The Walls of the Universe (7 page)

"I'll get my things and go," John said.

"Bill..." his mother said. "We've discussed this."

His father looked away, then said, "He pranced into the barn like he'd done nothing wrong."

His mother turned to him. "Where were you, John?"

He opened his mouth to rail, but instead he said, "Toledo. I had to ... cool off."

His mother nodded. "That's important."

"Yeah."

"Are you feeling better now?"

"Yes ... no." Suddenly he was sick to his stomach. Suddenly he was more angry with himself than with his father.

"It's okay," she said. "It's okay what you did, and we're glad you're back. Bill?"

His father grunted, then said, "Son, we're glad you're back." And then he took John in his big farmer arms and squeezed him.

John sobbed before he could fight it down, and then he was bawling like he hadn't since he was ten.

"I'm sorry, Dad." The words were muffled in his shoulder. His throat was tight.

"It's okay. It's okay."

His mother joined them and they held onto him for a long time. John found he didn't want to let go. He hadn't hugged his parents in a long time.

John climbed the steps to the library. This universe looked just like his own. He didn't really care how it was different. All he wanted was to figure out how to get home. He'd tried the device a dozen times in the square, but the device would not allow him to go backwards, not even to universes before his own.

He needed help; he needed professional help. He needed to understand about parallel universes.

Browsing the card catalog, it soon became apparent the Findlay library was not the place to do a scientific search on hypothetical physics. All he could find were a dozen science fiction novels which were no help at all.

He was going to have to go to Toledo. U of T was his second choice after Case. It was a state school and close. Half his friends would be going there. It had a decent if not stellar physics department.

He took the bus to Toledo, dozing along the way. A local brought him to the campus.

The Physics Library was a single room with three tables. Stacks lined all the walls and extended into the middle of the room, making it seem cramped and tiny. It smelled of dust, just like the Findlay Public Library.

"Student ID?"

John turned to the bespectacled student sitting at the front desk. For a moment, he froze, then patted his front pockets. "I left it at the dorm."

The student looked peeved then said, "Well, bring it next time, frosh." He waved him in.

"I will."

John brought the catalog up on a terminal and searched for "Parallel Universe." There wasn't much. In fact there was nothing at all in the Physics Library. He was searching for the wrong subject. Physicists didn't call them parallel universes, of course. TV and movies called them parallel universes.

He couldn't think what else to search for. Perhaps there was a more formal term for what he was looking for, but he had no idea what it was. He'd have to ask his dumb questions directly of a professor.

He left the library and walked down the second floor hall, looking at name plates above doors. Billboards lined the walls, stapled and tacked with colloquia notices, assistantship postings, apartments to share. A lot of the offices were empty. At the end of the hall was the small office of Dr. Frank Wilson, Associate Professor of Physics, lit and occupied.

John knew associate professors were low on the totem pole, which was probably why he was the only one in his office. And maybe a younger professor would be more willing to listen to what he had to say.

He knocked on the door.

"Come on in."

He entered the office, found it cluttered on all sides with bookshelves stacked to bursting with papers and tomes, but neat at the center, where a man sat at an empty desk reading a journal.

"You're the first person to show for office hours today," he said. Professor Wilson was in his late twenties, with black glasses, sandy beard, and hair that seemed in need of a cut. He wore a grey jacket over a blue oxford.

"Yeah," John said. "I have some questions, and I don't know how to ask them."

"On the homework set?"

"No. On another topic." John was suddenly uncertain. "Parallel universes."

Professor Wilson nodded. "Hmmm." He took a drink of his coffee, then said, "Are you one of my students? Freshman Physics?"

"No," John said.

"Then what's your interest in this? Are you from the creative writing department?"

"No, I..."

"Your question, while it seems simple to you, is extremely complex. Have you taken calculus?"

"Just half a semester...."

"Then you'll never understand the math behind it. The authorities here are Hawking, Wheeler, Everett." He ticked them off on his fingers. "You're talking about quantum cosmology. Graduate level stuff."

John said quickly before he could cut him off again, "But my question is more practical. Not theoretical."

"Practical parallel worlds? Nonsense. Quantum cosmology states that there may be multiple universes out there, but the most likely one is ours, via the weak anthropic principle. Which means since we're here, we can take it as a given that we exist. Well, it's more complex than that."

"But what about other universes, other people just like us?"

The man laughed. "Highly unlikely. Occam's razor divests us of that idea."

"How would I travel between universes?" John said, grasping at straws against the man's brisk manner.

"You can't, you won't, not even remotely possible."

"But what if I said it was. What if I knew for sure it was possible."

"I'd say your observations were manipulated or you saw something that you interpreted incorrectly."

John touched the wound in his calf where the cat-dog had bitten him. No, he'd seen what he'd seen. He'd felt what he'd felt. There was no doubt about that.

"I know what I saw."

Wilson waved his hands. "I won't debate your observations. It's a waste of my time. Tell me what you think you saw."

John paused, not sure where to start and what to tell, and Professor Wilson jumped in. "See? You aren't sure what you saw, are you?" He leaned forward. "A physicist must have a discerning eye. It must be nurtured, tested, used to separate the chaff from the wheat." He leaned back again, glanced out his window onto the quad below. "My guess is that you've seen too many Schwarzenegger movies or read too many books. You may have seen something peculiar, but before you start applying complex physical theories to explain it, you should eliminate the obvious. Now, I have another student of mine waiting, one I know is in my class, so I think you should run along and think about what you really saw."

John turned and saw a female student standing behind him, waiting. His rage surged inside him. The man was patronizing him, making assumptions based on his questions and demeanor. Wilson was dismissing him.

"I can prove it," he said, his jaw clenched.

The professor just looked at him, then beckoned the student into his office.

