Coin #2 - Quantum Coin (15 page)

“No offense, but I'll double-check your settings,” Dr. Kim said. “Nathaniel, as soon as your phone call drops, we're switching the LCD back on. We'll switch it off again for thirty seconds every hour, on the hour, local universal time. You each have watches synchronized with the home station.”

“The hourly time will probably be the same,” Nathaniel said. “It seems to be the default setting for the Charon device. But with you wishing, all bets are off, Ephraim, so we should be prepared for any variations in hour or day, aside from the year we want.”

Ephraim nodded. He tried to clear his mind to concentrate on the wish.

“Okay,” Nathaniel said. “Let's do it. Ephraim, whenever you're ready.”

No pressure.

He opened his eyes. Nathaniel and Jena smiled encouragingly.

Ephraim extended his left hand to Jena. She took it in her right. Nathaniel took her left hand in his right hand, completing the human chain, and flipped open the controller in his left hand. The screen glowed dimly in the bright afternoon sunlight.

Ephraim coughed to clear his throat. “I wish—”

“Remember to specify 1977,” Jena said.

“Okay,” Ephraim said. “I wish—”

“And Hugh has to be a working physicist,” Nathaniel said. “Studying parallel universes.”

“I—”

“At Princeton!” Jena said. “That's important too.”

“Okay.”
Ephram waited for another interruption, but Nathaniel and Jena simply watched him expectantly.

“Get on with it,” Jena said.

Ephraim scowled. “I wish…” He paused, looking at them. “I wish we were in a universe where it's still 1977 and Dr. Hugh Everett III is a physicist at Princeton University working on parallel universes.”
1977. Dr. Hugh Everett III. Parallel universes.
He repeated it all to himself like a mantra, letting it shape the reality he wanted.

Jena wrinkled her nose. “My nose itches,” she said.

“Nothing's happening,” Ephraim said. He jiggled the coin in his hand, like a cupped die, but it wasn't even warm. He let her hand go.

“That's okay. It happens to everyone,” Zoe said.

Jena scratched her nose, trying to hide a smile.

“You're still there?” Dr. Kim said.

“Unfortunately. Something's wrong,” Nathaniel said. “Confirm: The LCD is off?”

“Confirmed,” Zoe said. “It's frozen. And still no interference from adjacent universes on the monitors.”

“All our state-of-the-art scientific equipment, and we're relying on cheap closed-circuit cameras to detect other universes,” Nathaniel muttered.

He'd had to strip RF shielding from the Institute's video equipment to mimic the deficiencies of older technology like Nathan's camcorder, which was somehow more sensitive to the quantum wavelengths. They wouldn't be sure it was working until they saw a phantom from another reality, but they really didn't want to see a phantom.

“Try it again, Ephraim,” Jena said.

“It's just performance anxiety,” Nathaniel said. “You're out of practice.”

“It's supposed to be an instinct, isn't it?” Ephraim said.

He dutifully repeated his wish again, word for word, concentrating hard on keeping it all in his head, shaping the reality he wanted—willing the coin to take them where they needed to be.

“Still nothing,” Nathaniel reported after a moment.

“So what's the holdup?” Dr. Kim sounded impatient.

Ephraim examined the coin carefully: It was the right quarter and it was charged.

“It just won't respond. The coin's acted like this before, when I wished for something impossible, like a world where we have superpowers, or where the coin is programmed to respond to Nathan.”

“I'm calling this,” Dr. Kim said. “Head back to Crossroads.”

“No,” Ephraim said. “Nathaniel, hold out the controller for a second.”

Ephraim placed the coin in its groove and wrapped his hand around Nathaniel's over the controller. He closed his eyes and repeated the wish aloud slowly.

“The coin moved,” Jena said. She had the camera trained on it. She was getting as bad as Nathan with that thing.

“I didn't touch anything,” Nathaniel said.

“Good,” Ephraim said, trying to hold his concentration. He opened his eyes. The coin wasn't moving anymore.

“When did it stop?” he asked.

