The Alternate Universe

by The Alternate Universe [MM] (epub)

  “I’m waiting for Millstone to yell but he doesn’t. ‘It’s on a need to know basis,’ he says. ‘Give me a clue, bud,’ Eric says in a really jerky tone—not unlike the way I speak with Millstone, to be perfectly honest.”

  “He must bring it out in people,” Maya said.

  Claude smiled. “Yeah. Maybe. Anyway, Millstone says, ‘Crud, you’re stronger willed than Bill, aren’t you?’

  “ ‘Maybe backbone skips a generation,’ Eric says.”

  “Then Millstone gives in. ‘OK,’ he says. ‘You won’t be able to make heads or tails of it, but fine.’ He walks across the room and he fiddles with something. I hear him moving, opening a drawer maybe. And then I see him again, and he hands something to Eric.

  “‘Look at this photograph,’ he says. ‘Do you recognize anyone?’ Eric says, ‘How old is that?’ He sounds disgusted, like it’s dirty and he doesn’t want to touch it. ‘It’s old. Now take it and tell me what you see.’ ‘It looks like, I don’t know, a bunch of raggedy farmhands, sharecroppers or something.’ ‘Or something,’ Millstone sneers and points. ‘This kid. Over here.’ And Eric squints and says, ‘It kind of looks like Claude.’

  “ ‘Exactly,’ Millstone says.”

  An idea popped into Maya’s head—an absurd, frightening idea. “Halo,” she said aloud, instantly wishing she’d stayed quiet.

  “What is it?” Claude asked.

  She closed her eyes for a second and took a deep breath. Stick with the facts, she reminded herself. It was the same thing she told her students when they tried to draw conclusions without sufficient evidence. And right now, she didn’t have enough information for a hypothesis let alone a definitive conclusion.

  “An odd thought popped into my head.”

  “What thought?”

  It was too outlandish to voice; Claude might think she was crazy. “Did they say anything else?” she asked gently.

  Claude seemed hurt she wasn’t confiding in him. “Will you tell me later what you’re thinking?”

  “Yes. Of course. Just please, first, tell me everything you know.”

  Claude nodded. “OK. But there’s really nothing else to tell. I guess Eric says something like, ‘Was this picture taken at a play or costume party?’ and Millstone just laughs, like Eric is a complete idiot, and Eric starts getting mad. ‘Where’d you get it?’ he says, and Millstone says, ‘From the company archive.’

  “Eric seems as confused as I am but I hear something, sounds like a PAL’s coming, so I scram.”

  c c c c c

  They sat silently for what felt like a full minute, Maya cradling The Evolution of Physics, Claude looking at her anxiously as he sipped his coffee.

  She was calm despite the queasy, frightening feeling that Jonathan was in deep scheisse and the even more horrifying feeling that he was going to take his son along with him. Fortunately, crises tended to calm her. That had been the case in college when she’d coolly directed her classmates to evacuate the chemistry lab during an explosive fire, and many years later, when she’d methodically jerry-rigged a lever to pry open a manhole cover to escape an onrushing tornado.

  Claude was the first to break the silence. “I’m so mad right now,” he said.

  “Mad? Why?”

  “He disappears and doesn’t answer his phone and leaves a weird note.”

  “Well…” She didn’t know what to say. She wanted to defend Jonathan but could she? If he’d done what she suspected, he’d shown both brilliance and mind-boggling irresponsibility.

  “Dad says Millstone is bad and the next thing I know Millstone wants to use my would-be boyfriend to keep me distracted for a couple days, but distracted from what? What the Hades is going on?”

  “I don’t blame you for being a little scared,” she said.

  “Scared?” he said, looking offended. But then he sighed and nodded. “Yeah, scared. But what’s Dad done? How’d he get into this mess—I mean, if he is in a mess, which he probably is.”

  She found herself admiring him. A different 16-year-old might have denied being scared or melted in panic.

  “It’s funny how irresponsible parents can have responsible kids.”

  “You think Dad is irresponsible?”

  She smiled. “I think your dad is great, and I know he’s a great dad. But he’s not superman. He’s not perfect. And I think sometimes he gets carried away, especially by work. How can I put it? It’s as if he sometimes puts science—the pursuit of pure knowledge—before common sense.”

  “That sounds like Dad. He can spend the whole day outside, building something in the garden and get completely sunburned and forget to eat.”

  “His focus is incredible,” she said with genuine admiration. She heard herself use the present tense. Is incredible? Or would it be more accurate to say was incredible? She couldn’t help but imagine she might never see him again. It would be as if he’d died. The possibility seemed both absurd and, in a stomach twisting, ground-pulled-out-from-under-you way, very real.

  “You look like you’re having that odd thought you’d had before but wouldn’t tell me about.”

  Looking into Claude’s earnest, worried face, she couldn’t think of any reason not to share her suspicions. “Do you know what your father’s been working on lately?”

  He shrugged. “Yesterday he was all wired about alternate universes.”

  “And time travel? Did he say anything about time travel?”

  “Yeah, he did,” he said. His eyes widened, his nostrils flared—signs of a dawning realization. “You’re not going to say what I think you’re going to say.”

