by Melko, Paul
“No, the specific universe where the iaciorator is located,” she insisted.
John felt himself grow angry, but in an abstract way.
“I told you, every settled universe!”
“Which ones?”
“That’s a secret.”
“You need to tell me,” Luigiantia said. “Do you have two? Did you find two of them?”
“Didn’t find any,” John said. “It found me. I found me.”
“Did someone give you the iaciorator?”
“Yes! But it’s broken. Only goes one way.”
“What?”
“Broken. Can only go up. One-way trip.”
“If your iaciorator is broken, how can you travel anywhere?”
“Made my own,” John said.
“What did you say?” Luigiantia asked, incredulous.
“I made my own iokinatinator, whatever.”
“You made your own iaciorator? Without fail-safes? You can travel anywhere?”
“Haven’t tried anywhere,” John said. “Induction suggests I can. Can’t you?”
“There are limits. Practical and otherwise,” Luigiantia said, but quietly, as if she were speaking to herself.
“I had a limitation. I reverse engineered it.” John’s mind was slowly coming unfogged. He’d been drugged. He felt the freedom of it dissipating, and with it a dread that he had revealed too much. Had he told Luigiantia where the settled universes were? But she knew who he was. By a process of elimination—by the process of eliminating every John Rayburn—she could eliminate the Pinball Wizards.
“Leave us,” she said to someone beyond John’s vision. A door opened and shut.
“What does your iaciorator look like?”
“It’s—”
John forced himself to remain silent.
“It’s—”
“What does it look like?”
“Negotiate!” John shouted.
“I’ll drug you and get what I want! Answer the question.”
“No! You attacked us. You attacked us! You killed us! You killed Casey!”
“Vermin!”
“Murderers!”
“You want to be left in peace?”
“Yes!”
“You can’t be! You’ll kill us all, and you have no idea why!”
“We won’t!”
“You’ve never heard of the Vigilari, have you?”
“Never.”
“You’re from a fallow universe.”
John didn’t answer as he had no idea what that meant.
“One where there is no idea of transdimensional travel,” she added.
“None.”
“And you found some—machine—that allows you to move from one universe to another.”
“My doppelganger did.”
“Your dup.”
“My doppelganger.”
“What does the device look like?”
“A disk, ten centimeters in diameter, just a centimeter thick. With controls and a display.”
Luigiantia gasped.
“That small?”
“It fits under my clothes.”
“Where did your dup—your doppelganger—get it?”
“No more answers! We deal! You leave us alone!”
“That can never happen, John Rayburn. You’re too dangerous for the universe.”
“No!”
She reached for something, a needle.
“I need to know where that device is, John Rayburn. I need to know where you have been. Your traces have to be sterilized before it’s too late.”
“No!”
A door slammed open and there were words spoken quickly, breathlessly, in a language John didn’t recognize.
Luigiantia turned back toward him.
“Do your doppelgangers know which universe this is?”
“No.”
“Then why has there been an unauthorized incursion?”
She barked orders in her own language. He was unbelted from the bed and helped into a wheelchair.
“I don’t know how we could know where you are. We only knew vaguely of you from Corrundrum and the Alarians.”
“The Alarians? Of course.
“Take him to his room,” she ordered. “We’ll finish this, John Rayburn, and you’ll tell me what I need to know.”
He was too weak to lunge out of the chair, too weak to try to run. His body was limp and useless. The orderly pushed him into a white hallway. Sunlight streaked the floor through high windows. It felt like he was in a hospital. It smelled like a hospital.
An incursion! The Wizards were looking for him.
They passed a window. A small rock garden with a fountain stood in a courtyard. This world seemed artificial, not real. He’d been to the Pleistocene world enough to know what an empty universe felt like. This wasn’t the Vigilari’s home universe. It was a staging universe. A firewall between them and the rest of the multiverse.
Why?
“What universe is this?” he asked, not expecting an answer.
There was a flash of light. The orderly gasped. Then a roll of thunder slammed across the world, a wave of density that plugged his ears and made him gag. He’d felt this before, only much closer.
The orderly pushed him quickly to the next window, one facing the other direction—outside.
A mushroom cloud rose on the horizon.
“Prime! You son of a bitch!” John said. Oh, what had they done?
CHAPTER 40
“It’s an empty world,” Henry Home said. “Not Pleistocene. No megafauna or megaflora. It’s like our world, only empty.”
“How could they be from an empty world?” Casey Low asked. “That makes no sense.”
“It’s a staging world,” Grace Home said. “Not their home world, but something in between.”
“For protection,” Casey said.
“A firewall,” Henry said.
“I feel better about nuking it,” Grace Home said. “No collateral damage.”
“So no sign of them?” Grace Top said.
“Well, we sent a probe through from our Columbus site, from our Findlay site, and from our Toledo site,” Henry Top explained. “Simple camera probes. Scanned the entire horizon. Neat stuff. Let me draw it on the chalkboard—”
“Henry,” Grace Home, Grace Top, and Grace Champ said at the same time.
