Paul Melko - The Walls of the Universe

John looked up from the circuit board. His stomach rumbled. His breath tasted stale in his mouth.

“How long…?” he muttered.

The circuitry before him was a mess. He couldn’t remember anything he had done an hour ago; he was blindly connecting things, leaving taped notes to himself to help him remember what would connect where. He had no faith in it, however. What chance was there that he had pieced it all together correctly on the first try?

None at all, he thought to himself. It was useless. It would never work.

His mind turned toward Casey, then toward Henry and Grace. He felt sick to his stomach. Maybe he should just hand the device over to Visgrath. Maybe he should just do whatever it took to get his friends back instead of trying to be tricky.

John, anxious and frustrated, picked up the old rotary phone Bill had installed in the barn and dialed Visgrath’s office number in Columbus. Visgrath picked up on one ring.

“I need to know they’re okay,” John said as soon as Visgrath answered.

“You think you’re in control here?” Visgrath asked sharply. “You think you can call the shots? Think again. We have no compunctions. You clearly do.”

“You want the device, I need to know they’re fine.”

“Come here now, or we kill one of them,” Visgrath said.

John swallowed against a dry throat. “So? They’re not even singletons,” he said.

Visgrath laughed. “If you truly believed that, you wouldn’t care about them.”

“I’ve growth accustomed to them,” John said, trying to sound haughty.

“Do not pretend to be what you are not. It won’t work a second time,” Visgrath said.

“I talk with them before we make any deal,” John said.

Visgrath was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Call this number in ten minutes.” John wrote it down, then hung up.

John paced the barn floor as he waited. If Visgrath answered the phone, John knew where Henry and Grace were. They’d have to be in the fenced compound behind the Columbus site. They weren’t in Pittsburgh; John had dialed Visgrath’s office directly. The only secure place for him within ten minutes was the fenced area.

John dialed the number Visgrath had given him.

“Hello?” The voice was heavily accented and not Visgrath’s.

“Give me Visgrath,” John said, his voice breaking.

“He’s not here.”

“I need to talk with him.” If Visgrath wasn’t there, John had no idea where he was holding Grace and Henry.

“Who is this?”

“He told me to call here.”

“This is…” There was a pause, the sound of something away from the phone. “He’s here.”

John sighed. They were in Columbus.

The phone switched hands, and there was a long pause. Finally a faint voice came on the line.

“John?”

“Grace! Are you all right?”

“John?”

“There. You have spoken with her,” Visgrath said. “Now bring the device.”

“What about Henry?”

“He is fine as well.”

“I want to speak to him!”

“No!”

“Then no deals!” If Henry couldn’t talk, John had to assume the worst.

“If you don’t bring the transfer device to us now, I will kill them both,” Visgrath said.

“Forget it,” John said.

“Don’t test me!”

“Don’t fuck with me!” John’s voice was shrill. Looking at the old analog phone line strung along the wooden beam above him, John suddenly wondered if Visgrath had the power to trace his call. John felt dizzy with panic.

“I’ll deliver the device, but on my own terms,” John said. “If either Grace or Henry is harmed, I’ll leave and never come back.”

Visgrath said nothing for a moment. “When?”

“I’ll call you in two days.”

“Too long!”

“You’ve waited decades! You can wait forty-eight hours!” John slammed down the phone.

As if an automaton, John finished the wiring of the transfer circuit, which was the last critical control system that actually caused the transfer to occur. Many of the subsystems he’d ignored, hoping they weren’t absolutely necessary for the device to work. He made guesses, on intuition and feel, hoping he was cutting the right stuff. He didn’t study what he was doing, just strung the boards, capacitors, and resistors together in what he hoped was the right sequence based on Henry’s modeling of the thread properties. It was as if he were in a daze of wires and circuits. For a moment it all made sense, and then it collapsed into dream logic.

John knew it was a long shot. But he couldn’t expect to deal with Visgrath as a human being. The man would kill him and his friends to get the device. Visgrath was depravity incarnate.

At dawn John placed the final pieces and examined the completed machine.

It filled three tables in the barn, a hundred times larger than the device he wore. It wasn’t portable. It was stuck where it sat. Two-by-fours, wired with equipment, jutted out into the middle of the barn. The transfer field would be generated below the cantilevers, he hoped. John expected-guessed, prayed?-the device to generate a sphere-shaped field with a radius of two meters, but it was just as likely to explode. The physicist inside him chided him for encumbering his experiment with too many variables. Too many things were unknowns. But he didn’t have time for testing one thing at a time.

“Now we skip unit testing and rush headlong into production,” he muttered. John stopped as he spoke. How long had he been up?

John felt the same hyper-alertness he’d felt when he’d tried to kill his one-armed self. The nausea threatened to buckle his stomach again. No, Visgrath and company weren’t even human, though John knew as he thought it that it wasn’t true. They were monsters, killers. They had kidnapped his friends. They deserved to die, to be punished. John realized he was psyching himself up. Just as when he’d confronted Ted Carson.

John pushed it all aside and powered the machine, instantly smoking a dozen resistors.

He replaced them, and traced their destruction to a loose wire he had knocked from one end of a capacitor. He powered the thing again, and felt the contraption hum. He set the eigen matrix to Universe 7649, one universe back.

The lights flickered.

Did he have enough power?

John grabbed an old wheelbarrow with a broken handle and rolled it into the center of the field area.

Then, with a shrug, he activated his device.

With a pop, the wheelbarrow disappeared. In place of the wheelbarrow was a hemisphere of dirt, like a large model of the lower hemisphere of the Earth. As he watched, it slumped into a mound.

“Ha! Ha! It worked!” He realized as he capered around the lab that he looked like a mad scientist. Perhaps he was.

John ran outside and looked at the topography around the barn. In the faint light of the morning, he noticed where the land had been flattened and cleared. Maybe Walder had dug out the side of the hill to make the barn rest on flat ground. In the universe where the chair went, there was no barn. There was a field with a two-foot-radius hole in it, and in that hole was an old wheelbarrow.

John chortled and went back inside. He used a shovel to clear the transfer zone of dirt, dirt from another universe.

When he was done cleaning the transfer zone, John took the rolled-up plans for the device, his gold, and his backpack.

He stopped, his hands shaking. He hadn’t slept in days. His friends’ lives were in his hands. He’d built a crazy transdimensional device while in a delirium. What did he think he was doing? Did he think he was going to do this by himself? He couldn’t.

He needed help. Perhaps Grace and Henry from some other universe? No, they’d have no idea who he was. Who could even begin to understand his plight?