The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

“Why?” Joe Patadorn was the foreman for an industrial design shop. He scratched his bald head with the nub of his pencil. He was dressed in blue coveralls with “Joe” stitched on the breast. The office and shop near the river smelled of machine oil. A pad of paper on his drafting board was covered in pencil sketches of cubes. “Rotate against what? It’s a cube.”

  “Against itself! Against itself! Each column and each row rotates.”

  “Seems like it could get caught up with itself.”

  “Yes! If it’s not a cube when you try to turn it, it’ll not turn.”

  “And this is a toy people will want to play with?”

  “I’ll handle that part.”

  Joe shrugged. “Fine. It’s your money.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “We’ll have a prototype in two weeks.”

  They shook on it.

  His errands were finally done in Toledo. His lawyer was doing the patent searches and Patadorn was building the prototype. If Prime was lucky, he could have the first batch of Cubes ready to ship in a month. Too late for Christmas, but he didn’t need a holiday for the fad to catch on.

  From the bus stop he hiked the three miles to the farm, and stashed his contracts in the loft with the money there. When he was climbing down, he saw his dad standing next to the stalls.

  “Hey. Am I in time for dinner?” Prime asked.

  His father didn’t reply, and then Prime realized that he was in trouble.

  His father’s face was red, his cheeks puffed out. He stood in overalls, his fists at his hips.

  “In the house.” The words were soft, punctuated.

  “Dad-”

  “In the house, now.” His father lifted an arm, pointing.

  Prime went, and as he entered the house, he was angry too. How dare Bill order him around?

  His mother was waiting at the kitchen table, her fingers folded in a clenched, white mound.

  “Where were you?” his father demanded.

  “None of your business,” Prime said.

  “While you’re in my house, you’ll answer my questions!” his father roared.

  “I’ll get my things and go,” Prime said.

  “Bill…,” his mother said. “We’ve discussed this.”

  His father looked away, then said, “He pranced into the barn like he’d done nothing wrong.”

  His mother turned to him. “Where were you, John?”

  He opened his mouth to rail, but instead he said, “ Toledo. I had to… cool off.”

  His mother nodded. “That’s important.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you feeling better now?”

  “Yes… no.” Suddenly he was sick to his stomach. Suddenly he was more angry with himself than with his father.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay what you did, and we’re glad you’re back. Bill?”

  His father grunted, then said, “Son, we’re glad you’re back.” And then he took Prime in his big farmer arms and squeezed him.

  Prime sobbed before he could fight it down, and then he was bawling like he hadn’t since he was ten.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.” The words were muffled in his shoulder. Prime’s throat was tight.

  “It’s okay. “It’s okay.”

  His mother joined them and they held on to him for a long time. Prime found he didn’t want to let go. He hadn’t hugged his parents in a long time.

  CHAPTER 7

  John’s arms flailed and his left foot hit the ground, catching his weight. He groaned as his leg collapsed under him. He rolled across the grass.

  Grass? he thought as the pain erupted in his knee. He sat up, rocking as he held his knee to his chest. He’d been on the steps of the library and now he was on a plain. The wind blew the smell of outside: dirt, pollen, clover.

  He tried to stretch his leg, but the pain was too much. He leaned back, pulling off his backpack with one hand, and looked up at the sky, breathing deeply. It hurt like hell.

  The device had worked. He had changed universes again. Only this universe had no library, no Findlay, Ohio. This universe didn’t seem to have anything but grass. He fell because the steps he’d been standing on weren’t in the universe he was in now.

  He checked the readout on the device. He was in 7535. He’d gone forward one universe.

  John looked around him but didn’t see anything through the green-yellow grass. It rustled in the wind, making sounds like sandpaper rubbing on wood.

  John stood gingerly on his other leg. He was on a broad plain, stretching for a good distance in every direction. There were small groves of trees to the north and east. To the west and south, the grass stretched as far as he could see.

