Parallelities (24 page)

Boles took a deep breath and nodded. “Come downstairs.”

The reporter trailed his host through the house, the locked metal door, and down to the equipment-saturated cellar. His first view of the subterranean chamber crammed full of unruly electronics left him limp with relief—relief that was short-lived when he reminded himself that if this was the wrong para, none of it would work.

Boles busied himself at the control console. “You need to stand over…”

“I know where to stand.” An impatient Max did not hesitate to interrupt the inventor. “I was right here when it happened, remember? A guinea pig may not know much, but he doesn’t forget the door to his cage.”

“It was not my intention to imply ignorance.”

Max calmed himself. “Hey, forget it. I’m just a little on edge, you know? When you’re whacking through multiple realities like a hockey puck on a breakaway, it tends to make you a little jumpy.”

“I know.”

“No you don’t. Nobody knows but me.” Standing beneath the ominous arch, waiting for it to crackle to unsettling life, he somehow managed to smile and sing softly at the same time. “Nobody knows the parallelities I’ve seen, nobody knows but Jesus.” He swallowed. “I wonder how many para messiahs there are? One for each Rapture?”

Boles didn’t comment. He was too busy throwing switches.

Rapidly, the room came to life. Max remembered the colorful lights, the actinic flashes, and how he thought they would add spice to his story. He laughed bitterly, privately. Some story.

“What I’ve done,” Boles was saying, “is recalibrate the oscillating input to the paradigm generator in order to …”

“Save it,” Max snapped. “Do what you have to do. Fry me, toast me, burn all the hair off my head if you want—but get rid of this goddamn field that’s stuck to me like a leech. Free
me, Barrington. Let me live a normal life again. That’s all I’m asking.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do.” Peering over the crest of the console, Boles’s hands hung poised above unseen controls. “You sure you’re ready for this?”

Waiting beneath the soaring, intricately cabled arch, Max turned to face the inventor. “Barry, after what I’ve been through the past couple of days, I’m ready for Armageddon itself.” He was silent a moment, then added hastily, “Provided it’s the appropriate one, and not a para Armageddon, of course.”

Boles did not reply, but his hands dropped. Something hummed loudly enough to lead Max to believe that he could feel the individual molecules of air in which he was enveloped begin to vibrate. He waited for his teeth to start to chatter, for his head to become light, for a sense of unease and nausea to slip over him.

He felt nothing. A mild sense of well-being left him feeling as if he had just downed a nice glass of chardonnay. He tried to remember what it had felt like before, the first time he had occupied the experimental position of honor in Barrington Boles’s folly, but found he could not. He had been too preoccupied back then, too involved with the ramifications of a potential story to reflect on the possibility that the damn thing might actually do something, much less work.

His hair did not stand on end, he was not compelled to
utter any nonverbal vocal commentary, and the hoary-haired shade of Elsa Lanchester was not waiting to greet him when Boles finally shut the machine down.

Max took a deep breath and stepped out from beneath the arch. The meaningful glow of lights and telltales was fading around him, powering down, as if Dad had just switched off the Christmas tree. Santa was nowhere in sight.

He felt no different. The underground chamber, so fraught with vaguely unsettling suggestions of amateur science run amok, looked no different. Boles himself, gazing anxiously across from behind the cobbled-together console, was his same composed, engaging, country-club-cum-hippie self.

“Well?” the would-be inverter of universes finally asked after Max had just stood there for several moments.

The left corner of the reporter’s mouth curled upward. “It was good for me. Was it good for you?” He took a couple of hesitant steps toward his host. “I hardly felt a thing. You sure it was on?”

Boles nodded. “Everything was working, if that’s what you mean. Whether it worked as it was supposed to remains to be seen. I don’t feel any different myself.” He gestured around him. “How about your surroundings? Does anything look any altered to you? Modified, shifted, unnatural?”

“This whole dump looks unnatural, if that’s what you’re getting at. By which I guess I’m saying that it looks the same. So do you. Believe me, I was ready for anything. For this place to turn into a pit of fire and brimstone and you to grow horns
and a tail.” His gaze narrowed. “Come to think of it, I don’t know that I ever really noticed the resemblance before.”

