The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

  “We’ll start with twenty newtons of force,” John said.

  “This is just like physics lab,” Grace giggled.

  “Applying twenty newtons of force.”

  Henry watched the seam on the device. They had precision calipers on both sides to measure its width.

  “Nothing.”

  “Applying forty newtons.”

  “Nothing.”

  John worked slowly to 200 newtons, with no change in the width of the seam.

  “Maybe we need to relieve the pressure inside before it comes open,” Grace said.

  “But how?”

  “Cracking it open is probably not an option,” Henry said.

  “Not yet,” John said.

  “Lubricant?” Henry suggested.

  They sprayed a liquid lubricant along the edge. “Not too much.”

  Then John tried 200 newtons of force again. Then 240. “I can’t do any more than that evenly,” he said.

  “Then let’s use pulleys,” Henry said. “You have a four-pulley assembly.” With four pulleys they could quadruple John’s force.

  They hung the pulley assembly from the crane.

  “Three hundred newtons. Three fifty. Four hundred.”

  “Stop!” Henry cried. He slid the caliper against the line. “I’ve got half a millimeter movement here.”

  “Me too,” Grace said from the other side.

  “Now that it’s started, you may not need as much force,” Grace said.

  John tried 80 newtons, then 120. With a soft pop the front of the device came off.

  “Hold it.” The two halves hung separated by a small crack.

  “Flashlight, please,” John said.

  He shined the light at the crack but could see nothing.

  Henry said, “There’s hinges on this side.”

  There were, small hinges where the two halves came together.

  They disconnected the upper vise and moved the pulleys out of the way. Gingerly John lifted the upper half away, and it opened like a compact mirror, revealing the inside of the device.

  Inside were what looked like two marshmallows covered in mold.

  “It was meant to open like that,” Henry said. “If it has a hinge.”

  John looked into the inside of the device and examined the marshmallow things closely. “Take a picture from every angle, of everything. Use two rolls. I want redundancy.” If he screwed it up, he wanted to know how.

  The fungus attached to the two shapes was actually tiny threads. As he looked closer, he saw that the marshmallows themselves were made of tightly bound layers of the stuff.

  “That doesn’t look like anything made by a human,” Grace said. “It looks alien.”

  John had seen the diversity of the human universes and he was willing to bet that humans, however bizarre they might be, had built this. It just didn’t look like anything Grace knew of in her universe.

  Henry loaded a new roll of film and repeated all the same shots.

  Dozens of threads ran between the two marshmallows, connecting them. Threads also ran from the marshmallows to the hinges and then to the back sides of the controls on the device’s lid. Threads ran to all of the buttons, dials, and switches. In fact, below each of the buttons were smaller fuzzy marshmallows.

  “The threads comprise the control system,” Grace said. “They must be the electronics of the thing.”

  Of the two fuzzy marshmallows, one was near the center of the device and the other was to the upper right. That one was the source of the gamma radiation. John noted that there was a white spine, perhaps a half centimeter in diameter, jutting into it. The center mallow had no such spine.

  “That’s the power source, I assume,” John said. “Maybe that spine houses the antimatter.”

  “How can you house antimatter?” Henry asked.

  “Magnetic field, I assume.”

  Grace pointed the flashlight at the edge of the bottom half. “Look there.” John peered closely and saw a small strand of the fiber lying unconnected. “Do you think it fell off? Do you think that’s why the device is broken? Or perhaps you’ve come around to my hypothesis of sabotage!”

  “I don’t know. Do you have… something?” He made gripping signs with his hands.

  Grace handed him long, thin tweezers. Carefully, John slid the thing through the web of threads and caught the stray thread. He pulled it out and put it in a plastic bag.

  “Let’s see what this is made of,” he said.

  He placed it under the light microscope, and they took turns looking at it.

  “Fiber?” Henry asked.

  “I have a laser,” Grace cried. “For presentations.” She held it carefully to the end of the small thread. John couldn’t see coherent light coming from the other end.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe it will run current,” Henry said.

  They attached a voltmeter to the ends of the thread. It showed a few ohms of resistance. “Maybe they’re like wires,” Grace said. “That whole mass is a large electrical circuit.”

  “That doesn’t get us anywhere,” John said, sighing. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected inside the device, but the mass of threads wasn’t it.

  “Why not?” Grace cried. “We just have to figure out what these balls do.”

  “And fix where it’s broken,” Henry said.

  “How?”

  “I dunno,” Grace said. She peered closely at the masses. “If we could map it out…”

  Henry clicked a few more pictures. “There’s no way to figure out what’s connected to what.”

  Grace shook her head. “There’s always a way.” She pointed to the single thread that they had retrieved from the device. “We’ll start with this.”

  There wasn’t anything else for them to do with the device, so John closed it back up.

  “I’ll send the thread to a lab and get an analysis done,” Grace said.