  “I’m just telling you what I know, and what I know is that your father said he was getting close to a theoretical,” she said, giving the word special emphasis, “understanding of time travel. He’d worked it out mathematically, or he said he did. The formulas are so complicated that it’s taking me weeks to go through them, and I’m still only half way done.”

  “Wait, wait, wait. Are you saying that Dad traveled back in time and got stuck, so he wrote a message to me in this book thinking I’d somehow eventually—years and years later—find it?”

  She hesitated, unsure how much to say. “He said if he could make a machine, a real-life time-traveling device, the validity of his theorems would be self-evident. He’s always been a big believer in seeing-is-believing.”

  “A time-traveling device? A time-traveling device?” he said, as if repeating the words could help him better understand them.

  “That’s what he said: some kind of machine or buggy that can jump through time.” Jonathan had shown her many odd inventions—not just the magnetic oscillator but a sensor that measured how many people were in a building based on vibrations in the walls and a photovoltaic kettle that converted the sound of someone whistling into enough energy to boil water—but never anything as jaw-dropping as a time buggy. Still, if anyone on earth was smart enough to pull it off, it was Jonathan. “Science fiction writers play around with the idea of time travel, but no scientist I’ve ever met, except your dad, talked about it seriously. He seemed to really think it was—how did he put?—‘within the realm of the practicable.’ ”

  “Practicable? Is that a word?”

  She smirked. “I think so. Your father isn’t one to make up words.”

  Claude muttered sadly, “That’s right. But he’s one to make up time buggies.”

  She felt close to tears for Jonathan, who’d suffered verdammt knows what, and for Claude, who was facing something no one on earth had ever confronted before. It seemed ridiculous. It was ridiculous! How could Jonathan have sent a note from the past? And yet maybe it was just a failure of her imagination to see what Jonathan had thought was obvious. That time wasn’t merely a fixed fact of the universe but a road that could be traveled. If that were the case—and if he’d successfully found a form of transportation that allowed him to navigate that road—then his name in the book made perfect sense. Except if he knew how to travel back in time to w
rite the inscription, why had he stayed there? Why hadn’t he returned? Had he run out of fuel? Had his time machine broken down?

  “He was really worked up about something last night,” Claude said.

  “He was? How so?”

  He furrowed his brow, as if he could see into the past by squinting. “It was late, after midnight, and he’d said he’d had a breakthrough. Come to think of it,” he said, suddenly sitting up straight and looking intently at Maya, “he seemed different. I mean, I thought he looked really tired, like he hadn’t slept in days. He shaves every morning, but he had stubble, like he hadn’t shaved for a long time. I’d seen him a few hours earlier and he looked normal and then boom! I see him at two in the morning, and he’s got a two-day old beard, and he’s all hyped up about some breakthrough, like he’d just made a huge discovery.”

  “Wow,” she said, her heart pounding wildly. “Sounds like he really did it.”

  “Of course he did,” he said emphatically.

  She frowned. “But if it worked last night, why didn’t it work again? Why is he writing notes like this? And such obscure ones. I mean, if he wanted help, why didn’t he just, oh, I don’t know…” She was about to say “write a letter” but stopped herself. You can’t write a letter and ask that it not be delivered for 60 years. “There must be a better way to communicate. I mean, if he’s going to send an SOS, why send it in code in a book that’s just going to collect dust somewhere?”

  “Not just anywhere, but in my stepfather’s collection.”

  “Yeah, but how could your father—if he really wrote this 50 or 60 years ago—know that the book was going to end up in your stepfather’s house where you, who would recognize his name and look for a secret message, find it?”

  They sat for a moment pondering this question, which didn’t have a ready answer.

  “What about Millstone’s photo?” Claude asked.

  She’d forgotten about the photo. “I don’t know.”

  “Does it mean that I’m going to travel back in time, too? Am I going to be trapped like Dad, assuming he is trapped, which he probably is?”

  “Maybe we should just sleep on it. Your dad could call any minute, and we’ll realize we’ve let our imaginations get the best of us.”

  “You really think so?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t think we should sleep on it. We should do something.”

  Claude was right. They shouldn’t wait, especially if Millstone, who was somehow involved, needed just a day more to accomplish an important task. She looked at her watch. 10:48. “Do you know where the safe is? The one he mentions in the note?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then our first job is to find it. You should look through your house, top to bottom. I’ll go to Jonathan’s office.” She felt a brief moment of hope as she imagined opening his office door and finding him, so lost in his work that he hadn’t slept, eaten, or heard his cell’s persistent ringing. He’d laugh hysterically when he found out they’d believed he’d not only invented a time machine but had been trapped in the past.

  “OK. Call me right away if you find anything,” Claude said.

  She nodded. “And you do the same.”

  “Agreed.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Searching for a Safe

  By the time Claude got home, he was exhausted. He wanted to forget everything that had just happened, make a carrot-caramel sundae topped with sugared peas and acorn brittle and park in front of the TV, the volume high enough to drown his mind in an ocean of sound.

