Paul Melko: The Walls of the Universe

He would have to be careful when he changed universes. He’d have to be as certain as possible that there was nothing solid where he was going. But how?

Movement caught his eye and he looked up to see a large beast walking in the distance. It was so tall he saw it from his seat in the grass. A cross between a rhinoceros and a giraffe, it munched at the leaves of a tree. It was gray, with legs like tree limbs, a face like a horse. Leaves and branches gave way quickly to its gobbling teeth.

No animal like that existed in his universe.

John watched, amazed. He wished he had a camera. A picture of this beast would be a nice addition to his scrapbook. Would it be worth cash? he wondered.

Ponderously the beast moved to the next tree in the grove.

John looked around him with more interest. This was no longer a desolate North America. There were animals here that no longer existed in his time line. This universe was more radically different than he could have imagined.

The wave of the grass to the west caught his attention. The grass bobbed against the wind, and he was suddenly alert. Something was in the grass not twenty meters from him. He realized that large herbivores meant large carnivores. Bears, mountain lions, and wolves could be roaming these plains. And he had no weapons. Worse still, he had a bum knee.

He looked around for a stick or a rock, but there was nothing. Quickly he gathered the notebook into the backpack. He pulled his coat on.

Was the thing closer? he wondered. He glanced at the grass around him. Why hadn’t he thought of that earlier?

John felt beneath his shirt for the device. He glanced down and toggled the universe counter up one to 7536. But he dared not pull the lever. He could be under the library right now.

He looked around him, tried to orient himself. The library entrance faced east, toward the Civil War Memorial. If he traveled east sixty meters, he’d be in the middle of the park and it was unlikely that anything would be in his way. It was the safest place he could think of to do the transfer.

Suppressing a groan, he moved off in an easterly direction, counting his steps.

At fifty-two steps he heard a sound behind him. A doglike creature stood five meters away from him in his wake in the grass. It had a dog’s snout and ears, but its eyes were slits and its back was arched more like a cat’s. It had no tail. Its fur was tan with black spots the size of quarters along its flank.

John froze, considering. It was small, the size of a border collie. He was big prey, and it may just have been curious about him.

“Boo-yah!” he cried, waved his arms. It didn’t move, just stared at him with its slit eyes. Then two more appeared behind it.

It was a pack animal. Pack animals could easily bring down an animal larger than a pack member. John saw three of them, but there could be a dozen hidden in the grass. He turned and ran.

The things took him from behind, nipping his legs, flinging themselves onto his back. He fell, his leg screaming. He felt weight on his back, so he let the straps of his backpack slide off. He crawled forward another meter. Hoping he’d come far enough, he pulled the lever on the device.

A car horn screeched and a massive shape bore down on him. John tried to scramble away, but his hand was stuck. As his wrist flexed the wrong way, pain shot up his arm.

He looked up, over his shoulder, into the grille of a car. John hadn’t made it into the park. He was still in the street, the sidewalk a meter in front of him.

John got to his knees. His hand was embedded in the asphalt. He planted his feet and pulled. Nothing happened except pain.

“Buddy, you okay?” The driver was standing with his door open. John’s eyes were just over the hood of the man’s car.

John didn’t reply. Instead he pulled again and his hand tore loose with a spray of tar and stones. The impression of his palm was cast in the asphalt.

The man came around his car and took John’s arm. “You better sit down. I’m really sorry about this. You came outta nowhere.” The man led him to the curb, then looked back and said, “Jesus. Is that your dog?”

John saw the head and shoulders of one of the cat-dogs. The transfer had caught only half the beast. Its jaws were open, revealing yellowed teeth. Its milky eyes were glazed over. Blood from its severed torso flowed across the street. A strand of intestine had unraveled onto the pavement.

“Oh, man. I killed your dog,” the motorist cried.

John said between breaths, “Not… my… dog… Chasingme.”

The man looked around. “There’s Harvey,” he said, pointing to a police officer sitting in the donut shop that John had eaten in that morning. Well, not the same one, John thought. This wasn’t the same universe, since this car was gas powered.

“Hey, Harvey,” the man yelled, waving his arms. Someone nudged the police officer and he turned, looking at the blood spreading across the street.

Harvey was a big man, but he moved quickly. He dropped his donut and coffee in a trash can at the door of the shop. As he approached he brushed his hands on his pants.

“What happened, Roger?” he said. He glanced at John, who was too winded and too sore to move. He looked at the cat-dog on the street. “What the hell is that?”

He kicked it with his boot.

“This young man was being chased, I think. I nearly clipped him and I definitely got that thing. What is it? A badger?”

“Whatever it is, you knocked the crap out of it.” Harvey turned to John. “Son, you okay?”

“No,” John said. “I twisted my knee and my wrist. I think that thing was rabid. It chased me from around the library.”

“Well, I’ll be,” said the officer. He squatted next to John. “Looks like it got a piece of your leg.” He lifted up John’s pant leg, pointed to the line of bite marks. “Son, you bought yourself some rabies shots.”

The officer called Animal Control for the carcass and an ambulance for John. The white-uniformed Animal Control man spent some time looking for the other half of the cat-dog. To Harvey ’s questions about what it was he shrugged. “Never seen nothing like it.” When he lifted up the torso, John saw the severed arm straps of his backpack on the ground. He groaned. His backpack, with seventeen hundred dollars in cash, was in the last universe under the other half of the cat-dog.

A paramedic cleaned John’s calf, looked at his wrist and his knee. She touched his forehead gingerly. “What’s this?”

“Ow,” he said, wincing.

“You may have a concussion. Chased by a rabid dog into a moving car. Quite a day you’ve had.”

“It’s been a less than banner day,” John said.

“ ‘Banner day,’ ” she repeated. “I haven’t heard that term in a long time. I think my grandmother said that.”

“Mine too.”

They loaded him into the ambulance on a stretcher. By the time the door had shut on the ambulance, quite a few people had gathered. John kept expecting someone to shout his name in recognition, but no one did. Maybe he didn’t exist in this universe.

They took him to Roth Hospital, and it looked just like it did in his universe, an institutional building from the fifties. He sat for fifteen minutes on an examining table off of the emergency room. Finally, an older doctor came in and checked him thoroughly.

“Lacerations on the palm. The wrist has a slight sprain. Minor. The hand is fine.” Looking at John’s knee, he added, “Sprain of the right knee. We’ll wrap that. You’ll probably need crutches for a couple days.”

A few minutes later, a woman showed up with a clipboard. “You’ll need to fill these forms out,” she said. “Are you over eighteen?”

John shook his head, thinking fast. “My parents are on the way.”