Silently, Max thanked whatever god or gods was looking over him at that moment. “I won’t last till Tuesday.” Without waiting for an invitation, he stepped past the older man and into the house.
His expression becoming one of honest concern, Boles shut the door and followed the reporter into the front room. “You don’t look so good, Max. This has been hard on you, hasn’t it?”
“HARD?” Max counted to three—he did not have patience enough to wait till ten—and forced himself to stay calm. “Hard. Look at me, Boles. Since the last time we met I’ve been slipping in and out of parallel worlds like lead shot through Jell-O. I barely know who I am anymore, much less where I am.” Pacing the room, he extended his arms in a posture of helpless supplication.
“Take right now, this moment, for instance. How do I know this is my world and not some para? How do I know that you’re my Barrington Boles? How can you be sure that I’m not some para Max Parker? How can anybody be sure of anything?”
The inventor made soothing noises. “Take it easy.”
“Yeah, sure; take it easy.” Moody and depressed, Max threw himself down onto the couch, bouncing a couple of times as he landed. “Easy for you to say. It doesn’t matter to you what I am because you know for sure that this is your world. You possess a certainty that’s denied to me.” He looked up, his gaze desperate and searching.
“It’s amazing the things we take for granted, Barrington. The reality of the world around us, the stability, the knowledge that what we go to bed with tonight will in all probability be there when we wake up in the morning. You lose that and it doesn’t matter how successful you are or how rich or how healthy. Lose your reality and everything starts to come loose, to fall apart. Even if it’s a better reality than the one you’re used to, and I visited one or two of those, you never manage to quite fit in.” He grabbed a handful of mixed nuts from a glass dish on the coffee table and began munching them nervously.
“Let me tell you something, Barry. Shifting realities and parallel worlds suck. I just thought that, as an anticipative scientist, you ought to know that.”
Boles did his best to commiserate. “I’m not sure how to quantify that observation as empirical data, but it’s nice to have the opinion of someone who’s been there.”
Unmollified, Max fidgeted on the couch, too edgy to sit still. “Been there, done that. Been lots of wheres, done plenty of things. And I’m sick of it, Boles. Sick and tired of it. I want my own world back, my own para. I want to get up in my own bed, by myself, and drive to work, and write amusing stories about mildly outrageous incidents in the lives of ordinary citizens without becoming an outrageous incident myself.” He leaned forward and his tone turned dead earnest.
“Give me back my reality, Barrington. I want it back. I need it back. Take the Boles Effect and bury it someplace quiet where it won’t be found. It’s dangerous. It’s destabilizing. It makes a man inclined to do violent, unpleasant things to inventors they hardly know who monkey around with the fabric of the universe without a clear vision of what they’re getting other people into.”
The two men stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Then Boles announced quietly, “I’ve been working on the problem.”
“You found a way to kill the field,” Max shot back instantly.
“Well, I’m not sure.” The inventor rubbed at his chin. “I haven’t been sure about quite a lot since I started this project—but then, you already know that. But I’ve been working on it.”
“Great,” Max muttered, his hands working against one another. “I’m losing my mind, and you’re ‘working on it.’”
The inventor was eyeing him thoughtfully. “I wonder if you are in the right para? I mean, I know that I’m the right Barrington Boles, but I wonder if you’re the right Maxwell Parker. Just as you said, you could be another Max entirely who just happened to wander into this para by mistake. If so, and I help you and everything works, that means I might be marooning the real Max Parker in some other para forever.”
“Screw the other Max Parkers!” The reporter’s tone was choleric. “If you don’t do something to end this for me then you’ll have at least one angry maniac on your hands for sure. That’s something you don’t have to speculate on.”
Boles dug tiredly at his eyes and spoke thoughtfully. “You talk like the Max Parker I know, anyway.”
The reporter laughed hollowly. “Wouldn’t all the different mes talk alike?”
“Not necessarily. If the paras you say you’ve been slipping and sliding between are so different, the Max Parkers that inhabit them might speak and act differently as well. The differences would be subtle, but they would be real.” He continued to concentrate speculatively on his visitor.
After a little of this Max began to grow uneasy. “What are you staring at?”
“I told you. I’m trying to decide if you’re the real Max Parker, the original.”
Max found himself nodding slowly. “That’s exactly what I’d expect the original Barrington Boles to say. One who was familiar with the success of his machine. The other Boleses I met were familiar with the theory but hadn’t succeeded in making the device work.”
“Fascinating. I wish I could meet some of my paras.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Barrington. It’s pretty damn interesting to be able to sit down and have a conversation with yourself, but it’s no way to live. No matter what para you find yourself in, you’re always better off in the one that you belong to. I found that out.” He rose from the couch. “You said that you’ve been working on the problem.”
Boles nodded. “Personally, I think it’s premature to try using the equipment to negate the effect, but if you’re that desperate…”
“Barry, I’m beyond desperate. I’m going out of my mind. As if going out of my reality wasn’t bad enough. If you think there’s a chance, even a small chance, of doing anything, then for God’s sake let’s take a shot at it. No matter what happens, it can’t be any worse than what I’m going through now.”
Boles took a deep breath and nodded. “Come downstairs.”
The reporter trailed his host through the house, the locked metal door, and down to the equipment-saturated cellar. His first view of the subterranean chamber crammed full of unruly electronics left him limp with relief—relief that was short-lived when he reminded himself that if this was the wrong para, none of it would work.
Boles busied himself at the control console. “You need to stand over…”
“I know where to stand.” An impatient Max did not hesitate to interrupt the inventor. “I was right here when it happened, remember? A guinea pig may not know much, but he doesn’t forget the door to his cage.”
“It was not my intention to imply ignorance.”
Max calmed himself. “Hey, forget it. I’m just a little on edge, you know? When you’re whacking through multiple realities like a hockey puck on a breakaway, it tends to make you a little jumpy.”
“I know.”
“No you don’t. Nobody knows but me.” Standing beneath the ominous arch, waiting for it to crackle to unsettling life, he somehow managed to smile and sing softly at the same time. “Nobody knows the parallelities I’ve seen, nobody knows but Jesus.” He swallowed. “I wonder how many para messiahs there are? One for each Rapture?”
Boles didn’t comment. He was too busy throwing switches.
Rapidly, the room came to life. Max remembered the colorful lights, the actinic flashes, and how he thought they would add spice to his story. He laughed bitterly, privately. Some story.
“What I’ve done,” Boles was saying, “is recalibrate the oscillating input to the paradigm generator in order to …”
“Save it,” Max snapped. “Do what you have to do. Fry me, toast me, burn all the hair off my head if you want—but get rid of this goddamn field that’s stuck to me like a leech. Free me, Barrington. Let me live a normal life again. That’s all I’m asking.”
“That’s what I’m trying to
do.” Peering over the crest of the console, Boles’s hands hung poised above unseen controls. “You sure you’re ready for this?”
Waiting beneath the soaring, intricately cabled arch, Max turned to face the inventor. “Barry, after what I’ve been through the past couple of days, I’m ready for Armageddon itself.” He was silent a moment, then added hastily, “Provided it’s the appropriate one, and not a para Armageddon, of course.”
Boles did not reply, but his hands dropped. Something hummed loudly enough to lead Max to believe that he could feel the individual molecules of air in which he was enveloped begin to vibrate. He waited for his teeth to start to chatter, for his head to become light, for a sense of unease and nausea to slip over him.
He felt nothing. A mild sense of well-being left him feeling as if he had just downed a nice glass of chardonnay. He tried to remember what it had felt like before, the first time he had occupied the experimental position of honor in Barrington Boles’s folly, but found he could not. He had been too preoccupied back then, too involved with the ramifications of a potential story to reflect on the possibility that the damn thing might actually do something, much less work.