“How droll. I’m hardly an evil person, Max. Only one who is interested in pushing back the boundaries of knowledge.”

Max started for the stairs. “From now on you can use somebody else’s life to push with. I’m resigning as chief boundaries pusher, as of now. Provided you’ve put everything back the way it was meant to be, of course. Cured the ether, as it was.”

“You’re sure you feel all right?” A concerned Boles trailed his guest closely, watching his every move.

“I won’t be all right until I wake up in my own bed, in my own apartment, without any multiplied paras offering me orange juice or alien creatures crawling through my closet. I won’t be all right until I spend a whole day under a brown smoggy sky, working with friends who look like themselves instead of like me, eating food that lies as peacefully on my plate as it does in my stomach.” He looked unblinkingly back at the scientist. “Then, and only then, will I be all right.”

“You’re bitter.” Boles followed the other man up the stairs. “You should be proud. You’re a pioneer of instability, Max. A voyager on the farthest fringes of theoretical physics. A trail-blazer in the realm of the possible.”

“I’d rather do the Pirates of the Caribbean, thanks. And as far as instability is concerned, I’ll take the occasional earthquake.” At the top of the stairs he opened the heavy door and stepped through.

The rest of Boles’s house looked the same, as did the world
outside. Still, he refused to accept what he saw as so. Reality had played him false before. Among all men only he, and to a certain extent Boles, knew how it could twist and knot and contort and flow like bad karma. In the whole history of humankind only he, Max Parker, knew for a certainty that the cosmos was actually composed of silly putty.

It made him perception-shy. What you saw, he knew, was not always what you got. But the silvered sheen of the nearby Pacific, the intermittent overflight of patrolling gulls, the calm atmosphere within the great house, were encouraging if not yet entirely reassuring.

“How do we know?” he asked Boles as he stared out the sweeping picture window at the lazy, hazy Southern California panorama. “How can I be sure that you’ve put everything right, that I’m back where I belong not just for a few minutes but permanently?”

“The field distortion isn’t like malaria,” Boles assured him. “Either you’re stuck with it, or you’re not. It’s present, or it’s absent. And if the calculations were correct and I did my job right, it’s gone. Permanently. You should be back, Max. You should be home. But there’s only one person in the universe who can know that for a certitude, and that’s you.” The inventor was uncharacteristically subdued, his tone solemn.

Max turned to face him. “And how am I supposed to know that? I want to hear what you’re telling me, Barrington. I want to believe. Christ, but I want to believe! But I’ve been ambushed too many times these past few days. I’m reality-shy.”

“Go home,” Boles advised him. “Go back to work. Go to a movie, have some popcorn, lose yourself in another kind of unreality. I’ve done all that I can. I can’t even tell you for absolute certain if I’m the Barrington Boles you needed to find to help you. I hope I am.” By way of farewell he offered up one final, engaging, aging-beach-boy smile. “I’m truly sorry for all the trouble. Until I can find a way to moderate and control the field a good deal better I don’t think I’ll be playing at parallel-worlding for quite some time.”

Max agreed, readily and vigorously. “At least next time try to give the poor schmuck you stick under the wedding arch some idea of what he’s letting himself in for.”

“How could I do that?” Boles followed him to the front door. “I don’t have any idea. You’re the only one with any real notion of what slipping between parallelities means. You’re the only one who’s done it, Max. Only you and I and a few dreaming mathematicians know that there’s a great deal more to the cosmos than there appears to be, and only you know it firsthand.” Standing to one side, he held the door open for his guest. Beyond, lotus land beckoned.

“Write it down, Max. Write it all down. Not as some snide tabloid story but in the form of a journal. Record everything you experienced while you were living within the field. You owe it to science, and to mankind, and to future generations of quantum mechanics.”

“Forget it.” Max’s position was unshakable. “I don’t even want to think about it, much less relive it. If you did your job
and I’m well and truly back where I belong, then the last thing I want to do is spend time rehashing the nightmare.”

“I’ll pay you.”

