John shook his head, thinking fast. "My parents are on the way."

"Did you call them?"

"Yes."

"We'll need their insurance information."

John stood wincing and peered out the door until she disappeared. Then he limped the other way until he found an emergency exit door. He pushed it open and hobbled off into the parking lot, the bleating of the siren behind him.

John shivered in the morning cold. His knee was the size of a melon, throbbing from the night spent on the library steps. The bell tower struck eight; Prime would be on his way to school right now. He'd be heading for English cla.s.s. John hoped the b.a.s.t.a.r.d had done the essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

John had slept little, his knee throbbing, his heart aching. He'd lost the seventeen hundred dollars Prime had given him, save eighty dollars in his wallet. He'd lost his backpack. His clothes were ripped and tattered. He'd skipped out on his doctor's bill. He was as far from home as he'd ever been.

He needed help.

He couldn't stay here; the hospital probably called the police on his unpaid bill. He needed a fresh universe to work in.

Limping, he walked across to the Ben Franklin, buying new dungarees and a backpack.

Then he stood in the center of the town square and waited for a moment when no one was around. He toggled the universe counter upward and pressed the lever.

John climbed the steps to the library. This universe looked just like his own. He didn't really care how it was different. All he wanted was to figure out how to get home. He'd tried the device a dozen times in the square, but the device would not allow him to go backward, not even to universes before his own.

He needed help; he needed professional help. He needed to understand about parallel universes.

As he browsed the card catalog, it soon became apparent the Findlay library was not the place to do a scientific search on hypothetical physics. All he could find were a dozen science fiction novels that were no help at all.

He was going to have to go to Toledo. U of T was his second choice after Case. It was a state school and close. Half his friends would be going there. It had a decent, if not stellar, physics department.

He took the Silver Mongoose to Toledo, dozing along the way. A local brought him to the campus.

The Physics Library was a single room with three tables. Stacks lined all the walls and extended into the middle of the room, making it seem cramped and tiny. It smelled of dust, just like the Findlay Public Library.

"Student ID?"

John turned to the bespectacled student sitting at the front desk. For a moment, he froze, then patted his front pockets. "I left it at the dorm."

The student looked peeved, then said, "Well, bring it next time, frosh." He waved John in.

"I will."

John brought the catalog up on a terminal and searched for "Parallel Universe." There wasn't much. In fact, there was nothing at all in the Physics Library. He was searching for the wrong subject. Physicists didn't call them parallel universes of course. TV and movies called them parallel universes.

He couldn't think what else to search for. Perhaps there was a more formal term for what he was looking for, but he had no idea what it was. He'd have to ask his dumb questions directly of a professor.

John left the library and walked down the second-floor hall, looking at nameplates above doors. Billboards lined the walls, stapled and tacked with colloquia notices, a.s.sistantship postings, apartments to share. A lot of the offices were empty. At the end of the hall was the small office of Dr. Frank Wilson, a.s.sociate Professor of Physics, lit and occupied.

John knew a.s.sociate professors were low on the totem pole, which was probably why Wilson was the only one in his office. And maybe a younger professor would be more willing to listen to what John had to say.

He knocked on the door.

"Come on in."

He entered the office, found it cluttered on all sides with bookshelves stacked to bursting with papers and tomes but neat at the center, where a man sat at an empty desk reading a journal.

"You're the first person to show for office hours today," he said. Professor Wilson was in his late twenties, with black gla.s.ses, a sandy beard, and hair that seemed in need of a cut. He wore a gray jacket over a blue oxford.

"Yeah," John said. "I have some questions, and I don't know how to ask them."

"On the homework set?"

"No. On another topic." John was suddenly uncertain. "Parallel universes."

Professor Wilson nodded. "Hmmm." He took a drink of his coffee, then said, "Are you one of my students? Freshman physics?"

"No," John said.

"Then what's your interest in this? Are you from the creative writing department?"

"No, I..."

"Your question, while it seems simple to you, is extremely complex. Have you taken calculus?"

"Just half a semester. ..."

"Then you'll never understand the math behind it. The authorities here are Hawking, Wheeler, Everett." He ticked them off on his fingers. "You're talking about quantum cosmology. Graduate-level stuff."

John said quickly before Wilson could cut him off again, "But my question is more practical. Not theoretical."

"Practical parallel worlds? Nonsense. Quantum cosmology states that there may be multiple universes out there, but the most likely one is ours, via the weak anthropic principle. Which means since we're here, we can take it as a given that we exist. Well, it's more complex than that."

"But what about other universes, other people just like us?"

The man laughed. "Highly unlikely. Occam's razor divests us of that idea."

"How would I travel between universes?" John said, grasping at straws against the man's brisk manner.

"You can't; you won't, not even remotely possible."

"But what if I said it was? What if I knew for sure it was possible?"

"I'd say your observations were manipulated or you saw something that you interpreted incorrectly."

John touched the wound in his calf where the cat-dog had bitten him. No, he'd seen what he'd seen. He'd felt what he'd felt. There was no doubt about that.

"I know what I saw."

Wilson waved his hands. "I won't debate your observations. It's a waste of my time. Tell me what you think you saw."

