The Broken Universe

by Melko, Paul

  Prime opened the bag, found jewelry, gold bars, watches encrusted with gems. A small box lay at the bottom of the bag. Within was a handful of diamonds.

  He took the bag with him, stowed it on the passenger seat of the squad car. The shortwave radio still twirled.

  He left the car there and walked across the street to the SupeRx. He grabbed a thermometer off the shelf. Prime drove slowly back to the transfer site. He’d have to make a decision soon before Casey realized he was gone and alerted the Wizards.

  He parked the car next to the farmhouse, overlooking the transfer zone, and sat. He unwrapped the thermometer and slipped the tip under his tongue.

  If he was infected already—if this world was swimming in plague virus—he and his rescuers were doomed. They would come looking and be infected immediately. Or he would return and doom his home world and ultimately any world that he visited. The plague would spread to all the settled worlds of Pinball Wizards, Transdimensional.

  But perhaps the plague had passed away with the death of the last humans. Or perhaps it was a plague that humans in other universes were immune to. Perhaps he was utterly safe. He could pass back to Universe Prime and no one would know.

  He pulled the thermometer from his mouth. Thirty-seven degrees Celsius. Perfectly normal. He checked his watch. He could wait another six hours. He would check again then. If he was normal, he’d risk it and go back through to 7533.

  * * *

  Prime dozed in the squad car. Every once in a while, he would start awake, look to the dial of the shortwave radio, check his temperature, and close his eyes once more. The temperature did not change in that time, but he found he had no knowledge of how long a virus would incubate in a human host before manifesting symptoms. Depended on the virus, he supposed.

  He awoke with a start, shivering. He was certain he had contracted the disease, but then realized he was merely cold. The sun had slid behind the trees. He was late, he needed to get back to Universe Prime.

  Checking his temperature one last time, he found it still to be thirty-seven. He had to assume he was uninfected. He had to.

  Ten minutes to the next transfer, he saw after checking his watch. He shoved his platform into the transfer zone. Five minutes before the transfer time, he squatted on the platform and waited. He didn’t want to be too late into the zone, getting cut into pieces by being halfway in and out. Nor did he want to squat in the cold for too long.

  He knelt there, his bag of loot next to him, praying that he was not infected. That Abby would not die because of him. That Casey would survive. For a second, he was half convinced to just send a note through. Good as dead. Don’t come after me. Love, John.

  No, nothing would stop Casey from coming after him. Not even a plea for her safety.

  His watch beeped. He crouched on the platform. One minute.

  He hated this part. He hated this part. He hated—

  The universe shifted.

  He was back in the new lab. Stepping quickly away from the gate, he turned it off and deactivated the timer.

  Prime had done it. He’d built a system to allow him to explore worlds on his own. But in the process, he’d possibly infected himself and all of Universe Prime.

  He picked up the phone and dialed Casey.

  “Hey, baby, I’m gonna be a little late,” he said.

  “Sure, Abby and I are having pizza,” Casey said.

  “Cool, save some for me.”

  “See you when you get here,” she said.

  Prime hung up the phone, feeling sick to his stomach. Not a symptom, just stress and anxiety.

  He retched into the wastebasket, emptying his stomach of bile and fluid.

  “Uh,” he groaned. And then he was sick again.

  CHAPTER 25

  They walked silently a few hundred meters to a memorial park. Kylie ran off to play on the swings. Melissa sat on a bench to watch. John stood.

  “You can sit,” she said. “Tell me.”

  He sat next to her on the bench. “You got the last of the food, remember?”

  “I remember. Tell me what I don’t know.”

  “I was just passing through. I’d never seen a universe like that one. Never where the world was winter like that.”

  “Just passing through?”

  “I was lost myself, trying to get back home.”

  “So there isn’t just the two worlds? I always thought it was two.”

  “Thousands, if not millions, if not infinite,” John said. “But that’s the only one I’ve found that was like that. I don’t think it’s common.”

  “Thank god.”