John turned and stalked down the hall. He was asking for help, and he'd been laughed at.

"I'll show him," John said. He took the steps two at a time and flung open the door to the quadrangle that McCormick faced.

"Watch it, dude," a student said, almost hit by the swinging door. John brushed past him.

He grabbed a handful of stones and, standing at the edge of the quadrangle, began flinging them at the window that he thought was Wilson's. He threw a dozen and started to draw a crowd of students, until Wilson looked out the window, opened it and shouted, "Campus security will be along in a moment."

John yelled back, "Watch this, you stupid bastard!" He toggled the device forward one universe and pulled the lever.

John awoke in the night, gripped by the same nightmare, trapped in darkness, no air, his body held rigid. He sat up and flung the covers away from him, unable to have anything touching him. He ripped off his pajamas as well and stood naked in the bedroom, just breathing. It was too hot; he opened the window and stood before it.

His breathing slowed, as the heavy air of the October night brought the smells of the farm to him: manure and dirt. He leaned against the edge of the window, and his flesh rose in goose pimples.

It was a dream he'd had before, and he knew where it came from. He'd transferred near Lake Erie, on a small, deserted beach not far from Port Clinton, and ended up buried in a sand dune. He'd choked on the sand and would have died there if a fisherman hadn't seen his arm flailing. He could have died. It was pure luck that the guy had been there to dig his head out. He'd never transferred near a body of water or a river again.

That hadn't been the only time either. In Columbus, Ohio, he'd transferred into a concrete step, his chest and lower body stuck. He'd been unable to reach the toggle button on the device and had to wait until someone wandered by and called the fire department. They'd used a jack-hammer to free him. When they'd turned to him, demanding how he'd been trapped, he'd feigned unconsciousness and transferred out from the ambulance.

After that, each time he touched the trigger he did so with the fear that he'd end up in something solid, unable to transfer out again, unable to breath, unable to move. He was nauseated, his stomach kicking, his armpits soaked, before the jumps.

It was the cruelest of jokes. He had the most powerful device in the world and it was broken.

"No more," he said to himself. "No more of that." He had a family now, in ways he hadn't expected.

The confrontation with his parents had been angry, then sad, and ended with all of them crying and hugging. He'd meant to be tough; he'd meant to tell his parents that he was an adult now, and could take care of himself, but his resolve had melted in the face of their genuine care for him. He'd cried, goddamn it all.

He'd promised to reconsider the letter. He'd promised to talk with Gushman again. He'd promised to be more considerate to his parents. Was he turning into Johnny Farmboy?

He'd gone to bed empty, spent, his mind placid. But his subconscious had pulled the dream out. Smothering, suffocating, his body held inflexible as his lungs screamed. He shivered, then shut the window. His body had expelled all its heat.

He slipped back into bed and closed his eyes.

"I'm becoming Johnny Farmboy," he whispered. "Screw it all."

McCormick Hall looked identical. In fact the same student guarded the door of the Physics Library, asked him the same question.

"Student ID?"

"I left it in my dorm room," John replied without hesitation.

"Well, bring it next time, frosh."

John smiled at him. "Don't call me frosh again, geek."

The student blinked at him, dismayed.

His visit with Professor Wilson had not been a total loss. Wilson had mentioned the subject that he should have searched for instead of parallel universes. He had said that the field of study was called quantum cosmology.

Cosmology, John knew, was the study of the origin of the universe. Quantum theory, however, was applied to individual particles, such as atoms and electrons. It was a statistical way to model those particles. Quantum cosmology, John figured, was a statistical way to model the universe. Not just one universe, either, John hoped, but all universes.

He sat down at a terminal. This time there were thirty hits. He printed the list and began combing the stacks.

Half of the books were summaries of colloquia or workshops. The papers were riddled with equations, and all of them assumed an advanced understanding of the subject matter. John had no basis to understand any of the math.

In the front matter of one of the books was a quote from a physicist regarding a theory called the Many-Worlds Theory. "When a quantum transition occurs, an irreversible one, which is happening in our universe at nearly an infinite rate, a new universe branches off from that transition in which the transition did not occur. Our universe is just a single one of a myriad copies, each slightly different than the others."

John felt an affinity for the quote immediately. He had seen other universes in which small changes had resulted in totally different futures, such as Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the electric motor. It almost made sense then, that every universe he visited was one of billions in which some quantum event or decision occurred differently.

He shut the book. He thought he had enough to ask his questions of Wilson now.

The second floor hallway seemed identical, right down to the empty offices and cluttered billboards. Professor Wilson's office was again at the end of the hall, and he was there, reading a journal. John wondered if it was the same one.

"Come on in," he said at John's knock.

"I have a couple questions."

"About the homework set?"

"No, this is unrelated. It's about quantum cosmology."

Wilson put his paper down and nodded. "A complex subject. What's your question?"

"Do you agree with the Many-Worlds Theory?" John asked.

"No."

John waited, unsure what to make of the single syllable answer. Then he said, "Uh, no?"

"No. It's hogwash in my opinion. What's your interest in it? Are you one of my students?" Wilson sported the same gray jacket over the same blue oxford.

"You don't believe in multiple universes as an explanation ... for..." John was at a loss again. He didn't know as much as he thought he knew. He still couldn't ask the right questions.

"For quantum theory?" asked Wilson. "No. It's not necessary. Do you know Occam's Theory?"

John nodded.

"Which is simpler? One universe that moves under statistical laws at the quantum level or an infinite number of universes each stemming from every random event? How many universes have you seen?"

John began to answer the rhetorical question.

"One," said Wilson before John could open his mouth. Wilson looked John up and down. "Are you a student here?"

"Uh, no. I'm in high school," John admitted.

"I see. This is really pretty advanced stuff, young man. Graduate level stuff. Have you had calculus?"