The Fold: A Novel (24 page)

Mike opened the door and found Jamie in the hall, leaning against the wall. She’d turned her shirt right-side out and pulled her hair back again. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey. How are you?”

“Now that I’ve had time to think? Even more freaked out.”

“Yeah, me too.”

He glanced back into the conference room as the door eased shut on its hydraulic arm. Olaf and Sasha were checking over Tramp. Both of them still looked more than a little ill at the dog’s reappearance. Arthur stood at the head of the table, leaning on his cane. He stared at the dog with flat eyes.

After a few hours, Anne had still seemed to be in shock from the creature’s attack. Arthur had called a cab and sent her home. She’d flinched away when he touched her arm to say goodbye. She’d glared at him and climbed into the cab without a word.

Jamie glanced at the book in Mike’s hand. It was half an inch thick, with a dark cloth binding and ragged pages. “Koturovic?”

“Yeah. I got it from Arthur when they came back.”

She looked at his stomach. “Did you get fresh bandages?”

“Yep.”

“Good,” she said. “I threw up in the shower. Twice. And I think I took off a layer of skin.”

“Did it make you feel better?”

“A little.”

He tilted his head over at the bathroom door. “I came pretty close in there when I was getting cleaned up.”

“Are you hungry, too?”

“I had a couple mouthfuls of croissant before you showed up with…with the dog.”

“It’s Tramp,” said Jamie. “I get it. I think dicking around about it is just going to waste a lot of time.”

“Agreed.”

“And I’m starving.”

He nodded. “Probably crashing like I was after, well, after everything. You had more shocks than me.”

She shrugged and managed a smile. “Disemboweled by a monster versus finding a dog. I don’t know.”

Mike glanced at the conference room door. He was tempted to say the small dog bothered the scientists far more than either the fold in space or the three-armed monster. He wasn’t sure if that was funny or disturbing. Probably a little of both.

Jamie nodded at the door. “How’s it going?”

He weighed his words. “It’s creepy and fantastic that Tramp’s back, don’t get me wrong. But you’re right. He’s distracting us from the big issue.” He held up the book. “You’ve read this, right?”

“Yeah.”

“I think I’ve figured a bunch of stuff out.”

Her stomach rumbled.

“Speaking of distractions…”

“Sorry,” she said. “Just let me grab a cruller or something before we go back in. I’m going to pass out if I don’t eat something in the next five minutes.”

They wandered to the kitchen and Jamie rooted through the box of pastries. “Double donuts,” she said. She pulled out the two crullers and wrapped them in a paper towel. “Thank God for screwups,” she said.

“It’s not a screwup.”

“What?”

“Anne didn’t double it. It’s more bleed-through, like when we tried to pull the bolts on the ring housings.” He pointed at her small bundle. “We could call those quantum donuts.”

She studied the cruller for a moment, then shrugged and took a bite out of it. “I’m starving,” she said. “I’ll deal with it if I grow another arm.”

“It’s just from an alternate universe, it’s not magic.” Mike pulled open the fridge. “There. See?”

On the top shelf was Anne’s usual apple and lunch Tupperware. Except there were five apples piled on the shelf. Four were red, although the produce sticker on one was written in German. The apple farthest to the back was green. The words on its sticker were in Japanese.

“Great,” she said. “So if we don’t figure out how to shut it off, we’ll be smothered in donuts and apples.”

“And maybe dogs,” said Mike. “It could be a self-correcting problem.”

She snorted out a laugh and he pushed the fridge shut.

Unbidden, the ants pulled up his layout of the complex and added labels for the donuts, the refrigerator, Glitch’s disappearance, and the reappearance of Tramp. A thought crossed his mind, and they added distances. A red circle blossomed on his map, centered on the remaining set of rings.

One last ant skittered out and placed a label just outside the circle. He focused on it, and it set up a trail of time stamps from the rings, through the label, and into a trailer. More ants carried out memories to fill in the path.

“Huh.”

Jamie swallowed a second mouthful of cruller. “What?”

“I used your trailer and the donuts to mark out an area of effect. A map of how far away from the rings things are changing.”

She raised an eyebrow. “My trailer?”

