The Fold: A Novel Part 45

Mike took a bite out of the croissant, and the b.u.t.ter and sugar and chocolate melted on his tongue. He pictured it rus.h.i.+ng into his bloodstream to help stabilize him and calm his overtaxed system. He slumped against the wall, closed his eyes, and took another bite.

The front door hissed open in the distance. Footsteps echoed in the hall. He opened his eyes in time to see Anne straighten up.

Jamie appeared in the doorway. Her hair was still damp, and her T-s.h.i.+rt had wet spots on it. It was inside out, and st.i.tches wrapped around her shoulders. There were wet trails on her cheeks that stood out against the dampness from the shower.

In her arms was something bundled in a towel. It twisted for a moment, then settled down in her hands. He caught a glimpse of tan fur and a thick claw. She marched forward and set it down on the table in front of Anne. Anne pushed herself away, and Mike had to set a hand on her shoulder to keep her from tipping over backward.

"It's still spreading," Jamie said. She took a step back from the table. The bundle s.h.i.+fted and wiggled.

Mike put the pieces together, but needed confirmation. "The instability?"

"Yeah."

"How far?"

The bundle yipped and shook itself. The table rocked a bit. The towel slid and fell away to reveal even more fur.

"Pretty d.a.m.ned far," announced Jamie. "The trailers. Which means it's. .h.i.tting most of the campus. Glitch is gone."

"He got out?"

"He's gone," she repeated, looking anywhere except at the animal on the table.

The mutt was small, fifteen pounds, tops, with floppy ears. It eyed Mike and Anne curiously, yapped at her twice, then got distracted by the coffee cup on the table. Its tail wagged back and forth.

Mike stepped past Anne and crouched down to look the dog in the eye. It glanced up at him, then pressed its wet nose against the table and snorted up a few stray particles of food.

"I was getting dressed in the trailer," said Jamie, "and Glitch was on the bed, and then I turned around and..." She shook her head and nodded her chin at the dog.

Mike reached out and took the nylon collar in his hand and worked his way around to the bone-shaped tag. He already knew what it was going to say.

Jamie leaned her head against the wall and crossed her arms over her skull.

"h.e.l.lo, Tramp," murmured Mike.

FORTY-SIX.

Mike opened the door and found Jamie in the hall, leaning against the wall. She'd turned her s.h.i.+rt right-side out and pulled her hair back again. "Hey," she said.

"Hey. How are you?"

"Now that I've had time to think? Even more freaked out."

"Yeah, me too."

He glanced back into the conference room as the door eased shut on its hydraulic arm. Olaf and Sasha were checking over Tramp. Both of them still looked more than a little ill at the dog's reappearance. Arthur stood at the head of the table, leaning on his cane. He stared at the dog with flat eyes.

After a few hours, Anne had still seemed to be in shock from the creature's attack. Arthur had called a cab and sent her home. She'd flinched away when he touched her arm to say goodbye. She'd glared at him and climbed into the cab without a word.

Jamie glanced at the book in Mike's hand. It was half an inch thick, with a dark cloth binding and ragged pages. "Koturovic?"

"Yeah. I got it from Arthur when they came back."

She looked at his stomach. "Did you get fresh bandages?"

"Yep."

"Good," she said. "I threw up in the shower. Twice. And I think I took off a layer of skin."

"Did it make you feel better?"

"A little."

He tilted his head over at the bathroom door. "I came pretty close in there when I was getting cleaned up."

"Are you hungry, too?"

"I had a couple mouthfuls of croissant before you showed up with...with the dog."

"It's Tramp," said Jamie. "I get it. I think d.i.c.king around about it is just going to waste a lot of time."

"Agreed."

"And I'm starving."

He nodded. "Probably cras.h.i.+ng like I was after, well, after everything. You had more shocks than me."

She shrugged and managed a smile. "Disemboweled by a monster versus finding a dog. I don't know."

Mike glanced at the conference room door. He was tempted to say the small dog bothered the scientists far more than either the fold in s.p.a.ce or the three-armed monster. He wasn't sure if that was funny or disturbing. Probably a little of both.

Jamie nodded at the door. "How's it going?"

He weighed his words. "It's creepy and fantastic that Tramp's back, don't get me wrong. But you're right. He's distracting us from the big issue." He held up the book. "You've read this, right?"

"Yeah."

"I think I've figured a bunch of stuff out."

Her stomach rumbled.

"Speaking of distractions..."

"Sorry," she said. "Just let me grab a cruller or something before we go back in. I'm going to pa.s.s out if I don't eat something in the next five minutes."

They wandered to the kitchen and Jamie rooted through the box of pastries. "Double donuts," she said. She pulled out the two crullers and wrapped them in a paper towel. "Thank G.o.d for screwups," she said.

"It's not a screwup."

"What?"

"Anne didn't double it. It's more bleed-through, like when we tried to pull the bolts on the ring housings." He pointed at her small bundle. "We could call those quantum donuts."

