The Broken Universe (4 page)

“Don’t take that tone with me, John Wilson, John Rayburn, John number 7533, or whatever your name is.”

“I’m just worried about you,” John said. “Because—”

“Yeah, I know you are,” Grace said. “And yeah, I appreciate it. But how about we just leave Grace alone for a while and let her sort things out.”

“And who’s going to help Henry sort things out?”

“Henry can—”

The door from the reception area swung open. A sheriff walked in followed by a man dressed in a dark business suit.

“I’m going to have to ask you all to vacate this building,” the sheriff said.

CHAPTER
4

The sheriff held a piece of paper in one hand. His other hand was on his hip near his sidearm. The man behind him met John’s look of disbelief and smirked.

John wanted to fly at him, but he forced himself to relax. This was no time for aggression.

“Why is that?” Grace said. She sounded far calmer than John felt. Henry pushed open the door to the office and looked down. His hair was standing up and he looked fever-drenched in sweat.

“Who’s he?” he muttered.

“I have an injunction here that states you need to remove yourself from the premises,” the sheriff said.

“We have a lease for this building,” Grace said. “We’re the legitimate occupants.”

“This injunction says otherwise.”

“Just get them out of here,” the man in the suit said. John recognized the accent. He was an Alarian.

The sheriff turned only slightly to address him. “Mr. Gesalex, please let me do my job.” He turned back toward Grace. “This injunction states Mr. Gesalex is the owner of the business residing at 9812 South Crevinger Way, and that includes all the materials herein. This is signed by a judge in this county.”

“We’ve never heard of Mr. Gesalex, never met him,” Grace said. “I’m the president of this company, and we own all of this.”

“This document says otherwise,” the sheriff said.

John realized that Gesalex didn’t care a whit about the company; he wanted the transfer gate back, the same gate that sat half-assembled in the back room. John couldn’t let them get their hands on it.

“I’m the chairman of the board of this company,” Gesalex said. “I own all this.”

“Mr. Gesalex, I will have you wait outside if you interrupt me again,” the sheriff said.

Henry sat heavily at the top of the stairs. He muttered numbers in his feverish state, “Ninety-eight twelve, ninety-eight fourteen, ninety-eight twelve, ninety-eight fourteen.”

John was worried they’d have to take him to the hospital soon, but there was no time for that now.

“He’s not the chairman of the board,” Grace said. “Ermanaric Visgrath is.”

“He’s dead and you know it!” Gesalex cried.

“This is your last warning,” the sheriff said. “Stay quiet, Mr. Gesalex.” To Grace he said, “All I know is that a judge signed this order and you need to vacate the premises.”

“Not if he’s staying,” Grace said. “This is all ours.”

“Ninety-eight twelve, ninety-eight fourteen, ninety-eight twelve, ninety-eight fourteen,” chanted Henry from above.

“Listen, I just do what the injunction says,” the sheriff said. “I will remove you all by force if necessary.”

“You—”

“Hold on, Grace,” John said. “Can I see the injunction, please?”

The sheriff nodded and handed the paper to John. There it was in print. Henry’s fever-addled brain had found the clue.

“You’re in the wrong building,” John said. “This is 9814 South Crevinger, not 9812.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Gesalex said. “This is clearly the place. This is clearly where you should not be.”

The sheriff took the injunction back and read the address again. He pushed open the door to the reception area and looked at the address in bold letters above the front door.

“This letter has the wrong address,” the sheriff said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Gesalex said. “It’s just a typographical error. There isn’t even a 9812 so it must be this place.”

Gesalex tried to push the sheriff forward. The man did not move.

The sheriff turned toward Grace and tipped his hat. “Sorry to bother you, ma’am. This appears to be an invalid injunction.”

“I’m the CEO of Grauptham House,” Gesalex said. “You’ve probably heard of it. We are a billion-dollar company. We have a lot of power and money. And I want you to take care of these vermin.”

The sheriff looked at him for a long moment. “You’d think a billion-dollar company would have someone who could write a decent injunction.”

He walked out.

Gesalex watched him go, and then turned with a start, seeming to realize he was alone in the factory with Henry, John, and Grace.

