The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

“That’s not why we’re here,” John said.

  “Good thing. What then?”

  “We have a game. We’d like to put it in your bar.”

  The guy looked at them, then said, “I don’t want any trouble, so I don’t run any slots here.”

  “It’s not gambling,” John said. “It’s like a video game, but mechanical, sort of like pool.”

  “A game.” He pulled a long puff on his cigarette. “You got a license from the city?”

  “No.”

  “You work with the gaming union?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t think so.”

  “But…”

  “I’m sure it’s great, kids, but, one, I don’t have the room, and, two, I don’t have the time for the trouble it’ll cause me.” He lifted his hand, pointing to the door. “Thanks for asking.”

  John turned to go, but Casey said, “We made fifty bucks in one night, and that was when it was in a lab on campus.”

  “Fifty bucks?”

  “In quarters,” she said.

  “My jukebox makes seven dollars a night. How could you make fifty? You’re shitting me.”

  “You want to see it?” Casey asked.

  “You got it open to the public tonight?” he asked.

  “A small crowd,” John said. “We can’t keep it where it is.”

  The man nodded. “I’ll stop by.”

  Outside on the sidewalk, John said, “You did good, Casey.”

  She smiled and said, “I know.”

  The lab bay was packed and John was worried that it would attract campus security, but it didn’t. And the bar owner finally showed up, wading through the throng.

  “Ray Paquelli,” he said, offering his hand to John.

  “John Wilson.”

  Ray looked around, counting the people. He didn’t look too closely at the game, and John suspected he didn’t care.

  “How long is a game?”

  “Three minutes, seven max.”

  “How much per game?”

  “Fifty cents. They play to ten.”

  “What kind of deal you want?”

  “We split the money fifty-fifty.”

  Ray nodded. “You’ll need a license from the city.”

  “I’ve already got the paperwork.”

  “Deal.”

  They shook.

  CHAPTER 24

  John found himself thinking more and more about the antimatter source in the device. Somewhere within the device was a pinpoint of gamma radiation, perhaps used to power it. He didn’t have the equipment to take an X-ray of it, and at first he had worried that an X-ray might harm the device. But he knew that a tomogram of the interior of an object could be taken by using a point source passed through the device at various angles. The images of the sections were put back together to make the tomogram. Why couldn’t he use the source within the device as the source for the tomogram? Because he had not the first clue how to do it. He did know one grad student who might know.

  When John asked Alex Cheminov about his idea to use tomography for a special project, Alex listened emotionlessly, his hands in the pockets of his tattered jeans, then said, “You’ll need collimated beam.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve got a point source, right?” He held up a pencil. “Eraser is source. Radiation comes out of source in all directions isotropicly, decreases with one over r-squared. Further you get from source, more scatter your detector picks up from gammas that don’t come directly from source. Collimator blocks those scattered gammas, reduces noise. You’ll get a better image. Clearer. I worked on same in Russia.”

  “How long will my collimator need to be?”

  “Fifteen centimeters, maybe twenty.”

  “What should I make it out of?”

  He pointed to the storeroom. “Some in there. Take one. Fits right over the detector.”

  “Thanks, Alex.”

  He shrugged, his face slack. “No problem.”

  John borrowed the whole setup, collimator and detector. From what he’d read, he’d need to take long measurements because his source was so small. And he’d have to take many measurements. He decided that he’d need a measurement every fifteen degrees around the diameter of the device. That was twenty-four measurements. He decided to do one per night.

  Where he would do it was a problem. He couldn’t do it at his apartment. Casey was staying over every few nights. And after he’d reacted the first time she’d seen his notebook, he couldn’t afford to let her see any more. The lab bench that the team was using for the pinball machine, however, had a deep drawer. He could set the device in there for twelve hours each night and get a decent reading, he hoped.

  Then he would reconstruct the inside of the device. Anything that looked interesting he could reconstruct with finer detail or at oblique angles. It would take a while, but he would have an image of the inside of the device, without ever opening it up.

  The calculations were not particularly hard, but there were a lot of them. And there was more than one type of tomography reconstruction algorithm. He found himself begging off two dates in a row with Casey to struggle through a textbook on the subject, but by the third day he seemed to have worked out the equations he’d need to build the reconstruction.

  He started taking measurements, showing up late to set up the counter. He had to make clear notes on what angles he took the measurements on and be precise on what the counts were at the exact twelve hours in length.

  After he had six measurements, John sat down with a calculator and started figuring. He wished he had a computer, but the computers in this universe were like those from the sixties in his universe, big hulking things used for inscrutable government activities. He had to do the calculations by hand.

  The result of three hours of number crunching was a grid of blobs. He realized quickly that having too few measurements produced false images. He saw six regularly spaced blobs inside the device, and he couldn’t determine which were false and which were true. He filed his drawing away.

  Two weeks later, he tried it again, only this time it took him two days of work to back out the results. But it was much more successful. The inside structure was clearer. There were two main round areas of attenuation inside the device, one near the center, under the middle button, and one halfway between the center and the lever. There were also a number of smaller lumps.

