Paul Melko - The Walls of the Universe

They turned away, and Prime turned back toward his novel.

At quitting time, he felt his neck bristle and turned to see Ted Carson and a man with the same jowly face staring at him. Wouldn’t you know it? Prime thought. Ted Carson’s dad works at the plant too. Now he had two Carsons to deal with.

His lab class was in the old physics building-Hermangild Hall-a stone edifice with wooden-floored hallways that echoed with voices and footsteps. John had traveled universes, but he still wasn’t too sure of himself in crowds. He was still a small-town kid at heart. He turned and counted room numbers, realizing his lab was in the basement. He found a stairwell, and as he descended, the smell of mold and dust tickled his nose. Naked bulbs were strung along the ceiling, and he was certain he was lost.

“You look lost,” someone said.

John turned to find a frizzy-haired woman standing in a doorway.

“Looking for physics lab? You’re in the right place,” she said.

“Uh, thanks,” John said.

The room behind was fifteen meters long and five wide. Six black-lacquered tables were arranged in two rows, and a dozen students sat around them waiting for class. John found a seat at an empty table.

He felt someone at his elbow and turned to find the frizzy-haired woman had followed him.

“Can I sit here too?”

“I guess.”

She dumped her bursting backpack on the floor next to John, then sat. She held out her hand.

“I’m Grace. Grace Shisler.”

“John,” he replied, shaking. “Ray-John Wilson.”

“Is your middle name Ray?” Grace asked.

John blushed, embarrassed to have made a mistake with his alias. “No. It’s just… It’s irrelevant.”

“Okay, John Ray, whatever you say.”

John looked around for another table to sit at, but they were all full.

“Hey! Henry! Over here!” Grace shouted. Half the class craned their necks around, and John blushed again. He hated standing out.

Henry was a tall, gangly fellow, with dark hair and a slouch. He sat next to Grace and gave John a grunt in greeting.

“Henry’s in Alcott,” Grace said. “I’m in Benchley. We met at one of those mixer things they give for freshmen. Imagine that, both of us engineering majors. What dorm you in, John Ray?”

“It’s just John. Um, I’m off campus,” he said.

“How’d you swing that?” Grace asked. “All freshmen have to stay in the dorm. You’re a freshman, aren’t you? This is freshman physics lab.”

“I’m a freshman, but nontraditional,” John said. Without a high school diploma, without any sort of documentation at all, he’d been forced to take the GED and apply to the UT continuing-education program. If this universe had required any ID beyond his faked birth certificate, he would have been in big trouble.

“Cool, nontraditional,” Grace said. Henry grunted. “What do you think of Higgins’ class? I did everything he’s covered so far in high school.”

John nodded. The freshman physics class had been utterly useless to him, but there was no way he’d be able to understand the advanced physics he needed to master the device without starting with the basics. It was why he’d decided to attend the university, to understand enough to understand the device. But everything was so maddeningly irrelevant: engineering drafting, Electronics 101, freshman physics, European history, English! Of course, what school would offer a class on cross-dimensional travel? Maybe MIT.

“I wonder what’s going to be on the quiz,” Grace said. “I hope it’s hard.”

John glanced at her. She was smiling at him.

“You want us to sit somewhere else?” she asked.

John blushed for a third time. “No. I’m just-”

“-a little introverted?”

“A little. Not used to all this.”

“Well, just sit back and relax,” Grace said. “Leave the driving to me. I’m helping Henry acclimate to college too.”

John glanced at Henry, who shrugged silently.

Grace was forced to, if not be silent, then at least keep her volume low as the teaching assistant explained the lab for the day. It was all about velocity, acceleration, and momentum. They dropped wooden disks down a ramp and measured the time it took for the disks to travel the length of the board at various angles. Henry worked the stopwatch, Grace recorded the times, and John dropped the disks. John was surprised to look up at the end of the class and find they were the last ones there, having worked through the ancillary material on friction.

“That was pretty cool,” Henry said, the only opinion he had uttered all day.

“Yeah!” Grace said.

“It’s like a pinball machine,” John said.

“A what?” Grace asked.

“Pinball,” he said. “The ramp is like the play field. The disk could be the ball. If we added bumpers and paddles…” He trailed off.

“What?”

“What are you talking about? Pinball?” Grace asked.

“Oh,” John said. “Never mind, something I saw as a kid… in Las Vegas. Hard to explain.” He realized he’d found one of the anomalies that he had been tripping on now and again since he’d arrived in Universe 7650. Like the weird soda names: Pepsi and Dutch’s. He was used to Zotz and Coke. And saying, “Good health!” when someone sneezed instead of, “God bless you.” There was no pinball in this world.

“Oh, Vegas,” Grace said. “Hey, you want to eat with us at the dining hall?”

John checked his watch. It was past five.

“Thanks, no,” he said. “I have dinner at my apartment.”

“Sure. Apartment food,” Grace said. “I understand.”

“See you next week,” he said.

“Yeah, see you,” Grace said.

Henry grunted.

John pried up the boards in the closet while the water for his ramen noodles boiled. He withdrew the lockbox, dialed the combination quickly, and opened it. The device was wrapped in a lambskin cloth.

It had taken him a while to stop wearing it, to put it aside. The day he had, he’d realized he was going to be staying in this universe for a long time. He took out the rest of the items in the box: a jeweler’s tool set, a magnifying glass.

He realized that he needed one more thing now: a notebook. He and Henry had copied the numbers that Grace had written down during their experiment into their own notebooks. John Prime had had his own notebooks, but John hadn’t bothered. He realized now that he needed to document everything.

He brought the magnifying glass close to the edge of the device, looking for some detail, some hint. He ran his finger across the edge. The metal was smooth and cold. There were no warm spots anywhere on the device.

John wished he had been nicer to Henry and Grace, but it scared him to befriend anyone in this universe. These people were all shades and shadows, copies of themselves, one of a billion identical people. What good was it befriending them? He was leaving one day.

The kettle whistled. He carefully packed the device and his tools away. There was a comfort in deciding to follow a meticulous scientific method in his analysis of the device. Sooner or later it would yield its secrets.

“So explain this pinball thing you saw in Las Vegas.”

“Why?” John said. He glanced at Grace from across the air table. They were doing a linear momentum problem in two dimensions: floating disks on an air table and bouncing them together.

“Henry wants to know,” Grace said.

“Is that so?” John asked Henry.

Henry shrugged.

“He says he did a literature search on ‘pinball’ and couldn’t find anything,” Grace said.

John shook his head. “Would you launch the slug?”