  Charboric called three times that week asking for a meeting. John dodged the call all three times, having the secretary say he was in class, though he wasn’t. Grace called him on Saturday just as he was getting ready to head into work.

  “Charboric is here,” she said. “Head to the old factory instead. I have news.”

  John sped to the old factory. He couldn’t continue avoiding Charboric. The man would grow suspicious, if he wasn’t already. The man was paranoia incarnate.

  Grace was already at the old factory. She handed John a stack of paper. “Lab report,” she said. “This stuff is cool.”

  “Did the lab technicians have any questions?” John asked. “Were they suspicious?”

  Grace shrugged. “Who cares? This stuff, its walls are a dielectric material. Its inside is glass.”

  “What does that mean?” John asked. In his universe, he knew fiber-optic wiring was common. Here most electronics used copper.

  “Who knows?” Grace cried. “But that’s not the cool part. I mean, it’s cool, but it’s not the coolest part. Hit the lights.” John turned off the overhead fluorescent bulbs while Grace pulled the shades down to the room. She clipped a wire to the end of the thread. The other end of her wire was attached to a nine-volt battery.

  The thread glowed a ghostly blue.

  “Cool, but so what?”

  Henry slammed through the door. “What’d I miss?” he said, puffing.

  “Lab report, glowing thread,” Grace said. “But not the climax.”

  “Go!” Henry said.

  “We can map out the marshmallows with this,” Grace said.

  “Oh,” John said. “I get it. We can apply a voltage thread by thread to the device and figure out the diagram of its workings.”

  “Yes!” Grace cried. “Then we just have to engineer material to match the thread’s characteristics and-voila!-we’ve reverse engineered the device.”

  “Easier said than done,” John said.

  “Most things are,” Grace said. “Let’s get started.”

  It was a s
low, painstaking process. They marked up an enlarged photo of the masses, and worked through each mass, tracing each thread’s faint glow, applying a voltage and measuring the resistance. They found that threads could be arranged in parallel or series, much like typical electronic circuits that Grace understood. They could also be arranged in elaborate sequences that reminded John of human nerve cells connected together in three-dimensional lattices.

  They cataloged a thousand threads that weekend, and John estimated that the device held a hundred thousand such threads. But they got faster as they went along. John was worried that they wouldn’t be able to reach the center threads, but Henry and Grace showed him that she could move the threads out of the way with tweezers. The masses were not glued or otherwise bonded together.

  “This is going to take a long time,” Grace said, wiping her forehead.

  “I know, but it seems the best way,” John said.

  “Agreed.”

  “We can’t make this go any faster,” Henry said. “Only one pair of hands can reach into the device at a time.” He’d been drawing the diagram of the thing as they went, labeling it, snapping photographs.

  John said, “But sooner or later, we have to turn that diagram into physical components.”

  “I don’t know where to begin,” Henry said. “It’s one thing to draw it.”

  “We can make some assumptions, maybe,” John said. “We can assume that the threads are homogenous. We can assume that they use current and that they have a capacitance and a resistance.”

  “Unless they also have semi-conductor characteristics,” Henry said.

  “Let’s find out!” Grace cried. She spent an hour on the phone with a company out of Canada that was open on Sundays, ordering oscilloscopes, transistors, diodes, semi-conductor materials with various dopings. John looked up when she said, “Just charge it to my corporate card.”

  “How much is that costing?”

  “Does it matter? Wealth has no value now that we know a million universes exist,” she said.

  Henry grunted. “How many Mona Lisas exist?” he said. “How many diamond mines in South Africa that are known elsewhere and not here? How many worlds in which pinball doesn’t exist?”

  “There’s no value in material goods,” Grace said, “if material is infinite. The only good is personal happiness.”

  “That’s a rather odd philosophy for a CEO of a corporation to take,” John said.

  “You’ve changed everything, John,” she said. “Again.”

  They finished up for the weekend, without John getting anywhere near the pinball factory. Suddenly it seemed irrelevant. The longer he could avoid Charboric and Visgrath, the better. Unfortunately, when John got home there was a dark SUV in the street in front of his apartment and Charboric was leaning on the rail of his apartment steps smoking a cheroot.

  “Good evening, John. Let’s talk.”

  CHAPTER 35

  “Charboric.”

  “If I didn’t know how stupid it was, I’d think you were dodging me,” he said. He stamped the cheroot out on the cast cement stairs. There were at least half a dozen of the stubs littering the ground.

  “It would be stupid, wouldn’t it,” John said. “But as you know, I have engineering school and a job and a life as well.” He opened the door to his apartment, considered for a moment not inviting the man in, then thought better of it. John was keenly aware of the device in his backpack. He let Charboric in in front of him.

  “Why do you even bother with the backward physics of this world?” Charboric asked. “It’s not even worth knowing.”

  John shrugged off his backpack. He walked it into the bedroom and laid it carefully on the far side of the bed.

  “How long have you been here, Charboric? Fifty years?” Charboric nodded. “How long do you plan to live?” John asked. “I don’t rate my chances high of ever leaving.”

  Charboric eyed John, then nodded again. “You understand something that Visgrath sometimes forgets.” Charboric’s expression softened, and for a moment John almost felt sorry for him.

  “Engineering is a philosophy of science,” John said. “Even if the science changes, the process remains the same.”

  “Indeed,” Charboric said. “But we sometimes lack the patience for study.”

  “Knowledge is power,” John said.

  “Power is power,” Charboric replied.

  John shrugged.

  After a minute, Charboric added, “Visgrath has explained our situation, has he not?”

  “He has.”

  “We’ve been trapped here for a long time awaiting rescue-we are not going to debate the benefit of that strategy. In that meantime we have made ourselves as comfortable as possible by exploiting what we know from other… locations.”

  “Scuba,” John said.

  “Local law limits the length of time we can exploit our ideas.”

  “Patents.”

  “The time frame for patents in this universe is twelve and a half years.”

  “But you can still market a product after the patent time,” John said.

  “The most profit occurs in the time of monopoly,” Charboric said. “Afterwards we sell the patent and adjunct company. We have little patience for competitive markets.”

  “So after decades you’re running out of ideas,” John said.

  “We’ve accreted a rather extensive entourage beyond the original dozen,” Charboric said.

  “Thus your interest in pinball.”

  “We knew it was an extra-universal technology. We of course know how to exploit technology here. The decision to invest was obvious.”

  “But you don’t do competitive markets,” John said.

  “It was a strategic decision,” Charboric said with a smile and nod toward John. “You’ve been mainline much more recently than we have. An alliance would allow us to exploit everything else that you might know.”

  “But I’m not that old,” John said. “I don’t know that much.”

  “You’d be surprised. You’ve been immersed in a highly technological world for your lifetime. There are hundreds of objects-inane in that universe-that are valuable here.”

  John struggled to come up with some argument. “Yes, but everything was so different there.”

  Charboric shrugged. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small spiral-bound pad of paper and a pencil. “Carry this with you. Write down anything you think of. Ideas will come to you when you’re driving or in the shower or taking a shit. Keep this with you. Write down what you remember.”

  “Uh, okay,” John said. He took the pencil and pad. The pencil had teeth marks near the eraser.

  Charboric stood up. “We’ll talk again in a week. Don’t dodge my calls. This is important. I’ll expect you to have ten ideas on that list. Ten good ideas.”

  “Sure.”

  Charboric paused at the door. “I don’t need to remind you how important secrecy is. Your business partners should know nothing of this.”

  “Of course.”

  John listened as the car door slammed shut on Charboric’s SUV. He looked down at the pad of paper in his hand.

  “What the hell am I going to do now?”

  He opened the pad and wrote: “Rubert’s Cube” at the top of the first page.

  “What a dumb idea.”

  He scratched it out.

  Henry and John took turns going to class the next week. The one not in class spent hours hunched over the opened device in the old factory, tracing threads with the voltmeter. Slowly the neural mapping within the marshmallows took form. Grace drew the connections as they went along and John or Henry verified them so that there were no mistakes. If they made one, there was no way to correct it unless they started from scratch.

  “I don’t understand these at all,” John said, staring at the diagram.

  “We need an electrical engineer,” Grace said.

  “Electrical engineering is not till junior year,” John said. “We can�
�t wait that long.”

  “I’ll buy the textbooks,” she said with a laugh. “They’ll be here next week.”

  They finished another thread. While Grace drew it on their huge sheet of drafting paper, she said, “Casey keeps asking about you.”

  “What?”

  “Casey, remember her? Tall, blond, broke your heart.”

  “I remember.”

  “She says you two broke up over a big secret,” Grace said. “You wouldn’t share.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it this same secret?”

  John sighed. “I guess so.”

  “Well, the cat’s out of the bag on that one,” Grace said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can tell her the truth, can’t you?”

  “Too many people know already!” John said. “It could put you in danger.”

  “What will happen to her if we build a device and leave?”

  “Nothing.” John found the next thread within the device. Beside him the Geiger counter clicked a single beat. They kept it nearby in case, but there’d been nothing but background radiation. “Besides, she’s probably with Jack.” He remembered the sight of her and Jack on Thanksgiving Day, kissing and groping in front of her house.

  “She hasn’t seen Jack in months! Not since… Thanksgiving. She dumped him on the day before Thanksgiving.”

  “She did?”

  “Yep. Jack was a total asshole.”

  “I agree with that.”

  “So go see her,” Grace said.

  “She’s probably dating someone else,” John said.

  “She’s not.”

  “How do you know? You moved out of the dorm.” Grace had moved into an apartment near the factory when she stopped going to class.

  “I still keep in touch,” Grace said defensively. “I still go back for lunch at the cafeteria. It’s really good mac and cheese.”

  John laughed.

  “Call her; see her,” Grace said. “Talk to her. What can it hurt?”