The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

Grace rolled her eyes at him. “Build a pinball machine, of course.”

  “What? No!”

  “It’s not like you can stop us,” Grace said. “You already explained it to us. We’ll just do it without you if you don’t want to do it.”

  “But-”

  They were almost to Benchley Hall. Grace stopped suddenly. “You’re going the wrong way,” she said. “You live over on the other side of campus.”

  “I’m meeting… someone,” John said. It was his and Casey’s first date in a week, since the dance. She’d been busy with a project, and every time he’d called he’d gotten her roommate, and finally he’d just stopped calling, until Casey called him. He felt so… stupid with the emotions running through him.

  “Who?” Grace said.

  “My… friend,” John said. He wasn’t even sure how to refer to her. What were they? Friends? A couple, after just three dates?

  “Your friend who?” Grace said.

  “Casey,” John said.

  “Oh, Casey,” Grace said.

  “What does that mean?” John asked.

  “Nothing.”

  John glanced at Henry, who was staring off into the trees.

  “John!”

  He turned to see Casey walking down the sidewalk behind him. She lunged at him, wrapping her arms around him and kissing his cheek. He felt suddenly embarrassed.

  “Hey, Casey,” Grace said. “So…”

  “Let’s go,” John said.

  “So, what?”

  “So, you two dating, I guess? Going steady?”

  Casey said nothing, and John felt himself color.

  Casey finally said, “Oh, I don’t know. He’s just a rebound boy, so I doubt there’s any hope.”

  “I’m standing right here!” John cried.

  “Well, you should know these things,” Casey said with a smile. She kissed him again. “What are you guys doing?”

  “Nothing,” John said.

  “Discussing our pinball project,” Grace said.

  “Oh, yeah, pinball,” Casey said. “That sounds interesting.” She looked at John. “Let’s go get something to eat. I’m so done with dorm food.”

  “Right,” John said, happy to lead her away from Grace and Henry.

  A few dozen meters away, Casey asked, “Explain this pinball thing again?”

  John groaned.

  They sat across from each other in Giovanni’s, sipping milk shakes.

  “You perplex me, John Rayburn,” Casey said after a few moments of silence.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You can dance, which I like. You’re smart, which I also like. You have a cool car, which is a small plus. Yet…”

  “Yet?”

  “Your reaction to the police.”

  “It’s no big deal-”

  “Hold on. The police show up, and the worst that would happen is a ticket, and you run us out the door, where we hide in the shadows, then drive off out of there. What gives?”

  John shrugged, searching for something to say. “I just don’t like that kind of attention.”

  “What kind? Police kind?”

  “Yeah, I don’t want to be hassled by the police.”

  “Why?”

  “I just don’t. I had some run-ins with the law, and it’s better if I don’t have any more,” John said, the lie coming off his lips too easily.

  “ ‘Run-ins with the law,’ ” Casey repeated.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s so Glitzdale,” Casey said with a laugh.

  “Glitzdale?”

  “Didn’t you ever watch that? It was on in the nineties. ‘What evil lies in the heart of suburbia?’ Olena and Magdelene? You never watched that?”

  “I must have missed it,” John said. The TV show didn’t ring any bells with him at all.

  “Did you live in a cave?” Casey asked.

  “While I was running from the law,” John replied, trying to take a light tone.

  Casey laughed.

  “No, really?” she said.

  John realized she wasn’t going to let it go.

  “I was a bad boy, you know,” John said. “I brewed my own black powder. I wired my own detonators.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did,” John said. He had. Everything up to that point was true, and what he was about to say was almost true. “But I made too much.”

  “How much?”

  “Enough to blow up my dad’s barn.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I blew it up. Completely.”

  “Were there animals inside?”

  “No, it was empty, and mostly ruined. I got arrested. And my dad was so mad, he wouldn’t bail me out. The local FBI agents investigated, and I got booked for terrorism.”

  “Terrorism?”

  “Yeah, it was a mess. I’m on probation,” John said. “For another couple years. So I can’t get in trouble, at all.”

  “Oh,” Casey said. “Well, that makes sense.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I shouldn’t have taken you to the dance,” Casey said. “But you didn’t tell me!”

  “It’s embarrassing,” John said. “And we were only on our first date.”

  Casey nodded, grinning. “It’s dangerous for you to be out anywhere,” she said. “We need to get you to a safe place.”

  “Like what? Canada?”

  “No, I bet Grace would hide you in her closet.”

  “Stop it!”

  “Oh, you’ve been dealing with this all your life, I bet. Handsome farm boy, a bit of a rebel, explosives expert, smart. You must have to beat the girls away with a stick.”

  John blushed. “Not really. Not like you.”

  “A few girls, but mostly boys,” Casey said with a grin.

  John blushed deeper. “I meant-”

  “I know,” Casey said. “Now that she knows about us, maybe she can focus on Henry.”

  “Henry?”

  “You’re a little oblivious, aren’t you?”

  “I guess so. Henry and Grace?”

  “He’s crushing, big-time.”

  “I guess,” John said. It was his turn to be sly. “What does Grace know about ‘us’?”

  “We’re dating, didn’t I tell you?”

