Resonance

Chapter 30. Not According to Plan

  We all slept on it, and then we slept on it some more. Nobody came up with anything. Aside from our lack of inspiration and our worrying about Jessica—and pretty soon the others—Shep and I spent a very pleasant week exploring and enjoying the TSA. He talked to Simon every day we were there, so I had some time alone. Or not exactly alone, because I managed to persuade Angel to spend quite a lot of it with me. Also, I like to swim more than Shep does, and so does Angel.

  When the last evening arrived, Angel and I took a long walk on a beach that she showed me—or imagined for the occasion. It was good. But after a while she said she had to go home.

  "When are you going back to the real world?" I asked her as we approached her house in the TSA.

  "Why?" She looked up at me with her eyes without lifting her head, that sexy thing girls do.

  "Because, now that I know where you live, I'm planning to give you a call," I said. "As you probably already know."

  I'd found out that she and her parents lived in an older area of Lincoln north of the campus. We live in a town south and west of Lincoln that's actually in a different county, which is probably why we'd never run into each other in the real world.

  "It doesn't matter when I go back," she said. "Don't you remember? You go back to the moment you left. So no matter when I go back, I'll be there when you're back. Because there's no gap."

  "Oh," I said, feeling stupid. "Duh. Right."

  She put her arms around me and turned her face up for a last long kiss. It was very good.

  "Call me," she whispered and slipped away.

  I smiled all the way back to my room and went to bed with my head full of plans of where I would take her—definitely the lake.

  But when I woke up, I was not in my bed at home, where I should have been, and I was not in my room in the TSA, where I otherwise would have expected to still be. I was on a gurney that smelled nasty, and my head hurt way more than it should have.

  I opened my eyes, winced, groaned, and grabbed my forehead with both hands.

  "Ch?" said a faint voice nearby.

  "Uh?" I answered in a croak and cleared my throat.

  The voice cleared its throat too and tried again. "Mch?"

  "Shep?"

  "Mitch?"

  I turned my head very carefully and squinted enough to make out Shep next to me on a gurney with a grubby cover. He was also clutching his forehead and was wearing nothing but bright red silk boxers with black hearts all over them. Which is the sort of thing he usually sleeps in.

  I looked at myself. I was wearing the blue plaid boxers I'd gone to bed in the TSA in and nothing else.

  TSA. I looked around. We were also not in the lab in the TSA, but the room looked familiar. I slowly figured it out.

  "Shep?" I said again.

  "Yeah?"

  "We're in the Ys' TSA. Kirk A's TSA," I said.

  "Huh?"

  "Look around," I said. "This is where the Ys left from, when they went to World Whatsit, 437, to kill Halloway."

  The door to the lab opened, and who should appear but the Ys.

  "Wakey-wakey, sunshine!" said Yancy with a predatory grin.

  "Rise and shine," added Yarnall.

  We pushed ourselves upright and got off the gurneys. It was sort of uncomfortable being undressed and barefoot in front of those guys. Also my head still hurt, and I still felt pretty unsteady, and I think Shep did too. Damn, I thought—this would be a great time to still be linked together.

  They herded us out into the anonymous linoleum-tiled fluorescent-lighted windowless corridor and down to the elevator, which we all rode up to the top floor, the fifteenth floor. I thought to wonder what was on all those lower floors.

  We didn't go to Kirk A's office but down the hall in the other direction. The Ys pushed us through a door and locked it behind us. We were in another office, not nearly as fancy. There were two desks in it, with two desk chairs. It could have been anywhere, except for the windows. They showed a view similar to Kirk A's Death Star scenery.

  There was a door at one side. Shep went over and opened it. "Bathroom," he announced. "John, sink, shower. The water runs. No towels, though—and no t.p."

  I was opening the drawers on one of the desks. They were all completely empty, like new-and-never-used empty—there were no old paper clips or cough drops or pennies forgotten in the back. The other desk was the same, new and empty. And the tops of both of them were bare—no phone, no work station, not even a blotter. No desk lamp.

  I went over to the door and flicked the light switches. No lights. Shep and I looked at each other. I tried the door. It was definitely locked. It opened outward, so the hinges were on the outside.