“For Glitch and Tramp. The bugman’s corpse started to shrivel up as we got it near the edge of that area. And it fell apart just a few yards past your trailer.”

“Really?”

Mike studied the layout and the trail of images. “Yeah. Not sure what that means. Maybe it’s tied to the rings somehow.”

“We’re not. We’ve all left campus.”

“You’re still alive. And you’re not a bugman.”

“Thanks for noticing.”

He shrugged.

Jamie filled her massive coffee mug, and they headed back to the
conference room. Tramp barked at them and wagged his tail when they opened the door. She managed to hide most of her cringe at the sound.

Sasha and Olaf stood on either side of the table. They were at the end farthest from the door, farthest from the rings. Spread out across the table were blueprints and mathematical models.

Arthur hadn’t moved. Both hands were still on the head of his cane. Behind his glasses, his eyes focused on Tramp.

Sasha tapped one of the blueprints. Her arm had half a dozen stitches and some bandages that looked much more professional than the ones Mike had taped into place on his stomach. “Maybe it’s tapping into the Earth’s magnetic field, somehow?”

“That’s sci-fi nonsense,” Olaf said. A line of small butterfly bandages stretched along his cheek. They made the side of his face stiff when he talked.

“It’s what an electrodynamic tether does,” Sasha pointed out.

“Hypothetical science at best, sci-fi nonsense at worst.”

Mike waited for them to finish and set the book down on the table and counted to five. “I think we may have a big problem. Really big.”

Tramp leaped to his feet, yipped, and spun in a circle. He flopped back down, and his tail thumped against the table leg.

“When the Door opens,” said Mike, “it reaches into a ‘nearby’ universe. By nature of being close to us, so to speak, they’re less divergent. That’s why all of you were able to get by without too much trouble once you switched universes. There were only minor differences.”

“Except for other-Bob’s world,” said Olaf. “And the dead world.”

Mike raised a finger. “But they weren’t that divergent, either. We know this building existed in both of those worlds. We know teams existed there that built Albuquerque Doors. Which means they were near-parallel until the past year or two.”

“And then one world started a war and the other one was wiped out,” said Arthur. He balanced his cane against the table and tugged his glasses off. “That sounds somewhat divergent to me.”

Mike shook his head. “Not if whatever caused those changes came from outside of the given universe.”

They all stared at him. Olaf shook his head. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Mike reached down and tapped the book. “Koturovic,” he said. “Appendix three.”

Sasha nodded. “That’s where he starts spouting all the History Channel stuff about dimensional barriers and the end of the world, right?”

“All the things that got him tossed out of his university,” said Olaf.

“Yeah,” said Mike, “except I’m not so sure it’s that crazy. In fact, a lot of things start to make sense when we take all of his theories into account.”

He slid a piece of paper toward himself and scooped up a pen. “Say this is the multiverse,” said Mike. He drew a dot at the bottom of the sheet, and then a dozen quick lines coming out from it in a tight fan. “It’s our local cluster, if you will. A bunch of realities that only recently split apart, in the big scheme of things. We’ve got a lot of common history. Enough so that if someone crossed from one to another, they might not even notice any major changes. Think of the lines as branches in a tree.”

He glanced around the room. They all seemed to be following him. Or, at least, humoring him.

“Now something comes along with a set of clippers or one of those big buzzsaw things.”

“Hedge trimmer,” said Sasha.

He nodded. “A hedge trimmer. And it starts cutting through the branches.” He drew a horizontal line halfway across the fan. “The Door is doing what it’s been doing all along—opening to another branch close to this one. But we’re seeing universes that were hit by the trimmer. So they look different.”

Olaf tapped his fingertips on the table. His jaw shifted and the bandaged side of his face shifted with it. “And what’s the trimmer represent in your clever metaphor?”

“Just what Koturovic said.” Mike tapped the book again. “Some kind of super–alpha predators that eat everything. Something that would break through the dimensional barriers, hunt us, and wipe out humanity. An interdimensional locust swarm of some kind. He said they were from a universe outside our own, but if we accept that there are multiple universes, what makes ours so special? Wouldn’t the conditions that attract them exist in all those realities, too?”