  As he changed into a “Don’t Laminate the Lake” t-shirt, his cell chimed. It was Jayesh, who had already delivered several “Where r u?” quills followed by increasingly urgent VMs, in which he expressed first hurt over Claude’s avoiding him and then anger. Underlying it all Claude detected panic, no doubt fueled by Jay’s fear of Millstone and his failure to keep Claude distracted.

  He thought about Jay’s smiles, his sexy comments, his strong grip as he’d pulled him into a kiss at the party. It had seemed so wonderful, so perfect, but it had all been a lie. How could he have been so stupid as to believe that someone as perfect-looking and charming as Jay could have been interested in Claude?

  A tiny part of him felt sorry for Jay, although his pity was dwarfed by a desire to see him punished. Go ahead Milly, he thought; you have my permission to ruin Jay and his parents. He wasn’t sure the scope of the destruction Millstone had in mind, but Claude pictured Jay in ragged clothes, squatting on the ground and begging passersby to drop coins in a battered metal bowl.

  He closed the cell and tried to banish Jayesh from his thoughts.

  The logical place to find a safe was the basement lab. But as he descended the cellar steps, it was clear something was wrong. Everything had been dumped on the floor—pieces of metal, wires, tubes, gauze, bottles, goggles, gloves, solar cells, cathode tubes, cranks, gears, tools, paper, books, notebooks.

  He stood still and listened for the presence of an intruder, but all he heard, besides the thumping of his heart, were the harmless sounds of an empty house: the hum of the refrigerator; the rattle of the kitchen window in the wind; a whinny from a neighbor’s horse.

  Reasonably certain he was alone, he quilled Maya: Someone sacked house. Total mess

  Maya’s response was swift: Get out NOW

  What else was she supposed to say? Don’t worry. They’re gone he answered.

  If there’d been a safe, the thieves had probably already found it, but he looked around anyway. He grabbed a hammer and tapped the walls, listening for a hollow. He used a flamelight to probe the narrow space above the pipes. He examined the concrete floor, looking for any breaks or irregularities that might indicate an excavation.

  He studied the laundry room with similar care, hefting the machines aside to look for clues behind and beneath them. He tried to examine the chaos of papers, too, but most were scientific articles or his dad’s handwritten calculations, which, for all Claude understood, could just as easily explain how to make laxatives as they could a time buggy.

  The cell chimed. When he pulled it out of his pocket, he realized that he’d already missed several calls.

  “Yeah,” Claude said.

  “Where are you?” Maya asked, breathless.

  He was sitting on the floor, amid a maelstrom of papers and equipment. “Still here.”

  “Why haven’t you answered?” She sounded just like a parent: both relieved and mad.

  “I didn’t hear the phone.”

  “Did you see my quill? What if whoever sacked the house comes back?”

  “Did you find the safe?”

  “Just get out, please. Meet me at my house.”

  “A few more minutes. I’m going to go through the rest of the house.”

  “We can do that together.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow. And we should probably call the constable.”

  “And tell them what? Dad invented a time buggy?”

  She was silent for a moment. “I can’t get in his office.”

  “Why not?”

  “The lock’s been changed.”

  “Do you think Dad was worried someone would try to break in?”

  “Maybe,” she said. She sounded doubtful. “Or maybe someone’s keeping us out.”

  His head was swimming. It seemed like anything was possible. “Can you punch a hole in the wall?”

  “Through concrete? No.”

  He wished there was someone else to call, someone who knew how to evade alarms and break locks.

  “I have a friend.”

  “A friend who knows about locks? This is sophisticated stuff.”

  “Carolien can hack anything.” How would she react when he called at 3 in the morning to say his dad had invented a time buggy and was lost in the past? The funny thing was, she might actually believe him.

  “She may be another Einstein, but it’s better not to get more people involved,” she said
.

  “She’s not ‘more people.’ She’s my best friend,” he said.

  “We need the card that opens Jonathan’s office,” she said, as if speaking to herself.

  Claude thought of the key card he’d seen in Millstone’s closet. “Does Dad’s office have a number?”

  “Forty-two. Why?”

  “I know who has the card,” he said slowly.

  “Who?”

  “My stepfather.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can’t go back there. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Not going back is what’s dangerous. I’m supposed to be staying there. If I don’t show my face in the morning, Mom’ll worry.” The next steps were clear. “I’ll snag the card before they wake, leave Mom a message that I went to school early, and meet you at Dad’s office.”

  “Since I know I can’t stop you, I’m going to beg you to please, please be careful.”

  He was already leaping up the stairs from the basement, taking two at a time. “I will,” he said. “See you soon.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘I Need Help’

  She winced as she tweezed and then studied her face from different angles. Her once bushy brows now tapered off in graceful, clean arches that the personal grooming column on lesshairmorelove.com said accentuated “the natural mystery of the female iris, emphasizing a woman’s capacity for wide-eyed innocence.”

  Complete kuhscheisse, of course. Women had no greater capacity for innocence than men. Still, Carolien used the photo accompanying the column as a guide because she thought the higher arch looked sexy and might help her earn a few extra points for poise at the next meet. At the very least, with crisply arched brows, yellow eye shadow, pheromone enhanced eau de toilette, and skintight bodysuit, she’d be more likely to get a date to the Halloween ball.