walk of an established academic. He walks to the right-hand table with the croquet ball and holds the Geiger counter over it; the camera wiggles a bit as whoever was running it reassumes his or her position, then it zooms in to show the readout on the Geiger counter: Mona doesn’t know much about radiation, but judging by Dr. Coburn’s face, and his cavalier attitude, the number must be very low.

  Dr. Coburn picks up the ball and walks back to the camera. He holds it out again, and the camera focuses on its front.

  Running along one side of the ball is a meandering, carven S.

  “What the hell,” breathes Mona.

  Dr. Coburn, obviously pleased as punch, pops the ball back into his pocket. Hands folded before him, he addresses the camera with a few choice words. After remaining calm and respectable for a bit longer, he finally bursts out laughing. Two of the assistants (grad students, probably) come running in, one, the girl, to hug him, and the other, a pudgy, bearded man, to shake his hand. Then the camera operator walks around to adjust something below the camera’s lens.

  Mona gets only one glance at that face, which is serenely triumphant, the face of someone who’s been holding winning cards for a long time and knew she’d take the pot but is still damn pleased to see it happen. And when she does, Mona can say only one word:

  “Momma.”

  Then the screen goes dark.

  Mona watches the film two more times. Then she starts to look at the records around her.

  The reports don’t make any sense to her, and since she has no intention of staying here all night she drops them and moves on.

  The tapes, though… the tapes and the transcripts are worth something.

  After about a half hour of gathering material, she starts playing a couple of the recordings and reading the files.

  With a bit more arranging, they start to resemble a story.

  WHERE THE SKY TOUCHES THE EARTH

  TAPED REHEARSAL OF MEETING WITH CHAIR OF AERONAUTIC DEFENSE SUBCOMMITTEE

  AUGUST 4TH 1973, 10:30 AM ST

  STAFF INVOLVED:

  DR. RICHARD COBURN, PROJECT MANAGER

  MICHAEL DERN, CHIEF OF STAFF

  [STATIC]

  RICHARD COBURN:—not even pertinent. I’ve never met this man, nor do I wish to. We have people for that, I thought. I’m sure I’ve seen some of them on the payroll at some point in time.

  MICHAEL DERN: Yes, we’ve got people, but he’s not coming to meet with people. He’s coming to meet with you.

  RICHARD COBURN: Oh, that’s preposterous. Any… anyone else would be better. Why can’t you do it? You’re a perfectly sensible young man, more or less.

  MICHAEL DERN: More or less?

  RICHARD COBURN: Well, certainly. I mean, I don’t know everything about you, but you seem…

  [PAUSE]

  MICHAEL DERN: Keep that charm flowing, and I’m sure our funding won’t be touched.

  RICHARD COBURN: Oh, but he can’t really touch our funding. He’s some junior senator, or something or other. There’s that, I don’t know, the overarching defense committee. They control our funding. They’re the big boys we have to please.

  MICHAEL DERN: And who do you think reports to them?

  [PAUSE]

  RICHARD COBURN: Are you serious?

  MICHAEL DERN [CLEARS THROAT]: Why don’t we get started?

  RICHARD COBURN: Fine, but started where? I’ve never had to—to pitch myself to laymen before. Communication is not my strong suit, Michael. This is not the job for me.

  MICHAEL DERN: Well, you’re not going to be just pitching yourself. You’ll be pitching all of us. Not to put any pressure on you, but a lot’s riding on this. Hence my urgency. I wanted to make you flash cards, but—

  RICHARD COBURN: I am not using flash cards. Don’t be ridiculous.

  MICHAEL DERN: Well. Then you’d better get started now. Start at the beginning. Like… what… what do you want to accomplish here?

  RICHARD COBURN: Well, that is… hm. We set out to examine… well, originally we set out to examine the behavior of, of subatomic particles under conditions highly similar to, if not exactly similar to, those of cosmic bruising—

  MICHAEL DERN: Okay.

  RICHARD COBURN:—by which I mean multiuniversal breaches—though this term is under some scrutiny—whose signatures could only initially be registered by various frequencies of background radiation—

  MICHAEL DERN: Yeah.

  RICHARD COBURN:—and certainly have never been witnessed or measured in any location close to Earth. The reason being that, if there had in fact been multiuniversal contact, friction, bruising, or what have you, then there’s a significant chance that the rules that reality usually observes could… I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You know all this.

  MICHAEL DERN: Yeah. Yes. But you’re not telling me. You’re telling him. And let me give you a word of advice.

  RICHARD COBURN: Mm. Yes?

  MICHAEL DERN: Don’t tell him that.

  RICHARD COBURN: What? Which part?

  MICHAEL DERN: Any of it.

  RICHARD COBURN: Why not?

  MICHAEL DERN: Because to some junior congressman, or senator, or whatever from Illinois, that’s going to sound like a bunch of abstract horseshit not worth spending money on
. And that’s what he’s here to figure out. He’s not here to be educated in the mysteries of the universe. He’s here to figure out why this place, in the middle of a mountain, is worth the millions of dollars it’s costing the American taxpayer. And he’s gonna say that, too. He’s gonna actually look you in the eye, and say the words, costing the American taxpayer. Those will be this guy’s favorite words. I guarantee it. It’s how he got elected, I’m sure. So we’ve got to give him his proverbial bang for his proverbial buck. Him and his taxpayer.

  [SILENCE]

  RICHARD COBURN: Oh, for God’s sake, Michael. I, I told you I’d never be any good at this.

  [CHAIR SCRAPING]

  MICHAEL DERN: No. No! Come on, Dick, you are not getting up. You need to sit down and practice this! This is important!

  RICHARD COBURN: There is no amount of practice I can do to make this go well, I am convinced of it.

  MICHAEL DERN: Just… you know. Here. Do the whole Feynman thing. Explain it to a kid.

  RICHARD COBURN: Feynman… my God, don’t get me started on… and I enjoy the company of children even less than I do that of politicians, just so you know.

  MICHAEL DERN: Well, I, I am fucking sorry. I am sorry you don’t like politicians, or kids, or anyone without some amount of letters after their name. But this needs to get done.

  RICHARD COBURN: Don’t you cast me as an elitist! I’m not, it’s just, it’s hard to—to talk to people like that. We don’t operate in the same sphere, so, so, so I… why are you looking at me like that? Don’t look at me like that. Don’t.

  MICHAEL DERN: To a kid. Go on. Talk.

  RICHARD COBURN [SIGHS]: Well. Let me see… it is… well, it is… suggested that there are other universes than ours. That’s a pretty big thing to fit your head around, but it appears to be so. It’s thought that there have always been these other universes, stretching back to the Big Bang, though we don’t know exactly how many. And during the Big Bang, and especially the time directly, directly after, these various universes made a lot of contact with one another. They bumped and banged and scraped into one another. It has taken us some time to measure and quantify this theory, but we’ve found certain levels of background radiation near—