Coin #2 - Quantum Coin (35 page)

He cleaned all the dust from the machine with a cloth and a small vacuum. He sneezed three times in quick succession. Then he plugged in the radio at Mr. Mackenzie's workbench and concentrated on sorting the jumbled cables and wires, inserting them where he thought they belonged. Nathan found a scanned copy of the radio's manual online and plenty of schematics.

Ephraim flipped the power switch and held his breath. Nothing happened.

He tapped the dial lightly. He rapped his knuckles against the side of the old metal cabinet.

Tears blurred his vision. It hadn't been much to hope for, but he didn't even have that anymore. He was never going to see Zoe again, or his real mom.

He wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. He made some hero. He had to pull himself together.

“If you're done feeling sorry for yourself, the radio's working,” Nathan said.

Static burst from the radio, and the dial began to glow a soft orange. He put a hand on the box and felt it humming, like the coin always did.

“It takes time to warm up.” Ephraim laughed.

He quickly wrapped the controller in the copper wire from Dug Kim's house the way Nathaniel had in 1954. He plugged it into the back of the radio. He fiddled with the controller, but he didn't really know how it worked.

“Let me see,” Nathan said. “I'll figure out the new tech while you mess with the old.”

Ephraim nodded and handed it to his friend. If Ephraim was uncannily attuned to the coin, Nathan and his analogs were natural mechanics.

There were no speakers, but he optimistically pulled on the headphones he'd found in the box, with the rusted metal earpieces and fraying cloth covers over the cords.

He leaned closer to the console and held onto the microphone while Nathan worked the controller. He tried to find the spot on the dial that Zoe had tuned to, but all he got in that range was dead air. He didn't know if anyone would be monitoring his transmission; they had no reason to expect him to try to make contact.

“This seems promising,” Nathan said. “There's an option here for something called ‘tracking mode’?”

“That should do it. Nathaniel configured it to link up with the Large Coheron Drive.”

Ephraim coughed and squeezed the handle on the microphone a few times and started transmitting. “Hello? This is Ephraim Scott. I'm looking for Zoe Kim.” He remembered her call sign. “CHARON2. This is Ephraim Scott to CHARON2.”

Nothing.

He whirled the dial as far to the left as it would go and tried again, making his way through the bands incrementally. He got a few irate ham operators telling him to get off the radio, and some who were more helpful, warning him that he needed to get some training and a license before he started operating on public channels. He ignored them, pressing the headphones against his ears, listening intently for a familiar voice. Listening for Zoe.

“Anything?” Nathan asked.

Ephraim pulled the headphones off and left them dangling around his neck. He slumped back in the chair.

“It was easier when I had the coin,” Ephraim said.

Nathan rummaged in his pocket. “Have you ever tried putting a regular coin in the controller?” he asked.

“I never had a reason to,” Ephraim said. “What do you think would happen?”

“One way to find out. Only I don't have any quarters. I'll run and grab one from the change jar.”

“I have a quarter,” Ephraim said. He fished out his dad's car keys and popped the quarter out of its bezel on the key ring. He held it up and squinted at it doubtfully. He passed it to Nathan.

Nathan slotted it into the disc-shaped indentation in the controller.

Ephraim pushed his chair back, and Nathan backed away a step, but after thirty seconds, there'd been no reaction. Nathan leaned over it to check the readout on the screen.

“Careful,” Ephraim said.

“It isn't doing anything,” Nathan said.

Ephraim tapped the coin lightly with his index finger. Then he pressed his fingertip against it more firmly. “No change in temperature.”

Nathan snapped his fingers. “I forgot to engage the gyro mechanism.” He pressed a button on the controller, and the coin jumped.

They scrambled backward and watched the quarter skitter on the controller like the Mexican jumping bean Ephraim had made his father buy him when he was six. It hadn't been a bean at all. He'd been amazed, disillusioned, and disgusted when a tiny moth eventually hatched from it.

