“Not doing this, Gonz,” I say, dodging him.
He sticks out his hands, moving them in bad martial-arts-movie style. “Can’t let you go in there, man.”
“Shall I go forward, Cameron? I would be honored to face a chain saw on your behalf, may Tyr grant me courage,” Balder says.
Gonzo practically pushes Balder forward. “Good idea. Balder can go. He can’t die.”
“Right. Great idea. We’ll send the yard gnome to ask for gas. No offense, Balder.”
Balder bows his head. “None taken.”
“Look, I’m going to knock on that door and ask for help. You can come with me or go back and stay in the car. Your choice.”
Gonzo sucks down a mouthful from his inhaler.
At the door, a black cat meows a hello and winds between my legs. “Don’t start,” I say to Gonzo.
“It probably feasted on human fingers this morning,” he whispers.
The door opens and the cat darts inside. A kid stands there, a bowl of cereal in one hand. He’s maybe about ten or eleven and wears a pair of small, round glasses. His wiry dark hair is sporting some serious bedhead cowlicks.
“Careful, he might be armed,” Balder deadpans.
“Let’s see if you end up keeping watch over a freezer of flesh, Gnome-Man.”
“Hi,” I say, ignoring them both. “Our car ran out of gas out on the road, and I was just wondering if maybe your parents have some we could buy off ’em?”
“I don’t have parents,” the kid says in a soft, high voice. Milk dribbles from his cereal-full mouth down his chin. “I’m an orphan.”
“Is there anybody else here, like an adult?” I ask.
The kid leaves the door standing open and we follow him into the dark house. The TV’s on in the living room. The kid sits down cross-legged on a beanbag chair with the name ED stitched on it and goes back to eating cereal and watching cartoons. “They’re downstairs in the basement.”
“Oh hell no,” Gonzo whispers.
“We’re not staying,” I remind him. “Just getting the gas and we’re outta here.”
“This way.” Balder opens the cellar door, and we climb down in darkness, following a short, dimly lit passageway to a pretty serious-looking door made of stainless steel. A sign beside it reads ENTERING MAGNETIZED ZONE, PLEASE REMOVE ALL METAL.
Gonzo holds his inhaler close to his chest. “This is the part in the movie where I would haul ass.”
We put everything with any metal into little plastic bags we find on a nearby table. I practically have to pry Gonzo’s inhaler out of his hands. There’s no bell or anything that I can see, so I just throw the door open.
“Whoa,” I say.
“Seconded,” Gonzo whispers.
Balder gasps. “What strange new world is this?”
We’ve stumbled onto what could be the world’s most gi-normous MegaMart, if the shelves of sweat-shop-produced T-shirts and cheap-ass plastic toys were replaced by masses of long blue and red tubes, big as waterslide tunnels and connected to an intricate maze of wires, gizmos, robotics, and computers. The place seems to stretch up fifty feet or more, like we’re in an airplane hangar inside a silo, and it’s got enough megawatts lighting it to give a space station lightbulb envy.
Dead center is a miles-long tunnel supported by metal beams stretching out on all sides like petals on a crazy daisy. And in the center of that is a strange, bumpy door that reminds me of a cross between a seashell and a pinwheel. Two guys and one woman in white lab coats and safety goggles are gathered around a table. A third guy is strapped to a chair, his head held by a steel band.
“I’m getting a serious dwarf-tossing vibe off these guys,” Gonzo whispers.
“Would you chill?” I whisper back.
“I’m just saying, if anybody goes airborne here, it’s not gonna be me.”
I don’t want to interrupt whatever experiment they’re in the middle of, so I clear my throat and hope they’ll notice. When they don’t, I say, “Um, hello? Excuse me?”
“Be with you in a moment,” calls an older man with a pompadour of white hair. “Ready, Dr. A?”
“Ready when you are, Dr. M,” the guy in the chair with his head immobilized says.
“Very well. Calabi Yau!” the white-haired man shouts.
“Calabi Yau!” the others cheer just as he lobs a grape. The guy in the chair tries to grab it with his mouth and misses.
