"You're a b.u.mper," Henry said to Grace. He bounced his hip off hers and said, "Boing!"

"Funny."

One of John's purchases was a set of vises. They took the device and placed it in a vise that gripped the base of the device. The vise had rubber grips that squeezed the thing evenly. John then lowered a similar vise from above. This vise was attached to a lever and pressure gauge so that they could measure the exact force they were applying to the device.

"We'll start with twenty newtons of force," John said.

"This is is just like physics lab," Grace giggled. just like physics lab," Grace giggled.

"Applying twenty newtons of force."

Henry watched the seam on the device. They had precision calipers on both sides to measure its width.

"Nothing."

"Applying forty newtons."

"Nothing."

John worked slowly to 200 newtons, with no change in the width of the seam.

"Maybe we need to relieve the pressure inside before it comes open," Grace said.

"But how?"

"Cracking it open is probably not an option," Henry said.

"Not yet," John said.

"Lubricant?" Henry suggested.

They sprayed a liquid lubricant along the edge. "Not too much."

Then John tried 200 newtons of force again. Then 240. "I can't do any more than that evenly," he said.

"Then let's use pulleys," Henry said. "You have a four-pulley a.s.sembly." With four pulleys they could quadruple John's force.

They hung the pulley a.s.sembly from the crane.

"Three hundred newtons. Three fifty. Four hundred."

"Stop!" Henry cried. He slid the caliper against the line. "I've got half a millimeter movement here."

"Me too," Grace said from the other side.

"Now that it's started, you may not need as much force," Grace said.

John tried 80 newtons, then 120. With a soft pop the front of the device came off.

"Hold it." The two halves hung separated by a small crack.

"Flashlight, please," John said.

He shined the light at the crack but could see nothing.

Henry said, "There's hinges on this side."

There were, small hinges where the two halves came together.

They disconnected the upper vise and moved the pulleys out of the way. Gingerly John lifted the upper half away, and it opened like a compact mirror, revealing the inside of the device.

Inside were what looked like two marshmallows covered in mold.

"It was meant to open like that," Henry said. "If it has a hinge."

John looked into the inside of the device and examined the marshmallow things closely. "Take a picture from every angle, of everything. Use two rolls. I want redundancy." If he screwed it up, he wanted to know how.

The fungus attached to the two shapes was actually tiny threads. As he looked closer, he saw that the marshmallows themselves were made of tightly bound layers of the stuff.

"That doesn't look like anything made by a human," Grace said. "It looks alien."

John had seen the diversity of the human universes and he was willing to bet that humans, however bizarre they might be, had built this. It just didn't look like anything Grace knew of in her universe.

Henry loaded a new roll of film and repeated all the same shots.

Dozens of threads ran between the two marshmallows, connecting them. Threads also ran from the marshmallows to the hinges and then to the back sides of the controls on the device's lid. Threads ran to all of the b.u.t.tons, dials, and switches. In fact, below each of the b.u.t.tons were smaller fuzzy marshmallows.

"The threads comprise the control system," Grace said. "They must be the electronics of the thing."

Of the two fuzzy marshmallows, one was near the center of the device and the other was to the upper right. That one was the source of the gamma radiation. John noted that there was a white spine, perhaps a half centimeter in diameter, jutting into it. The center mallow had no such spine.

"That's the power source, I a.s.sume," John said. "Maybe that spine houses the antimatter."

"How can you house antimatter?" Henry asked.

"Magnetic field, I a.s.sume."

Grace pointed the flashlight at the edge of the bottom half. "Look there." John peered closely and saw a small strand of the fiber lying unconnected. "Do you think it fell off? Do you think that's why the device is broken? Or perhaps you've come around to my hypothesis of sabotage!"

"I don't know. Do you have... something?" He made gripping signs with his hands.

Grace handed him long, thin tweezers. Carefully, John slid the thing through the web of threads and caught the stray thread. He pulled it out and put it in a plastic bag.

"Let's see what this is made of," he said.

He placed it under the light microscope, and they took turns looking at it.

"Fiber?" Henry asked.

"I have a laser," Grace cried. "For presentations." She held it carefully to the end of the small thread. John couldn't see coherent light coming from the other end.

"No, I don't think so."

"Maybe it will run current," Henry said.

They attached a voltmeter to the ends of the thread. It showed a few ohms of resistance. "Maybe they're like wires," Grace said. "That whole ma.s.s is a large electrical circuit."

"That doesn't get us anywhere," John said, sighing. He wasn't sure what he'd expected inside the device, but the ma.s.s of threads wasn't it.

"Why not?" Grace cried. "We just have to figure out what these b.a.l.l.s do."

"And fix where it's broken," Henry said.

"How?"

"I dunno," Grace said. She peered closely at the ma.s.ses. "If we could map it out..."

Henry clicked a few more pictures. "There's no way to figure out what's connected to what."

Grace shook her head. "There's always a way." She pointed to the single thread that they had retrieved from the device. "We'll start with this."

There wasn't anything else for them to do with the device, so John closed it back up.

"I'll send the thread to a lab and get an a.n.a.lysis done," Grace said.

Charboric called three times that week asking for a meeting. John dodged the call all three times, having the secretary say he was in cla.s.s, though he wasn't. Grace called him on Sat.u.r.day just as he was getting ready to head into work.

"Charboric is here," she said. "Head to the old factory instead. I have news."

John sped to the old factory. He couldn't continue avoiding Charboric. The man would grow suspicious, if he wasn't already. The man was paranoia incarnate.

Grace was already at the old factory. She handed John a stack of paper. "Lab report," she said. "This stuff is cool."

"Did the lab technicians have any questions?" John asked. "Were they suspicious?"

Grace shrugged. "Who cares? This stuff, its walls are a dielectric material. Its inside is gla.s.s."

"What does that mean?" John asked. In his universe, he knew fiber-optic wiring was common. Here most electronics used copper.

"Who knows?" Grace cried. "But that's not the cool part. I mean, it's cool, but it's not the coolest part. Hit the lights." John turned off the overhead fluorescent bulbs while Grace pulled the shades down to the room. She clipped a wire to the end of the thread. The other end of her wire was attached to a nine-volt battery.

The thread glowed a ghostly blue.

"Cool, but so what?"

Henry slammed through the door. "What'd I miss?" he said, puffing.

"Lab report, glowing thread," Grace said. "But not the climax."

"Go!" Henry said.

"We can map out the marshmallows with this," Grace said.

"Oh," John said. "I get it. We can apply a voltage thread by thread to the device and figure out the diagram of its workings."

"Yes!" Grace cried. "Then we just have to engineer material to match the thread's characteristics and-voila!-we've reverse engineered the device."

"Easier said than done," John said.

"Most things are," Grace said. "Let's get started."

It was a slow, painstaking process. They marked up an enlarged photo of the ma.s.ses, and worked through each ma.s.s, tracing each thread's faint glow, applying a voltage and measuring the resistance. They found that threads could be arranged in parallel or series, much like typical electronic circuits that Grace understood. They could also be arranged in elaborate sequences that reminded John of human nerve cells connected together in three-dimensional lattices.

They cataloged a thousand threads that weekend, and John estimated that the device held a hundred thousand such threads. But they got faster as they went along. John was worried that they wouldn't be able to reach the center threads, but Henry and Grace showed him that she could move the threads out of the way with tweezers. The ma.s.ses were not glued or otherwise bonded together.

"This is going to take a long time," Grace said, wiping her forehead.

"I know, but it seems the best way," John said.

"Agreed."

"We can't make this go any faster," Henry said. "Only one pair of hands can reach into the device at a time." He'd been drawing the diagram of the thing as they went, labeling it, snapping photographs.

John said, "But sooner or later, we have to turn that diagram into physical components."

"I don't know where to begin," Henry said. "It's one thing to draw it."

"We can make some a.s.sumptions, maybe," John said. "We can a.s.sume that the threads are h.o.m.ogenous. We can a.s.sume that they use current and that they have a capacitance and a resistance."

"Unless they also have semi-conductor characteristics," Henry said.

"Let's find out!" Grace cried. She spent an hour on the phone with a company out of Canada that was open on Sundays, ordering oscilloscopes, transistors, diodes, semi-conductor materials with various dopings. John looked up when she said, "Just charge it to my corporate card."

"How much is that costing?"

"Does it matter? Wealth has no value now that we know a million universes exist," she said.

Henry grunted. "How many Mona Lisa Mona Lisas exist?" he said. "How many diamond mines in South Africa that are known elsewhere and not here? How many worlds in which pinball doesn't exist?"

"There's no value in material goods," Grace said, "if material is infinite. The only good is personal happiness."