Sasha crossed her arms. “So you’re saying something…what,
ate
the Moon-world?”

“Maybe,” said Mike. “I don’t know that it’s true, I just know that it fits all the evidence.”

“Wait…” Jamie glanced toward the main floor, then to the trailers.

“You mean there’s more of those bugman things?” asked Sasha.

“Maybe a lot more,” said Mike. “I think the rings punched a hole in that dimensional barrier he talks about. And if Koturovic’s right about everything, the more people there are around the hole, the bigger it gets.”

“And the more bugmen come through,” Jamie said.

Arthur pulled off his glasses, and reached for the tie he wasn’t wearing. “We’re in the middle of a major city,” he said. “We’re in a relatively deserted area, but if the instability keeps growing…”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “San Diego’s got a population of a couple million, right?”

“Yes,” said Arthur. “And then there’s Orange County, Baja, Anaheim, Los Angeles…we’re talking about ten or twenty million people, depending on how far it reaches.”

“And how many bugmen would that set loose?” asked Sasha.

“I don’t know,” said Mike. “Koturovic seemed pretty sure the alpha predators could wipe out humanity, and it seems like he was right about a lot of this.”

Arthur tapped his cane on the floor. “That creature was fast and strong,” he said, “but I can’t imagine even hundreds of them could stand up to a few platoons of Marines from Pendleton.”

“You have to stop them,” said Olaf.

Sasha glanced between them. “What?”

“Bob’s last words,” said Olaf. He glanced at her, then Mike. “The other Bob. He was terrified of the monsters. He said we had to stop them.”

Mike bit his lip and nodded. “I think other-Bob came from a world the alpha predators had already reached. And the people there fought back with everything they had. And it wasn’t enough. For all we know, maybe the Moon-world is the same one. They just finished eating.”

“They can’t eat everything,” said Olaf. “It’s just…it’s not possible.”

Arthur’s cane rocked back and forth under his hands. “A small locust
swarm can strip a field bare in hours,” he said. “A large one can eat over a million tons a day. I suppose it’s not impossible.”

“I’d rather not find out,” said Jamie.

“We stick with our original plan,” Mike said. “We know the fold collapses if there’s enough damage to the rings. That’s what happened on Site B.”

“But we can’t take them apart,” said Sasha.

“Right, so let’s just go with primitive basics. We can’t take it apart, so let’s just smash it.”

Arthur winced. Olaf raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“I’m not sure we can,” said Sasha. “The rings are pretty solid, even without this other-dimensional reinforcement. The carapace is half-inch polystyrene, and past that the rings are almost solid metal. Steel frame, copper coils, lead plating.” She shrugged and winced as her arm moved. “We could work on it for hours with sledgehammers, and not even dent the frame.”

“Then we hit it with something bigger,” said Jamie. “We drive a truck into it.”

“Again, steel frame,” said Sasha. “And I don’t think we could get a truck up onto the main floor anyway.”

“What if,” Mike said, “we freeze it with the liquid nitrogen first?”

Arthur and Sasha both shook their heads. “The rings get bathed in it every time we open the Door,” said Arthur. “It will boil away long before doing any structural damage.”

“At best, we might be able to crack the carapace sections,” said Sasha. “And then we’re back to solid metal.”

“Could we make a pipe bomb or something?” Jamie asked. “What do they call it, an IED?”

Sasha shook her head again. “We don’t have anything to make it with.”

“None of the chemicals in the storage lockers?” asked Mike.

Sasha shrugged and looked from Mike to Arthur. “I’m not a chemist. I don’t know if any of that stuff mixes to make explosives.”

“Coffee creamer,” said Jamie. “I think I saw a thing on television once where they used coffee creamer to make a bomb.”

“I still don’t think that’s strong enough,” said Sasha. “And I don’t think we have powdered creamer, anyway.”

“I’m also not sure we should be going back in there unarmed,” said Olaf. He reached up to touch his cheek. “If just one of those things did this to us, I can’t imagine what a few dozen of them could do.”

“I have another magazine for my pistol in my office,” said Arthur. “And half a box of ammunition at home.”

“So we need guns and explosives,” said Mike. “Let me make a phone call.”