  “I couldn’t even get ahold of you all week.”

  “I do go to school,” she said. “But the weekends are all yours. Until you screw it up.”

  “Won’t be long.”

  Casey grinned, and their conversation turned to other things. At the end of the evening, he found her in his arms on his grungy couch, her lips on his.

  The lab was huge: a football field-sized enclosure off the engineering building, with additional bays. The main area housed a dozen experiments: the subcritical nuclear pile that was roped off, a miniature tokamak, a medium energy collider, a supercool lab, a metallurgy lab, and a machine shop. One of the bays was the freshman lab, broken into six benches, all of them labeled and cluttered with junk. One said: “Pinball.”

  “You already got us a lab area?” John said.

  “If I didn’t, someone else would have taken it,” Grace said. The table was empty, except for a pile of empty boxes some other team had thrown on it. “There have already been inquiries on our space. Use it or lose it, you know.”

  John shook his head. “Do you just not have any other ideas for projects?” he asked.

  Grace grinned. “We have lots of ideas. They all stink,” she said. “So, what do you think?”

  John looked around the labs. There was a Geiger counter on one table. An X-ray machine was roped off across the bay. Light microscopes sat atop workbenches. A scanning electron microscope was hidden somewhere. He realized that his poking at the device with a jeweler’s tool kit was a waste of time. Here were tools that he could use to probe the inside of the device, without opening it up.

  And he could have access to it all.

  “Fine,” John said. “We’ll do it.”

  He sat at the table in h
is apartment and stared at the blank page of the notebook. The device was on the table. It grinned at him, its teeth an LED green. The jeweler’s kit lay open but unused. It was his habit to sit every night and think about the device, what it did, and what he had done with it. All of that was written in the notebook. But tonight his mind was elsewhere.

  He found himself drawing freehand, not the device but rather a pinball machine. He’d played it so much in high school. There’d been one at the Lawson’s where he bought comic books. He’d ride into town on his bike, spend his meager allowance on books and pinball, milking high-score extra games from a single quarter. He’d played a lot of games, and he remembered once when the machine was broken the repairman had had the front open like the hood of a car. Inside had been a hundred lights, a mile of wire, and a lot of dust. Mesmerizing, but that didn’t mean he knew how a pinball machine actually worked. But when it came right down to it, it was freshman physics.

  It was a ball on a slanted plain. Gravity was the enemy. When he thought of it that way, it became an experiment in classical physics. He had been reminded of pinball during physics lab, because the ball followed Newtonian laws of motion. The ball was easy: It was ball-bearing. The plane was easy: It was a slab of wood with obstacles. Add lights, flippers, bumpers, and scoring and you’re there.

  John started making a parts list under the drawing.

  He jumped when the doorbell rang.

  “John, it’s me!”

  “Shit!” It was Casey. He stared at the device sitting on the table. She couldn’t see it. He couldn’t explain it if she did. He grabbed it and ran to the bedroom. He shoved it into the lockbox and turned the key.

  “John!”

  “Coming!” He threw the lockbox onto the floor of the closet.

  As he ran past the kitchen table, he realized the tools were still out. He folded them up in their leather satchel.

  “John, I see you through the peephole! Open up!”

  “I’m… I’m cleaning up.”

  “Don’t bother. We’re going out.”

  John tossed the tool kit on top of the refrigerator, then unlocked the door.

  Casey was dressed in a miniskirt and leather jacket with dangling leather bangles. John couldn’t say he liked the local styles, but Casey looked good enough in anything.

  “You’re not dressed,” she said flatly.

  “I-Uh, I was… working?”

  “Yeah, I figured.” She waved her hands. “Go, go on; get dressed. We have to be there in an hour.”

  “Right.”

  John jumped in the shower, sprinkling more than showering. When he came out of the bathroom, Casey was paging through his notebook. He’d left it on the table.

  “What’s this?” she said.

  “Just a notebook.” He reached out to take it from her.

  “These are pretty elaborate drawings,” she said. “Very crisp, very clear.”

  “It’s nothing!” John cried. He snatched the notebook from her hands, slapping it shut. He threw it through the door of his bedroom, where it sailed with a ripple of pages.

  Casey looked at him calmly. “Fine, it’s nothing. You ready?” There was a tone to her words that chilled him, that ebbed his anger and made him feel cautious.

  All night Casey was aloof, hardly dancing at all. Instead of going back to his apartment, she asked to be dropped off at the dorm. John watched her enter Benchley Hall and realized he’d made a superb mistake in letting her see the notebook. No one could know about the device.

  “Here’s the parts list I came up with,” John said. It’d been relatively easy to come up with. Flippers were a chunk of wood attached to a solenoid. Bumpers were plastic wrapped in rubber with a solenoid inside. The coin box could be bought from whoever made them for vending machines. The balls were steel ball bearings. The launcher was a spring and rod. He’d need a sheet of glass, power, a stand, wood. The first design would be simple.

  Grace looked at the list, then reached for his drawing.

  “Your perspective’s off,” she said.

  “I barely got a B on my first drafting assignment,” John said.

  “I’ll get someone to redraw these,” she said. Henry took the diagram from Grace and grunted.