“Ah, Heisenberg!” the white-haired man exclaims. He turns around and takes notice of us for the first time. “Oh, hello. Are you here with the pizza?”
* * *
After we disappoint the scientists with the news that we’re not the pizza delivery guys, they take us back to the house, and we explain that we’ve run out of gas and how important it is that we get back on the road because I’ve got mad cow disease and am on my way to be cured and that we’d be eternally grateful and blah-de-blah-blah.
“I’m afraid the only fuel we have is hydrogen. Your car isn’t equipped for hydrogen cell, is it?” the smiling Dr. T says.
“Honestly? We’re lucky our car has seats and tires,” I say.
“Well, we’ll get Ed to rig you a converter, then,” Dr. T explains, hooking a thumb at the kid who let us in. “He’ll have you on your way by tomorrow.”
The kid, Ed, doesn’t look up, just continues scribbling equations on a blackboard.
“Tomorrow?” I can’t keep the whine out of my voice.
“Best we can do. You’re welcome to stay here for the night.”
“Chainsaw Motel,” Gonzo singsongs under his breath.
“Of course, there is a gas station in town if you’d care to walk,” Dr. T adds.
“How far?” I ask.
The lone woman, Dr. O, shrugs. “In miles or kilometers or centimeters or what?”
“Miles would be good.”
“Oh, about forty, give or take,” Dr. T says.
Dr. O glares at him. “I was getting to it, Brian.”
Forty miles would take us forever to walk and we’re already exhausted. Then there’s the little matter of the police and the United Snow Globe Wholesalers bounty on our heads. “Fine. That would be great, thanks.”
“Oh, hello,” Dr. M says, shaking Balder’s hand. “Wonderful costume. I’m a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?”
“It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg,” Balder answers.
“Lovely. I got mine on the Internet.”
Gonzo picks up a toy that reminds me of a kid’s wacky macaroni sculpture. It’s a bumpy ball constructed of these looping chutes, slides, and tubes, none of which actually seem to connect to anything else. “What is this place?”
“This? This is Putopia,” says Dr. A, the tall guy with the curly hair who was trying to catch the grape in his mouth. He’s wearing a T-shirt under his lab coat that reads MY BANG THEORY IS BIGGER THAN YOURS.
“Putopia?” I repeat.
“Yes. Putopia. It stands for Parallel Universe Travel Office … pia.”
Dr. O breaks in. “We haven’t figured out the whole acronym yet, but we wanted to secure the domain name before anyone else did.”
“We believe our universe may be a small part of something vast—we’re one house in a cosmic subdivision of houses all right next to each other. If only we could just pop in to see the neighbors, easy as opening the front door,” Dr. T explains.
“You’re kidding, right?” Gonzo raises an eyebrow.
“Not at all,” Dr. T continues. “Why should our world be the only one? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“And, frankly, a little narcissistic?” Dr. M adds.
“Surely, there must be many worlds, many possibilities. Rather like these bubbles.” Dr. T dips a wand into a soapy bottle, gives it a puff, and about a gazillion bubbles float out and away on the breeze. “See? Some bubbles burst immediately or don’t make it far—the least-probable possibili
ties. But some bubbles go the distance. They float on.”
“Nothing disappears. All of time is unfolding all of the time,” Dr. M continues. He picks up the macaroni-shaped toy and shifts one of the tubes. Lights flash on the toy, and now I can see another set of little shapes underneath the ones on top. “Eleven different dimensions. Most of them too small for us to see.”
“Or dimensions much larger than our world, like a big time ship on which our universe is only a stowaway mouse,” Dr. O argues.
“Whoa,” Gonzo says, and really, he’s got that right.
“We’re trying to reach into those endless worlds now. And this little baby …,” Dr. A says, gesturing to the strange daisy tunnel, “is our crowbar into other realities.”
“What is it?” Gonzo takes a step back. He’s got one hand resting on the exit.
“Seventeen miles of magnetized tunnels with one purpose: to open a window into that house next door and the house next door to that one and so on,” Dr. M tells us. He smiles broadly. “I can almost smell the coffee!”
“So it’s a supercollider,” I say.