“Isn't it supposed to float?” Nathan asked. He aimed his camera at the controller and zoomed in so they could observe it from a safer distance.

“It's doing something,” Ephraim said.

The coin was glowing now, a dull red, growing brighter.

“Dude,” Nathan said.

Now the quarter was bright white, blotting out everything else on the video screen. Nathan tilted the camera to look at the controller's display. It was cycling through a series of numbers and broken characters.

“Looks like an error message,” Ephraim said.

“Uh, how do we stop this?” Nathan asked.

“Usually it stops when it finds the right frequency and then I grab the coin to shift.”

“Yeah, I wouldn't touch that if I were you.”

Nathan put down the camera and hurried over to the wall where various tools were mounted on corkboard. He found a pair of long pliers with a rubber handle and brought them over to the controller.

“What's that horrible sound?” Nathan asked.

Ephraim lifted the headphones and listened with one ear. A high-pitched whine came out of the earpiece. He winced and pulled it away from his head. The frequency became more piercing. He spun the dial, but it was the same on every channel, with the addition of a cacophony of voices complaining about interference.

“Some kind of feedback loop,” Ephraim said. “Get the coin out of there!”

Nathan held the shaking pliers closer to the controller. He winced as he clamped the ends around the coin. As he lifted the coin, the controller went with it.

“It's stuck,” Nathan said.

“Great. Is it melting?” Ephraim asked.

Nathan pulled on a dark visor from the bench and peered closely at the coin and controller. “They're separated by about a half-inch of air, but there's some kind of force holding it to the controller.”

“Can we slide something between them to break the connection?” Ephraim asked. “A sheet of metal?”

“On it,” Nathan said. He dumped a box of odds and ends open on the concrete floor and pawed through it while the dark garage got brighter and brighter with light from the coin, now glowing like a tiny star. Their shadows elongated across the room in harsh relief.

Ephraim felt the heat of the coin against his bruised cheek, even from a couple of feet away.

He kept cycling through the stations on the radio until he heard something under the crackling static and whining frequency. It might have been his imagination, but the lights on the dial were getting brighter too and the radio was generating heat of its own.

A vacuum tube popped and a wisp of smoke rose from the vents on the radio. The lights on the dial darkened, and the headphones went quiet. Ephraim smelt burnt ozone.

“Shit,” he said.

The controller itself was rattling now too.

“Nathan, do something!” Ephraim said.

“Got it!” Nathan jumped up and hurried over with a steel ruler. He pulled on a thick gardening glove and clutched one end of the ruler, while he slowly slid the other end under the coin like he was trying to flip a pancake on the stove with a spatula. Sparks flew and the ruler vibrated.

“It's resisting.” Nathan gritted his teeth. He wrapped his bare left hand around his gloved right and pushed harder. Blue electricity crackled over the steel ruler, and Nathan's hair drifted up from his head. “Not good,” Nathan said.

Suddenly the coin disappeared with a cartoonish
zing
, and they heard a crash on the other side of the room. The controller settled down on the table, and Nathan threw the steel ruler to the floor.

Nathan leaned against the table and pulled off his face mask. “That was a terrible idea,” he said. He held up the tinted visor. A thin crack ran down the left side. Nathan touched his cheek.

“Are you okay?” Ephraim asked.

“I'd swear the coin hit me,” Nathan said. “I think it went
through
me. I felt it plink against the mask and there was a hot pinprick on my face.”

“How's the controller?” Ephraim asked.

“It's still on,” Nathan said. “It looks like some of the coin melted off on it and the edges are a little scorched.” He poked at the controller with his gloved finger. “I can scrape it off, I think.”

Nathan rubbed his cheek again and shook his head in disbelief. “What about the radio?”

“It kinda blew up,” Ephraim said.

“I'll take a look under the hood. You find the coin before it starts a fire or something.” Nathan lifted the top off the radio and held up a wiring schematic for comparison.