His hair did not stand on end, he was not compelled to utter any nonverbal vocal commentary, and the hoary-haired shade of Elsa Lanchester was not waiting to greet him when Boles finally shut the machine down.
Max took a deep breath and stepped out from beneath the arch. The meaningful glow of lights and telltales was fading around him, powering down, as if Dad had just switched off the Christmas tree. Santa was nowhere in sight.
He felt no different. The underground chamber, so fraught with vaguely unsettling suggestions of amateur science run amok, looked no different. Boles himself, gazing anxiously across from behind the cobbled-together console, was his same composed, engaging, country-club-cum-hippie self.
“Well?” the would-be inverter of universes finally asked after Max had just stood there for several moments.
The left corner of the reporter’s mouth curled upward. “It was good for me. Was it good for you?” He took a couple of hesitant steps toward his host. “I hardly felt a thing. You sure it was on?”
Boles nodded. “Everything was working, if that’s what you mean. Whether it worked as it was supposed to remains to be seen. I don’t feel any different myself.” He gestured around him. “How about your surroundings? Does anything look any altered to you? Modified, shifted, unnatural?”
“This whole dump looks unnatural, if that’s what you’re getting at. By which I guess I’m saying that it looks the same. So do you. Believe me, I was ready for anything. For this place to turn into a pit of fire and brimstone and you to grow horns and a tail.” His gaze narrowed. “Come to think of it, I don’t know that I ever really noticed the resemblance before.”
“How droll. I’m hardly an evil person, Max. Only one who is interested in pushing back the boundaries of knowledge.”
Max started for the stairs. “From now on you can use somebody else’s life to push with. I’m resigning as chief boundaries pusher, as of now. Provided you’ve put everything back the way it was meant to be, of course. Cured the ether, as it was.”
“You’re sure you feel all right?” A concerned Boles trailed his guest closely, watching his every move.
“I won’t be all right until I wake up in my own bed, in my own apartment, without any multiplied paras offering me orange juice or alien creatures crawling through my closet. I won’t be all right until I spend a whole day under a brown smoggy sky, working with friends who look like themselves instead of like me, eating food that lies as peacefully on my plate as it does in my stomach.” He looked unblinkingly back at the scientist. “Then, and only then, will I be all right.”
“You’re bitter.” Boles followed the other man up the stairs. “You should be proud. You’re a pioneer of instability, Max. A voyager on the farthest fringes of theoretical physics. A trail-blazer in the realm of the possible.”
“I’d rather do the Pirates of the Caribbean, thanks. And as far as instability is concerned, I’ll take the occasional earthquake.” At the top of the stairs he opened the heavy door and stepped through.
The rest of Boles’s house looked the same, as did the world outside. Still, he refused to accept what he saw as so. Reality had played him false before. Among all men only he, and to a certain extent Boles, knew how it could twist and knot and contort and flow like bad karma. In the whole history of humankind only he, Max Parker, knew for a certainty that the cosmos was actually composed of silly putty.
It made him perception-shy. What you saw, he knew, was not always what you got. But the silvered sheen of the nearby Pacific, the intermittent overflight of patrolling gulls, the calm atmosphere within the great house, were encouraging if not yet entirely reassuring.
“How do we know?” he asked Boles as he stared out the sweeping picture window at the lazy, hazy Southern California panorama. “How can I be sure that you’ve put everything right, that I’m back where I belong not just for a few minutes but permanently?”
“The field distortion isn’t like malaria,” Boles assured him. “Either you’re stuck with it, or you’re not. It’s present, or it’s absent. And if the calculations were correct and I did my job right, it’s gone. Permanently. You should be back, Max. You should be home. But there’s only one person in the universe who can know that for a certitude, and that’s you.” The inventor was uncharacteristically subdued, his tone solemn.
Max turned to face him. “And how am I supposed to know that? I want to hear what you’re telling me, Barrington. I want to believe. Christ, but I want to believe! But I’ve been ambushed too many times these past few days. I’m reality-shy.”
