by Paul Melko
John knew associate professors were low on the totem pole, which was probably why Wilson was the only one in his office. And maybe a younger professor would be more willing to listen to what John had to say.
He knocked on the door.
“Come on in.”
He entered the office, found it cluttered on all sides with bookshelves stacked to bursting with papers and tomes but neat at the center, where a man sat at an empty desk reading a journal.
“You’re the first person to show for office hours today,” he said. Professor Wilson was in his late twenties, with black glasses, a sandy beard, and hair that seemed in need of a cut. He wore a gray jacket over a blue oxford.
“Yeah,” John said. “I have some questions, and I don’t know how to ask them.”
“On the homework set?”
“No. On another topic.” John was suddenly uncertain. “Parallel universes.”
Professor Wilson nodded. “Hmmm.” He took a drink of his coffee, then said, “Are you one of my students? Freshman physics?”
“No,” John said.
“Then what’s your interest in this? Are you from the creative writing department?”
“No, I…”
“Your question, while it seems simple to you, is extremely complex. Have you taken calculus?”
“Just half a semester…”
“Then you’ll never understand the math behind it. The authorities here are Hawking, Wheeler, Everett.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “You’re talking about quantum cosmology. Graduate-level stuff.”
John said quickly before Wilson could cut him off again, “But my question is more practical. Not theoretical.”
“Practical parallel worlds? Nonsense. Quantum cosmology states that there may be multiple universes out there, but the most likely one is ours, via the weak anthropic principle. Which means since we’re here, we can take it as a given that we exist. Well, it’s more complex than that.”
“But what about other universes, other people just like us?”
The man laughed. “Highly unlikely. Occam’s razor divests us of that idea.”
“How would I travel between universes?” John said, grasping at straws against the man’s brisk manner.
“You can’t; you won’t, not even remotely possible.”
“But what if I said it was? What if I knew for sure it was possible?”
“I’d say your observations were manipulated or you saw something that you interpreted incorrectly.”
John touched the wound in his calf where the cat-dog had bitten him. No, he’d seen what he’d seen. He’d felt what he’d felt. There was no doubt about that.
“I know what I saw.”
Wilson waved his hands. “I won’t debate your observations. It’s a waste of my time. Tell me what you think you saw.”
John paused, not sure where to start and what to tell, and Professor Wilson jumped in. “See? You aren’t sure what you saw, are you?” He leaned forward. “A physicist must have a discerning eye. It must be nurtured, tested, used to separate the chaff from the wheat.” He leaned back again, glanced out his window onto the quad below. “My guess is that you’ve seen too many Schwarzenegger movies or read too many books. You may have seen something peculiar, but before you start applying complex physical theories to explain it, you should eliminate the obvious. Now, I have another student of mine waiting, one I know is in my class, so I think you should run along and think about what you really saw.”
John turned and saw a female student standing behind him, waiting. His rage surged inside him. The man was patronizing him, making assumptions based on his questions and demeanor. Wilson was dismissing him.
“I can prove it,” he said, his jaw clenched.
The professor just looked at him, then beckoned the student into his office.
John turned and stalked down the hall. He was asking for help, and he’d been laughed at.
“I’ll show him,” John said. He took the steps two at a time and flung open the door to the quadrangle that McCormick Hall faced.
“Watch it, dude,” a student said, almost hit by the swinging door. John brushed past him.
John grabbed a handful of stones and, standing at the edge of the quadrangle, began flinging them at the window that he thought was Wilson ’s. He threw a dozen and started to draw a crowd of students, until Wilson looked out the window, opened it, and shouted, “Campus security will be along in a moment.”
John yelled back, “Watch this, you stupid bastard!” He toggled the device forward one universe and pulled the lever.
CHAPTER 8
John Prime awoke in the night, gripped by the same nightmare, trapped in darkness, no air, his body held rigid. He sat up and flung the covers away from him, unable to have anything touching him. He ripped off his pajamas as well and stood naked in the bedroom, just breathing. It was too hot; he opened the window and stood before it.
His breathing slowed as the heavy air of the October night brought the smells of the farm to him: manure and dirt. He leaned against the edge of the window, and his flesh rose in goose pimples.
It was a dream he’d had before, and he knew where it came from. He’d transferred near Lake Erie, on a small, deserted beach not far from Port Clinton, and ended up buried in a sand dune. He’d choked on the sand and would have died there if a fisherman hadn’t seen his arm flailing. He could have died. It was pure luck that the guy had been there to dig his head out. He’d never transferred near a body of water or a river again.
That hadn’t been the only time either. In Columbus, Ohio, he’d transferred into a concrete step, his chest and lower body stuck. He’d been unable to reach the toggle button on the device and had to wait until someone wandered by and called the fire department. They’d used a jackhammer to free him. When they’d turned to him, demanding how he’d been trapped, he’d feigned unconsciousness and transferred out from the ambulance.