  “Machine shop,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Grace said. “We’ll need some time on the lathe and we’ll need the soldering tools.”

  They were standing at their table in the lab. All around them was the sound of voices and tools clinking. The thrum of some equipment somewhere vibrated the floor. Casey had wanted to join them but had begged off at the last minute. “You guys can handle the tech. I’ll handle the other stuff.” What other stuff was there? John wondered. And how had she gotten on the team?

  “Why is it called pinball again?” Grace asked. “There’s no pins on this list. I see a ball, but no pins.”

  “Steelball,” Henry chimed in. John realized he was suggesting a new name.

  “I don’t know why they call it pinball,” John said. “They just do.”

  “I’m sure it’ll become apparent as we move forward,” Grace said. “Where’s Casey? Everything all right between you two?”

  “What?” John said. “She had something to do, okay? Why do you think there’s something wrong?”

  Grace looked at him strangely, and John realized he’d yelled at her.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to raise my voice.”

  “Yeah, no problem.”

  “Hold on,” Henry said. He disappeared into a storeroom. John heard things banging around. Henry emerged with a huge piece of fiberboard. He hauled it over to their lab table and John helped him heft it onto the table.

  “Can we use this?” John asked. It was about the right size for the play board.

  “Everything in there is fair game,” Grace said.

  John took out a measuring tape. He marked off a rectangle a meter wide and two meters long. He held his hands along the width and flipped imaginary flippers. Maybe a little skinnier, he thought.

  “We’ll need a lacquer to smooth the surface, and paint,” he said.

  Henry had found a block of wood in the skunk works room. He propped the first plank up, giving it a five-degree angle. Then he grinned at Grace and John. He pulled a steel ball bearing, about two centimeters across, from his pocket and held it at the top of the plank.

  “Ready?” he asked, then let the ball go.

  It rolled down the plank, gained speed, and flew off the end. John caught it in his palm.

  “Cool,” Henry said.

  “I love potential energy,” Grace said.

  John found himself grinning too. It had been no sort of test at all, no prototype of any value, but the physics was true. It could work.

  They missed dinner, and by the time they looked up from their drawings and list of parts, the lab was empty. They agreed to meet daily after class, then parted company.

  John went back to his apartment, retrieved the device, and returned to the lab. Since Casey was busy that night, he figured he’d do something he’d been meaning to do for a long time.

  The lab was still empty when he unlocked the door. Now that he had a key, he could stop by any time he wanted. He walked the entire length of the room to be certain, but it was truly empty.

  John sat at the row of light microscopes and turned the first one on.

  He removed the device from his bag and placed it under the microscope.

  The light microscope only gave an increase in resolution of a few times, but it was better than the magnifying glass he had at the apartment.

  He peered at the gray surface of the device, looking for anything that was out of the ordinary, looking for any clue.

  Centimeter by centimeter, he examined the surface.

  One hand on the scope, one hand holding a pencil, he drew close-ups of the controls. But even with the microscope, he saw nothing that he hadn’t seen before.

  Then he turned it on its side. The line was a hair-width wide, and ran t
he circumference of the device’s disk. Was this how the device came together? he wondered.

  He spun the device slowly under the scope, following the line. It remained the same hair-width wide, but then he saw the scratches.

  They were tiny, but a dozen of them radiated from the crack, as if a tiny tool had been used to dig there. Why?

  The door opened and John jumped.

  “Hello there, working late, I see.”

  John reached for the device to hide it but then felt that would look too suspicious. He turned, smiling. Professor Wilson stood by the door.

  “Uh, yeah,” John said. He’d had almost no contact with his advisor and didn’t want any now.

  “You’re the other Wilson, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, I am,” John said, regretting for the umpteenth time that Wilson was the name he’d latched onto when he’d met his faux father in this universe.

  “What’s that you’re looking at?” Professor Wilson asked.

  “Nothing, nothing important.”

  Wilson peered around John at the device sitting on the microscope’s stage. He stared at it, then nodded slowly. John refused to explain or say more or remove it from sight.

  “How are classes? Too hard? You were admitted with just a GED, correct? You and I had some question on how you’d handle the core physics classes.”

  John gritted his teeth. He’d had no question of how he’d do, but Wilson had.

  “No problems,” John said. “I’ve aced all the quizzes in physics and physics lab.”

  “Good, good.” Wilson paused, still staring at the device. “Carry on.”

  After Wilson had disappeared, John packed up the device and exited as quickly as he could.

  They built the prototype out of the wood plank. Henry found a dozen more ball bearings at a local industrial supply store. John carved flippers out of wood and placed them so that a player could flip them from underneath. It was more work than an electric flipper, but it got the idea across. As he used the rasp and the file to carve the flipper, John realized that the shape and length of the flipper could be varied. The prototype was done by the end of the week.

  It was clunky and hard work to play, but it was fun. John’s wrists ached after whacking at the flippers all afternoon. The crew-Henry, Grace, and John-spent the evening talking about how each component would work. Casey was busy with a project, but John kept glancing at the door, expecting her to show. After the first night, John added a spring launch mechanism, so they didn’t have to drop the ball in at the top.