Going Bovine (33 page)

“Whoa,” Gonzo says.

Down the hill is a field of mustard-colored wheat like brushstrokes in a painting.

Everywhere I look, there are wind turbines whirling against the clean blue of the sky like alien birds ready for takeoff, or takeover, whichever comes first. Smack-dab in the center are an old farmhouse, a barn, and what looks like a futuristic gas station.

Balder drops to one knee in prayerful thanks. “The Norn have favored us.”

“Great. Let’s see if they’ll give us some gas.”

Gonzo grabs my arm. “Are you out of your mind? Dude, didn’t you see Chainsaw Motel?”

“If I say no does that mean you’ll shut up?”

“Chainsaw Motel, quick plot summary,” Gonzo continues. “Spring break camping trip, ‘Oh, man, the truck’s out of gas! Bummer! Hey, look—there’s a creepy old bed-and-breakfast with a gas pump.’ Crunch, crunch through woods to isolated, gnarly house. ‘Knock, knock—hey, there’s nobody home—oh, what’s this weird chair made out of? Hey, it’s made out of human skin! Rrrrrnnnnnnnnn! Oh my God, he’s got a chain saw—Aaaahhhhhh! Rrrrrnnnnnnn! Gratuitous blood spray. Dismemberment. Death. Freezers of college-kid limbs. More screaming. And one lone, blood-spattered, forever-scarred survivor, who will spend the rest of her miserable life in psychiatric care. Roll credits.” Gonzo folds his arms over his chest.

“Wow. Maybe they have that on disc. We’ll ask them.”

I march toward the house, down a soft slope of clover and weeds. Gonzo darts in front of me, running serpentine style.

“Not doing this, Gonz,” I say, dodging him.

He sticks out his hands, moving them in bad martial-arts-movie style. “Can’t let you go in there, man.”

“Shall I go forward, Cameron? I would be honored to face a chain saw on your behalf, may Tyr grant me courage,” Balder says.

Gonzo practically pushes Balder forward. “Good idea. Balder can go. He can’t die.”

“Right. Great idea. We’ll send the yard gnome to ask for gas. No offense, Balder.”

Balder bows his head. “None taken.”

“Look, I’m going to knock on that door and ask for help. You can come with me or go back and stay in the car. Your choice.”

Gonzo sucks down a mouthful from his inhaler.

At the door, a black cat meows a hello and winds between my legs. “Don’t start,” I say to Gonzo.

“It probably feasted on human fingers this morning,” he whispers.

The door opens and the cat darts inside. A kid stands there, a bowl of cereal in one hand. He’s maybe about ten or eleven and wears a pair of small, round glasses. His wiry dark hair is sporting some serious bedhead cowlicks.

“Careful, he might be armed,” Balder deadpans.

“Let’s see if you end up keeping watch over a freezer of flesh, Gnome-Man.”

“Hi,” I say, ignoring them both. “Our car ran out of gas out on the road, and I was just wondering if maybe your parents have some we could buy off ’em?”

“I don’t have parents,” the kid says in a soft, high voice. Milk dribbles from his cereal-full mouth down his chin. “I’m an orphan.”

“Is there anybody else here, like an adult?” I ask.

The kid leaves the door standing open and we follow him into the dark house. The TV’s on in the living room. The kid sits down cross-legged on a beanbag chair with the name ED stitched on it and goes back to eating cereal and watching cartoons. “They’re downstairs in the basement.”

“Oh hell no,” Gonzo whispers.

“We’re not staying,” I remind him. “Just getting the gas and we’re outta here.”

“This way.” Balder opens the cellar door, and we climb down in darkness, following a short, dimly lit passageway to a pretty serious-looking door made of stainless steel. A sign beside it reads ENTERING MAGNETIZED ZONE, PLEASE REMOVE ALL METAL.

Gonzo holds his inhaler close to his chest. “This is the part in the movie where I would haul ass.”

We put everything with any metal into little plastic bags we find on a nearby table. I practically have to pry Gonzo’s inhaler out of his hands. There’s no bell or anything that I can see, so I just throw the door open.

“Whoa,” I say.

“Seconded,” Gonzo whispers.

Balder gasps. “What strange new world is this?”