John paused, not sure where to start and what to tell, and Professor Wilson jumped in. "See? You aren't sure what you saw, are you?" He leaned forward. "A physicist must have a discerning eye. It must be nurtured, tested, used to separate the chaff from the wheat." He leaned back again, glanced out his window onto the quad below. "My guess is that you've seen too many Schwarzenegger movies or read too many books. You may have seen something peculiar, but before you start applying complex physical theories to explain it, you should eliminate the obvious. Now, I have another student of mine waiting, one I know is in my cla.s.s, so I think you should run along and think about what you really saw."

John turned and saw a female student standing behind him, waiting. His rage surged inside him. The man was patronizing him, making a.s.sumptions based on his questions and demeanor. Wilson was dismissing him.

"I can prove it," he said, his jaw clenched.

The professor just looked at him, then beckoned the student into his office.

John turned and stalked down the hall. He was asking for help, and he'd been laughed at.

"I'll show him," John said. He took the steps two at a time and flung open the door to the quadrangle that McCormick Hall faced.

"Watch it, dude," a student said, almost hit by the swinging door. John brushed past him.

John grabbed a handful of stones and, standing at the edge of the quadrangle, began flinging them at the window that he thought was Wilson's. He threw a dozen and started to draw a crowd of students, until Wilson looked out the window, opened it, and shouted, "Campus security will be along in a moment."

John yelled back, "Watch this, you stupid b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" He toggled the device forward one universe and pulled the lever.

CHAPTER 8

John Prime awoke in the night, gripped by the same nightmare, trapped in darkness, no air, his body held rigid. He sat up and flung the covers away from him, unable to have anything touching him. He ripped off his pajamas as well and stood naked in the bedroom, just breathing. It was too hot; he opened the window and stood before it.

His breathing slowed as the heavy air of the October night brought the smells of the farm to him: manure and dirt. He leaned against the edge of the window, and his flesh rose in goose pimples.

It was a dream he'd had before, and he knew where it came from. He'd transferred near Lake Erie, on a small, deserted beach not far from Port Clinton, and ended up buried in a sand dune. He'd choked on the sand and would have died there if a fisherman hadn't seen his arm flailing. He could have died. It was pure luck that the guy had been there to dig his head out. He'd never transferred near a body of water or a river again.

That hadn't been the only time either. In Columbus, Ohio, he'd transferred into a concrete step, his chest and lower body stuck. He'd been unable to reach the toggle b.u.t.ton on the device and had to wait until someone wandered by and called the fire department. They'd used a jackhammer to free him. When they'd turned to him, demanding how he'd been trapped, he'd feigned unconsciousness and transferred out from the ambulance.

After that, each time he touched the trigger he did so with the fear that he'd end up in something solid, unable to transfer out again, unable to breathe, unable to move. He was nauseated, his stomach kicking, his armpits soaked, before the jumps.

It was the cruelest of jokes. He had the most powerful device in the multiverse, and it was broken.

"No more," he said to himself. "No more of that." He had a family now, in ways he hadn't expected.

The confrontation with his parents had been angry, then sad, and ended with all of them crying and hugging. He'd meant to be tough; he'd meant to tell his parents that he was an adult now and could take care of himself, but his resolve had melted in the face of their genuine care for him. He'd cried, G.o.dd.a.m.n it all.

He'd promised to reconsider the letter. He'd promised to talk with Gushman again. He'd promised to be more considerate to his parents. Was he turning into Johnny Farm Boy?

Prime had gone to bed empty, spent, his mind placid. But his subconscious had pulled the dream out. Smothering, suffocating, his body held inflexible as his lungs screamed. He shivered, then shut the window. His body had expelled all its heat.

He slipped back into bed and closed his eyes.

"I'm becoming Johnny Farm Boy," he whispered. "Screw it all."

Prime helped his father around the farm the next day. He took it as penance for upsetting his parents. They still thought he was Johnny, and so Prime had to act the part, at least until his projects started churning.

As they replaced some of the older wood in the fence, Prime said, "Dad, I'm going to need to borrow the truck on Sat.u.r.day night."

His father paused, a big smile on his face. "Got a big date, do you?" He said it in such a way that Prime realized he didn't think his son really had a date.

"Yes. I'm taking Casey Nicholson out."

"Casey?" His father held the plank as Prime hammered a nail into it. "Nice girl."

"Yeah, I'm taking her to a movie at the Bijou."

"The Bijou?"

"I mean the Strand," Prime said, silently yelling at himself for sharing details that could catch him up. The movie theater was always called the Palace, Bijou, or Strand.

"Uh-huh."

Prime took the shovel and began shoring up the next post.

"What movie you gonna see?"

Before he could stop himself, he answered, "Does it matter?"

His father paused, then laughed heartily. "Not if you're in the balcony, it doesn't." Prime was surprised; then he laughed too.

"Don't tell your mother I told you, but we used to go to the Strand all the time. I don't think we watched a single movie."

"Dad!" Prime said. "You guys were... make-out artists?"

"Only place we could go to do it," he said with a grin. "Couldn't use this place; your grandpa would have beat the tar out of me. Couldn't use her place; your other grandpa would have shot me." He eyed Prime and nodded. "You're lucky we live in more liberal times."

Prime laughed, recalling the universe where the free-love culture of the sixties hadn't ended until AIDS had killed a quarter of the population and syphilis and gonorrhea had been contracted by 90 percent of the population by 1980. There dating involved elaborate chaperone systems and blood tests.

"I know I'm lucky."