  “I was trying to understand. I had been in a normal universe and suddenly I was in yours. I talked to the soldier there, asking what happened when the food ran out. They pounced on you … Rudy, Stan … shot you as you walked away.”

  “I knew them. From our old neighborhood.”

  “Kylie rolled down the embankment, broke her leg. I carried her back up to where you lay. The blood had turned the snow red. I didn’t … know what to do. I was just a stupid high school kid. I took you to the next universe.”

  “The same but different.”

  “Yes, no war. It was a beautiful fall day. Snow was clumped around us, but it started to melt right away. I called an ambulance, and then I walked off.” John paused. “I’m sorry I did that to you. I’m really sorry.”

  “Sorry for saving my life?” Melissa said. “Sorry for saving Kylie? She would have died right there with me.”

  “I know, but I ripped you right out of your world. Took everything away from you. Your life, your family.”

  “It’s okay. It was a sucky world.” She paused. “What’s your name anyway?”

  “I’m John Rayburn.”

  “My life wasn’t so great back there. Kylie’s father was dead. We were barely getting enough to eat. It was only a matter of time before it all fell apart. I just wish…”

  “What?”

  “I woke up in the hospital, looked out the window, saw the sun shining, and started screaming,” she said. “I thought I had died. We hadn’t seen the sun in months and didn’t expect to until summer again. And there it was, and it was warm and comfortable. And Kylie wasn’t there. I freaked.”

  “Yeah, I bet you did.”

  “They tried to calm me down. When I realized I wasn’t dead, I thought I might be in Mexico or something. But then my ideas weren’t in sync with the history here. They sent me to a psychiatrist. I explained everything clearly. Gave them the entire history of the war in my world. The psychiatrist listened and diagnosed me as suffering from post-traumatic delusional disorder. They took Kylie away and placed me in an institution.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Stop, it’s not your fault,” she said. “I had no family, of course. No one I knew lived here. No one to claim me. No one to vouch for me. I knew I was right. Kylie remembered some things, but she was no reliable witness. Years of living with a delusional mother had shaped what she thought she knew, right? I realized I was either insane or the victim of some event I could never prove. So I gave in. Memorized the history of this universe, better than most natives.” She laughed. “Convinced them I was sane. Told them I was from Sebewa, but without family, without a husband. They let me go, let me collect Kylie, and I came here, eighteen months ago.” She waved her hand around. “It’s the same but different.”

  “I know. People you recognize that don’t know you. Familiar places you’ve never been,” John said.

  “You said you were lost. Did you ever get back?”

  “I found a new home. But I could go back if I wanted to.”

  “I found a new home, or rather an old home that seems new,” Melissa said. “So, why did you track me down after two years? It couldn’t have been easy.”

  John thought for a moment of his own travels, of how far he’d come in two years.

  “It’s taken me this long to get back. Taken me this long to get back here,” John said. “I
knew I was leaving you in a lurch. But the alternative was to leave you to die. I’m trying to fix it.”

  “How?”

  “I can take you and Kylie back if you want,” John said.

  “Back? To the long winter? No. That’s no choice.”

  “I know, but if you had people there. I could take you back to them,” he said. “I left people behind when I was whisked from my universe.”

  Melissa looked at him from the corner of her eye. “What else? You’ve come with options, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, we’re colonizing a universe. One that has no humans in it at all,” John said. “We’re populating it with refugees. You’re a refugee too, I guess.”

  “Refugee,” she said, considering the word. “I guess so.”

  “We have less than a hundred refugees. All of them women,” John said. “We plan to build some common shelter before winter, keep the colony supplied with materials during the winter.”

  “No men? That seems a little odd,” Melissa said. “It’s not some transdimensional lesbian experiment, is it?”

  “Uh, no,” John said. “One of the reasons I wanted you involved was to help bring people from your old universe there. People from 7538.”

  “7538,” she said, rolling it around on her tongue. “That’s this place?”

  “This is 7539. Your home universe is 7538.”

