Unwritten Rules of Impossible Things

joy as she pulled and poked and turned the towering mass to the total astonishment of everyone else in the room.

  “And you say this has meaning?” the old professor asked.

  “It’s a replay,” she said, “a recording of what my son and his friend were discussing here today, only not as it was in the visible realm, but also in shadows, the essence in relief.”

  “What?” Janet Boltch was brief in her commentary.

  “I don’t know how to explain,” Marina admitted.

  “Never mind that,” Alexei said, as Miranda let the ‘conversation’ relapse and subside into its original two-dimensional form.

  “I’m afraid it’s too far beyond anyway,” he continued, and now looking up at Phil, he directed a question at the boy.

  “Marina’s child,” he said, “I would like to know how you came up with this,” he said, pointing at a different page on the screen.

  “This,” he explained to Marina, “is an equation, a fractal exponential of pi which resolves into a finite value, and constitutes the properties of a four dimensional wormhole.”

  “Which,” Janet Boltch butted in, “can only be realized physically in a silicate ferrous, of course”.

  “Of course,” Marina said, looking concerned.

  “You’re talking about time travel?” she added.

  “Travel of some sort,” the old man replied. “Now tell me, Marina’s child, how it is you know about this?”

  Phil felt suddenly very warm, standing there in that rather small room filled with strange grownups, their odors and sounds. It was time, he understood, to tell them the truth, so he did. He explained about the moose in the house, and the ghost house with its lights in its rooms, and the windows and curtains, and the doors, and the others.

  “That wasn’t me you saw,” he said to his mother, “and it wasn’t my friend. It was them,” he concluded. The grownups were quiet for several long moments, and then Alexei let out a sigh and exclaimed,

  “Now it begins to make sense.”

  “It does?” Phil asked, but nobody heard him. Janet and Alexei started jabbering at once, and Marina got very excited as well, and as if they were one the whole group of them bustled out of the room, down the stairs to the kitchen, where Marina set about making tea and warming up biscuits. Alexei and Janet sat down at the table and continued their discussion in Russian, and Phil, who had followed slowly behind, realized he understood nothing of what they were saying, as little as he understood what he had seen on his own desktop screen, and the whole house seemed different, as if it was not the home he had known all his life. He stood in the hallway uncertain of what he should do. It was already midnight, but he felt more awake than ever before. He felt like he might never sleep again.

  There was a knock on the front door. Phil went over and opened it, and there on the sidewalk stood Marcus.

  “I saw your lights on,” Marcus said, and Phil nodded.

  “Come on, let’s go,” he answered, and stepped outside, quietly closing the door behind him.

  Chapter Ten

  “There was a definite sense of panic in the holographic conversation,” Marina said.

  “That would explain the muddiness of the palette,” Janet considered.

  “There was some disorganization in the general thinking,” agreed Alexei.

  They had been sketching out the three-dimensional vision which Marina had extracted from the computer. As an imagistic representation of an internal dialog such as none of them had ever seen before, it was difficult to make something of it.

  “There was also indication of hurry,” Marina tossed in. “There had been a long wait.”

  “Their efforts have been sporadic,” Alexei concluded from some evidence not apparent to the others. “It seems they return to their plans at irregular intervals.”

  “I didn’t notice that,” Janet said. “What I saw was raw calculations. Did you notice they used a strange value for the constant ‘e’? It differed from ours from the seventeenth decimal place onward.”

  “Gravitational distortion,” Alexei said, frowning. He took another sip of tea and nodded wearily.

  “Gravity seems to be the central problem,” he added. “Everything circles around it. There were many equations designed to magnify mass to a tremendous extent. A great deal of energy would be required. I wonder.”

  He was interrupted at this point by a loud bang, which turned out to be the front door slamming, and the stomping of heavy feet, which preceded the appearance in the kitchen of a strong-looking man with thick black hair and bloodshot eyes.

  “Who are you people?” he demanded, “and what are you doing in my house in the middle of the god damn night?”

  “That’s just Pete,” Marina said, standing up from her chair.