  Studying the drawing, he noted that the device was mostly empty space, or very weakly attenuating material.

  He decided to do the same set of measurements at a slightly higher plane. John had a cross section of the things at the mid-plane, but he didn’t know if the shapes were cylindrical or spherical.

  He returned to the device one morning to find his drawer empty.

  A wave of panic passed through him.

  The device was gone!

  Fuck! I should have locked it!

  John spun around. The lab was empty, except for someone making a racket with the lathe in the bay one over.

  John ran over there. A grad student was at work on a piece of wood, carving into it a series of grooves. She looked up when he waved his arms.

  “I’m sorry for disturbing you,” John said. “Did you see anyone in that lab bay over there?”

  “No, sorry,” she said, bending back over her work. Then she stood back up. “Well, Professor Wilson was there, which was odd since it’s so early in the morning.”

  “Wilson!”

  John turned and ran out of the lab. He ran down the connecting hall to McCormick Hall, then up the stairs two at a time. Wilson’s light was on, his door closed.

  John paused to knock, then instead pushed the door open.

  Professor Wilson looked up. On his desk was the device. He had a screwdriver out and was attempting to lever the device open.

  “What are you doing?” John cried.

  “Is there a radioactive source in here?”

  “ ‘What are you doing?’ I said,” John repeated. He st
epped forward and reached for the device.

  Wilson pulled it back. John had a moment’s flashback to the arguments he’d had with other versions of Wilson. John didn’t want to play games.

  “You can’t have a radioactive device in the lab without permission,” Wilson said. “And don’t try to attack me. It’ll be the end of your academic career.”

  “Watches use radium. Bananas have potassium,” John said. “Those are no more radioactive than this. You’re just trying to hide the fact that you stole my equipment. Hand it over.”

  “It’s my lab; it’s my equipment,” Wilson said.

  “You know that’s a lie,” John said.

  “Don’t speak to me that way!”

  John stared at Wilson and reached across the desk. Wilson jumped back, but John grabbed the phone. He spun it around.

  “I’m calling the police,” John said.

  “Do it. Campus security will see things my way.”

  “The real police,” John said. He hit 9 to get an outside line. The phone emitted a steady tone.

  Wilson just stared at him.

  John dialed 911.

  “This is the operator. What is the nature of your emergency?”

  John paused.

  Wilson stared at him.

  “Mr. Wilson? Is there an emergency?”

  Again neither moved.

  “I’ll send a patrol car to investigate.”

  John opened his mouth to urge them to hurry, but Wilson spoke up. “I’m sorry. This is Professor Wilson. I seem to have hit the wrong button by accident.”

  “Thank you, sir. Have a good day.”

  The line went dead.

  John held out his hand.

  Wilson smiled meekly, then placed the device onto John’s palm. He shoved the device into his backpack and turned to go.

  “What is it, John?” Wilson asked. “Tell me.”

  “I told you once, and you didn’t believe me.”

  He’d left the collimator and the detector in Wilson’s office. He didn’t bother to get a new one. He had enough measurements to do the tomography calculations. He set to work on them with his calculator.

  The result showed that the blobs were ovoid. Not cylinders, not spherical. Were the lines wires? No, they seemed to clump together at the ends like spiderwebs. Were they even real or artifacts of his calculation? He wished he had an industrial tomograph. Then he could produce a high-resolution tomogram. He didn’t have the time or the facilities for that. But he wasn’t unhappy with the results. He had vision into the inside of the device. Even his run-in with Wilson couldn’t dim that elation.

  He made a final drawing, one with perspective, and filed it in his lockbox.

  John had his first inkling of the inside of the device, and now he would continue to dig at it until all the mysteries were solved. The answers were still far, far away, but he had some hope that he would one day discover them.

  CHAPTER 25

  Henry wrote out a note and taped it on the lab bay door: “Pinball Machine Moved to Woodman’s.” Then they managed to drag-carry the thing to the loading dock, where they maneuvered it into Henry’s truck.

  “Note this down,” John said. “ ‘Add wheels.’ ”

  “And let’s make the next one out of plastic,” Grace said.

  It barely fit.

  “It’s going to fall out the back,” Grace said, and she proceeded to wrap a hundred yards of red rope around the machine and the truck.

  “Relax, Grace,” Henry said as he started the truck.

  “I’m riding in back with it,” she squeaked, climbing in.

  “Fine.”

  John followed in the Trans Am.

  They unloaded the machine onto the street, and Grace stayed with it while Henry and John parked. Then they wrestled it into the back room, complicated by the three steps that connected the room to the bar area. Luckily, the bartender was there, a hefty fellow named Lou, and he helped get it up the steps.

  “Can I try it out?” Lou asked.

  “Sure. We just have to get it set up,” John said, getting his level out. “We need to prop that side up.”

  Henry slid a shim under the leg nearest him. “How’s that?” He wrote something in his notebook. “We should build screw levels right into the legs. There’s no telling what kind of floor these things are going to be on.”