“StephenfreakingHawking!” Dr. M huffs. “Super is what you call a sale. Super is the size of a hero sandwich when you upgrade for a buck. This …” He gestures to the weirdly shaped door. “This is an Infinity Collider.”
“That’s trademarked, by the way,” Dr. A warns.
“Your particles colliding with the infinite in an infinite number of ways so that none of the regular quantum laws apply—backward, forward, up, down, sideways, inside out, and outside in.”
Balder’s eyebrows shoot up. “Time travel?”
“Parallel-world travel,” Dr. T says with glee.
Gonzo leaves his post by the exit and sits next to Dr. T. “Dude! So, like, you’ve been to other worlds? What’s it like? Are there, like, Teddy Vamps laying waste to droids and shit? Wait—you’ve been, right?”
The scientists shift uncomfortably. “Not as such,” Dr. A says.
“Still a few kinks to work out,” Dr. T says, his smile tight.
“Kinks, like the hinges on the door need oiling or more like bad stuff I really don’t want to know about?” Gonzo asks.
“We’ve never put a person through,” Dr. A tells us.
“Except for once,” Ed pipes up from his blackboard scribblings.
“Yes. Well. Best forget that one, Ed,” Dr. M cautions.
“Come on. We’ll show you our work. It’s snack time anyway,” Dr. O says. She leads us upstairs to a nice comfy game room complete with big-ass TV and sectional sofa.
“What we’re about to show you is a record of all our work here at Putopia,” Dr. T explains. “The Infinity Collider, String Theory, Superstring Theory, M-Theory …”
“Y-theory, Z-theory, Double-Z-Theory …,” Dr. M adds.
Dr. O chimes in. “Subatomic particles, partner particles, gravitrons, maybetrons, perhapsatrons …”
“The Theory of Everything …”
“The Theory of Nothing …”
“The Theory of Somewhere in Between …”
“What we’re working on now is a supplement to the Theory of Everything,” Dr. T explains. “The Theory of Everything Plus a Little Bit More.”
“Because who doesn’t want a little more?” Dr. O asks. “Okay, Ed—start ’er up.”
The room darkens and a video burbles to life on the TV. A younger-looking Dr. M waves to the camera nervously and places an orange tabby with a purple collar inside the chamber of an earlier model of the Infinity Collider, which is half the size of the current one and not nearly as elaborate. “In you go, Schrödinger,” he says to the cat. “May you find a dimension where the mice are plentiful and the tuna fresh.”
Schrödinger’s meowing protests are cut short by the closing of the door. Then there’s a hum, and then a flash, and when the door is opened again, Schrödinger is lying inside the chamber, motionless.
“He was a good kitty,” Dr. T says with a sniffle.
The clips jump around in a very disjointed history of Putopia—scientists in their younger days, mapping out equations on a blackboard. A photo of them in a band at a dance, the banner spelling out the name THE MIGHTY MIGHTY BOSONS. A soccer game in full swing. A progression of those weird macaroni toys, each one different from the last.
“What are those things?” I ask.
“Calabi Yau manifold,” Dr. O says, like it’s as basic as toast or socks.
“Right. I knew that,” Gonzo says. He rolls his eyes at me.
Dr. M bounces the model from hand to hand. “They’re geometrical models that represent the many curled-up dimensions of space we’re not even aware of yet.” He shrugs. “It’s a math thing.”
The movie plays for another minute. I notice that there are a lot of scientists in the beginning, not so many in the later shots.
“What happened to everybody else?”
Dr. T’s expression is flat. “We lost our funding. More money for tanks and missiles, less for finding God particles.”
“Ah—there’s eternity in a kiss!”
I whip my head back to the screen. “Wait! Pause it!” I shout. The image freezes on an Asian man with surprised eyes. I point excitedly at the screen. “That’s Dr. X! Do you know him? Is he here?”
The scientists shift uncomfortably.
“He was once,” Dr. O says quietly.
My heart sinks. I’d hoped we’d finally found him. “Well, do you know where he went? Please, it’s superimportant that I find him.”
“No one’s seen or heard from him since …” Dr. A trails off.
“Since?” I prompt.