  “Oh, ‘Just Pete’ is it?” Pete demanded, lurching another two steps into the room. “Just Pete who owns this house? Just Pete who lives here? Just Pete your worthless husband? That’s what you really meant to say, am I right?”

  “Pete,” Marina sighed, “Do you mind? We won’t be here long. These are my friends”.

  “Friends is it?” Pete yelled. “Why then howdy! Howdy-do! Welcome to my humble abode, you friends of my wife.” He staggered toward a cupboard and began rummaging around, looking for a bottle of something.

  “Let’s have a celebration!” he shouted. “It’s not every day I meet friends of my wife hanging out in my house in the middle of the night. This calls for a party, yes sir!”

  He found a bottle of Tequila and plunked it down on the counter, then turned to a cabinet to search for some glasses.

  “Better be going,” Alexei murmured, and then he and Janet both started to rise. Pete swung around quickly and stammered,

  “Wha, wha, where you going? The party’s just starting! Sit down, lovely friends of my wife. Have a seat. I’ll bring you some glasses. I know they are here. We can have a great time, sure, why not?”

  “Thank you,” Alexei told him, “but we have somewhere to go and must hurry.”

  “Oh, hurry now, is it? I don’t know about that. Didn’t look like you were in a hurry a minute ago. And then I showed up. Now it’s a hurry. I see. I don’t think so,” he said, and he rushed over and tried to push the old gentleman down in his seat. Janet Boltch stepped between them, however, and stopped Pete’s advance. He looked up at her stony wide face, and whistled and said,

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything uglier. Ever,” and started to laugh. Janet was not very amused. She grabbed hold of his shirt with both hands, and lifted the stocky man up to the ceiling.

  “I don’t like you,” she said. “And you’re drunk. I’m going to put you down now, and you’re going to stay where I put you.”

  Pete blinked a few times and tried to look down at his feet, which were dangling somewhere around Janet’s knees. Marina was gathering the notes they had made, and her keys and her purse and, with Alexei in tow, skirted out around Janet and Pete and reached the front door. Once she saw the two were outside, Janet swiveled around and lowered the man, putting him down in the chair where Alexei had sat. Pete was still speechless. Janet poured a cup of tea and pushed it toward him.

  “Drink this,” she instructed. Then she stalked away proudly and joined the others, who were getting into Marina’s car. Pete stared at the teacup and frowned.

  “Some friends of my wife,” he muttered. “Some wife.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “What a jerk!” Janet said as she climbed into the front passenger seat, and Marina nodded.

  “I think I’ve had enough,” she muttered as she began to back out of the driveway.

  “We must be going to moose house now,” Alexei piped up from where he was squished in the back seat of the small economy car.

  “Right,” Marina said.

  It was only a few blocks away, according to Phil’s description. Marina was pretty sure she knew the place, and even thought she knew its owner, a man named Burleson who used to buy fish at the
market. He had a wife who was a total shrew, if she remembered correctly. The wife was one of those people who like nothing better than to glare at strangers. She was another little dumpling, around the same size as Marina, but had a built-in arrogance twice her size. Mrs. Burleson was rumored to have had a child and put it up for adoption rather than raise it herself, although she was a nurse. Most people think of nurses as kindly and caring people, but Mrs. Burleson was a different breed. She was more of a hospice nurse, helping her patients move along to the next stage as efficiently as possible. That left Mr. Burleson for Marina to think about. Jerry, was it? Jerry and Jessica, she thought they were called. Jerry Burleson was in mechanical repairs. Air conditioners, she recalled. They were ordinary people, as far as Marina could tell. Unhappy, it seemed, but otherwise plain.

  Their house was one of those pre-fab jobs, the whole block was out of a kit that some developer plunked down in a month’s worth of building. The houses were all in pairs, opposites laid out across the street from each other, so that when you looked out your window you could imagine you were seeing your own house straight across. It was a concept development, but people didn’t like it, and soon the homeowners were customizing their places, putting in new garage doors, altering the paint jobs, and changing the colors of their roofs.

  “This is the street,” Marina said out loud as they turned onto it. She had been right, and at the end of the block, there stood the Burleson’s place. She parked on the road, and the three got out