We’ve stumbled onto what could be the world’s most gi-normous MegaMart, if the shelves of sweat-shop-produced T-shirts and cheap-ass plastic toys were replaced by masses of long blue and red tubes, big as waterslide tunnels and connected to an intricate maze of wires, gizmos, robotics, and computers. The place seems to stretch up fifty feet or more, like we’re in an airplane hangar inside a silo, and it’s got enough megawatts lighting it to give a space station lightbulb envy.

Dead center is a miles-long tunnel supported by metal beams stretching out on all sides like petals on a crazy daisy. And in the center of that is a strange, bumpy door that reminds me of a cross between a seashell and a pinwheel. Two guys and one woman in white lab coats and safety goggles are gathered around a table. A third guy is strapped to a chair, his head held by a steel band.

“I’m getting a serious dwarf-tossing vibe off these guys,” Gonzo whispers.

“Would you chill?” I whisper back.

“I’m just saying, if anybody goes airborne here, it’s not gonna be me.”

I don’t want to interrupt whatever experiment they’re in the middle of, so I clear my throat and hope they’ll notice. When they don’t, I say, “Um, hello? Excuse me?”

“Be with you in a moment,” calls an older man with a pompadour of white hair. “Ready, Dr. A?”

“Ready when you are, Dr. M,” the guy in the chair with his head immobilized says.

“Very well. Calabi Yau!” the white-haired man shouts.

“Calabi Yau!” the others cheer just as he lobs a grape. The guy in the chair tries to grab it with his mouth and misses.

“Ah, Heisenberg!” the white-haired man exclaims. He turns around and takes notice of us for the first time. “Oh, hello. Are you here with the pizza?”

* * *

After we disappoint the scientists with the news that we’re not the pizza delivery guys, they take us back to the house, and we explain that we’ve run out of gas and how important it is that we get back on the road because I’ve got mad cow disease and am on my way to be cured and that we’d be eternally grateful and blah-de-blah-blah.

“I’m afraid the only fuel we have is hydrogen. Your car isn’t equipped for hydrogen cell, is it?” the smiling Dr. T says.

“Honestly? We’re lucky our car has seats and tires,” I say.

“Well, we’ll get Ed to rig you a converter, then,” Dr. T explains, hooking a thumb at the kid who let us in. “He’ll have you on your way by tomorrow.”

The kid, Ed, doesn’t look up, just continues scribbling equations on a blackboard.

“Tomorrow?” I can’t keep the whine out of my voice.

“Best we can do. You’re welcome to stay here for the night.”

“Chainsaw Motel,” Gonzo singsongs under his breath.

“Of course, there is a gas station in town if you’d care to walk,” Dr. T adds.

“How far?” I ask.

The lone woman, Dr. O, shrugs. “In miles or kilometers or centimeters or what?”

“Miles would be good.”

“Oh, about forty, give or take,” Dr. T says.

Dr. O glares at him. “I was getting to it, Brian.”

Forty miles would take us forever to walk and we’re already exhausted. Then there’s the little matter of the police and the United Snow Globe Wholesalers bounty on our heads. “Fine. That would be great, thanks.”

“Oh, hello,” Dr. M says, shaking Balder’s hand. “Wonderful costume. I’m a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?”

“It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg,” Balder answers.

“Lovely. I got mine on the Internet.”

Gonzo picks up a toy that reminds me of a kid’s wacky macaroni sculpture. It’s a bumpy ball constructed of these looping chutes, slides, and tubes, none of which actually seem to connect to anything else. “What is this place?”

“This? This is Putopia,” says Dr. A, the tall guy with the curly hair who was trying to catch the grape in his mouth. He’s wearing a T-shirt under his lab coat that reads MY BANG THEORY IS BIGGER THAN YOURS.

“Putopia?” I repeat.

“Yes. Putopia. It stands for Parallel Universe Travel Office … pia.”

Dr. O breaks in. “We haven’t figured out the whole acronym yet, but we wanted to secure the domain name before anyone else did.”

“We believe our universe may be a small part of something vast—we’re one house in a cosmic subdivision of houses all right next to each other. If only we could just pop in to see the neighbors, easy as opening the front door,” Dr. T explains.

“You’re kidding, right?” Gonzo raises an eyebrow.

“Not at all,” Dr. T continues. “Why should our world be the only one? Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“And, frankly, a little narcissistic?” Dr. M adds.

“Surely, there must be many worlds, many possibilities. Rather like these bubbles.” Dr. T dips a wand into a soapy bottle, gives it a puff, and about a gazillion bubbles float out and away on the breeze. “See? