The Walls of the Universe

by Paul Melko

The spring night left the barn cool. The space heater hummed when John turned it on, emitting the sharp stink of burning dust. He set it under the bench, where it toasted his feet. The halogen lamp he’d bought cast sharp shadows, but still the barn was dark in the corners. There was nothing to be done for it.

  He unrolled the diagram and laid it on the bench. His heart beat too fast, and he felt a moment’s panic as he stared at the diagram.

  “Damn it!”

  It was like a physics problem he didn’t have the tools to solve. Too big and too hard. He had no idea where to start.

  He had to start somewhere. This was his only weapon, and Visgrath didn’t know it was broken.

  Or did he? Would Henry or Grace tell? Would Visgrath force them to speak?

  John shuddered. He was playing a violent, crazy game and he had only half the rules.

  He stood over the diagram, and his eye caught the set of circuits that tied to the display. They had to be simple. It was just an LED. He decided to try to model that first.

  An hour later, he grunted in frustration. He had no idea what went with what. John popped another can of cola. It was his sixth, and he was beginning to feel jittery. At the same time, he felt inflated with knowledge and drive. He turned his attention to the next nexus of circuits. Something had to give.

  John’s first breakthrough came when he found that the dial on the side of the device was tied to the power system. The dial had always been placed on the most counterclockwise position when he used the device. John Prime had said that he had no idea what the dial did. But John suspected that it regulated the strength of the device’s field. Wouldn’t power correlate positively to strength? It made sense.

  He remembered how the cat-dog had been cut in half. The dial might well extend the range of the field, so that larger volumes of material could be transported. He wondered how large of a volume it could move between worlds. An entire building?

  Then he began wondering why the field was not a sphere, with the device at the center. If it had been a sphere, he would have always scooped up an arc of dirt every time he transferred. But no, he only transferred to his feet. The field seemed to stop at the edge of his body, with his clothes included, but not beyond. The cat-dog had been gripping his leg when he’d transported through from that universe. He had been lying on the grass; the cat-dog had been attached to his calf. Yet none of the prairie he had been lying on had come though with him. Just himself, his clothes, and half the cat-dog.

  Clearly the field followed some topology rules when it determined what passed through to the next universe. Perhaps whatever was in contact with the device up to a certain radius was included in the transfer, but earth material and air were not. Perhaps it was based on density. Only objects with a density near one were transported.

  John wondered if that was a property of the field or it was determined in some fashion by the device. Perhaps there were circuits built into the fuzzy marshmallows to calculate the passenger’s topology. The thought that complex intelligence was built into the device daunted him. How would he reproduce that with simple diodes, resistors, and transistors? Then he wondered if he even needed to. Perhaps he could simplify it to the bare essentials needed to move between worlds.

  The buttons on the front that incremented and decremented the universe counter also were easy to understand. He realized that one nexus of circuits kept the counter; they tied into the display and the toggle switch. These circuits modified the state of a complex three-dimensional circuit that John figured must determine which universe was the destination. John noted that the decrement and increment buttons did change the state, as did the third button. The first and second buttons changed it to a new one each time, while the third button changed the state to a fixed one every time.

  John assumed that the third button represented some kind of reference universe. Perhaps it set the device to transfer to universe zero. If so, John wondered why it didn’t reset the display.

  John paused, realizing it was nearly dawn and that he had actually simulated several functions of the device. Sure, they were smaller functions, but he had done it! Groups of circuits began to make sense in his head. He started to see the logic of it grow. A glance at a ganglion told him what it might do. It was slowly starting to make sense!

  He’d covered the whole workbench by then, and had to place some of his circuits on the ground or the hood of his car. He’d need some card tables. He rubbed at his eyes. He needed sleep. He needed food, but he wasn’t leaving until he’d made more progress.

  The basic controls, such as the field radius control, were easy to duplicate. The eigen matrix, as he came to call it, was the most complex. The hardest part of the neural mass was that connected to the trigger mechanism. It seemed to wrap around on itself like an Ouroborus eating its tail.

  As he was turning to pick up a new circuit board, his foot caught the leg of the bench and he nearly sent all his work flying. He steadied himself, his chest heaving, his heart racing. He needed rest. He’d done enough.

  John checked his watch: nine. He’d visit Casey again.

  “John.”

  “Casey! You’re awake.”

  “Yeah, I’m awake and sore, but I think I’m okay.”

  “I’m so sorry you got messed up in this,” John said.

  Casey looked confused. “What are you talking about? Wasn’t it some crazed worker? Where are Henry and Grace?”

  John lowered his voice. A nurse was standing outside the door to Casey’s room, and the same security guard was sitting on a bench watching.

  “It was Visgrath,” John said. “He’s kidnapped Henry and Grace. He was here last night. He threatened your life.”

  “What? That’s nuts.”

  “What happened yesterday? When Henry showed up? What did you see?”

  Casey shrugged, then closed her eyes. “Grace and I were in the office talking when that weird guy showed up.”

  “Visgrath.”

  “Yeah, that’s his name. She was apologetic to me, but Visgrath had to see her right then. He looked angry. They disappeared into her office, and I didn’t eavesdrop, but there was no missing that they were yelling.”