“You’re trespassing, Gesalex, you murdering son of a bitch,” John said.

He sneered. “You can’t stand against us. We will crush you and all your duplicates.”

“Tell it to Visgrath,” Grace said quietly.

Gesalex paled.

“Now go,” Grace continued, “and count yourself lucky there’s a witness to your being here, or you’d not make it out alive.”

Gesalex opened his mouth to speak, and then turned and left.

As they watched him drive away, John said, “We better get that transfer gate out of here.”

“And we better get Henry into a bed,” Grace added.

*   *   *

“We’re going to run out of glass tops, microprocessors, and LED score boxes,” Grace said. She, Henry, John, and Casey sat around her desk in the office. Grace had managed to get the help-wanted ad in the paper just in time for the next morning’s edition, and Viv had interviewed and hired ten assemblers, none of whom had worked there before. They heard her yelling below, correcting the slow, error-prone work of the new workers. “We can’t make the order.”

“When do the parts get here?” John asked.

“Glass tops we can get anywhere,” she said. “But our cheapest supplier won’t ship until next week. The score boxes are out of stock at the local place. The microprocessors we use, the MPU-12s, are nowhere to be found.”

“Out of stock? Back-ordered?” Henry asked. He paused in mid-question to cough. A night’s sleep had broken his fever.

Grace said, “No one has them.”

“Maybe we can use a different model,” John said.

“The MPU-24s are three times the price!” Grace said. “We’re eating into profit.”

“We have no profit if we don’t ship,” John replied.

Grace glared at him. “More expensive parts are the last resort. We already have to get the glass for more. And if the score boxes are more too, there goes the margin. We need the profit, not just the volume.”

“We need the cash flow,” John said. “You said we could make payroll, but can we?”

“At least one,” Grace said with a grin. A real grin. John had noticed all day that she was more animated than she’d been since the incident with Visgrath. Was she pulling out of her depression due to hard work on something she loved?

“Do you guys have to work so hard again?” Casey asked. “You just got back to this … uh … universe.”

Grace didn’t say anything, so John said, “We need a certain volume to make a profit. If we don’t push hard now, it’ll all fold up from overhead costs. We could give up, but I don’t think anyone wants to.” He glanced at Grace.

“We’ve worked too hard for that,” Henry said. He looked at Grace too.

Grace shrugged. “Maybe it doesn’t really matter,” she mused. “What we need are those little processors we bought in Universe 7651. What were they, five dollars each? They could handle the processing.”

The microprocessors had been more advanced in 7651. The transfer device they’d built there had been smaller than the one in 7650. Not only were the processors more compact but it was the second time John had done it, and he knew shortcuts he could take now.

“We used up most of our cash in 7651,” John said. “I don’t think we have enough capital to do much there.”

“But we’ve got cash here,” Henry said.

“My bank account went into the gold we used to fund ourselves in 7651,” John said.

“We own our town house,” Henry said. “We can mortgage it again.”

“Will the processors even work with the voltages in this universe?” John asked. He hated anything that seemed like exploitation between the universes. It reminded him of what Prime had dangled in front of him.

“They should. Same voltages. I don’t see why not,” Henry said.

“I wonder what else is cheaper in 7651?” Grace said.

“Hold on—” John said.

“Maybe shipping too,” Henry said. “We could build here, ship there, and use a transfer device at our two destinations to move them back and forth.”

“But—” John said.

“Or we build them in 7651,” Grace said, “if labor is cheaper there.”

“I wonder what the price of a microprocessor in 7649 is?” Henry asked.

“Stop!” John shouted. Henry and Grace looked at him quizzically. “We’re not doing that. We’re not setting up some network of devices between dozens of universes. We’re just … not.”

“Why?” Grace said. “Seems like the obvious thing to do.”

“There are bad people out there,” John said. “They’ll notice—”

“Worse than the Alarians?” Grace asked. “Because we can deal with them.”

“There could be. Corrundrum indicated there were,” John said. The marooned traveler had hinted at a force called the Vig in the multiverse. Corrundrum had died before he could explain, shot by John Prime as he tried to steal the device from John.

“We can be careful,” Henry said.

“We were careful last time, and we got found out,” John said.

“We know what to look for,” Grace said. “I wonder how many stranded travelers there are in the universes. I wonder if they have conventions.”

“Do you think someone takes a census?” Henry asked.

“There are billions of people in billions of universes,” John said. “Wouldn’t we notice if travel between them was commonplace?”

“No one noticed that EmVis had scuba and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, not even you,” Grace said.

“I didn’t know what to look for,” John said.

“Could you spot it now?” Grace asked. “If we dropped you in 7652, could you tell if there were extradimensional travelers exploiting the universe?”

John considered it. “If I knew enough of what is common technology across a span of universes, I could spot the exceptions.”

“If you knew,” Grace said. “But you don’t.”

John thought. “Prime knows. He kept a notebook of information about each universe he visited.”

“A notebook! We should have kept a notebook,” Henry said.

“Prime even had me ship a huge footlocker of stuff to 7533,” John said. “Probably included an encyclopedia, since it was so damn heavy.”

“An encyclopedia from every universe!” Henry said. “That would be a good start.” He scratched his head, and his red eyes held a faraway look. He wiped his nose absently. “It would be an exception-based analysis. We’d scan the encyclopedia looking for differences, and that would give us a list of things to examine and exploit.”

“And for modern data,” Grace said, “the day’s
Wall Street Journal
s would show us everything that we could buy low and sell high.”

“Just hold on!” John said. “Prime couldn’t do it easily. We all know how his Cube idea panned out. And we can barely do it with pinball here. It’s not easy at all, and there’s all four of us working at it. The Alarians took thirty or forty years to do it here and they had dozens, if not hundreds, of people.”

“You’re right,” Henry said. “We’d need an army of people to do it.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Grace said, “Let’s get back to the problem at hand. We have machines to ship, and we need some parts. Unfortunately, they need to come from this universe … for now.”

*   *   *

The next day, John and Casey drove into Detroit where Grace had found a cache of cheap MPU-12s that a distributor was trying to unload. For a change, Casey let him drive. She placed a hand on his thigh as they drove.

“I was thinking about what Henry said yesterday,” Casey said.

“About what?”

“About an army to help manage a company across universes,” she said.

“That was just talk,” John said. “We can’t really do it. We’re too busy here.”

“What about the other John, this Prime guy?” Casey said.

“Prime,” John said. “It’s complicated. He…”

Prime had arrived on the Rayburn farm in Universe 7533 offering something fantastic to John, the chance to see another universe. He’d flashed money, told him stories, proven that he was who he said he was. But in the end, he’d stolen John’s life. John had been lost among the universes, while Prime slipped right into his life. He’d married the Casey there, the Casey that John had had a crush on.

John had spent a long time hating Prime for what he had done. But when he had needed help in saving his friends, Prime had come willingly. John couldn’t have done it without him.

“And doesn’t he have a Casey of his own?” Casey said.

“And a child too.”

“The more the merrier,” Casey said.

John felt a bit of discomfort discussing his old Casey from 7533.

“Um.”

“I’d like to meet her,” Casey said.

“I don’t want him involved in this,” John said.

“Why? Isn’t it clear after what he did that he’s a good guy? He’s you, and you’re a good guy.”

Was he? John wondered. Prime and he were identical and Prime was immoral. He lied, cheated, and had even killed. But John could never say with any certainty that he wouldn’t have done the same thing in the same situation.

“I don’t know if he is,” John said.

“He risked everything for you,” Casey said.

“Everything he stole from me in the first place.”

“Including the other Casey?”

“Um. I hadn’t even asked her out yet. Or even talked to her.”

“She clearly had a thing for you,” Casey said, “or she wouldn’t have fallen for Prime.”

“I guess so.”

“So you regret that you never talked to her?”

“I— No.”

“No?”

“No, she’s a whole other person. I don’t even know her. Never did. You’re the Casey I love.”

“Really?”

“Of course.”

“That’s rather sweet of you,” Casey said. “But what if I had died when I was shot? Would you have gone to find another Casey?”