The Frenchman saw nothing. His eyes had begun to blur.
“Get to the good part!” the Mongol prodded.
“It is the discovery that will allow us to escape this place!”
“He’s been workin’ on this a long time,” said the Mongol with unmasked approbation. “Smarter than a cartload of Norwegians, this man!” He clapped the Moor on the back. “His grandmother was African. Eaten by a horde of hyenas.”
“A pack,” the Moor corrected. “Mongols come in hordes.”
Kengis laughed heartily. “It was the custom of her tribe that when folks got too old or sick to be useful, they were just sent out into the savannah to die. Most of ’em got eaten. Ain’t that a fact, Sarcen?”
The Moor nodded.
“Dead and buried, she is,” said the Mongol.
“Leftovers mostly. But that suffices,” said the Moor, as if this accomplishment was one that could be pointed to with pride.
This seemed, to the Frenchman, an unnecessary aside and his demeanor must have indicated as much, for the Moor—after a moment of wistful reflection upon the good fortune of his ancestor—returned to the subject. “The Principle of Resultant Extrapolation,” he said.
“That’s his!” said the Mongol, with another clap on the back. “P.R.E. He come up with that over a cold cappuccino. Think what he’d’ve done if it’d been hot!”
The Moor declined his head modestly.
The Frenchman was staring as if from the depths of a bottomless hole.
“Allow me to explain,” said the Moor.
‘Please don’t,’ thought the Frenchman.
“Let me do it!” Kengis interrupted. “You’ll get it all tied up in words that somebody should be shot for inventin’.” He turned to the Frenchman. “The point is, this fella, this Swiss gent, started a whole new line of thinkin’, though he didn’t have the sense to know it at the time. No one realized he’d come up with pretty much the Grand Poobah of all ideas until the 22nd century, just before the Tahitians sacked Washington. Anyway, one thing led to another—the way theories do for this breed of egg-heads who’ve always got to have it one up on the next guy—and eventually they come up with the Grand Unification Theory that explains everything about everything includin’ the color of your aunt Maisie’s knickers and why the phone always rings just when you’ve got in the tub!”
The Frenchman sighed heavily and would have wondered what the Viking and the monk were talking about if he were not beyond caring.
“It wasn’t quantum physics, after all,” the Moor said, by way of explanation. “It was this.” He bounced the soccer ball off his forehead. “Mathematical physics.”
The anachronistic duo nodded meaningfully at the Frenchman who said, simply, “So?” rather than what he was thinking, which was “Huh?”
The Moor, reading more into the Frenchman’s monosyllabic response than it warranted, succumbed to a new line of thought. “It’s a good question. Let us suppose one had a choice to make. He thinks, ‘I could do A, but I could also do B.’ Well, that alternative is an idea and an idea is alive, so it has to have a place to live. And because it can’t live at the same time and in the same place as the choice that is ultimately made, a whole new universe must come into being to accommodate the consequences of that choice.”
Even the Mongol was stymied. “You digress,” he said pointedly. “Let’s get back to the past, shall we?”
The Moor, having already skipped ahead through several alternate realities, took some time to recall himself to the immediately perceptible dimension. “Yes. Yes, of course. Leonhard Euler must not be hindered in his studies. He must be allowed to prove his theory, else we’ll all be here forever.”
“But here is everywhere, isn’t it?” asked the Frenchman, feeling he must contribute something of substance to the conversation.
“Even everywhere is a prison if you can’t get to the one place you want to go,” said the Mongol, his left incisor catching a spark of light from a neon Corona sign. “Inter-dimensional burglary must lose its fascination at some time. Not that it has yet,” he reflected thoughtfully. “But it must. Then where will we be?”
The Frenchman tried to wrap his intellect around the hypothesis. “What’s to prevent this Swiss fellow,” it occurred to him there was no such term as “Swissman,” an irregularity to which some linguist must apply himself, “from doing what he’s going to do?”
“There are those who do not wish to leave this prison,” said the Moor in a whisper. “Some forms of life thrive in tyranny. They would upset natural order in a twinkling, should there be some profit in it. Consequences be damned. One of them,” he lowered his voice, “the gentleman in leather at the far end of the bar—”
“Calls himself D. B. Cooper,” the Mongol interjected. “He drags that parachute with him wherever he goes.”
“Cooper, yes. I made his acquaintance in the palace of King Hiram of Tyre, sometime about the 9th century B.C. I was lonely for company, as you might imagine, so we shared a bottle or two of mead and I made the mistake of telling him my theory. Some time later I learned he’d gone back to the 18th century and distracted Euler from his studies at the critical juncture. Ergo, his crucial postulation never came into being.”
“I think you’re raving mad,” said the Frenchman. Exhaustion had finally overtaken him. A thought occurred. “Besides, if all that is true, then how are we talking about it?” the Frenchman wondered.
The Moor smiled condescendingly. “There are an infinite number of universes. An equal number of alternate versions of you and me and our friend here.” He nodded at Kengis. “But they are all extrapolations of our own. Our universe is the master template, if you will. This being the case, whatever is possible, however improbable, must exist somewhere at some point in time. If one alters the template in any particular, the change ripples throughout the other dimensions of existence, and an aberration can either infect the whole or be set right.”