“Right. Nothing at the quarry. Nothing at Columbus. But we got a sighting at Toledo,” Henry Gore said.
“About six kilometers to the southeast,” Henry Low added.
“Huge structure,” Henry Case said.
“Nothing else,” Henry Pinball said.
“That’s the spot then,” Prime said. “Six klicks away and downwind. That’ll get their attention. Next one will be right on top of that structure if they don’t give us John.”
Grace Home held his gaze. She nodded.
She said, “Set up another gate near the structure on this side. And another halfway there. And one more to be safe, on the other side. We’ll have nukes at each location. We’ll escalate if we have to.”
“Got it,” the Henrys said in unison.
* * *
John Prime and John Gore transferred over at the first Toledo site into Universe 0010—Site #1. They placed the SADM device next to a tree on a level spot of ground.
“How long?” John Gore asked.
“Ten minutes.”
Then Prime looked up and saw the rise of an aircraft in the distance coming their way.
“Better make that two minutes.”
“Then we’ve got to make the next transfer cycle!” The gate at Site #1 in 7650 was flashing every sixty seconds to bring them back. Prime checked his watch. They had twelve seconds until the next one.
“We’ll make the next cycle. Two minutes.”
“Okay.”
John Gore set the timer, and together they turned their switches.
“One, two, three!”
It took four hands to activate the SADM, all
toggling switches within a second of each other. No single person could activate one. There had to be two madmen. Not to worry, Prime thought, Pinball Wizards has a plethora of madmen.
The Site #1 gate cycled with a small whoosh of air, the result of whatever pressure differential than existed between the two universes. They ran to stand in the transfer zone, holding each other’s shoulders and counting to sixty.
“Get ready,” Prime said.
“It’s fast. It’s gonna get caught in the blast.”
Prime eyed the aircraft coming toward them. It wouldn’t reach them within sixty seconds. “Screw ’em,” he said.
He glanced at his watch.
“Here we go,” he said.
The universe jumped and they were in Universe 7650.
“Mark site one as radioactive in Universe 0010. Don’t transfer there from here,” he said to the Henry working their gate.
“Noted.”
“Tell the teams that they have some sort of detection system,” Prime said. “Don’t send a nuke through—or anything else—unless we plan to use it.”
“Right.”
“Let’s get to Site Number Two.”
Site #2 was three kilometers to the southwest toward the structure they had spotted in Universe 0010. Prime hoped it was far enough away from the first explosion.
“Did you notice which way the wind was blowing?” he asked John Gore.
“From the southwest,” John Gore replied.
“Good.”
They had a car standing by and reached the abandoned high school in minutes. The gate was in the gymnasium.
“What’s the word?” Prime asked the Henry who was attending the transfer gate. It was the largest transfer gate they’d built so far, a marvel that three Henrys had worked all night on, that would cast a transfer zone fifteen meters in diameter. Henry put down the phone as the two entered.
“They dropped the pamphlets from Site Number Four,” he said. “Right next to a boom box blaring static noise.”
“Someone will notice that,” John Gore said.
“I don’t know,” Prime said. “That nuclear bomb is probably a pretty large distraction right now.”
The Henry added, “And we have confirmation on the explosion. They’ve moved the transfer gate at Site Number Four a hundred meters north of the drop site and are watching the site every ten minutes via a remote camera.”
“What do the pamphlets say? What did Grace settle on?” Prime asked.
The Henry handed him a piece of paper with large-type font on it. It read, Parlay at 41.5, -83.6 at noon local time. Bring John Rayburn and all his belongings. Otherwise we will detonate nuclear bombs on your facility. The Wizards.
“Let’s hope they know how to use our grid system and our time system,” Prime said.
“They attacked us in 7351,” the Henry said. “They must.”
“What’s at this location there?”
“Prairie, we think. We haven’t looked.”
“And how far is it from here?”
“About one hundred meters west.”
Prime checked his watch. Noon was two hours away, and enough time for him to gather enough firepower.
“Send me through to Universe 9000,” Prime said. “I’ll drop something through over there when I need you to transfer me back through.” He pointed to the far corner of the gym.
“Are you sure?” the Henry said. “That isn’t part of the plan.”
“We could always use more firepower,” Prime said.
* * *
It took him far less time to gather his firepower. He had it waiting when the rest of the team showed up.
“Where the hell did you get that?” Grace Top shouted. She looked flushed and flustered, exhausted from coordinating four transfer sites across multiple universes.
“Same place the nukes came from,” Prime said. “Universe 9000.” He patted the M1 Abrams tank on its desert-camo-painted flank. Inside were a dozen assault rifles, a handful of grenades, and a bazooka. He didn’t mention that part to Grace.
“We’re bargaining for John’s life!” she screamed. “We can’t escalate our chances away.”
“We sorta escalated it already,” Prime said with a grin.
“What sort of bloodthirsty bastard are you?”
“One who’s going to get our Johnny Farmboy back,” he said. “Is it time?”
“Five minutes,” a Henry said.
“Let’s go now,” Prime said. He jumped up to the hatch of the M1.