She studied the cruller for a moment, then shrugged and took a bite out of it. "I'm starving," she said. "I'll deal with it if I grow another arm."

"It's just from an alternate universe, it's not magic." Mike pulled open the fridge. "There. See?"

On the top shelf was Anne's usual apple and lunch Tupperware. Except there were five apples piled on the shelf. Four were red, although the produce sticker on one was written in German. The apple farthest to the back was green. The words on its sticker were in j.a.panese.

"Great," she said. "So if we don't figure out how to shut it off, we'll be smothered in donuts and apples."

"And maybe dogs," said Mike. "It could be a self-correcting problem."

She snorted out a laugh and he pushed the fridge shut.

Unbidden, the ants pulled up his layout of the complex and added labels for the donuts, the refrigerator, Glitch's disappearance, and the reappearance of Tramp. A thought crossed his mind, and they added distances. A red circle blossomed on his map, centered on the remaining set of rings.

One last ant skittered out and placed a label just outside the circle. He focused on it, and it set up a trail of time stamps from the rings, through the label, and into a trailer. More ants carried out memories to fill in the path.

"Huh."

Jamie swallowed a second mouthful of cruller. "What?"

"I used your trailer and the donuts to mark out an area of effect. A map of how far away from the rings things are changing."

She raised an eyebrow. "My trailer?"

"For Glitch and Tramp. The bugman's corpse started to shrivel up as we got it near the edge of that area. And it fell apart just a few yards past your trailer."

"Really?"

Mike studied the layout and the trail of images. "Yeah. Not sure what that means. Maybe it's tied to the rings somehow."

"We're not. We've all left campus."

"You're still alive. And you're not a bugman."

"Thanks for noticing."

He shrugged.

Jamie filled her ma.s.sive coffee mug, and they headed back to the conference room. Tramp barked at them and wagged his tail when they opened the door. She managed to hide most of her cringe at the sound.

Sasha and Olaf stood on either side of the table. They were at the end farthest from the door, farthest from the rings. Spread out across the table were blueprints and mathematical models.

Arthur hadn't moved. Both hands were still on the head of his cane. Behind his gla.s.ses, his eyes focused on Tramp.

Sasha tapped one of the blueprints. Her arm had half a dozen st.i.tches and some bandages that looked much more professional than the ones Mike had taped into place on his stomach. "Maybe it's tapping into the Earth's magnetic field, somehow?"

"That's sci-fi nonsense," Olaf said. A line of small b.u.t.terfly bandages stretched along his cheek. They made the side of his face stiff when he talked.

"It's what an electrodynamic tether does," Sasha pointed out.

"Hypothetical science at best, sci-fi nonsense at worst."

Mike waited for them to finish and set the book down on the table and counted to five. "I think we may have a big problem. Really big."

Tramp leaped to his feet, yipped, and spun in a circle. He flopped back down, and his tail thumped against the table leg.

"When the Door opens," said Mike, "it reaches into a 'nearby' universe. By nature of being close to us, so to speak, they're less divergent. That's why all of you were able to get by without too much trouble once you switched universes. There were only minor differences."

"Except for other-Bob's world," said Olaf. "And the dead world."

Mike raised a finger. "But they weren't that divergent, either. We know this building existed in both of those worlds. We know teams existed there that built Albuquerque Doors. Which means they were near-parallel until the past year or two."

"And then one world started a war and the other one was wiped out," said Arthur. He balanced his cane against the table and tugged his gla.s.ses off. "That sounds somewhat divergent to me."

Mike shook his head. "Not if whatever caused those changes came from outside of the given universe."

They all stared at him. Olaf shook his head. "What the h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

Mike reached down and tapped the book. "Koturovic," he said. "Appendix three."

Sasha nodded. "That's where he starts spouting all the History Channel stuff about dimensional barriers and the end of the world, right?"

"All the things that got him tossed out of his university," said Olaf.

"Yeah," said Mike, "except I'm not so sure it's that crazy. In fact, a lot of things start to make sense when we take all of his theories into account."

He slid a piece of paper toward himself and scooped up a pen. "Say this is the multiverse," said Mike. He drew a dot at the bottom of the sheet, and then a dozen quick lines coming out from it in a tight fan. "It's our local cl.u.s.ter, if you will. A bunch of realities that only recently split apart, in the big scheme of things. We've got a lot of common history. Enough so that if someone crossed from one to another, they might not even notice any major changes. Think of the lines as branches in a tree."

He glanced around the room. They all seemed to be following him. Or, at least, humoring him.

"Now something comes along with a set of clippers or one of those big buzzsaw things."

"Hedge trimmer," said Sasha.

He nodded. "A hedge trimmer. And it starts cutting through the branches." He drew a horizontal line halfway across the fan. "The Door is doing what it's been doing all along-opening to another branch close to this one. But we're seeing universes that were hit by the trimmer. So they look different."

Olaf tapped his fingertips on the table. His jaw s.h.i.+fted and the bandaged side of his face s.h.i.+fted with it. "And what's the trimmer represent in your clever metaphor?"