  There was no library to use to figure out what was different in this universe. No humans at all, maybe. A Mayan empire? If he wanted to find the differences, he’d have to do some field research.

  He sat back down. No, he thought. He had to get back to his life. John Prime had some answers to give and a price to pay. It was Sunday afternoon. He still had half a day to figure out how to get back to his universe.

  His knee was swelling, so he took off his coat and shirt. He ripped his T-shirt into long strips and used that to wrap his knee as tightly as possible. It wasn’t broken, but he may have sprained it.

  He took the sandwich that he had packed on Saturday from his backpack and unwrapped it. He finished it in several bites and rinsed it down with some of the water in his water bottle. The taste of the sandwich made him angry. Prime was eating his food and sleeping in his bed.

  John spent the afternoon nursing his knee and considering what he knew, what he thought he knew, and what Prime had told him. The latter category he considered biased or false. What he knew, however, was growing.

  Universe 7535 was the second one he’d visited. The device clearly still worked. His going from 7534 to 7535 proved that.

  It was also support for his theory that the device only allowed travel to universes higher in number than the one a traveler currently resided in. But not proof. Hypotheses required repeatable experimental proof. He’d used the device to move forward through two universes. He’d have to do it a couple more times before he was certain that was the way the device worked.

  He took a blade of grass and chewed on it. This was an unspoiled universe, he thought. Which gave him another piece of data. Universes sequentially next to each other could have little in common. John couldn’t even begin to guess what had happened for a universe to not have North America settled by the Europeans.

  There’d been no library steps here, so he had fallen three meters to the ground. More data: There was no guarantee that a man-made object in one universe would exist in the next. Nor even natural objects. Hills were removed or added by machines. Rivers were dammed and moved. Lakes were created. What would happen if he jumped to the next universe and the steps were there? Would he be trapped in the cement that formed the steps? Would he die of asphyxiation, unable to press the lever because he was encased in the library steps?

  The thought of being entombed, blind and without air, horrified him. It was no way to die.

  He would have to be careful when he changed universes. He’d have to be as certain as possible that there was nothing solid where he was going. But how?

  Movement caught his eye and he looked up to see a large beast walking in the distance. It was so tall he saw it from his seat in the grass. A cross between a rhinoceros and a giraffe, it munched at the leaves of a tree. It was gray, with legs like tree limbs, a face like a horse. Leaves and branches gave way quickly to its gobbling teeth.

  No animal like that existed in his universe.

  John watched, amazed. He wished he had a camera. A picture of this beast would be a nice addition to his scrapbook. Would it be worth cash? he wondered.

  Ponderously the beast moved to the next tree in the grove.

  John looked around him with more interest. This was no longer a desolate North America. There were animals here that no lon
ger existed in his time line. This universe was more radically different than he could have imagined.

  The wave of the grass to the west caught his attention. The grass bobbed against the wind, and he was suddenly alert. Something was in the grass not twenty meters from him. He realized that large herbivores meant large carnivores. Bears, mountain lions, and wolves could be roaming these plains. And he had no weapons. Worse still, he had a bum knee.

  He looked around for a stick or a rock, but there was nothing. Quickly he gathered the notebook into the backpack. He pulled his coat on.

  Was the thing closer? he wondered. He glanced at the grass around him. Why hadn’t he thought of that earlier?

  John felt beneath his shirt for the device. He glanced down and toggled the universe counter up one to 7536. But he dared not pull the lever. He could be under the library right now.

  He looked around him, tried to orient himself. The library entrance faced east, toward the Civil War Memorial. If he traveled east sixty meters, he’d be in the middle of the park and it was unlikely that anything would be in his way. It was the safest place he could think of to do the transfer.

  Suppressing a groan, he moved off in an easterly direction, counting his steps.