“After you wished for it to be 1977,” Nathaniel said.

“One out of three,” he said. Ephraim repeated the wish and saw that Nathaniel was right. The coin rotated a few times for the first part of his wish but didn't budge when he mentioned Dr. Everett or Princeton.

Jena narrated what they were trying to do for Dr. Kim and Zoe's benefit.

“I was afraid of this,” Dr. Kim said. “There may not be any universes left that match the criteria we need.”

“But the multiverse is infinite,” Ephraim said. “This should be a reasonable possibility.”

“Perhaps once it was. Hugh was dabbling in something he called the preferred basis, in which the multiverse is dependent on the probability of certain outcomes. For whatever reason, the likelihood of Hugh's success with parallel universe research is very low. He began to suspect this when he initially had difficulty recruiting his replacement. That's why he went back to ’77, after visiting dozens of contemporary universes,” Dr. Kim said.

“I read about that theory,” Jena said. “In universes where Everett went into computer science, he worked for the US government running nuclear war simulations during the Cold War. Some biographers speculated that if he hadn't designed the software that proved nuclear altercations result in mutual assured destruction, then we would have entered a nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union. No winners.”

Nathaniel whistled. “In other words, odds are that most of the worlds where Everett studied parallel universes were destroyed by nuclear war.”

“So we have to go a little farther back,” Ephraim said. “Like when, the sixties?”

“We don't have the luxury of being able to try multiple universes hoping that you'll find a surviving Everett,” Dr. Kim said.

“Do you want him or not?” Ephraim asked. “We're already here. We have to try. If we give up now then we've already failed.”

“Guys!” Zoe called. “Monitors are picking up quantum phantoms in the atrium.”

“Here too,” Jena said. She showed Ephraim and Nathaniel the screen of the camcorder, and they noticed the ghostly images of students walking down the avenue around them, faint in the bright sunlight.

“I'm shutting this operation down,” Dr. Kim said. “Sorry, team. Come home.”

Ephraim covered the cell phone so Dr. Kim couldn't hear them. “Jena, when did Everett study at Princeton?”

“Graduate school?” She stared at him for a moment. “1953.”

“Is that in most universes or just some of them?”

“All of them,” she said. “A rare certainty in the multiverse. He always went to Princeton for graduate work. But it was only in about a quarter of them that he ended up coming up with the many-worlds interpretation. And it only went anywhere in a small fraction of those.”

“Good enough for me,” he said. “We're going to the 1950s. It's our best chance to make contact with a living Everett.”

“He'll be too young. Practically a kid,” Nathaniel said.

Ephraim and Jena glared at him.

“Not that there's anything wrong with that,” Nathaniel said.

Ephraim related the plan to Dr. Kim and Zoe.

“Absolutely not,” Dr. Kim said. “That's not what we agreed. I'm initiating the lockdown sequence now. It's too late. Come back home.”

“Go, Ephraim!” Zoe said. “Make it quick.”

“Release that lever, young lady. No, the other lever,” Dr. Kim said.

“Jena! Remember Grumps!” Zoe said, just before the call cut off.

Nathaniel put his hand on Ephraim's shoulder. “Sorry, Eph. It was a ballsy idea.”

“What did she mean by ‘remember Grumps,’ Jena?” Ephraim asked.

Jena was scrolling through the menus of the phone, muttering under her breath.

“Jena?” Nathaniel asked.

“Please shut up. I almost have it,” she said. “How long do we have?”

“The LCD takes a few minutes to warm up,” Nathaniel said. “The initialization sequence for the barrier may take even longer if Zoe's stalling the doctor.”

“Got it!” Jena said. The coin started spinning.

She put her free arm around Ephraim's waist.

“Better grab on, Nathaniel,” she said as the coin slowed, then stopped.

Tails up.

“Take it away, Eph,” Jena said.

“But where are we—”

“No time. Let's go!” Jena said.

Ephraim grabbed the coin. Even though the tails orientation of the coin probably didn't mean anything, as the world shimmered around them, he tried extra hard to think positive thoughts.