  "Got a credit card in your boxers?" asked Shep.

  "Huh?"

  "If you did, we could try using it to push back the latch. Which probably wouldn't work anyway." He shrugged.

  We walked over to the windows together. The glass was set right into the wall all around. They were most definitely not made to open.

  "Maybe we could smash the glass with a chair," suggested Shep. We looked out and down. And down, and down. Fifteen stories of smooth wall. If there were windows on the floors below us, there was no visible molding or anything above them that you could grab onto. Shep sighed. "And maybe not."

  "And what if we did get out?" I asked. "We're in a TSA. How do we get back to anywhere? Even if we found the control room or whatever you call it, how could we find our world?"

  The door opened and we both whirled around. Yancy stood there with Yarnall behind him.

  "Into the bathroom," he said. When we didn't move, he pulled a switchblade out of his belt and popped it open. "Now, boys," he said.

  "Whoa," said Shep, and we moved fast into the bathroom. Knives are nasty—they make you bleed.

  Yancy stepped into the room, keeping a good distance from us. Yarnall came in behind him, put something down on one of the desks, and went out again. Yancy followed him out, and we heard the click as he relocked the door.

  On the desk were two styrofoam cups and two cellophane packages, each containing a Danish.

  "Hey, breakfast!" said Shep.

  The coffee was weak and had milk and sugar in it. The Danish were slightly stale. We didn't leave a crumb or a drop, and the food seemed to help with the headache.

  "Keep the cups," I suggested. "We can use them for water."

  "Too bad cellophane makes such lousy toilet paper," Shep said. "I'm feeling a dump coming on."

  "Do it the Arab way—right hand for food, left hand for, uh, cleanup. You can use your boxers for a towel."

  In the end we each took a shower and just hung around bare-ass until we were mostly dry.

  "I guess you're not afraid of me jumping you," commented Shep with a grin.

  We were so used to being naked together that I honestly hadn't given it a thought. And even now that he'd brought it up, it didn't make any difference to me. It seemed perfectly natural, like always.

  "You weren't planning to, were you?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Nope." He walked over and looked out the window, his back to me. I looked at his ass, which I'd seen a million times before. It looked like it always did, like Shep's ass. Shep's my best friend, the closest thing I have to a brother, but I had no idea whether his ass was attractive or not—I couldn't seem to think of it in those terms. And the thought of messing with it in any way whatsoever left me totally cold. Turned me off, in fact. I breathed a mental sigh of relief and decided Simon Fletcher had it right.

  As if he was reading my mind, Shep suddenly said, "I talked it over with Simon Fletcher."

  I wasn't sure where he was going or what to say, so I just said, "Oh?" in a way that I hope sounded calm and interested, but not too interested.

  "He gave me a test," Shep went on after a minute. "A questionnaire. I think it was like a personality test. And he asked me a lot of questions."

  I thought of saying, "Me too," but decid
ed not to go there. "Uh-huh?" I said.

  "He thinks I'm probably not gay," Shep said. He turned around and grinned at me. "Just curious. And adventurous. And a daredevil—I enjoy kind of living on the edge."

  I grinned back. I hadn't thought there was any weirdness left between us, but I realized that there actually had been, a little bit, mostly from Shep's side, and now it was gone.

  We sat in the desk chairs and speculated about why we were there. Shep thought it was to get back at us for preventing the murder. On the one hand, that sounded really plausible to me, but on the other, how had they found us?

  "Out of all the worlds in which you and I exist," I said, "how did they know which world had the two of us? In fact, how did they know that we stopped the murder anyway?"

  "Maybe a lot of usses from a lot of worlds stopped the murder," said Shep. "Maybe it doesn't matter which world they got us out of."

  "But I know and you know that we're actually the us that stopped the murder," I objected.

  "Maybe we'd think that anyway," said Shep. "Maybe every us from all the in-between worlds thinks that they, I mean we, stopped it."

  "But they don't have every us," I said. "They have this us. And it's the right us."

  We went around and around like that and didn't get anywhere.

  After a while—Shep wasn't wearing his fancy watch, so we didn't know how long—the Ys came back. We went through the same drill of being told to go into the bathroom, and we did, and they left again.