Ephraim found his father's quarter on the other side of the room, embedded halfway into the plaster wall like a thrown shuriken. The area on its edges were burned, but it had been even more of a close call—the coin was lodged just to the right of a small propane tank for the barbeque grill. He decided not to mention that to Nathan. He held his hand above the coin and waited for it to cool off enough for him to touch before trying to retrieve it. It still took him a couple of minutes of wiggling to pry it from the wall.

He brushed off the loose plaster and examined the damage. The edge that had hit the wall was actually bent flat. Washington's face was distorted, melted half off. He turned the coin over. The other side was blank; all he could make out was the faint lettering at the top: “E PLURIBUS UNUM.” His hand tingled.

Ephraim went back to the bench. Nathan was poking around in the radio's guts.

“One of the tubes blew,” he said. “I replaced it. Who knew my dad had a collection of old vacuum tubes?”

“You're a genius,” Ephraim said. He flipped the coin to Nathan. It wobbled awkwardly through the air, and Nathan caught it.

Nathan took one look at it and whistled. “Any idea what happened?”

“Yes. We did something incredibly stupid.” He sat down. “But hopefully there's no permanent damage.”

Nathan came around to the front of the radio. “Give her another try,” he said.

“Her?” Ephraim asked.

“I feel like I've bonded with ‘Arciay’ now that I've had my hands inside her.” He swung the rusted RCA logo around on one loose screw on the face of the radio.

“And you gave it a name. You're rather bizarre, Nathan Mackenzie.”

“Thanks.”

Ephraim flipped the radio back on and crossed his fingers. Two of the dials remained dark, but the one in the center glowed faintly amber. The buzzing noise was gone, replaced with the hissing background noise of an active frequency. He didn't touch the knob—this was the station that had seemed strongest during their little experiment. He turned up the audio volume and set the headphones on top of the radio so Nathan could listen with him.

“This is Ephraim Scott,” he said. “Reaching out to
anyone.
Zoe Kim. Nathaniel Mackenzie. Anyone read?”

The radio crackled, and he repeated his message. Then he heard an eerily familiar voice reply through the headphones:

“Are you there, Ephraim? It's me, Ephraim.”

Ephraim stared at the ham radio in shock. He'd made contact…with himself?

Nathan jostled his shoulder. “What's going on?”

“It's one of my analogs,” Ephraim said. He twisted the right earpiece of the headphones so it faced out. Nathan leaned close to listen in.

Ephraim fumbled with the microphone and squeezed the transmit bar. “Am I really talking to myself?”

“Yes, but for the first time, you're getting an intelligent response.”

Nathan laughed. “I like him.”

“He's me,” Ephraim said. But which him was it? Was he talking to the analog he'd just swapped with? If so, he doubted he would be much help. “Where are you?” Ephraim asked.

“Seattle Below.”

“Just below Seattle?”

“More like
under
it. My turn. How old are you?”

“Seventeen,” Ephraim said.

A sigh. “Are they recruiting kids now?”

“I'll be eighteen next month,” Ephraim said.

“Ah, youthful optimism. Good attitude to have, squirt.”

“Don't call me squirt,” Ephraim said.

“Sorry, Junior.”

Ephraim clenched his jaw. “And what should I call you?” he asked evenly. “It seems weird to call you Ephraim.”

“I've been Ephraim for much longer than you have,” his analog said. “But call me Scott, if that's easier for you.”

“Scott.” Ephraim tried it out. “How old are
you?”

“Forty-two,” Scott said.

“So you're twenty-five years older than me. You were Nathaniel's partner?”

“You're brighter than you sound.”

“Aren't you supposed to be dead?”

“Give it time,” Scott said. “It won't be long now.”

“You abandoned your best friend in a universe with no way home,” Ephraim said.

“That was his own damned fault. I warned that idiot not to follow me,” Scott said.