The long night had left the Frenchman exhausted and his brain was far too tired to make sense of what he was hearing. Only one thing was clear. “I must see that my family is provided for. The girl . . . Tortusse . . . she said it is possible to return as a ghost.”
“Oh, don’t imagine it!” said the Moor. “It is too horrible!”
“Horrible? How?”
The Mongol shook his head. “You have no substance. You can’t do anything . . . only watch.”
“But I could see my wife and daughter!” the Frenchman protested, the flush of anger and frustration rising to this cheeks.
“Exactly,” the Moor replied, lowering eyes and shaking his head. “And if something terrible were about to happen to them . . .”
“And there was nothing you could do . . .?” the Mongol let the question hang.
“Besides, they sense your presence,” Sarcen continued, “which only sharpens their mourning. No. Do not even think of it.”
The Frenchmen grasped the paradox; to be with his family, yet completely apart from them, entirely impotent to do anything on their behalf or effect any positive change in their lives would be horrifyingly painful. “But I must see that they are provided for,” he said weakly.
“Of course you must,” said Kengis.
“How?”
“Tell him, Sarcen.”
“It is very simple, really,” said Sarcen, looking around. “You must go back to 18th century, find D. B. Cooper and prevent him from intervening in Euler’s studies.”
The Frenchman was resigned. “How do I go about it?”
The fundamental mechanics of the process were explained and so within the hour—provided with the proper clothing and currency more than sufficient to his needs, in payment for which the landlord required the answer to a particular puzzle upon which he had made a sizable wager—the Frenchman found himself in Switzerland.
The place was not so unfamiliar. France was but next door. The populace spoke French, if poorly, and somewhere in the distant and crowded warren of Paris’
s Montmartre his mother would, within a decade or so, be giving him birth.
Within three days of his arrival, after much tiring detective work, he learned that Leonhard Euler had been seduced by Catherine, Czarina of the Russias, to teach at her newly-founded Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. And so, after conducting a little business with a bank in Geneva, the Frenchman set out with heavy heart to make his way thence.
The perils and adventures he encountered on the journey would require several volumes to relate in all their color and pathos. For the purpose of this treatise, it must suffice to say he was on the road for somewhat less than three months and arrived in Catherine’s sparkling capital city on the 4th of October, 1781. Of the Russian language, which to him sounded like nothing so much as the growling of dogs and the snorting of swine, he knew nothing, so intercourse with the lower classes was all but impossible. The privileged classes, however, spoke French nearly as well as he, so it was among them he made himself at home.
The whereabouts of Euler were not difficult to ascertain—he seemed to have gained a considerable notoriety among the intelligentsia—but he was old and blind and rarely saw anyone but his amanuensis, whose task it was to transcribe the dying genius’s formulae on optics, algebra, and lunar motion for posterity.
But it was not Euler’s presence the Frenchman sought, only his proximity, for it was within those suburbs of Euler’s presence that the Frenchman would find D. B. Cooper. If Cooper had been a normal individual, to find him amongst the teeming masses of that snow-covered city would have been impossible, but the parachute was bound to give him away.
The Frenchman lounged in the doorway of a coffee house opposite the Academy, in which were Euler’s apartments, and waited. Nor did he have to wait long. Within a matter of days Cooper appeared and if the parachute, carefully rolled and stuffed into a rucksack hanging from his back, hadn’t given him away, certainly his furtive demeanor would.
From Demidov—dispossessed nobleman, winebibber, and a frequent occupant of the Frenchman’s doorway—he learned not only such important local gossip as that the Czarina would that very night be hosting a grand ball in which to showcase her new crown jewels, but that Cooper, whom locals had dubbed “Hunchback,” had been visiting the Academy frequently, and that he had been trying for some time, but to no avail, to gain an audience with the famous mathematician, passing himself off as a disciple of Euler’s teachings. Lately he seemed to have become desperate, even to the point of attempting to bribe the guards, which act had been rewarded with a month in jail. Nevertheless, he persisted, as if his life depended upon it.
“You’ve got to give the man credit,” said Demidov, curling himself around the cup off coffee in his hands, warming himself in its steam, “he doesn’t give up. One of the guards, Vladimir, is my brother-in-law. He says that the interview has finally been granted. The hunchback is to see Euler this very afternoon.”
The words sent a shiver through the Frenchman. This was the moment he had been waiting for, one for which he had planned with great care over long, lonely months. Now that it had arrived, however, none of the situations he had considered conformed to the reality. Something had to be done. He’d have to improvise, which to someone of the Frenchman’s limited imagination, meant wrestling the hunchback to the ground and seeing what happened next.
No sooner said than done. The Frenchman was not halfway across the street, though, when he was run over by a runaway turnip wagon. Immediately the cry for help went up from the throat of the general public as if from one man. Euler’s attending physician, who had been drawn to the window by the Pavlovian sound of grinding bones, ran down the stairs and out into the street. It was his face—and that of the oxen that had flattened him, its eyes brimming with tears of self-recrimination—into which the Frenchman found himself staring when at last he opened his eyes. This was the image that accompanied him into oblivion as the mists of unconsciousness closed about him.
