Coin #2 - Quantum Coin (18 page)

Finally, he rolled over onto his back and stared at the clear blue sky, breathing heavily. His vision blurred. It wasn't fair that he could somehow lose everything on such a beautiful day.

Maybe not everything.

If Jena had been protected by the controller, the way the coin had anchored Ephraim in this universe, she would be waiting for him at the gates.

He spun around slowly, trying to imagine the campus the way it had been half an hour ago. College Road was missing, too. In this altered reality, there was no need for a street leading to nonexistent residence buildings. If there was no path, he would just have to make his own.

He ran across the field toward the main campus.

Ephraim stood on Nassau Street, consulting his map anxiously. He was fairly certain that the car accident had happened right over there, but the gate Jena had pointed out wasn't in sight and neither was she.

“You look lost.” An elderly man with a pointed gray beard stopped on the sidewalk. “What are you looking for?”

“Oh.” Ephraim tucked the eReader behind his back. “FitzRandolph Gate?”

The man frowned. “If you mean FitzRandolph
Road
, you're on it.”

“No, I'm looking for a giant metal gate.” Ephraim described the gate as he remembered it, and the man's face lit up.

“Van Wickle Gateway! That's over on Prospect Avenue.” He pointed across campus and rattled off some directions that Ephraim tried to follow. The campus had been rearranged more than Ephraim had thought. “You're sure you don't want to write this down?”

“Ephraim!” A familiar voice called from down the street.

“Never mind,” Ephraim told the man. “Thank you.”

He turned and saw Jena running toward him. She grabbed him and planted a kiss on his mouth.

When she let him go, Ephraim grinned. “What was that for?” he asked. That hadn't been like her at all, but he could get used to it.

“For Cliff,” Jena said in a low, breathless voice. She nudged her eyebrows up and rolled her eyes to the side. Ephraim looked past her and spotted the car accident victim waiting about ten feet away, pretending he wasn't looking at them.

Cliff? Clifford Marlowe. That's what had been on his driver's license when Nathaniel went through the man's pockets.

Cliff looked absolutely fine, if somewhat glum. Even his glasses were intact, though one of the lenses had been cracked earlier.

“I told him I was going steady with someone, but he didn't believe me,” Jena said.

“Oh. Then how about a kiss for
me
?” Ephraim asked.

She punched Ephraim on the shoulder.

“Ow! Was that for him, too?” He rubbed his arm.

“Where the hell have you been? I've been waiting for twenty minutes,” she said.

“Where have
I
been? You told us to meet you here,” he said.

“We were supposed to meet at the
gate
,” Jena said. “Do you see a gate?”

“How was I supposed to know it was going to move? The campus is all turned around. It isn't even called FitzRandolph anymore,” Ephraim said. “We really need to bring walkie-talkies next time.”

“Where's Nathaniel?” she asked, craning her neck to peer around Ephraim. She looked down the street in the direction of the no-longer-existent Graduate College and frowned.

“I…I don't know,” Ephraim said. “He vanished in that last quantum hiccup.”

Jena covered her mouth with a hand. “That's awful.”

Ephraim told her what he'd seen.

“The whole campus is gone?” Jena asked. “Hmmm. Do you have my book?”

Ephraim handed her the eReader and she started paging through it.

Cliff headed toward them. Ephraim put a hand over the eReader screen to hide it. Jena pulled it away from him.

“Don't worry,” Jena said. “He knows.” She continued thumbing through the virtual pages.

“He
knows
?” Ephraim asked.

The bespectacled man stood next to Jena and flashed Ephraim a friendly smile.

“Hello. I'm Cliff.” He extended a hand.

Ephraim shook it. “Ephraim. Glad you're in better shape than the last time I saw you.”

Cliff puffed his lips and blew air out through them. “That wasn't me.” He glanced at Jena. “Apparently.”

“Jena?” Ephraim asked.

“Cliff was unconscious during the whole ambulance ride to the hospital and in the emergency room,” she said. “They were preparing to operate, but after everything in the world went all blurry, he sat up on the operating table.”

“That was when the window opened. But how did it fix him?” Ephraim asked.

“It didn't. He insisted he wasn't hit by a car,” Jena said. Half her attention was still on the eReader screen.

“I wasn't,” Cliff said. “One minute I was walking down the street, reading a book, the next I was in hospital.”

“He was displaced by his analog,” Ephraim said. “Jeez.”

Cliff took out a silver case and offered each of them a cigarette. They both refused, and he lit one for himself with a match.

With any luck, Cliff's counterpart had ended up near a hospital in whatever universe he'd been swapped into, or he might not have lasted long with those injuries. It was a good thing they hadn't already begun the surgery when he shifted out.

“I thought the Charon device was supposed to protect this universe,” Jena said. She looked up from the eReader, spun around, and looked toward the center of campus. She checked the screen again and smiled to herself.

“Nathaniel's theory is that it's less effective when it's divided over long distances,” Ephraim said. He didn't mention that Nathaniel was also worried that bringing the device to this universe in the first place had made it more vulnerable to whatever was happening to all the others.

“I get it. So the coin and controller protected us because we were carrying them, but no one else,” Jena said. “If Nathaniel hadn't insisted I take the controller…”

“What are you doing?” Ephraim asked. “We need to figure out how to find him.”

“That's what I'm doing. If I'm right, Nathaniel's still here,” Jena said. “Somewhere. Originally there were two proposed locations for the Graduate College. Woodrow Wilson, who was president of Princeton at the time, wanted the College to be in the center of the university campus. But the dean, Andrew Fleming West—”

“There was a statue of him in the courtyard,” Ephraim said.