After that, each time he touched the trigger he did so with the fear that he’d end up in something solid, unable to transfer out again, unable to breathe, unable to move. He was nauseated, his stomach kicking, his armpits soaked, before the jumps.
It was the cruelest of jokes. He had the most powerful device in the multiverse, and it was broken.
“No more,” he said to himself. “No more of that.” He had a family now, in ways he hadn’t expected.
The confrontation with his parents had been angry, then sad, and ended with all of them crying and hugging. He’d meant to be tough; he’d meant to tell his parents that he was an adult now and could take care of himself, but his resolve had melted in the face of their genuine care for him. He’d cried, goddamn it all.
He’d promised to reconsider the letter. He’d promised to talk with Gushman again. He’d promised to be more considerate to his parents. Was he turning into Johnny Farm Boy?
Prime had gone to bed empty, spent, his mind placid. But his subconscious had pulled the dream out. Smothering, suffocating, his body held inflexible as his lungs screamed. He shivered, then shut the window. His body had expelled all its heat.
He slipped back into bed and closed his eyes.
“I’m becoming Johnny Farm Boy,” he whispered. “Screw it all.”
Prime helped his father around the farm the next day. He took it as penance for upsetting his parents. They still thought he was Johnny, and so Prime had to act the part, at least until his projects started churning.
As they replaced some of the older wood in the fence, Prime said, “Dad, I’m going to need to borrow the truck on Saturday night.”
His father paused, a big smile on his face. “Got a big date, do you?” He said it in such a way that Prime realized he didn’t think his son really had a date.
“Yes. I’m taking Casey Nicholson out.”
“Casey?” His father held the plank as Prime hammered a nail into it. “Nice girl.”
“Yeah, I’m taking her to a movie at the Bijou.”
“The Bijou?�
�
“I mean the Strand,” Prime said, silently yelling at himself for sharing details that could catch him up. The movie theater was always called the Palace, Bijou, or Strand.
“Uh-huh.”
Prime took the shovel and began shoring up the next post.
“What movie you gonna see?”
Before he could stop himself, he answered, “Does it matter?”
His father paused, then laughed heartily. “Not if you’re in the balcony, it doesn’t.” Prime was surprised; then he laughed too.
“Don’t tell your mother I told you, but we used to go to the Strand all the time. I don’t think we watched a single movie.”
“Dad!” Prime said. “You guys were… make-out artists?”
“Only place we could go to do it,” he said with a grin. “Couldn’t use this place; your grandpa would have beat the tar out of me. Couldn’t use her place; your other grandpa would have shot me.” He eyed Prime and nodded. “You’re lucky we live in more liberal times.”
Prime laughed, recalling the universe where the free-love culture of the sixties hadn’t ended until AIDS had killed a quarter of the population and syphilis and gonorrhea had been contracted by 90 percent of the population by 1980. There dating involved elaborate chaperone systems and blood tests.
“I know I’m lucky.”
CHAPTER 9
The wind shoved at him, and, unprepared for it, John staggered into a snowdrift. He hurried to zip up his coat, then stuffed his hands into his pockets. Snow? It was only October.
He pulled himself up, leaning against the wind, and turned quickly to survey his locale. He was still on campus, but the place was desolate; the trees that had been holding leaves in the last universe were empty and black here. Dark clouds roiled above the roof of the physics building. The windows were broken out or boarded up, the doors chained shut. He smelled something burning, acrid. It was still the University of Toledo, but something was wrong here.
The snow was powdery and fine, and he guessed that it was near freezing and much colder with the windchill. John had no hat, and the wind pulled the heat from his forehead, giving him an instant headache. He turned away from the wind, but it still ripped through his coat. It was his fall coat, not his winter one. He walked with the wind, toward the center of campus.
He passed between two buildings. Ahead of him was a large open area, empty. Again the trees were black and dead, not like hibernating trees but like dead and rotten ones, as if they had not been alive for years.
He walked across the open space, staring up at the gnarled limbs. Ahead of him was a large building, the Student Union, he saw by the carved words above the door. Next to the door was a large sign, painted in red.
“The University of Toledo is closed during the current crisis until further notice.” It was dated three years prior. The sign was weathered and beaten.
What crisis would close the school? John wondered. He walked around the Student Union and found himself looking down onto a river that ran toward the northeast. He knew this was the Ottawa River and that it would ultimately dump into Lake Erie on the north side of the city. The river was frozen over.
John was cold, but he was growing accustomed to the wind. He followed the river to the southwest. There were no other footprints in the snow. No one had passed here since the snow had last fallen. He had no idea when that might have been. There was a bridge behind him, and it had not been plowed. But then university facilities would not bother plowing if the campus was closed.
Ahead of him he heard an engine running, evidence of someone alive in this universe. John ran through the snow, feeling it collect in his shoes at his ankles. He rounded a building and saw an army truck, surrounded by soldiers parked on one of the campus roads. They held weapons and watched a line of civilians standing at the back of the truck.
A sign was posted near the truck: “UT Food Drop-Off, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday.”