“Go home,” Boles advised him. “Go back to work. Go to a movie, have some popcorn, lose yourself in another kind of unreality. I’ve done all that I can. I can’t even tell you for absolute certain if I’m the Barrington Boles you needed to find to help you. I hope I am.” By way of farewell he offered up one final, engaging, aging-beach-boy smile. “I’m truly sorry for all the trouble. Until I can find a way to moderate and control the field a good deal better I don’t think I’ll be playing at parallel-worlding for quite some time.”
Max agreed, readily and vigorously. “At least next time try to give the poor schmuck you stick under the wedding arch some idea of what he’s letting himself in for.”
“How could I do that?” Boles followed him to the front door. “I don’t have any idea. You’re the only one with any real notion of what slipping between parallelities means. You’re the only one who’s done it, Max. Only you and I and a few dreaming mathematicians know that there’s a great deal more to the cosmos than there appears to be, and only you know it firsthand.” Standing to one side, he held the door open for his guest. Beyond, lotus land beckoned.
“Write it down, Max. Write it all down. Not as some snide tabloid story but in the form of a journal. Record everything you experienced while you were living within the field. You owe it to science, and to mankind, and to future generations of quantum mechanics.”
“Forget it.” Max’s position was unshakable. “I don’t even want to think about it, much less relive it. If you did your job and I’m well and truly back where I belong, then the last thing I want to do is spend time rehashing the nightmare.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“Deal. As soon as I’ve got my life back in order, and I’m sure that it’s my life I’ve got back, I’ll send you a contract. Standard exclusive North American rights work-for-hire.”
His smile widening, Boles followed him outside. “Whatever you’re comfortable with, Max, but this won’t be for publication. Not for the foreseeable future, anyway. It’ll just be between me and you. Like everything else that’s happened.”
Max shrugged as he climbed back into his car. “Suit your-self. You pay for the words, the words are yours.” He pulled the door shut.
“You may want these particular words back somed
ay,” Boles called out to him.
“Not these words!” Max shouted back through the window.
He could see Boles in the rearview mirror, standing in the circular drive, watching as his guinea-pig guest departed. With luck, the reporter thought, it would be the last time he would ever have to set eyes on the brilliant but undisciplined Barrington Boles. The man, his inventions, and his scattershot intentions would be out of his life forever.
The drive back down the coast looked, felt, and smelled normal. The Golden Horde had left no evidence of its passing. Death and destruction had been replaced by thriving chaparral and elaborate landscaping. Crows and buzzards glided effortlessly through the sky, no longer in competition with rejuvenated condors. He found that of all the parallelities he had encountered, the only one he missed was the majestic sight of the soaring raptors over the coastal mountains.
Seeking surcease in normalcy, he grew more and more hopeful the nearer he drew to the city. Maybe this really was it. Maybe Boles, for a change, had known what he was doing.
Certainly nothing appeared abnormal or out of place as he approached Santa Monica. Even the friendly bum was still lying in his flower bed, ready to greet him as he neared the garage. Have to slip the sorry old son of a bitch a twenty, a grateful Max thought.
For the first time in recent memory, his apartment felt like home again. His big TV and stereo were still missing, but at this point he would have been delighted to see even the burglar again—provided he came skulking in by himself and not in the company of compatible doubles or triples, of course.
When he called in to the office and tendered an excuse for his extended absence that sounded lame even to himself, Kryzewski responded by heaping on him a wonderfully scurrilous assortment of calumny. Max positively reveled in the choice collection of expletives. Not only was he truly back home, but his work environment promised to be exactly as he had last left it—frantic, frenetic, grudgingly appreciative, and fondly abusive.
At long last able to relax, he luxuriated in the performance of simple, basic daily activities. He made coffee. He warmed a cheese Danish in the microwave. He ate, and listened to the all-news channel on the radio, and watched people—ordinary, out-of-shape, happy Angeleno-type people—enjoy the beach and the polluted bay.