  At fifty-two steps he heard a sound behind him. A doglike creature stood five meters away from him in his wake in the grass. It had a dog’s snout and ears, but its eyes were slits and its back was arched more like a cat’s. It had no tail. Its fur was tan with black spots the size of quarters along its flank.

  John froze, considering. It was small, the size of a border collie. He was big prey, and it may just have been curious about him.

  “Boo-yah!” he cried, waved his arms. It didn’t move, just stared at him with its slit eyes. Then two more appeared behind it.

  It was a pack animal. Pack animals could easily bring down an animal larger than a pack member. John saw three of them, but there could be a dozen hidden in the grass. He turned and ran.

  The things took him from behind, nipping his legs, flinging themselves onto his back. He fell, his leg screaming. He felt weight on his back, so he let the straps of his backpack slide off. He crawled forward another meter. Hoping he’d come far enough, he pulled the lever on the device.

  A car horn screeched and a massive shape bore down on him. John tried to scramble away, but his hand was stuck. As his wrist flexed the wrong way, pain shot up his arm.

  He looked up, over his shoulder, into the grille of a car. John hadn’t made it into the park. He was still in the street, the sidewalk a meter in front of him.

  John got to his knees. His hand was embedded in the asphalt. He planted his feet and pulled. Nothing happened except pain.

  “Buddy, you okay?” The driver was standing with his door open. John’s eyes were just over the hood of the man’s car.

  John didn’t reply. Instead he pulled again and his hand tore loose with a spray of tar and stones. The impression of his palm was cast in the asphalt.

  The man came around his car and took John’s arm. “You better sit down. I’m really sorry about this. You came outta nowhere.” The man led him to the curb, then looked back and said, “Jesus. Is that your dog?”

  John saw the head and shoulders of one of the cat-dogs. The transfer had caught only half the beast. Its jaws were open, revealing yellowed teeth. Its milky eyes were glazed over. Blood from its severed torso flowed across the street. A strand of intestine had unraveled onto the pavement.

  “Oh, man. I killed your dog,” the motorist cried.

  John said between breaths, “Not… my… dog… Chasingme.”

  The man looked around. “There’s Harvey,” he said, pointing to a police officer sitting in the donut shop that John had eaten in that morning. Well, not the same one, John thought. This wasn’t the same universe, since this car was gas powered.

  “Hey, Harvey,” the man yelled, waving his arms. Someone nudged the police officer and he turned, looking at the blood spreading across the street.

  Harvey was a big man, but he moved quickly. He dropped his donut and coffee in a trash can at the door of the shop. As he approached he brushed his hands on his pants.

  “What happened, Roger?” he said. He glanced at John, who was too winded and too sore to move. He looked at the cat-dog on the street. “What the hell is that?”

  He kicked it with his boot.

  “This young man was being chased, I think. I nearly clipped him and I definitely got that thing. What is it? A badger?”

  “Whatever it is, you knocked the crap out of it.” Harvey turned to John. “Son, you okay?”

  “No,” John said. “I twisted my knee and my wrist. I think that thing was rabid. It chased me from around the library.”

  “Well, I’ll be,” said the officer. He squatted next to John. “Looks like it got a piece of your leg.” He lifted up John’s pant leg, pointed to the line of bite marks. “Son, you bought yourself some rabies shots.”

  The officer called Animal Control for the carcass and an ambulance for John. The white-uniformed Animal Control man spent some time looking for the other half of the cat-dog. To Harvey ’s questions about what it was he shrugged. “Never seen nothing like it.” When he lifted up the torso, John saw the severed arm straps of his backpack on the ground. He groaned. His backpack, with seventeen hundred dollars in cash, was in the last universe under the other half of the cat-dog.

  A paramedic cleaned John’s calf, looked at his wrist and his knee. She touched his forehead gingerly. “What’s this?”

  “Ow,” he said, wincing.

  “You may have a concussion. Chased by a rabid dog into a moving car. Quite a day you’ve had.”

  “It’s been a less than banner day,” John said.

  “ ‘Banner day,’ ” she repeated. “I haven’t heard that term in a long time. I think my grandmother said that.”

  “Mine too.”

  They loaded him into the ambulance on a stretcher. By the time the door had shut on the ambulance, quite a few people had gathered. John kept expecting someone to shout his name in recognition, but no one did. Maybe he didn’t exist in this universe.

  They took him to Roth Hospital, and it looked just like it did in his universe, an institutional building from the fifties. He sat for fifteen minutes on an examining table off of the emergency room. Finally, an older doctor came in and checked him thoroughly.

  “Lacerations on the palm. The wrist has a slight sprain. Minor. The hand is fine.” Looking at John’s knee, he added, “Sprain of the right knee. We’ll wrap that. You’ll probably need crutches for a couple days.”

  A few minutes later, a woman showed up with a clipboard. “You’ll need to fill these forms out,” she said. “Are you over eighteen?”

  John shook his head, thinking fast. “My parents are on the way.”

  “Did you call them?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll need their insurance information.”

  John stood wincing and peered out the door until she disappeared. Then he limped the other way until he found an emergency exit door. He pushed it open and hobbled off into the parking lot, the bleating of the siren behind him.

  John shivered in the morning cold. His knee was the size of a melon, throbbing from the night spent on the library steps. The bell tower struck eight; Prime would be on his way to school right now. He’d be heading for English class. John hoped the bastard had done the essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

  John had slept little, his knee throbbing, his heart aching. He’d lost the seventeen hundred dollars Prime had given him, save eighty dollars in his wallet. He’d lost his backpack. His clothes were ripped and tattered. He’d skipped out on his doctor’s bill. He was as far from home as he’d ever been.

  He needed help.

  He couldn’t stay here; the hospital probably called the police on his unpaid bill. He needed a fresh universe to work in.

  Limping, he walked across to the Ben Franklin, buying new dungarees and a backpack.r />
  Then he stood in the center of the town square and waited for a moment when no one was around. He toggled the universe counter upward and pressed the lever.

  John climbed the steps to the library. This universe looked just like his own. He didn’t really care how it was different. All he wanted was to figure out how to get home. He’d tried the device a dozen times in the square, but the device would not allow him to go backward, not even to universes before his own.

  He needed help; he needed professional help. He needed to understand about parallel universes.

  As he browsed the card catalog, it soon became apparent the Findlay library was not the place to do a scientific search on hypothetical physics. All he could find were a dozen science fiction novels that were no help at all.

  He was going to have to go to Toledo. U of T was his second choice after Case. It was a state school and close. Half his friends would be going there. It had a decent, if not stellar, physics department.

  He took the Silver Mongoose to Toledo, dozing along the way. A local brought him to the campus.

  The Physics Library was a single room with three tables. Stacks lined all the walls and extended into the middle of the room, making it seem cramped and tiny. It smelled of dust, just like the Findlay Public Library.

  “Student ID?”

  John turned to the bespectacled student sitting at the front desk. For a moment, he froze, then patted his front pockets. “I left it at the dorm.”

  The student looked peeved, then said, “Well, bring it next time, frosh.” He waved John in.

  “I will.”

  John brought the catalog up on a terminal and searched for “Parallel Universe.” There wasn’t much. In fact, there was nothing at all in the Physics Library. He was searching for the wrong subject. Physicists didn’t call them parallel universes of course. TV and movies called them parallel universes.

  He couldn’t think what else to search for. Perhaps there was a more formal term for what he was looking for, but he had no idea what it was. He’d have to ask his dumb questions directly of a professor.

  John left the library and walked down the second-floor hall, looking at nameplates above doors. Billboards lined the walls, stapled and tacked with colloquia notices, assistantship postings, apartments to share. A lot of the offices were empty. At the end of the hall was the small office of Dr. Frank Wilson, Associate Professor of Physics, lit and occupied.