“Deal. As soon as I’ve got my life back in order, and I’m sure that it’s my life I’ve got back, I’ll send you a contract. Standard exclusive North American rights work-for-hire.”

His smile widening, Boles followed him outside. “Whatever you’re comfortable with, Max, but this won’t be for publication. Not for the foreseeable future, anyway. It’ll just be between me and you. Like everything else that’s happened.”

Max shrugged as he climbed back into his car. “Suit your-self. You pay for the words, the words are yours.” He pulled the door shut.

“You may want these particular words back someday,” Boles called out to him.

“Not these words!” Max shouted back through the window.

He could see Boles in the rearview mirror, standing in the circular drive, watching as his guinea-pig guest departed. With luck, the reporter thought, it would be the last time he would ever have to set eyes on the brilliant but undisciplined Barrington Boles. The man, his inventions, and his scattershot intentions would be out of his life forever.

The drive back down the coast looked, felt, and smelled normal. The Golden Horde had left no evidence of its passing. Death and destruction had been replaced by thriving chaparral and elaborate landscaping. Crows and buzzards glided effortlessly
through the sky, no longer in competition with rejuvenated condors. He found that of all the parallelities he had encountered, the only one he missed was the majestic sight of the soaring raptors over the coastal mountains.

Seeking surcease in normalcy, he grew more and more hopeful the nearer he drew to the city. Maybe this really was it. Maybe Boles, for a change, had known what he was doing.

Certainly nothing appeared abnormal or out of place as he approached Santa Monica. Even the friendly bum was still lying in his flower bed, ready to greet him as he neared the garage.
Have to slip the sorry old son of a bitch a twenty
, a grateful Max thought.

For the first time in recent memory, his apartment felt like home again. His big TV and stereo were still missing, but at this point he would have been delighted to see even the burglar again—provided he came skulking in by himself and not in the company of compatible doubles or triples, of course.

When he called in to the office and tendered an excuse for his extended absence that sounded lame even to himself, Kryzewski responded by heaping on him a wonderfully scurrilous assortment of calumny. Max positively reveled in the choice collection of expletives. Not only was he truly back home, but his work environment promised to be exactly as he had last left it—frantic, frenetic, grudgingly appreciative, and fondly abusive.

At long last able to relax, he luxuriated in the performance of simple, basic daily activities. He made coffee. He warmed a
cheese Danish in the microwave. He ate, and listened to the all-news channel on the radio, and watched people—ordinary, out-of-shape, happy Angeleno-type people—enjoy the beach and the polluted bay.

Home he was, and so being, he could finally take time to reflect. For such memories Boles would have paid him, and paid him well, but they were his memories, Max told himself. His nightmares. He had suffered them, survived them, and if he desired to keep them private, then by God they would remain his and his alone.

Parallelities, he mused as he watched the day’s quotient of surfers illegally shoot the pilings of the main pier. Parallel worlds, parallel people, parallel ghosts. He found that he was able to smile.
Parallel mes. What an unstable soup we exist in, tiny motes bobbing back and forth convinced that our universe is a stable, knowable place.
With reality offering so many options, how to tell what was your world and what not? No one knew otherwise except himself, and to a certain extent Barrington Boles, and perhaps the occasional insightful madman.

He felt no nostalgia for any of the paras he had visited, not even for the true Utopian vision-version of Los Angeles. That was somebody else’s para, not his. He would take the smog, and street crime, and burglaries, and bad television, and banal popular music, and inept politicians—take the whole uneven, irrational, imperfect mishmash of a world, and be happy in it. Because it was
his.

Let the other Max Parkers be as happy as they could be in
their own para worlds, he thought. Leave him just this one and he would from now on forever be content with his lot. In another para he might be a Nobel Prize winner, or a movie star, or a president, or even a character in another writer’s para tale of para worlds. No need for any of that for him.

Holding the coffee in one hand, he walked over to the window and looked out at the brightly lit panorama visible from his apartment. Sea, sky, beach, the children cavorting on the sand, the trim and tanned volleyball players battling at the net—all was as it should be. He was home at last.