“We check with a camera first,” Grace said. “That’s the plan.”
Prime reached down and started the tank. It rumbled to life, drowning out Grace’s words. Grace turned toward the Henry and mimed the number five to him.
One of the Johns motioned Prime forward in his behemoth, and he rumbled it into the transfer zone.
Prime lifted his head out of the hatch and shouted, “Everyone who’s coming better find a place aboard.”
The Henry manning the gate controls glanced at Grace Home. Her face was grim, but she nodded and Graces, Henrys, Johns, and Caseys, all armed with rifles, grenades, pistols, and Kevlar jackets, climbed aboard the tank, clinging to handholds.
The Henry climbed aboard and shouted at John Prime, “I’m sending you through. Then I’ll transfer again in exactly sixty seconds. Then I do it at five-minute intervals. Get out of the zone fast, unless you need to come back right away.”
“Got it.”
The Henry got down. He counted down from five on his fingers and flipped the switch.
CHAPTER 41
Luigiantia reappeared dressed in a black cloak. She wore weapons and devices at her belt. Six soldiers escorted her into the huge bay where John had been wheeled and left to wait for an hour. The mushroom cloud had risen into the stratosphere and dissipated slowly as he and the orderly watched. Even so, the eastern skies remained dirty and dark.
After what seemed like ten minutes—though it could have been longer, they were so mesmerized by the explosion—a runner found them and shouted an order in the Vig language.
The orderly turned the wheelchair around and headed deeper into the facility. John saw black walls ahead as high as ten stories. It looked like an enclosed stadium or hangar.
They came to a checkpoint that separated the facility he had been kept in from the hangar. Four soldiers covered in battle gear and armed with weird-looking weapons took the orderly’s laminated ID. They stared at John, and their harsh words made it clear that they had no interest in letting him into the hangar. The orderly shrugged, intimidated.
Finally after some conversation on a two-way radio, they let the orderly push John into the hangar, but not without an escort of one soldier. John noticed that the technology of the enemy was eclectic. The two-way radios looked like something he could buy at an electronic supply store. Yet, the use of transdimensional technology was more advanced than anything his own universe might have. John had assumed that the level of technology he had seen of the enemy in 7351 had been to match the technology in that universe; anything too advanced would have stood out and caught attention. Other than the transfer technology—the iaciorator—there was no great differentiating technology—nothing that made him think these were superintelligent overlords.
The soldier led the orderly and John into a hallway. A pair of glass doors opened before them, and then closed with a hiss as they passed. They were in a small airlock. The pressure changed; John felt his ears pop. He smelled some sort of antiseptic smell. The doors ahead of them slid apart, and they were in the hangar itself.
Inside, the hangar was humongous. It was at least a kilometer long and three hundred meters tall. Huge machines were parked within the structure, and smaller machines, wheeled ones and fixed-wing aircraft, were parked beneath and around the larger ones. Some of them looked like blimps. One seemed to be the craft that had attacked and captured him.
“These are all transfer devices,” John said.
“What?” the orderly
said.
“Iaciorator,” he said. “These are all iaciorators.”
The orderly snorted. “What else would they be?”
“Is this where you make them?”
“Make them?”
“Your factory?”
“What are you talking about? No one makes iaciorators!”
I do, John thought to himself.
“Are these all of them? Are these all you have?”
The orderly was about to answer, but the soldier grunted. Apparently he didn’t want John to know the answer, but he had it now.
The Vigilari had found transfer technology just like he had. They controlled it, but the number of devices they had was limited. They couldn’t create it.
As he watched, a crew of twenty people ran toward one of the huge machines. They were evacuating. Their cache of transfer devices was in danger. Another nuclear device on this structure would put them out of business.
Everywhere, soldiers and crewmen were rushing toward the machines and preparing them for departure. The larger ones clearly could not be started and moved quickly. But the smaller ones could. A wheeled vehicle, sort of like a six-wheel earthmover, powered up and slowly rolled down the floor of the hangar. It entered an irising door that shut behind it. Another airlock. Why?
One of the large machines powered up with a shrill intensity and then disappeared with a boom. The hangar shook with its disappearance, from the air it had displaced suddenly rushing in.
Twice more large machines transferred out, and a half-dozen smaller machines disappeared, either using the airlock or transferring directly from the hangar to some other universe. No machines came back.
The evacuation looked haphazard and slow, as if they couldn’t believe they would ever be under attack.
Finally Luigiantia appeared with her escort. She pointed to one of the multiwheeled machines, and the orderly pushed John toward it. He was fairly certain he could now walk by himself if need be. His brain was clear of the drug. But he stayed put and even slouched a bit as if he were too weak to sit up straight.
A driver was already on board their machine. Luigiantia and the soldiers found chairs. The orderly strapped the wheelchair into its own spot in the center of the aisle. From there, he could see into the cockpit and out the front window.
John scanned the insides of the machine. It looked odd, as if it had been cobbled together. The metal of the floor and the walls had an odd bluish sheen. The chairs weren’t even bolted into it. Instead ropes and cords lashed the chairs in place.