  She paused, glanced back at Kylie in the park. “Before I had Kylie, I was a white-water rafter. I hiked daily in Colorado and then in Ohio when I moved,” she said.

  “Then this is perfect for you!”

  Melissa looked at him, her face a frown. “I’ll think about it,” she said. She stood. “Kylie! Let’s go.”

  John watched her walk off, certain she’d have nothing more to do with him. He’d tried at least.

  Melissa turned and said, “Check with me in a week. I’ll think about it until then.”

  * * *

  By the end of November, before the first snow, they had erected six twenty-meter-long huts and a central house for cooking and meals for the Alarian women. The name was debated and came down to something in Alarian or New Toledo. In the end, they wanted nothing to do with the old Alarian ways, including the language, and chose New Toledo.

  Game was plentiful and with the milder climate, a late crop in the greenhouse bloomed and produced vegetables. The colony was never meant to be self-sufficient, and daily transfers augmented the settlement with the benefits of an advanced society: soap, paper, oranges, and books. The transfers were handled by the largest, most advanced gate the Wizards had built yet.

  The settlement was near where downtown Toledo would have been, not far from the Maumee River. Instead of transferring through at the Findlay quarry site—and lugging material overland in the Pleistocene world—they built a gate in a warehouse not far from the settlement. A kilometer walk was all it took to carry material there and back.

  The elephant-snouted herbivores proved rather tasty, but the Alarians preferred not to hunt them, choosing instead to graze a herd of domesticated cattle on the open prairie. Guarding it became a concern, when a cow and her calf were brought down by a saber-toothed tiger. However, the tiger was no match for the long-bore rifle that the Alarian women carried, and, once dispatched, there was no sign of another tiger. Apparently they were solitary beasts and no other tiger was nearby, and probably wouldn’t be until spring.

  John was present, however, when Clotilde and John Ten came across a den of cat-dogs. The two came running back to town, saying one of the cows had been attacked and gutted. The spore had led back to a mound of dirt that looked like some kind of dug-up den.

  “I think we’ll need some gasoline to drive them out,” John Ten said.

  John and two or three Alarians followed John Ten and Clotilde. They stopped first at the cow’s carcass. Bones, scraps of skin, and the last of the viscera were all that remained of the beast.

  “How long was the cow gone?” John asked.

  “Less than six hours,” Tilly said.

  “These beasts are quick and thorough,” John said. He knelt and looked at the gray rib bones. Small teeth marks covered them. He worried for a moment there was some horrendous predator they had missed on this world—the real reason that humans didn’t live here—some deadly Grendel-like predator. But then he realized what he was looking at, a victim of the cat-dogs, the pack creatures that had almost gotten him when he passed through this universe. He should have realized the colonists would run into them eventually.

  He led the way to the den, a low mound of dirt, maybe a half meter tall, with entrance holes leading inward and down in all directions. In the tall grass, the den would have been invisible from across the plain.

  The six of them circled the den. They were all armed; carrying at least a pistol was standard procedure in the Pleistocene world. John Ten dashed forward and leaped atop the mound. His boots sunk a few centimeters into the soft dirt. He splashed half the gasoline around the top of the den before emptying the rest of it into a hole.

  Using a lighter, he caught flame to a makeshift torch of dry grass.

  “Stand back!”

  He tossed the torch and it floated awkwardly down, losing flares of sparks as it did so. John was certain the gas wouldn’t light. Nothing happened, and then with a whoosh, the mound erupted in flame.

  The smoke of the gasoline fire was black and heavy, rising in slow spirals. John had expected the cat-dogs to flee their home en masse, but there was nothing coming from the den, not even a keening sound, at least nothing over the crackle of the flame.

  Then something shot out of the opening to John’s right, a blur of tan. The cat-dog leaped between him and the Alarian next to him. She turned quickly, tracked the beast with her pistol, and fired a single shot. The cat-dog jerked, twisted, and collapsed in the grass.

  “Careful! They’re fast!”

  Across from them, another leaped out of the flaming mass, right at John Ten. He batted the cat-dog down with the butt of his rifle, then took aim, and shot it once.