Everything looked the same. The campus even smelled the same, like freshly mowed grass and sunbaked stones. Then Ephraim peeked around the corner and saw that the Everett Science Center had been downgraded to a humbler brick structure. He sighed with relief.

“We made it,” Ephraim said. “Somewhere.”

“I'm more interested in
when
.” Nathaniel examined their surroundings carefully.

“It's the mid-1950s,” Jena said. “And I'm wearing entirely the wrong thing for this decade.”

Expecting to be in the seventies, she'd worn a plain white blouse and black capri pants. Ephraim's white T-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes were a bit casual for a university, but they fit in just about any decade. And Nathaniel had nailed the stuffy professor look: a tweed jacket with patches on the sleeves and a red bowtie.

“Where did you get these coordinates, Jena?” Nathaniel asked.

“Yesterday, when we were DXing on the radio, Zoe and I recognized our grandfather's voice. The frequency of the transmission wavered between two coordinates, which we recorded. His analog had to be in his twenties, so this is circa 1955.” She smiled. “Which means Grumps is alive right now.” She looked around, sweeping the area with the camera. “This is so excellent.”

Jena loved the past, largely because of her father's job as a historian at the Paley Center for Media in New York. She'd grown up watching old television programs like
Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, The Patty Duke Show
, and
The Twilight Zone.
And now she was practically in one of her favorite shows.

They explored the campus. Ephraim felt like he was on the set of a period film. Every man they saw walking around the campus wore a suit, many of them sporting stylish fedoras. They all looked at Ephraim, Nathaniel, and Jena curiously—especially Jena. Some of them looked annoyed.

“They act like they've never seen a girl,” Jena said.

“It's more likely they've never seen a camcorder,” Ephraim said.

“Oh.” She checked the screen one last time, then switched it off, stowing it in her purse. “No phantoms, by the way.”

They continued down the walkway.

“They're still staring at me,” she said through tight lips. “I know women weren't admitted here until ’61, but still.”

Nathaniel cleared his throat. “Asian women were considered a bit…exotic in this time period.”

She glared at him.

A man in a gray suit and a loosened, skinny tie was headed down the path toward them. As he brushed past Jena, he mumbled something under his breath that made her stop in her tracks. She looked as if she had just been slapped.

“What's wrong?” Ephraim asked. She didn't say anything. “Jena?” he asked softly.

Jena's face flushed. “That…” She swallowed. “He called me a…” She choked back a breath and her lower lip quivered.

“What?” Ephraim asked.

Jena lowered her head and balled her fists. Tears dripped from her eyes. “And he told me to go home to
China
.” She spat the words out.

Ephraim took a step after the man, but Nathaniel grabbed the back of his shirt.

“Let go! Whatever he said to Jena he can say to me,” Ephraim said.

“No,”
Jena said. She drew in a rattling breath and wiped her eyes dry with a sleeve, smearing mascara on the inside of her arm. She stared at the black streak on the thin white fabric. “I don't want to hear it again.”

“But—” Ephraim said.

“It's a different era, Eph,” Nathaniel said. Ephraim glowered at him.

“Of course that's no excuse,” Nathaniel said quickly. “But we aren't here to open their eyes and alter society. We have a mission.”

“Nathaniel's right,” Jena said. “Let it go. Kids used to call me names like that. Worse. Usually I don't pay any attention; people like that are just ignorant. I was just shocked to hear it here.” She looked up. “It isn't like it is on TV. Not that you saw Asians on TV back then.”

“You okay?” Nathaniel asked.

“Let's just get on with this,” Jena said. “All right?” She looked at Ephraim.

“If you say so,” Ephraim said. He adjusted the stretched collar of his shirt.

If Ephraim hadn't taken after his mother's Scottish blood more than his father's Puerto Rican roots, he might have had to deal with that kind of behavior growing up, too. He didn't see how Jena could brush it off so easily. Maybe not
so
easily, looking at her now.

Nathaniel looked around. “We have to find out what year we're in. Perhaps we can find a campus newspaper.”