Paul Melko - The Walls of the Universe

Even the man who’d been holding back the blood was gone, bloody footprints marking his retreat.

John laid the girl down next to her mother’s face.

“Momma?” she said pitifully.

The woman’s breathing was shallow, but she was alive. No ambulances, the old woman had said. Authorities looked the other way over killings for food. John was sure he could get no help in this universe for the woman.

And if she died, so would the child.

“Do you have a family, child?” John asked softly. She stared at him blankly. “Do you have a father or brothers or sisters?”

The girl shook her head. “No, just Momma.”

“What’s your name?”

“Kylie. Kylie Saraft.”

John tried to think back to the severed cat-dog carcass. The thing had dove at him and been clinging to his back as he fell. The slice had looked perpendicular to the beast’s torso, perhaps a meter behind John. That meant the device had a field of radius of one meter, at least.

“Hug your mother,” John said. Kylie looked at him for a moment, her eyes hard. John wondered what atrocities she had seen in her short life. Then she took John’s hand and slid against her mother’s body, groaning when her leg flexed suddenly.

John toggled the universe counter forward to 7539, slipped in beside the two on the ground. He pulled them as tight as he could. They felt like skeletons. He could easily feel the ribs of both of them, the bones in their arms.

There was no one in this universe for them. They’d been left for dead. No family, no medical help. If he didn’t help them, they would die. He had to do this.

Grasping them both, he pulled the lever.

“Jesus,” someone said.

John stood. The snow was gone, except for the bits that clung to his legs and the woman’s back. The daughter and the woman had come through with him. All of them, no bloody stumps. The field of the device seemed to have covered him, the woman and the girl, and a pile of snow.

“What happened to you, man?”

John turned to the students looking on. The woman was lying on a footpath that followed the Ottawa River; a half-dozen students stood around them.

“This woman’s been shot. We need an ambulance.”

“No way, man,” the student said. He wore black denim pants, a black jeans jacket. An earring dangled from his left ear, and a stocking cap, also black, covered his head. He looked around, as if he could find an ambulance that way.

“Does anyone have a phone?” John said. “This woman is bleeding to death.”

A female student, holding her books in front of her like a shield, pointed to a lamppost ten meters away. “Security phone’s over there.”

John ran over and picked the phone up. It began to ring immediately. “Campus security.”

“Yes. There’s a woman shot at this location. And a little girl with a broken leg. Send an ambulance.”

“Please state your name.”

“Is the ambulance coming?”

“Yes.”

John hung up the phone. The chill of the other universe had left him. It was a warm October day here. No food riots, no shootings over two cans of Campbell Chicken Noodle. He watched the crowd of well-fed students gather around the woman and her child.

The girl had sat up and was looking at all the strange faces, perhaps wondering where all the snow had gone. Within a minute, John heard the wail of sirens. He looked down at his blood-soaked jacket and realized he’d have to answer a lot of questions.

He pulled his jacket off, turned it inside out, and walked away. What more could he do?

He’d brought them to a universe where food was plentiful. Sure, he’d ripped them out of their home universe. But there was no one there for them. It was better for them in this next universe, John was certain, though he had no idea what this universe was like. It seemed close enough to his own. There would be Welfare and services for the two. They would survive. He’d helped them.

John Prime had done the same thing to him, he realized. Guilt and anger knotted his stomach. He’d saved their lives, damn it! He hadn’t kidnapped them. He’d saved them. It was nothing like what Prime had done to him.

The ambulance pulled up and two EMTs began working on the woman. Moments later a university police car arrived.

John continued walking. He needed someplace to clean up. Ahead of him was the field house. He assumed it would have a locker room. Maybe he could fake his way in as he had at the Physics Library in the earlier universe. His shirt and jacket were soaked in blood. His shoes were soaked with melted snow and squeaked as he walked.

The field house was an old building adjacent to the quad he had walked through to get to the Student Union. McCormick Hall was there; he saw the telescope observatory rising above the other buildings.

There was no one barring his way into the locker room, so he slipped in and found the showers. There were a couple guys changing clothes, but no one noticed him.

John stripped down and hung the device on a hook in the shower alcove. Then he wrung out his shirt and coat. Red swirls circled the drain and disappeared. He used his hands to wash the streaks of blood off the shower curtain.

Afterwards, he dried his clothes as best he could on the hand drier. He would have preferred a washing machine, but at least the blood was gone. As he leaned against the hand drier, he wondered what would happen with the woman and her daughter. He hoped that they would, if not understand, at least cope with being in another universe. Just like he was doing.

As he walked across the quad from the field house to McCormick Hall, John was taken aback by the juxtaposition of this same grass field with the one in the other universe. The trees weren’t gnarled and hideous here; they still held a bouquet of colorful leaves, as students flung Frisbees or lounged around, on one of the last warm days of the year. Some of the students were even wearing shorts, and John compared these well-fed, fleshy children to the boney, malnourished people of the last universe. There the clouds roiled; here the sun shined.

He decided not to feel guilty about bringing the woman and her daughter here. If he could, he thought, he’d bring everyone from that universe here. The inhabitants of that universe thought they had to live with the world as it was, but they didn’t. Here was a universe with food to spare. Did they realize that salvation and plenty was in the universe next door? If he had a device that was large enough, one that worked right, he could transfer thousands of people through.

A large enough device, he thought. If he had a device that worked, he’d get himself home. He looked for the physics building. He had what he needed to confront Wilson now.

McCormick Hall looked identical. In fact, the same student guarded the door of the Physics Library, asked John the same question.

“Student ID?”

“I left it in my dorm room,” John replied without hesitation.

“Well, bring it next time, frosh.”

John smiled at him. “Don’t call me frosh again, geek.”

The student blinked at him, dismayed.

His visit with Professor Wilson had not been a total loss. Wilson had mentioned the subject that he should have searched for instead of parallel universe. He had said that the field of study was called quantum cosmology.

Cosmology, John knew, was the study of the origin of the universe. Quantum theory, however, was applied to individual particles, such as atoms and electrons. It was a statistical way to model those particles. Quantum cosmology, John figured, was a statistical way to model the universe. Not just one universe either, John hoped, but all universes.

He sat down at a terminal. This time there were thirty hits. He printed the list and began combing the stacks.