“Yes. West wanted the College away from campus, in its own separate location.”

“Is this really a good time for a history lesson?”

“History is everything right now,” Jena said. “Eph, in our universe's history, Andrew Fleming West won that fight, and the College was built away from the undergraduate campus.”

“But in other universes, he didn't?” Ephraim asked.

She pointed in the distance. “Doesn't that building look familiar?” she asked.

Rising amid the campus buildings in the distance was a tower he realized he had seen before.

“Cleveland Tower?”

“I don't know what it's called in this newly merged reality, but it's very distinctive, isn't it?” She showed him a holographic image of it on her eReader screen. It was the same building.

“But that was over at the Graduate College…” Ephraim said.

And Nathaniel's video camera had caught a glimpse of the tower's quantum phantom at the main campus. It had moved, just like FitzRandolph Gate had.

Jena tucked her eReader away with a smug expression.

“You think Nathaniel might have gone with the dining hall when the Graduate College shifted here?”

“I hope so,” Jena said.

“Then let's go find him,” Ephraim said.

“Ephraim. No, we can't.” Jena looked stricken.

“What are you talking about? He's probably looking for us.”

“Then let him find us. We still have a mission and we only have thirty minutes before the next window opens.”

“We need him,” Ephraim said.

She shook her head. “We have the coin and the controller. We should find Hugh first and bring him back to Crossroads.”

Cliff had been listening intently to everything they said, but he perked up at that. Ephraim ignored him.

“I can't believe you're suggesting we abandon Nathaniel,” Ephraim said. “He might have saved your life by giving you that controller.”

“Not abandoning him. We'll come back for him when we can. I don't want to do this, but it's the most practical thing. It's what he would want.”

“Zoe—” Ephraim stopped.

Jena narrowed her eyes.

“Zoe
what
?” she asked.

Zoe would never leave one of them behind.

“Zoe won't be happy if we come back without him,” Ephraim said.

Jena made a dismissive sound.

“So we're off then?” Cliff asked. He stomped his cigarette out on the sidewalk and looked at the two of them eagerly.

“Excuse me?” Ephraim asked.

“Ms. Kim says that my roommate can explain what happened to me and help you sort the mess you're in.”

“Really,” Ephraim said. “Who's your roommate?”

“Hugh Everett,” Cliff said. “Brilliant fellow. Always leaves his dishes in the sink, though.”

Jena winked at Ephraim. “Small multiverse, huh?”

“I could kiss you, Jena,” Ephraim said.

“Permission granted.”

Cliff opened the door to his apartment, in the same building Ephraim had visited earlier. It was in a different location now, where Jena's map said the School of Architecture had once stood. He wondered where all those students had gone after the last dimensional shift.

A man at the window slowly turned. Ephraim instantly recognized Hugh Everett from his photo. In real life, the man's hair was reddish-brown, almost fiery in the light from the window. He was about Ephraim's height; he'd looked taller in his picture, and more…black-and-white. It took Ephraim a moment to adjust his concept of Everett into the physical person who was standing right in front of him.

“Hugh?” Cliff said. “You'll never believe what just happened to me.”

“Who's your friend?” Hugh asked. His piercing eyes were on Jena. She smoothed her wind-blown hair self-consciously. Ephraim stepped in front of her.

“Dr. Everett, I presume?” Ephraim said. “We have to talk.”

“That's the second time I've been addressed that way today. I like the sound of the title, but I haven't earned my degree. Yet.” He sipped a dark liquid from the glass in his hand.

“The second—?” Ephraim asked.

“Ephraim!” Nathaniel rose from the couch. “Jena. You found me. How?”

Ephraim swallowed his guilt and embraced Nathaniel. “You never shifted out of this universe. It rearranged itself and you moved across campus with the rest of the Graduate College.”

“Fascinating,” Nathaniel said.

“You're all right?” Ephraim asked.

“I am now.” Nathaniel noticed Cliff. “Isn't that—? Aren't you…?”

“Cliff Marlowe,” Cliff said. They shook hands.

“I'm Nathaniel Mackenzie. You look pretty good for an almost-dead guy, Cliff,” Nathaniel said.

“I'm aces,” Cliff said. “But I understand that another me may not be so fortunate,” he said with a thoughtful expression.

Ephraim took a deep breath. “Nathaniel, this isn't the Cliff from the car accident. He was swapped with his analog during the last quantum disruption.”

Nathaniel paled. “Oh, that
sucks
.”

“Yeah,” Ephraim said.

“But I can't believe you're Everett's roommate,” Nathaniel said to Cliff. “That's a hell of a coincidence.”

“If you're right about these multiple worlds of yours, there are no coincidences,” Hugh said. He stared at the bottom of his glass. He raised his eyes and looked at Jena. “I'm Hugh. And you are?”

“J-Jena Kim,” she stammered. He took her hand and brushed his lips against the top of it. Ephraim wrinkled his nose.

“A pleasure to meet you,” Hugh said.

“I'm Ephraim Scott,” Ephraim said. Everett hesitated before shaking his hand. His palm was cold and wet from holding his drink.

“Your friend Nathaniel told me an incredible story at dinner,” Hugh said. “He says you're all from other universes. Is he as insane as I think he is?”

Hugh sat on the edge of the couch, his eyes lingering on Jena in a way that made Ephraim want to punch him in the face. Jena leaned back against the door and flipped on her eReader, eyes focused on the screen self-consciously.