The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

She whispered into Prime’s ear, “Don’t say a damn word. Do you hear me?”

  One officer pulled her away, while the other pushed Prime into the car.

  “Do you hear me, John?” Casey yelled.

  He looked at her, nodded slowly.

  In his mind, he gave himself over to her completely and utterly.

  CHAPTER 27

  The second time John noticed the tall blond man, he was talking with Grace at the all-university tournament. John couldn’t remember the first time exactly, but the man definitely stood out. He was tall, over two meters tall, with nearly albino features. His close-cropped hair was almost white. His eyes were sled dog blue. He was so distinctive, John knew he had seen him elsewhere but wasn’t sure exactly where.

  Grace turned toward John and gestured as she explained something. She couldn’t stop talking with her arms and hands. The tall man stared at John, and a feeling of being examined under a magnifying glass passed through him.

  The ball slammed against the glass, and John turned his eyes back to the game. Henry was beating the crap out of a freshman English major who’d bet him twenty dollars. The back room of Adam’s All-Star Cavalcade had four pinball machines arranged back-to-back, and it was nearly impossible to move in the room with all the people. A lot of students were going to fail their finals, John thought.

  John glanced up from the game. The man was on his way over. It bugged John that he couldn’t remember where else he’d seen the man. He worked his way through the crowd, pushing between people who gave him dark looks that he didn’t seem to care about.

  He reached John’s side and said into his ear, “This pinball was your idea?”

  “What?”

  “This pinball,” the man repeated, waving his hand at the machine. “It is your idea.”

  John shrugged. The name was the same, but no one from his Earth would confuse it for the pinball that he knew. It had ended up more like foosball, with its head-to-head action. “It was a team effort.”

  “The name is your idea?”

  John didn’t like the man’s demeanor.

  “I don’t remember,” John said.

  “What was the source of the name?”

  “I told you, I don’t remember. It was a brainstorming session,” John said.

  “It is quite important for me to know.” The man had an odd accent, almost Germanic but not quite.

  “Listen, people are waiting to play,” John said. “If you’re not here to play, move on.”

  The man gave him a dark look, then reached into his front pocket and handed John a card. It read: “Ermanaric Visgrath, Investments.” There was a Columbus address and phone number. “Perhaps another time then, and we can discuss your invention in detail. My firm is always interested in financing exciting and innovative ideas.”

  He turned then and disappeared out the door. John filed the card away in his pocket and thought no more of it.

  They filed the patent application on the day after they freed the machine from Ray’s bar with the help of a young law student, studying patent law. Kyle Thompson had come out to Adam’s All-Star Cavalcade, played and lost three games to John, and then agreed to work on their patent with them.

  “I can’t charge for my work, which may delight you or worry you,” he said.

  “Delight,” Grace chimed in.

  “Worry,” added Henry.

  “But all my work will be looked at by one of my professors. And I will do good work.”

  John liked his serious, polished manner. He’d played his games without so much as a smile but with intensity. His finger had been white on the flipper buttons.

  “How long before we have the patent?” John asked.

  “It varies, six to ten weeks.”

  “How much will it cost in fees?” Henry asked.

  “To file the application with the Patent and Trademark Office, it costs two hundred and forty dollars. If they accept the patent, it costs an additional four hundred and twenty-five.”

  “That’ll about wipe out our profit so far,” Henry grumbled.

  “I’ll need access to the machine. It helps that you built a working prototype. I’ll also need your time to fill in the details. It won’t take long. Part of the problem in patent applications is visualizing the item.” He pointed to the pinball machine. “We’ll have no problem visualizing.”

  They heard no more from Ray but saw Lou once at Adam’s All-Star Cavalcade. He said that Ray was mad and wouldn’t talk about it. Lou grinned. “Serves him right.”

  After cleaning out the lab bay, they decided to keep using it to work in. John wanted to do the stand-alone model that he’d talked about at the start. He also wanted to build a phase two prototype. There were a lot of improvements that six weeks of play had caused them to consider.

  Steve, the high school student who’d won the first tournament, came and worked in the lab after school every day, testing and making suggestions for playability. He also had a knack for soldering, as he’d said. He became Grace’s arms and legs. They had the two new machines built in three weeks. Grace almost failed her finals, but then they had all of Christmas break. The lab was deserted.

  They had no problem finding a home for as many machines as they could build. When the students had discovered it at Adam’s All-Star Cavalcade, they’d managed to keep the place packed day and night.

  “Maybe we should offer one of the new ones to Ray,” Henry said.

  “No way,” Grace said. “I say we put one on campus, next to the bowling alley.”

  “In front of the Electrux game,” Henry added.

  “That’s a great idea,” John said.

  They stood in the student lab, a week before Christmas. They had taken over three more lab tables during break. Their parts inventory was strewn across the floor. John’s apartment was filled with boxes and electronics. Grace had had to move everything out of her dorm when her roommate complained to the RA.

  “We need a better place to build,” John said. “We need a factory or a warehouse.”

  “How do we pay for that?” Henry said.

  John shrugged.

  “We form a corporation, we make a business plan, and we get a loan,” Grace said.