The scientists exchange glances. Dr. T pulls a worn photo out from a bookshelf—Dr. X beside a smiling, freckle-faced woman. It’s the photo I saw on his desk when I did the Internet search for the fire giants and accidentally found Dr. X instead.
“Dr. X’s wife, Mrs. X,” Dr. T explains. “He loved her very much. She inspired his work. He used to say, ‘There is no meaning but what we assign to life, and she is my meaning.’” Dr. T puts her picture back on the shelf. “Lovely woman.”
The scientists all bow their heads.
“So … what happened?”
“Every year for Christmas, she gifted Dr. X with a new snow globe for his collection. He loved snow globes, said they were like little worlds unto themselves. Anyway, it was the week just before Christmas, the first snow of the season. She’d gone downtown to the shop to make her final payment and collect his gift. But …” Dr. T shakes his head sadly.
Dr. O continues. “A bomb exploded. They never found out who did it or why. A random attack. Meaningless. Mrs. X was killed in the explosion. When they found her body, she was still clutching her husband’s Christmas snow globe in one hand.”
Balder removes his helmet. “That is a sad tale indeed.”
“After his wife’s death, Dr. X was a changed man,” Dr. M says with a heavy sigh. “He said what did it matter if we could find the Theory of Everything Plus a Little Bit More, measure gravitrons, or prove evidence of other worlds if we could not stop such suffering in our own—the plague of the unpredictable, the terrible, the futile.”
“He wanted to use the Infinity Collider not to ask questions, but to search for an answer,” Dr. O says softly. “He wanted to search time and space so that he might find a way to stop death.”
“So.” I swallow hard. “What happened to him?”
“Dr. X had a theory that certain musical frequencies could open up portals in the fabric of time and space. Something about the vibrations. He believed that music was in fact its own dimension,” Dr. T explains in that teacher voice of his.
“My friend Eubie would probably agree,” I say.
“One night, he made a few secret tweaks to the Infinity Collider. Only Ed was with him.” He glances at Ed, who’s watching a bag of microwave popcorn expand in the microwave like it’s every bit as fascinating as the Infinity Collider. “According to Ed, Dr. X reconfigured the Calabi
Yau into a sort of superspeaker, which he then attached to his radio to amplify the music—”
“It was the Copenhagen Interpretation!” Ed yells from the kitchen where he’s pouring the freshly popped corn into a bowl.
“—and push those musical vibrations into the universe in order to puncture a hole in the fabric of space-time and gain passage. It worked. Within minutes, he was gone. So was the Infinity Collider. We had to build this one from scratch.”
Dr. M sighs. “We haven’t seen or heard from Dr. X since. For all we know, he’s trapped in an alternate universe.”
“When was that?” I ask.
“Eleven years ago,” Dr. A says. “I remember because it was the same night the Copenhagen Interpretation played their Big Benefit Concert for Peace but Against Non-Peace and People Generally Being Not Nice. Great show. I think there was an aurora borealis. That’s what my girlfriend told me.”
“That was also the night they disappeared,” I say.
On TV, Dr. X’s somber face fills the screen. “Why must we die when everything within us was born to live?” He shakes the snow globe of the angel and it blurs with fake snow.
Connections. Dulcie said everything was connected. Maybe if I can duplicate Dr. X’s experiment, I can find that connection.
“Can you send me through to wherever Dr. X went?”
“Depends on whether you’re deterministic or probabilistic.” Dr. O laughs, but no one else does. “That’s a joke,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Anyway, it’s possible. A record of his trip might still be imprinted there, like an echo.”
“We don’t know that for certain,” Dr. A says. “We’ve never been able to duplicate Dr. X’s experiment. There’s the possibility we could create a small black hole. Or you could enter another world and not come back. You could cycle through worlds indefinitely, like the Flying Dutchman.”
“But if he leaves an XL-gravitron—a sort of ‘parallel-world footprint’—we’d have proof,” Dr. M says, pacing. He lowers his voice. “It could mean funding.”
“Hmmm,” the scientists all say at once.
Gonzo whispers in my ear. “What if that thing pushes you into another reality where you’re a Grade-A wanker with no girlfriend. Oh wait. That would be this reality. Never mind.”