As each person shambled forward, a soldier dropped two cans into their hands or their bag if they’d brought one. It was a food line.
John stood near the back of the line and watched.
Someone nudged him and said, “Line starts back there.” John turned on the man, dressed in a bulky red coat and toboggan hat. Even under the coat, John could tell the man was thin.
“I’m not here for food,” John said.
“No other reason to be out,” the man replied. “Line’s in back.”
“What’s happening here?” he asked.
“Food, maybe enough to last until I get up there. Probably not.”
“Why won’t you get any food?”
“ ’Cause I didn’t get up at four A.M. like the rest of these yahoos. I slept in and so I’m late. Which ain’t so bad. The wife has a card for the Ottawa Hills High School drop. We’re right by there, so we’re always first in line.”
John couldn’t guess how this universe came to be. Food lines and ration cards were not something that happened in the United States.
“Don’t you think it’s early for winter?” John asked.
“Early?” The man laughed. “It ain’t early for winter. It’s late for summer. Three years late.” He nudged the guy in front of him. “You hear that, Rudy? Boy thinks winter is here early.”
Rudy turned and cast an eye on John, then grunted. “Boy looks well fed, Stan.”
Stan looked at John then, his eyes suddenly appraising him. “You a hoarder, son? That why you don’t need food?”
John didn’t like the way things were going, so he walked forward, knowing the two couldn’t follow him or else they’d lose their places in line.
He stood away from the line and watched as person after person took their two cans of food. John saw that the cans were soup. The truck held dozens of boxes of Campbell ’s Chicken Noodle Soup.
A soldier saw him, noticed that he was watching, and stepped up to him.
“Why you loitering?” he said, his weapon held against his chest.
“I’m waiting, sir. Not making any trouble,” John said.
The soldier nodded, relaxing. “Don’t wait too long, okay?”
John nodded. The soldier stood there watching the line, not moving back to where he’d been standing. John ventured a question. “Do you think you’ll have enough food?”
The soldier glanced at the truck, then at the length of the line. “I hope so. It’s no fun when there isn’t. Last week we had oranges-I have no idea where they came from-and we ran out. We had to push the crowd back and run before they tipped over the truck.”
“Don’t oranges come from Florida?” John asked.
“Not anymore. They plowed the last of the fields under last year. Planting wheat and soybeans. Farms in Kansas didn’t get one crop in this year.”
“It’s nuclear winter, isn’t it?” John said, half to himself.
The soldier looked at him. “Course it is. What do you think?”
John shrugged, then said, “What do you think caused it, in your opinion? What did you hear through the army?”
John and the soldier watched as a young woman and her daughter, maybe three or four years old, took their two cans. John could have eaten two cans of soup in a single sitting. How could the two of them and whoever else was at home survive on that?
“Same as was in the papers. Fucking Pakistanis. I can’t blame the Indians, though their bombs did all the damage. If someone nuked Washington, I’d say nuke them right back. But the last count I heard was one hundred and seventeen bombs. Not a centimeter of Pakistan worth living on and the rest of the world cold.”
John nodded. A nuclear winter was the result of the debris kicked up by nuclear explosions into the atmosphere. The dirt particles, so small by themselves, in bulk curtained the world from sunlight, causing a long winter. In this case, it had lasted three years already. A similar thing had wiped out the dinosaurs. A meteor had struck the Earth, cooling it enough that most of the dinosaurs died out.
“Any idea when it’ll be o
ver?” John asked. A nuclear winter would end slowly as the debris washed out of the sky.
“They’re still saying a decade before it warms up again. I heard the scientists have some ideas on how to clean up the sky. Maybe it’ll be less than that, but I ain’t counting on it. We’ll be driving through Texas into Mexico soon; I just know it.”
“War?”
“Hell, yes. Mexico ’s gonna be a paradise. I have a cousin in Dallas who says the temperature never got above sixty this summer. Who’d have thought it? I spent a summer there when I was a kid. Hottest place I’ve ever been, just gullies and cactuses. Everything melting in the sun. If Texas is getting cold, then the only place to go is south, just like the Canadians did to us.”
An officer waved at the soldier, told him to come back to the truck. They’d stopped handing soup out for the moment, and John saw why. The truck had been only half as full as he thought. The boxes filled only the back of the truck. The front was empty.
The soldier saw what was up as well. He motioned to John. “Step on back, friend. You might want to move along.”
John backpedaled away as he felt the sound travel up the line like a force. “No food,” he heard. “That’s the last of it.” And the line of waiting people transformed into a throng of voices. They surged at the truck, a hundred angry men and women.
“On the truck,” the officer said. The soldiers stopped the advance with their weapons, lowering their rifles and aiming at the group. John didn’t want to be in the mob, nor between them and the soldiers.
“Stop right there, people! More food is on the way,” the officer said.
“Liar!”
“We’ve been waiting for hours.”
The officer motioned all the soldiers into the truck, and the truck jumped away from the crowd. “More food will be here soon!” he shouted.