  Then everything was too fast to take in. One appeared before John, a fat one, slithering out to peer around with dark, evil eyes. John wasted no time and shot the thing twice.

  To his left, Clotilde screamed. A cat-dog had launched itself at her and was clinging to her shirt, its teeth latched deeply in the fabric.

  John drew his knife, steadied the writhing thing’s head with his left hand and slit it across its throat with his right. It spasmed and fell loose, still stuck to Clothilde’s shirt. She was awash in blood, her shirt ruined. John ripped the carcass away.

  No more cat-dogs were coming out, and the fire was dying down, except to the east where the wind was blowing it into the dry grass. John Ten stamped at the spreading fire with his shoes. John jumped to help, worried for a second that the fire would spread across the entire prairie, but the wind died down and they managed to stamp the entire fire out.

  When John turned back, he saw that Clotilde’s face was white. Her shirt was soaked in blood, and John realized it wasn’t blood from the cat-dog. He ran toward her, just as John Ten saw. They steadied her, one on each arm.

  “I think I’m…” she said. “I think I’m bleeding.” They laid her on the ground, and John Ten opened her shirt. The cat-dog had managed to bite her shoulder, gashing the flesh at least ten centimeters from the clavicle to her forearm. The wound gurgled with the beating of her heart.

  John applied pressure, pushing the shirt against the wound.

  “Call for the first-aid kit,” John said.

  One of the Alarians drew out her military-grade walkie-talkie and raised the town.

  “Hang in there, Tilly,” John said. “We’ll get you back to the settlement. We’ll get you some bandages and some painkillers.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m fine. I feel…” And then she lost consciousness. John felt for a pulse. It was steady and even, but she was in shock.

  In a few moments, he heard the sound of the quad
ATV, one of three they had transferred through. Any vehicle larger wouldn’t fit in the transfer zone. Not until they built an even bigger gate.

  Englavira was driving the ATV, the first-aid kit in the trailer she was hauling behind. She tsked at the sight of Clotilde’s shoulder and said something in Alarian.

  “Look out,” she said. She lifted the shirt away to peer at the wound. Reaching into the first-aid kit, she grabbed the antiseptic powder and sprinkled it into the wound. Then she ripped open the gauze pads. They soaked red immediately, but she laid another package of them on and used a bandage to hold it in place, wrapping Clotilde’s shoulder, armpit, and torso.

  “Help me sit her up,” she said. They leaned her forward, and Englavira continued wrapping Clotilde until she looked not unlike a mummy, from the waist up.

  Once she had tied the bandage off, they gently lifted her into the trailer, and Englavira got in with her.

  “You drive,” she said to John.

  Slowly, avoiding the bumps and ditches, he drove the ATV back to the settlement, while the rest of the hunting expedition trailed behind.

  A bevy of Alarians rushed out at the sound of the ATV and carried her into the dormitory. John’s eyes rested on the bloodied shirt that lay in the trailer. His heart sank. How could he justify bringing Melissa and Kylie here? It was a deadly world. He had been a fool to think this was a suitable location to raise a child.

  CHAPTER 26

  John Prime went to his doctor’s office, claiming an upcoming trip to South America and Africa and asking for whatever injections that would require and anything that might be preventative for those locales. What else could he do?

  His temperature had remained the same and he felt no symptoms after his stomach had calmed, after he had emptied his guts into the trash can. Every itch, every twitch, every pain was a sign to him of his imminent demise. After two weeks, however, and no sign that he was actually sick, John Prime realized that he had not brought destruction on the multiverse.

  That relief and the million dollars’ worth of gems and jewelry that he had found in Universe 9000 buoyed his spirits. He had managed to explore a whole new world on his own. He had a system to repeat the process. Better yet, the world was utterly devoid of human life, yet all the infrastructure was in place for him to exploit. How many banks did the United States have? And he had all the time in the world to break into each one and extract the valuables. He would be rich beyond belief. And free to pursue whatever further exploitation of the universe he wished.