  “That’s level.” John took the gaming sticker out of his pocket and stuck it to the glass. “I think it’s ready. Plug it in. Grace, do the honors.”

  Grace found an outlet in the floor and the game started up with a bit of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

  “I like that,” John said.

  Henry smiled. “Grace wouldn’t let me do ‘Caveman Rock.’ ”

  “And right she was.”

  Lou played a quick game against John. John easily passed the ball from flipper to flipper and slammed it down the center of Lou’s play field.

  “Fuck!” he yelled as the tenth straight ball went down his outlet. “Damn. That was fun. Let’s go again.”

  Lou played John again and managed three scores. He stood up, and said, “You guys should start making a few more of these right now.” Then in a whisper, he said, “Ray splits thirty-seventy with the jukebox people. He’s ripping you guys off.”

  John nodded, then shrugged to his three companions as Lou walked back to the bar. “Oh, well.”

  “Back here at what? Seven?”

  “Yeah. It’s a Wednesday night. Who goes to bars on a Wednesday night?”

  “People with quarters, I hope,” John said.

  The game was sitting unplayed when they got there that evening. Henry checked with the bartender.

  “No one played it,” he said.

  The bar was relatively empty. A couple locals were playing pool and a few people were watching a baseball game on the TV above the bar.

  “That’s ’cause they don’t know how,” Grace said. “Come on, John. Let’s make some noise.”

  They played three games, and by the end of the third everyone in the bar was standing around them.

  “I’ve got winner,” someone said.

  Woodman’s was the place to be, and Ray had to open his doors at noon for the college students who wanted to play pinball. They cleared close to one hundred dollars one day.

  “We need to redesign the flipper,” Grace muttered. “It keeps burning out.” They were sitting at the Burger Chef, eating a quick lunch.

  “You showed Lou how to fix it,” John said.

  “Yeah, but if it was properly designed, he wouldn’t have to fix it every other night.”

  John finished with his calculator. “One hundred and twenty-two dollars and fifty cents apiece.”

  “What?” Henry said.

  “That’s a chunk of change,” Grace said.

  “Not bad for two weeks,” John said. “But I didn’t take out anything for parts. I assume we donated that stuff for the good of the project.”

  “Is it a project still?” Henry asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe it needs to be, I dunno, a company?”

  “Why?” John asked.

  “One machine brings in three thousand bucks a year. Ten machines bring in thirty thousand. One hundred machines bring in over a quarter-million dollars per person sitting at this table!”

  John nodded. “Do we want to do that?”

  “Maybe we have to,” Grace said. “To protect ourselves.”

  “How much time are we going to have to do this during finals? And next quarter is even tougher than this quarter,” Henry said. “I know I won’t have time to run a company.”

  “You may be right,” John said. “Let’s give it another week and see if this fad sustains itself.”

  “We’ve got the tournament this weekend,” Grace said. “I’m putting up flyers.” She showed them the electric orange flyer she had designed. It showed a huge ball speeding past a flipper. It read: “Pinball: The Best Game in Town. Tournament, t
his Saturday, Woodman’s. Bring your quarters.” She grinned.

  “Looks good, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “And bright,” John said, shielding his eyes. John blinked. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Through the glass he saw Casey getting out of a car. She was smiling, leaning down with one hand on the top of the car to speak with whoever was driving.

  Casey had said she was studying, John remembered.

  And then the driver stood up, and John recognized Jack. His stomach clenched, and he felt the food he’d just eaten begin to rise.

  Grace glanced over her shoulder, looking for what John was staring at.

  “Oh, man,” she said. “I was hoping you wouldn’t find out.”

  John felt a surge of anger. He slammed his cup down and rose.

  Henry put a hand on John’s shoulder, but he was already up and headed toward the door.

  His eyes were riveted on Casey and Jack. She had taken his arm and was leaning heavily on him. John swung the door open in Casey’s face.

  She flinched, then saw who it was.

  “John!”

  “Casey,” he said coldly. “Jack.”

  “Hey, dancer,” Jack said. “Excuse us.”

  “Jack, let’s go someplace else,” Casey said.

  “I thought you were studying,” John said.

  “No, I want a Big Shef,” Jack said.

  “Listen, John,” Casey said. “I didn’t want you to find out, but…”

  John looked at Jack’s smirk and Casey’s pale face. She wasn’t upset, just embarrassed. He realized they’d been cruising toward this inevitably. In fact, he felt a moment’s relief. He didn’t ever have to explain to her about the device. He didn’t ever have to hide it from her again. It was really for the best.

  “Sure, yeah, I’ve been seeing other people too,” John said. “It’s for the best. See ya.”

  He pushed past the two and got in his Trans Am. His heart was thudding. There were a million other girls in the world anyway. There were a million other Caseys for that matter. This one didn’t even matter. This one could date Jack for all he cared. He’d have his choice of Caseys one day.

  A local high school student won the tournament, beating Henry in the finals ten to eight. Henry sulked for an hour, then challenged the kid, pockets lined with the one-hundred-dollar prize, to a rematch.