  This time they had brought us two cans of soda and two sandwiches. The sandwiches were thin slices of processed ham and thin slices of very pale orange tomato on white bread with some mayo. They were wrapped in cellophane, like the Danish. I was really glad to see them anyway, because I was having a real blood-sugar dip from all the sweet stuff at breakfast.

  "You know what this is like?" I said with my mouth full. "It's like the food they sell at gas stations."

  "At least it's food," said Shep.

  We were hungry, so we ate it all. Then we tried to flatten out one of the cans, in the hope that we could use it like the credit card we didn't have, to slip the latch on the door.

  It's very difficult to flatten a can really flat when you're not wearing shoes. We tried to make a nice sharp edge by one of us positioning the can under a leg of the desk and the other one dropping the leg down on it. This is also very difficult, and I dropped the desk leg on Shep's fingers, and he dropped it on my fingers. The end result was that we couldn't get the can remotely flat enough to slip behind the latch.

  It did serve to pass the time, sort of.

  At one point, I had a thought. "Will they come looking for us?"

  "What?" said Shep. "Who—oh, our Kirk and them. Well, yeah, of course they will."

  "When?" I asked.

  "As soon as they—oh. How would they know we're gone?"

  "The Ys, I mean Kirk A, must have gotten us out of our beds at home," I said, "because they—our Kirk and Nicholas—they were going to put us back, I mean home, in our world, last night, so that's where we would have been. And also because Kirk A couldn't get us out of the TSA, our TSA, right?"

  "Right. Unless he knows how to move between TSAs."

  "Let's assume he doesn't. So he took us from home. Okay, if the time we spend in the TSA, our TSA or Kirk A's TSA, any TSA, has no duration, they won't know we're gone until—until when?"

  "Well," said Shep slowly, "if Kirk or Heather or Angel goes back to our world, after the our-world time when we were put back, and we're not there."

  "But when we were going back and forth to our TSA," I objected, "it didn't matter how long we were there, because they would always put us back two seconds or whatever after they took us out. Simon told me that he could stay in the TSA for a year and then go home to the evening he left."

  "Okay, but suppose someone from our TSA went to see Simon after the time that he'd left to go to the TSA—wait, he'd be back, because he'd go back to the exact minute he left. So there can't be a gap. Only there would be a gap if we never went back. But when?"

  "If Evil Kirk could move between TSAs," I said, "that would be a good thing, because if he took us out of our TSA, then they would know we've disappeared."

  "Unless they thought someone else had sent us home," objected Shep. "Like maybe Nick thought Jean had, and Jean thought Nick had."

  "Kirk A wouldn't take the chance," I said. "If he wanted to snatch us, he'd want them to not know he had. Probably. Don't you think?"

  "Unless we're some kind of bait, and he wants Kirk, our Kirk, to come after us. Except it would be more logical in that case to take Angel."

  "Unless he's killing two birds with one stone," I suggested. "He gets us as bait, and he gets back at us for keeping him from offing Halloway."

  "But wait," said Shep. "What are we bait for? If he can get us, he can get Kirk. Our Kirk."

  We thought about it.

  "So it's logical to assume that he snatched us from home," Shep said. "We just have to figure out when people will know we're missing."

  "That just puts us back where we started," I said. "We don't know."

  "But there must be some way to tell," said Shep. "I mean, if there wasn't, why didn't they just snatch Halloway instead of offing him?"

  "I can maybe think of one reason why not," I said. "Suppose they inject us with digoxin or shoot us or cut off our heads here, in their TSA, and we never get back. At what point are we missing in our world? Or do we flip back, dead, at the moment they took us? And if so, that would start a murder investigation."

  We looked at each other.

  It was a very long afternoon.

  Eventually the Ys came back and brought us more soda and more cellophane-wrapped sandwiches, baloney and cheese this time. By then the light was going, and by the time we'd finished it was almost totally dark. The floor, which was carpeted, was marginally more comfortable, or marginally less uncomfortable, than the desks, so we lay down against the end wall, away from the door and the windows.

  Wadded-up boxer shorts make a totally inadequate pillow, but we did eventually go to sleep.