Paul Melko: The Walls of the Universe

“He’s not coming home, Bill!”

“Give me the phone, Janet.” Into the phone his father said, “John, I want you home tonight. We understand that you’re upset, but you need to be home, and we’ll handle this here, under our roof.”

“Dad, I’ll be home tomorrow.”

“John-”

“Dad, I’ll be home tomorrow.” He hung up the phone and almost chortled.

Then he turned on Home Theatre Office and watched bad movies until midnight.

“It turns this way, this way, and this way!” Prime made the motions with his hands for the fourth time, wishing again that he’d bought the key-chain Cube when he’d had the chance.

“Why?” Joe Patadorn was the foreman for an industrial design shop. He scratched his bald head with the nub of his pencil. He was dressed in blue coveralls with “Joe” stitched on the breast. The office and shop near the river smelled of machine oil. A pad of paper on his drafting board was covered in pencil sketches of cubes. “Rotate against what? It’s a cube.”

“Against itself! Against itself! Each column and each row rotates.”

“Seems like it could get caught up with itself.”

“Yes! If it’s not a cube when you try to turn it, it’ll not turn.”

“And this is a toy people will want to play with?”

“I’ll handle that part.”

Joe shrugged. “Fine. It’s your money.”

“Yes, it is.”

“We’ll have a prototype in two weeks.”

They shook on it.

His errands were finally done in Toledo. His lawyer was doing the patent searches and Patadorn was building the prototype. If Prime was lucky, he could have the first batch of Cubes ready to ship in a month. Too late for Christmas, but he didn’t need a holiday for the fad to catch on.

From the bus stop he hiked the three miles to the farm, and stashed his contracts in the loft with the money there. When he was climbing down, he saw his dad standing next to the stalls.

“Hey. Am I in time for dinner?” Prime asked.

His father didn’t reply, and then Prime realized that he was in trouble.

His father’s face was red, his cheeks puffed out. He stood in overalls, his fists at his hips.

“In the house.” The words were soft, punctuated.

“Dad-”

“In the house, now.” His father lifted an arm, pointing.

Prime went, and as he entered the house, he was angry too. How dare Bill order him around?

His mother was waiting at the kitchen table, her fingers folded in a clenched, white mound.

“Where were you?” his father demanded.

“None of your business,” Prime said.

“While you’re in my house, you’ll answer my questions!” his father roared.

“I’ll get my things and go,” Prime said.

“Bill…,” his mother said. “We’ve discussed this.”

His father looked away, then said, “He pranced into the barn like he’d done nothing wrong.”

His mother turned to him. “Where were you, John?”

He opened his mouth to rail, but instead he said, “ Toledo. I had to… cool off.”

His mother nodded. “That’s important.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes… no.” Suddenly he was sick to his stomach. Suddenly he was more angry with himself than with his father.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay what you did, and we’re glad you’re back. Bill?”

His father grunted, then said, “Son, we’re glad you’re back.” And then he took Prime in his big farmer arms and squeezed him.

Prime sobbed before he could fight it down, and then he was bawling like he hadn’t since he was ten.

“I’m sorry, Dad.” The words were muffled in his shoulder. Prime’s throat was tight.

“It’s okay. “It’s okay.”

His mother joined them and they held on to him for a long time. Prime found he didn’t want to let go. He hadn’t hugged his parents in a long time.

John’s arms flailed and his left foot hit the ground, catching his weight. He groaned as his leg collapsed under him. He rolled across the grass.

Grass? he thought as the pain erupted in his knee. He sat up, rocking as he held his knee to his chest. He’d been on the steps of the library and now he was on a plain. The wind blew the smell of outside: dirt, pollen, clover.

He tried to stretch his leg, but the pain was too much. He leaned back, pulling off his backpack with one hand, and looked up at the sky, breathing deeply. It hurt like hell.

The device had worked. He had changed universes again. Only this universe had no library, no Findlay, Ohio. This universe didn’t seem to have anything but grass. He fell because the steps he’d been standing on weren’t in the universe he was in now.

He checked the readout on the device. He was in 7535. He’d gone forward one universe.

John looked around him but didn’t see anything through the green-yellow grass. It rustled in the wind, making sounds like sandpaper rubbing on wood.

John stood gingerly on his other leg. He was on a broad plain, stretching for a good distance in every direction. There were small groves of trees to the north and east. To the west and south, the grass stretched as far as he could see.

There was no library to use to figure out what was different in this universe. No humans at all, maybe. A Mayan empire? If he wanted to find the differences, he’d have to do some field research.

He sat back down. No, he thought. He had to get back to his life. John Prime had some answers to give and a price to pay. It was Sunday afternoon. He still had half a day to figure out how to get back to his universe.

His knee was swelling, so he took off his coat and shirt. He ripped his T-shirt into long strips and used that to wrap his knee as tightly as possible. It wasn’t broken, but he may have sprained it.

He took the sandwich that he had packed on Saturday from his backpack and unwrapped it. He finished it in several bites and rinsed it down with some of the water in his water bottle. The taste of the sandwich made him angry. Prime was eating his food and sleeping in his bed.

John spent the afternoon nursing his knee and considering what he knew, what he thought he knew, and what Prime had told him. The latter category he considered biased or false. What he knew, however, was growing.

Universe 7535 was the second one he’d visited. The device clearly still worked. His going from 7534 to 7535 proved that.

It was also support for his theory that the device only allowed travel to universes higher in number than the one a traveler currently resided in. But not proof. Hypotheses required repeatable experimental proof. He’d used the device to move forward through two universes. He’d have to do it a couple more times before he was certain that was the way the device worked.

He took a blade of grass and chewed on it. This was an unspoiled universe, he thought. Which gave him another piece of data. Universes sequentially next to each other could have little in common. John couldn’t even begin to guess what had happened for a universe to not have North America settled by the Europeans.

There’d been no library steps here, so he had fallen three meters to the ground. More data: There was no guarantee that a man-made object in one universe would exist in the next. Nor even natural objects. Hills were removed or added by machines. Rivers were dammed and moved. Lakes were created. What would happen if he jumped to the next universe and the steps were there? Would he be trapped in the cement that formed the steps? Would he die of asphyxiation, unable to press the lever because he was encased in the library steps?

The thought of being entombed, blind and without air, horrified him. It was no way to die.