  “What?” John said. “Where did you get that?”

  “I was in Teen Professional,” Grace said. “In high school. I designed and built a kickstand for your bike that was also a bike lock.”

  “A kickstand lock?”

  “Yeah. I lost two hundred dollars, and I still have a hundred SecureStands in the attic at home.”

  “How reassuring,” John said.

  “This is a way better idea,” Grace said. “Probably.”

  “I have no idea how to do a business plan,” John said.

  “I’ll do it,” Grace said. “It’s all pretty pictures.”

  “Are you taking this seriously?” John asked.

  “No, are you?” Grace replied quickly.

  John couldn’t help himself, and he began laughing. “Good point.”

  “What do we call ourselves?” Henry asked.

  “I dunno,” Grace said.

  John couldn’t help himself. “Pinball Wizards,” he said. There was no Pete Townshend in this universe, no super rock group called the Who. He’d checked. There was no Beatles either, which made John feel a little silly whenever he hummed “Hey Jude.”

  “Pinball Wizards,” Henry said, rolling it around in his mouth.

  “I like it,” Grace said. “Anything with wizards in it is cool.”

  Every place John looked at was too expensive for their shoestring budget. They finally found an abandoned factory on the far side of the river. The neighborhood was decrepit, but the place had strong locks on all the doors. John signed a six-month lease, with a down payment of most of his savings. If they didn’t start bringing in more money, he’d be flat broke.

  If it came to that, he’d have to drop classes and get a job. He’d be detoured from his goal of understanding the device. What
a mess, he thought as he surveyed the freezing-cold factory floor. He was setting himself up for failure in his primary goal. He should just cut Henry and Grace loose, let them ruin their lives here. Yet the pinball machine was some last vestige of John’s own universe. Pinball didn’t exist here. He had brought it into being, an idea passed tenuously between worlds. A simple, silly game.

  An hour later, Henry and Grace appeared with Henry’s truck filled with parts and pieces of pinball machines.

  “We need heat,” Grace said, rubbing her hands on her shoulders.

  “You want to pay that bill?” John asked.

  “No. Maybe we need a trash can fire,” she said. “Or space heaters.”

  “We do need electricity,” Henry said.

  John moaned. He hadn’t thought of utilities when he’d signed the lease. “Let me call Toledo Edison right now,” he said. “Do you think they’ll turn it on without a deposit?”

  “They might,” Grace said. “We are a business after all.”

  They hauled two more piles of parts from the lab that afternoon. As they did so, John calculated they had enough pieces to build maybe three more machines.

  On their last trip, they stopped by the three bars where their machines sat and the Student Union and drained the coin bins of quarters.

  “Sixty-seven dollars and fifty cents,” Henry said. “Plus fifty cents Canadian. I gotta work on the foreign coin rejection system.” He looked up. “But it’s got to wait.”

  “Why?” John asked.

  Grace chimed in. “The parents want him home for the holidays. Mine too.”

  “When do you guys go?” John asked.

  “Day after tomorrow,” Grace said. “I have a train ticket to Athens.”

  Henry nodded. His family was in Columbus.

  “I guess it’s just me for the next three weeks,” John said.

  “I bet Steve would help you.”

  John laughed. “That’s all right. I have work to do on a couple new features.” His eyes rested on the huge crane hanging from the ceiling. He remembered the scratch on the edge of the device, and wondered how much pressure would be needed to pull the two hemispheres of the device apart. With Grace and Henry gone…

  They ordered pizza delivery, but the driver wouldn’t bring it to their neighborhood. Instead Henry went out for it and brought back a steaming pie that they ate in their coats in the dusty office.

  Grace raised her can of cola. “To Pinball Wizards, Incorporated. May our balls always roll!”

  “Hear, hear!” Henry said.

  John laughed but felt a moment’s regret that Casey wasn’t there to share the toast.

  With electricity-kindly turned on by two coveralled workers the day after they ordered, no deposit needed-they worked through the night and finished two more machines. Henry drove Grace back to the dorm to pack in the morning but came right back with her, waving a letter.

  “We’re official!” Grace cried.

  “What?”

  “Our articles of incorporation, notarized and accepted by the great State of Ohio,” Grace said. “We’re a company!”

  John opened the letter. Inside were their boilerplate articles and a form signed by the deputy secretary of state. It listed Grace as CEO, only because neither Henry nor John wanted the job. Casey would have been a great CEO, John thought.

  “Aren’t you two going to be late for the train?” John asked.

  “Yes!” Grace cried. “Let’s go!”

  “Merry Christmas!” John shouted as they ran from the building toward Henry’s truck.

  John turned back toward the machine he had been hips deep in, one of his single-player models. Their first machines were head-to-head, but he’d wanted from the start to build a traditional one, just like he remembered from his universe. He reached in and triggered a credit. He popped the ball into play and bounced it around for a few minutes. John had to admit that the old type of machine that he was used to was not as fun as the competitive version.

  They’d gone through six flipper designs until Grace was happy. They had a hundred different bumper configurations that could be built from the simple plastic parts that Henry had ordered. If they could build ten machines a month, if the money came in for each of them the same as the first machines, they could keep the factory and they might even have a little extra for salaries.

