Parallelities (4 page)

Ignoring his host’s observation, Max pressed on with a question. “I’m a little confused by something you said earlier. I was told by my source that you held some kind of radical scientific theories. But you say you’re not a scientist.”

“That’s right. I don’t have the patience for theoretical work. I’m more of an inventor. A scientist would care deeply
why
something works. I just care that it works.”

“That what works?” Max’s gaze kept straying to the vacant eye sockets of the fossilized theropod skull. It seemed to be staring back at him. Four-inch-long scimitar-like teeth wore dark stains. The colors of random mineralization, he told himself. Not blood. He found himself struggling to avoid looking at the coffee table. It persisted in looking back, across the floor as well as across the eons.

Boles rose abruptly from his chair, his own eyes bright and alert. “My new dragon board, for one thing. But you didn’t come out here to go night surfing.” He turned to his right and winked. “Come with me and I’ll show you something. As I said, you’ve chosen a propitious time to pay a visit.”

Max stood, holding the recorder out in front of him as he followed his enthusiastic host through a portal and down a hall lined with costly, beautifully framed signed and numbered prints of sea life and African big cats.

“So you think it’s all right to share your secrets with me?”

Boles looked back over his shoulder. “You had enough imagination to get past the road guard without an appointment. Anyone without imagination isn’t ready for what I’m about to show you.”

They halted at the end of the hall and Max waited while Boles unlocked a door. A door, he noted, that had been fashioned from heavy steel. Recalling the maid’s comment about strange noises, he hesitated. Boles talked and acted as straight as a county lifeguard. But then, Hannibal Lecter had been a practicing psychiatrist.

He wasn’t reassured when the open doorway revealed stairs leading down into darkness. “A basement? You’ve got a basement? In Southern California?”

“It’s an architectural anomaly I’m rather proud of.” Boles started down. “Please close the door behind you.”

Uh-huh. Max lingered at the top of the stairs. The hallway, the invitingly open den that now lay some distance behind him, and his car all beckoned. But there was no story in any of them. Any story lay ahead, and down. With a shrug he pulled the massive door shut behind him, surprised at how well balanced it was and how easily it moved. In his young career he’d already found himself in much worse places and confronted
by far more candidly unstable types. He felt confident he could deal with any surprises Barrington Boles might spring.

Well, reasonably confident.

The basement was enormous, much more extensive than he had expected. Relieved to see that it was not done up in contemporary dungeon, he allowed his initial wariness to give way to something like reluctant astonishment. His feeling that he had made the right choice was enhanced, if not completely confirmed, by the numerous diplomas and awards, all seemingly genuine, that decorated the wall immediately on his right.

Brightly lit by ranks of overhead fluorescents built into the twenty-foot-high ceiling, the single room was immaculately clean, so much so that it reminded him of the production rooms he had once visited while touring the plant of a major microprocessor manufacturer. Every device, every instrument, was as spotless as if it had just been unpacked from the original shipping materials.

Everything appeared to be interconnected. Possessing the scientific sophistication of the average educated American, he recognized absolutely none of it. The impressive aggregation of gear was dominated by a fifteen-foot-tall arch in the center of the room. Fashioned of some silvery metal, it hung heavy with coils, cables, and a fuzz of fine filaments that would have done an alien spider proud.

Something snapped and he looked around sharply. Ignoring
his guest, Boles was busy at a half-moon-shaped console, flipping switches and thumbing buttons. In sections, the impressive interconnected confabulation began to come alive. There was a sufficient surfeit of colored lights to put to shame the best outdoor Christmas display in Beverly Hills. No nomadic bolts of lightning, though, and no explosive bursts of elegiac electricity. Quite frankly, Max had seen better special effects in half a dozen recent films. The requisite slobbering, hunchbacked assistant with the terse Slavic name was missing as well. And Barrington Boles’s casual beach attire ruined any covert Gothic atmosphere completely.

“I’m sorry, Barry, but I have to tell you: You don’t look the part at all.” Max had to raise his voice slightly to make himself heard above the rising electronic thrum of the machinery.