  “About what?”

  Casey shrugged again. “Dunno. I heard ‘circuit boards’ and ‘transfer device.’ I figured it was a pinball issue and none of my business.”

  “If only.”

  “And then Henry shows up, and he goes right in. They’re in there for a while, so I wander around. For five minutes or so, and then I see them leaving, only Visgrath is dragging Grace and another guy is dragging Henry. They don’t look happy. I run across the factory floor, but by the time I get there, they’re in a black minivan. I yell, ‘Hey! Wait! I’m calling the cops!’ or something like that. It was clear Grace and Henry didn’t want to go. Then I get hit, and, man, did that hurt. I woke up in the hospital.”

  “Who shot you?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody in the first minivan. The doors and windows were closed.”

  “The first?”

  “There were two, but I didn’t look at the second.”

  John shook his head. Visgrath had found out about the circuit boards that Grace had charged on her corporate card; that was apparent. He’d confronted her and she’d let out or he’d deduced that they were building a transfer device. He’d taken Grace and Henry, thinking perhaps they were travelers too, thinking they had knowledge of building a device.

  “Do you believe me now?” John asked.

  “About what?”

  “My paranoid delusions!”

  “I guess even paranoids can be right about someone out to get them,” Casey said, with a slight grin.

  “Thanks for your support.” John paused, then said, “Casey, I may be gone for a while, or something might happen to me.”

  “John! What are you going to do? Just go to the police!”

  “We can’t. They’ll kill Grace and Henry. I’ve got to do this in a different way.”

  �
�What way?”

  “I can’t say, in case they get to you.”

  “John!”

  “I’ll do everything I can to win this, Casey. I promise.”

  “Oh, John. You’re a big paranoid idiot.”

  “I can’t argue with that.” He bent over and kissed her dry lips. “See ya.”

  John slept through the morning in the barn, his dreams filled with circuits like mazes that he ran down. The capacitors were huge balloons that slowly grew until they exploded. The resistors were thin sewer lines that he had to crawl through. He reached the end of the maze, only to discover that the last door opened onto a huge white fiber labyrinth even larger than the one before. He awoke covered in sweat.

  His back stiff, John stood again before the array of circuits and wires. He didn’t know where to begin. A wave of panic crept through him. Things that seemed clear the night before were vague in his mind in the light of day. It was a Rube Goldberg contraption; he was a fool to think he could understand the device’s logic.

  He wrung his hands, and then turned his attention to a single circuit. Break the problem down, he thought. Start with a simple thing. Then go to the next thing. Don’t hold the whole problem in your head at once. Just the part you need to look at first. Then it would be easier to add to the whole later.

  As he was staring at the diagram, a piece of it suddenly clicked. He started placing pieces together, soldering, wiring. He didn’t have to understand it to duplicate it. Understanding would come later. Maybe ten years later, when his friends’ lives weren’t in jeopardy.

  John looked up from the circuit board. His stomach rumbled. His breath tasted stale in his mouth.

  “How long…?” he muttered.

  The circuitry before him was a mess. He couldn’t remember anything he had done an hour ago; he was blindly connecting things, leaving taped notes to himself to help him remember what would connect where. He had no faith in it, however. What chance was there that he had pieced it all together correctly on the first try?

  None at all, he thought to himself. It was useless. It would never work.

  His mind turned toward Casey, then toward Henry and Grace. He felt sick to his stomach. Maybe he should just hand the device over to Visgrath. Maybe he should just do whatever it took to get his friends back instead of trying to be tricky.

  John, anxious and frustrated, picked up the old rotary phone Bill had installed in the barn and dialed Visgrath’s office number in Columbus. Visgrath picked up on one ring.

  “I need to know they’re okay,” John said as soon as Visgrath answered.

  “You think you’re in control here?” Visgrath asked sharply. “You think you can call the shots? Think again. We have no compunctions. You clearly do.”

  “You want the device, I need to know they’re fine.”

  “Come here now, or we kill one of them,” Visgrath said.

  John swallowed against a dry throat. “So? They’re not even singletons,” he said.

  Visgrath laughed. “If you truly believed that, you wouldn’t care about them.”

  “I’ve growth accustomed to them,” John said, trying to sound haughty.

  “Do not pretend to be what you are not. It won’t work a second time,” Visgrath said.

  “I talk with them before we make any deal,” John said.

  Visgrath was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Call this number in ten minutes.” John wrote it down, then hung up.

  John paced the barn floor as he waited. If Visgrath answered the phone, John knew where Henry and Grace were. They’d have to be in the fenced compound behind the Columbus site. They weren’t in Pittsburgh; John had dialed Visgrath’s office directly. The only secure place for him within ten minutes was the fenced area.

  John dialed the number Visgrath had given him.

  “Hello?” The voice was heavily accented and not Visgrath’s.

  “Give me Visgrath,” John said, his voice breaking.

  “He’s not here.”

  “I need to talk with him.” If Visgrath wasn’t there, John had no idea where he was holding Grace and Henry.

  “Who is this?”