  John let the ball fall into the slot at the bottom of the machine. He was tired of solenoids, flippers, and ball bearings. He turned to his briefcase, sitting innocently on the table near the crane controls. Inside was the device.

  The real estate agent said the crane worked, and to John’s surprise it lowered when he pressed the switch, shuddering as it unrolled the steel cable. The iron hook slammed into the floor, sending a shard of cement skittering to the far side of the factory.

  He’d need vise grips to hold the device in place. He’d have to be careful; he couldn’t afford to destroy it. Did he even dare try this? he wondered. What if the device ripped apart? What if it ceased working?

  He’d still have the parts. He’d still have his slowly garnered knowledge. The alternative-his own slow experimentation with the physics of multiworlds after ten years of physics study and no guarantee that he would be able to make the breakthroughs necessary-was too daunting. He had a working device right here. The marks on the edge seemed to indicate it had once been opened. He could do it again and have access to the internals.

  John took the device from his briefcase. He placed it on the floor near the crane hook. His stomach twittered. If he destroyed it, he might be stuck here forever in a universe where he’d ruined his chances with Casey.

  He was suddenly angry at what he had wasted and scared of what he might be giving up if he broke the device. He placed it back in his briefcase and locked it. No, he thought. I’ll not do that yet.

  John found two letters in his mailbox when he got home that evening, the first, a letter from the city of Toledo, from the Department of Treasury. He recognized the address, the same one they’d used to apply for gaming licenses for all their machines.

  He opened it and read the notice. “It has come to our attention that the game licenses (see attached sheet for a complete listing) issued to Pinball Wizards, Inc., are for gambling devices. Gambling devices are not allowed within the city limits, and as such must be removed within twenty-four hours from their locations. Failure to do so will result in a one-hundred-dollar per day penalty for each offending device.”

  They weren’t gambling devices! John thought. But how do we prove that?

  He opened the second, thicker envelope. It had a return address of a law firm in Toledo. The document inside was dozens of pages thick and, at first, John couldn’t parse the legalese. Then he realized that the Ray Paquelli in the document was Ray from Woodman’s and that he was suing them for breach of contract and theft.

  John sat heavily on a kitchen chair. How would they deal with this? They had forty-eight hours from the postmark on the letter (yesterday!) to remove the machines, and they had no more than a handful of quarters in the bank. And Henry and Grace were at home on winter break.

  He called Grace and Henry the next morning on a conference line from his apartment.

  “Call our student lawyer,” Grace said.

  “No, we need a real lawyer this time,” Henry said.

  “How will we pay for that?”

  “Call Kyle Thompson!” Grace said. “He filed the patent for us; maybe he’ll do this too.”

  “He’s probably on winter break,” John said.

  “At least try!” Grace said.

  “Maybe Casey can help,” Henry said.

  “No,” John replied quickly. That was the last person he wanted to see for help.

  “I mean, she’s in Findlay-”

  Grace cut him off. “If John doesn’t want Casey, Henry, don’t push it.”

  “Okay. I’m just saying…”

  John said, “I’ll contact Kyle. Maybe he’s still in town.”


  “Do you need us to come back?” Grace asked. “I mean, I can turn around. My parents would understand…”

  “Don’t even think about it,” John said. “It’s just a game.”

  “Sure,” Henry said. “Call anytime. Even on Christmas. Good luck.”

  Kyle didn’t answer his phone, but the message didn’t say anything about being out of town for the holidays. It didn’t note a second number either. John drove over to the law school. The door was locked, but a pair of students pushed out through the double doors and John slipped in after them. Kyle had an office in the basement, called the Bench, an open space of dozens of desks and chairs jammed together in what may have been optimized use of space or just plain chaos. Surprisingly, the place was nearly half-full with law students. One of them was Kyle Thompson.

  “Ah, the intrepid Pinball Wizard,” he said as he saw John approach. “Nothing back from the Patent Office yet, so no news to give you.”

  “It’s not that,” John said. “It’s these.” John handed the letters to Kyle.

  Kyle leaned back in his chair, instantly absorbed in the documents. He seemed to forget that John was there, and John began pacing in front of Kyle’s desk. When Kyle turned the last page of Ray’s suit, John said, “Well?”

  “It’s not my speciality,” Kyle said. John sighed. “I don’t do municipal law. And I can’t advise you on this lawsuit.”

  “That’s okay,” John said. He reached for the documents. “Thanks for-”

  “But-” Kyle placed his hand on the documents. “I think we can still help.”

  “We?”

  “Hey, Angela!” Kyle called. A brunette looked up from her desk. “You interned in the mayor’s office, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you take a look at this?”

  Angela was a foot shorter than Kyle, dressed in a wool sweater and gray skirt. She skimmed the letter from the city, then threw it down on Kyle’s desk.

  “They can’t do this,” she said.

  “They can’t?”

  “No, Department of Treasury has no jurisdiction over gambling. That’s the Department of Gambling Control. That’s Able Swenson. Treasury can garnish wages for back taxes, but it can’t order a cease and desist.”