Paul Melko - The Walls of the Universe

With the plant job, washing-machine assembly line work from four until midnight, he’d have enough for tuition for the year. Plus Bill and Janet were still paying him three an hour for chores he was helping out with. He noted ironically to himself that in his own universe he wouldn’t have been paid a dime. In September he’d get another job for pocket money and rent near the university.

He set the carburetor on the front seat and rolled the car back into the barn. This was a good universe, John had decided, but he wasn’t staying. No, he was happy with Bill and Janet taking him in. They were kind and generous, just like his own parents in nearly every respect, but he couldn’t stay here. Not for the long term.

The universe was a mansion with a million rooms. People didn’t know they were in just one room. They didn’t know there was a way through the walls to other rooms.

But John did. He knew there were walls. And he knew something else too. He knew walls came down. There were holes between worlds.

John had listed his major as physics, and he’d laughed when the manila envelope from the department had arrived, welcoming him and listing his faculty advisor as Dr. Frank Wilson. Professor Wilson’s world was going to shatter one day, and John was going to do it for him.

John knew something that no other physicist in this world knew. A human could pass through the walls of the universe. Just knowing that it was possible, just knowing, without a bit of doubt-he needed only to pull up his pant leg and look at the scars from the cat-dog bite-that there were a million universes out there, was all it would take for John to figure the science of it out.

That was his goal. He had the device and he had his knowledge. He’d reverse engineer it, take it apart, ask the questions of the masters in the field, he would himself become one of those masters, to find out how it was done.

And then, once the secrets of the universe lay open to him, he would go back; he would kick the shit out of John Prime and take his own life back.

He smiled as he shut the barn door.

John Prime awoke from a nightmare of suffocation. Casey’s elbow nudged him in the ribs.

“Your turn,” she muttered.

At first Prime thought she was talking in her sleep, and he rolled over, pulling the covers with him. The secondhand bed squeaked as he moved. Then he heard Abby scream.

“Fuck,” he said.

The alarm clock blazed 2:17. He had to get up in three hours for work at the plant. Why couldn’t Casey feed the baby? He was the one bringing in the money. All she had to do was stay home with Abby all day.

Abby’s screams turned to tiny shrieks. The Williamses upstairs would be complaining to the landlord if Prime didn’t do something.

He sat on the edge of the bed, rubbed his eyes, then stood. He pulled on some shorts. He should have just started wearing pajamas; it wasn’t like Casey and he had done it anytime recently.

He stumbled into the kitchenette and opened the refrigerator, glaring at the light. He found the fullest bottle of formula and nuked it for thirty seconds. By the time he made it to Abby’s room, she was bright red and so angry her shrieks were nearly silent.

Prime lifted her to his shoulder, his own anger gone, his own resignation lifted away. She struggled against his neck for a moment and then went still, sobbing silently. The maternity nurses had been shocked when he’d asked to be present for the birth. That was a small difference between his universe and this one. But he had insisted, and Casey had been glad for him next to her. He had viewed the blotchy purple Abby with a mixture of feelings. Pride, yet fear. Joy, yet frustration. She was another millstone, just like his marriage, just like his job.

He sat in the wooden rocking chair his mother had given them. It squeaked reassuringly. Abby rooted for the plastic nipple, and fell silent save the slurping.

Would he have used the device if he still had it? Always it had been a getaway, a fail-safe. He had tried to stay before, vowing never to use the device again. He’d tried to make a life for himself. Every time he transferred out, he was terrified, guilty, depressed.

Now there was no choice. But would he have, if he could?

He pulled the nipple out of Abby’s mouth, and the bottle sucked in air.

It was safe here. He had made it safe, for once. How many times had he almost died because of that damn device? It had even made him a murderer. His mind returned to Thomas and Oscar. It had been around 7450 or so, early on in Prime’s flight. He had switched out after the police had busted in his door, having time only to grab his emergency bag.

In the dawn light, he had been surprised to see a well-worn path and in the distance a palisade. It looked like a Pleistocene universe, one of the unpopulated ones, where all of North America was mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. But there was a human-made structure.

He checked the sky: no contrails. He checked the horizon for power lines and cell towers. Nothing. The little transistor radio he had in the emergency pack emitted nothing but static.

“Weird,” he muttered.

He started down the path.

As the palisade came into view, Prime caught the smell of burning wood and roasting meat. A guard, dressed in cured skins and armed with a twelve-foot-long pike, leaned against the gate. He didn’t show surprise at Prime’s arrival down the well-worn path, nor at Prime’s clothes.

“Another one? And young,” the guard said, shaking his head. “Welcome to Fort America, home of the truly free. Got anything on you?”

The man reached into Prime’s jacket, and Prime jumped back.

The guard seemed about to press the point, then shrugged.

“Why would you, then? They never leave us with anything useful.” He pulled out a clipboard and said, “Thomas has a spot in his crew for a tenderfoot. See that bunkhouse? Ask for him there.”

Prime wondered at the way the guard had expected people to show up at the gate. Was that common? He spoke unaccented English, which seemed anachronistic in this wilderness world.

The gate was open, and inside were two longhouses and several smaller huts, built of logs and skins. A battlement ran around the inside of the outer wall. At the parapet at two-meter intervals leaned pikes with stone heads. What were these people fortified against?

The courtyard was empty except for a couple of women tending a cooking fire, slowly turning a spit. The quartered beast was nothing Prime recognized, too large for the hindquarters of a cow. The women eyed him dully.

Prime knocked on the rough wooden door of the first long-house.

“Come in!” someone yelled.

Prime entered and found himself in a long room of bunk beds, rough-hewn from logs. The room smelled of sap and fresh wood. Two young men leaned against one bunk, talking.

“Who are you?”

“John. The guard at the gate sent me here.”

“Jesus! Another one, and a kid,” the first said. “You don’t know metallurgy, do you, kid?”

“Uh, no.”

“Oh, well. I’m Thomas; this is Oscar. I’m captain and he’s lieutenant of this bunk.” Thomas was tall and blond, like the quarterback of a football team. Oscar was shorter, with a shaved head.

Oscar said, “What have you got on you? Hand it over.”

Prime backed away.

“Leave him alone,” Thomas said. “They never drop anybody off with anything of value.” To Prime he said, “Come on. We were just about ready to walk out to the mine. My crew is working a coal seam today, and they’re probably loafing.”

Thomas led him out the back of the bunkhouse and then through a smaller gate in the fort wall. This one was there for convenience, it seemed, as there was no guard. It was wide open, though it could have been closed with a wooden latch. They grabbed pikes as they passed through the gate. Prime grabbed one too.