  “He told me to call here.”

  “This is…” There was a pause, the sound of something away from the phone. “He’s here.”

  John sighed. They were in Columbus.

  The phone switched hands, and there was a long pause. Finally a faint voice came on the line.

  “John?”

  “Grace! Are you all right?”

  “John?”

  “There. You have spoken with her,” Visgrath said. “Now bring the device.”

  “What about Henry?”

  “He is fine as well.”

  “I want to speak to him!”

  “No!”

  “Then no deals!” If Henry couldn’t talk, John had to assume the worst.

  “If you don’t bring the transfer device to us now, I will kill them both,” Visgrath said.

  “Forget it,” John said.

  “Don’t test me!”

  “Don’t fuck with me!” John’s voice was shrill. Looking at the old analog phone line strung along the wooden beam above him, John suddenly wondered if Visgrath had the power to trace his call. John felt dizzy with panic.

  “I’ll deliver the device, but on my own terms,” John said. “If either Grace or Henry is harmed, I’ll leave and never come back.”

  Visgrath said nothing for a moment. “When?”

  “I’ll call you in two days.”

  “Too long!”

  “You’ve waited decades! You can wait forty-eight hours!” John slammed down the phone.

  As if an automaton, John finished the wiring of the transfer circuit, which was the last critical control system that actually caused the transfer to occur. Many of the subsystems he’d ignored, hoping they weren’t absolutely necessary for the device to work. He made guesses, on intuition and feel, hoping he was cutting the right stuff. He didn’t study what he was doing, just strung the boards, capacitors, and resistors together in what he hoped was the right sequence based on Henry’s modeling of the thread properties. It was as if he were in a daze of wires and circuits. For a moment it all made sense, and then it collapsed into dream logic.

  John knew it was a long shot. But he couldn’t expect to deal with Visgrath as a human being. The man would kill him and his friends to get the device. Visgrath was depravity incarnate.

  At dawn John placed the final pieces and examined the completed machine.

  It filled three tables in the barn, a hundred times larger than the device he wore. It wasn’t portable. It was stuck where it sat. Two-by-fours, wired with equipment, jutted out into the middle of the barn. The transfer field would be generated below the cantilevers, he hoped. John expected-guessed, prayed?-the device to generate a sphere-shaped field with a radius of two meters, but it was just as likely to explode. The physicist inside him chided him for encumbering his experiment with too many variables. Too many things were unknowns. But he didn’t have time for testing one thing at a time.

  “Now we skip unit testing and rush headlong into production,” he muttered. John stopped as he spoke. How long had he been up?

  John felt the same hyper-alertness he’d felt when he’d tried to kill his one-armed self. The nausea threatened to buckle his stomach again. No, Visgrath and company weren’t even human, though John knew as he thought it that it wasn’t true. They were monsters, killers. They had kidnapped his friends. They deserved to die, to be punished. John realized he was psyching himself up. Just as when he’d confronted Ted Carson.

  John pushed it all aside and powered the machine, instantly smoking a dozen resistors.

  He replaced them, and traced their destruction to a loose wire he had knocked from one end of a capacitor. He powered the thing again, and felt the contraption hum. He set the eigen matrix to Universe 7649, one universe back.

  The lights flickered.

  Did he have enough power?

&n
bsp; John grabbed an old wheelbarrow with a broken handle and rolled it into the center of the field area.

  Then, with a shrug, he activated his device.

  With a pop, the wheelbarrow disappeared. In place of the wheelbarrow was a hemisphere of dirt, like a large model of the lower hemisphere of the Earth. As he watched, it slumped into a mound.

  “Ha! Ha! It worked!” He realized as he capered around the lab that he looked like a mad scientist. Perhaps he was.

  John ran outside and looked at the topography around the barn. In the faint light of the morning, he noticed where the land had been flattened and cleared. Maybe Walder had dug out the side of the hill to make the barn rest on flat ground. In the universe where the chair went, there was no barn. There was a field with a two-foot-radius hole in it, and in that hole was an old wheelbarrow.

  John chortled and went back inside. He used a shovel to clear the transfer zone of dirt, dirt from another universe.

  When he was done cleaning the transfer zone, John took the rolled-up plans for the device, his gold, and his backpack.

  He stopped, his hands shaking. He hadn’t slept in days. His friends’ lives were in his hands. He’d built a crazy transdimensional device while in a delirium. What did he think he was doing? Did he think he was going to do this by himself? He couldn’t.

  He needed help. Perhaps Grace and Henry from some other universe? No, they’d have no idea who he was. Who could even begin to understand his plight?

  He could think of just one person.

  He set the universe to 7533.

  If there was one person who could understand, it was the John who got him into this mess.

  “Here goes nothing,” he muttered. He powered the machine; then with a ten-foot pole he pressed the trigger.

  CHAPTER 37

  The same dawn sun filled the same barn through the same barn windows. Only it wasn’t the same. He was back home: Universe 7533. He’d done it!

  Something rustled in the dark stalls.

  He spun, but it was only a horse. This was Walder’s barn. John remembered that they used it in this universe. His father had never bought it from Walder here.