When he woke he found himself in a large, comfortable bed, its circumference draped with heavy curtains of rich, rococo design. Overhead, an elaborate canopy of complimentary texture, inlaid with threads of gold, arched with mild concern. Somewhere at the frayed edges of his reason, he heard voices and knew, as if by osmosis, that he was in Euler’s apartments and that the voices were those of D. B. Cooper and Euler himself, in deep discussion. By the same mystical inculcation of understanding, he also was aware that the mathematician had been on the verge of propounding his theory of biquadratic reciprocity when his ruminations had been intruded upon by the 20th-century hunchback.
“Now, supposing,” Cooper was saying, “that you jumped out of an airplane that was going 537 miles an hour . . .”
“Airplane?” said Euler, seeming distracted.
“And you had $200,000 in a canvas sack . . .”
The conversation went on. The Frenchman saw what Cooper was doing; attempting to distract the great mathematical mind with fatuous and irrelevant conjecture, knowing that, as a scientist, he could be led down any number of theoretical rabbit trails, thus depriving posterity of that pivotal, incendiary moment of true, scientific revelation.
The Frenchman tried to extricate himself from the bedclothes, but was too weak and mentally befogged to perform the act. The conversation, apparently coming from an adjoining room, eventually concluded, and Cooper, having succeeded in his simple plan, made a clean getaway.
When at last the Frenchman was sufficiently in command of his faculties to think clearly, two random bits of information collided in his brain: First, that Catherine the Great would be showing off her new crown jewels at a grand ball that night. Second, that thieves from the Tavern knew the best time to snatch and grab was just before they departed a given place and time. The conclusion? Cooper would not be departing the dimension immediately. He was not the sort to be satisfied merely thwarting history when so great a prize was within his grasp. He’d stay in the neighborhood at least until then.
Staggering to Euler’s study, where he met with a chilly reception, the Frenchman managed at great length to unburden himself of everything he knew, thanks to the fact that the old man was too blind and infirm to beat a retreat.
Euler, conjectural theorist that he was, was eventually captivated by the scientific principles suggested by the wild Frenchman’s queer tale and, in no time, fell entirely under their thrall. “If this place exists,” he said, referring to the Tavern, “it can be explained mathematically. It can even be manipulated by the correct arrangement of signs and numbers, no doubt having to do with beta and gamma transcendental functions.”
“I don’t understand,” said the Frenchman.
“Of course you don’t. You’re French,” said Euler. “Perhaps if I could put it in the form of a recipe . . . there isn’t time. Simply put, if this hunchback, this Cooper, can trek through time and space to prohibit me from developing this theory of which you speak, then there is a formula that will enable us to interfere with his plan.”
“But he’s already carried it out!” complained the Frenchman in exasperation.
“In the present, yes,” the mathematician replied, “but not in the past. Nor yet, perhaps, in the future. If I take into account the mathematics required to allow a place such as this Tavern to exist, then . . .” He stopped abruptly in mid-thought. “Get a paper and pencil, and write down everything I say.”
And so the Frenchman took dictation for the better part of four hours, by which time the Czarina’s ball was about to commence. And still Euler droned on.
“It’s getting late,” said the Frenchman.
Euler wasn’t listening. His eyeballs drifted sightlessly around their sockets as, inwardly, the crosshairs of his prodigious brain focused like a laser on a new truth. “I’ve got it!”
“Got what?”
“Read that last equation back to me.”
The Frenchman did so.
“That’s it! Mathematically speaking, if someone dreams of you while you are absent from the Tavern,
you will cease to exist except in the imagination of the dreamer!”
“Dream of me?” said the Frenchman.
“Of anyone from the Tavern,” Euler clarified. “What you need to do, is get someone to dream of this Cooper while he is still here.”
“How do I do that!?”
“Mathematics,” Euler replied, a gleam in his cataract-heavy eyes. “Get a fresh pencil.”
The Frenchman did as he was told and was rewarded, at length, with another ‘Eureka!’
“What now?”
“It’s done,” said the mathematician, falling back on his pillow, exhausted.
“What’s done?”
“A young woman in Besançon, France—named Marie, if my calculations are correct—is now having a dream of our Mr. Cooper.”
“How?”
“Mathematics!” said Euler. “Cooper is no more. And, incidentally, I am reminded of the formula I was about to propound when he interrupted me. Very soon now, I suspect, the Tavern will no longer be able to contain, against their will, those who are trapped there. Incidentally . . .” He went on to inform the Frenchman of subsequent realities that were bound to result from his most recent calculations. “Can’t be helped,” he said in conclusion. “Glad you dropped by. Goodnight.”
“And so,” said the Frenchman, as the Mongol slipped the new batteries into his Game Boy, “that’s what happened.” He nodded at the bar, from which Cooper was pointedly absent. “He won’t be troubling you any more.”
“Who won’t?” said the Mongol.
“D. B. Cooper, of course.”
“Never heard of him.” The Mongol looked at Sarcen. “You?”
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