Boles responded with a boyish, slightly lopsided grin. “Sorry. I spend most of my time in sweats and tees. I don’t even own a white lab coat.” He returned to his work.

Max wandered over to watch, but the energized instrumentation that filled the underground chamber was much more interesting than his host’s methodical pushing of buttons and monitoring of readouts. Since he had not been ordered or instructed to do otherwise, he wandered freely, examining different bits and pieces of equipment, careful to touch nothing. It all looked brand-new and very expensive. He did not have a clue what it was for or what it was supposed to do, nor could he have offered even an educated guess, and the busy Boles was not being very forthcoming. Max did not
think that the aged surfer was being evasive; he was clearly preoccupied.

The increasingly irritating whine leveled off while thousands of mini-lights and gauges continued to glow and blink. It was all very impressive and very pretty and, after thirty minutes of nonstop glowing and blinking with no explication, very boring. Max checked his watch. While he did not have a story, Boles had provided the foundation for one. Given the now validated existence of a glut of arcane scientific equipment in a sealed basement in the mountains, Max knew he could fill in the reportorial blanks between bites of a fast lunch. He had already decided that he would have to come up with something other than the clichéd hunchbacked assistant, though. A mysterious, attractive girl with dark hair, an Eastern European accent, and carefully concealed origins who ostensibly served as the maid, perhaps. Like a good double espresso, his imagination began to perk.

Why hang around and kill the evening in search of a story, when with the material he already had at hand he could invent one infinitely more interesting than anything he was likely to see? He smiled ingratiatingly at his busy host.

“Thanks for the demo,” he told the would-be inventor as he started toward the doorway. “This is all very high-tech and I’m sure it can do some fascinating things—once you’ve got it up and running. But it’s getting late and I don’t want to impose.” Half expecting Boles to try and intercept him, either physically or with an argument, he lengthened his stride.

“You’re not imposing. You’re going to expose me, remember?” Boles spoke without looking up from the arc of glowing console.

“Expose what?” Noting that his host showed no inclination to interfere with his departure, Max hesitated. He made a gesture that encompassed most of the huge room and its inventory of shiny, blinking, humming, apparently purposeless electronics. “A failed ride proposal for Disneyland? A Westinghouse science fair entry gone mad? What’s all this supposed to be for, anyway?” He could not quite keep all the sarcasm out of his voice. “I’m assuming it’s supposed to be for
something.”

Boles made no attempt to hide the pride he was feeling in his perceived achievement. “You will be privileged to witness the first fully scaled-up run-through of the system, Max. I really would rather that you were on the staff of
Nature
or
Scientific American
, but given some of the scuzzball would-be writer types that I’ve had to deal with these past several years, I suppose I’ll have to settle for the
Investigator.”

“I’ll settle for coffee and Danish. I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to go, Barry.” He did not, but willing to play the game to the last move, he made a show of checking his watch.

“You can go in a minute,” Boles told him. “This should only take a minute.”

Max eyed the phantasmagoric farrago of indiscriminately interconnected electronics gear dubiously.
“What
should only take a minute?”

Boles glanced up briefly from his work. “Making contact with the world next to ours.”

“Next to ours?” Max didn’t bat an eye. He’d interviewed too many loony scientist/inventor types to be surprised by anything the affably chatty Boles had to say. “You mean, out in space?”

“No, no.” Within the enclosed underground room both light and sound were magnified. “I mean
next to ours.
I am a great believer in the existence of parallel worlds, or paras, as I call them. Always have been. Over the past several years I have been constructing a device with which to prove my theories.”

“Prove them, huh? Prove them how?” Max gazed yearningly at the doorway.

“By making actual contact with one. With this.” He gestured proudly at the confabulation of disparate electronics.

The reporter’s skepticism continued unabated. “There’s more than one?”

“So theory insists. Hopefully we will be the first to find out.”

Max struggled to suppress a smile. “Mind if I take pictures?”

“Not at all.” The reporter’s sarcasm lost on him, Boles returned to work at the console. “Documentation is what I’m after.”

As he pulled the Minox from a pocket and checked to make sure there was a full roll of film on board, Max found
himself liking his host more and more. Nuttier than a Texas fruitcake he might be, but he was a regular guy. A dangerous opinion for a reporter to hold, he knew. It might interfere with his objectivity—though this was not really a problem in Max’s case, because he had none.

A really colorful explosion, now, when all this expensive gear blew sky high, would make for a great shot. Trouble was, he was likely to find himself in the middle of it. Therefore, despite a missed photo op, he found himself hoping that everything would remain intact. He made a mental note to contact Southern California Edison for a copy of Boles’s monthly electric bill. It would give him a nice, absurd, appropriately mad-scientist statistic to slip into the story. One that could, for a change, be verified.

As Boles had not warned him to keep away from any particular piece of equipment, Max roamed among the lights and sounds, snapping shots of gear he did not recognize while wondering what each piece was for. Of one thing he had no doubt, and that was the cost of the futuristic setup Boles had put together. Everything looked new, state-of-the-art, and expensive. It was all very impressive, even if it didn’t do anything more than just turn the basement into a kind of low-key nerd-styled disco.

A bright flash of vaguely violet light strobed the room and he found himself blinking at the pretty colored dots that had suddenly chosen to do the two-step boogie on his retinas. “What the hell was that?”

“Don’t know,” Boles called out to him. “Generated some intriguing readings, though.”

Disneyland, Max decided silently. Or maybe Universal Studios. Boles was actually a clandestine consultant to the secret masters of contemporary consumer fantasy and he was working out the details of a new ride in his basement and Max was going to be the guinea pig for the first tryout. If so, his verdict was going to be unfavorable. As far as entertainment value went, the subterranean setup boasted plenty of color, but no action.

As he contemplated an entirely new take on the story he was going to write, the ceiling lights began to flicker and the pervasive electronic hum to fade. The occasional second or two of total darkness that resulted bothered him more than he would have cared to admit.

“Hey, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” The disappointment in Boles’s voice was unmistakable. “I’m shutting the system down. It didn’t work.”

“Oh well. That’s physics for you. Maybe next time.”

“You’re humoring me,” Boles said flatly.

His host’s genial personality notwithstanding, Max had had about enough. He had a life outside the basement, and he was ready to get on with it. “Don’t you want to be humored? Or would you rather I went on and on about what a waste of time and money this is?”

Boles came around from behind the console. Though
older, he was a lot bigger and in much better shape than the reporter. He was also between his guest and the doorway. Max tensed slightly. It would not be the first time he’d had to dodge an irate interviewee. If it came to that, he calculated he was quicker on his feet than the tall inventor.

But there was no animosity in Boles’s voice as he addressed his visitor. No overt animosity, anyway. “Is that what you’re going to write in your article?”

Max hedged his reply; an occupational necessity in his line of work. “I don’t know what’s going to be in my articles until they’re finished. I mean, trying to contact parallel worlds with some homemade basement gizmo, Barry—what did you think I’d write?”

His host sounded faintly wistful. “A respectful report detailing serious efforts to expand the scope of contemporary dimensional physics.”

Max’s expression turned apologetic. “Sorry, Barry. Wrong paper.”

“I know, I know. Just be as kind as you can, will you? Despite appearances and what you may think, I’m partially dependent on a couple of outside sources for funding, and ridicule still hurts.”

“Okay, I promise. No ridicule.” A little laughter and some smug supercilious sniggering, maybe, but no ridicule. He liked Barrington Boles, in spite of the fact that the guy had inherited money. He was an okay bloke, as one of the reporters for
the competing British tabloids might say, even if mentally he did list strongly to one side.

Wanting to end the interview on a more upbeat note, he switched to a subject devoid of controversy. “How’s the surfing these days?” He smiled in what he hoped was an ingratiating manner. “I can deal with the concept of parallel waves if they’re the watery kind.”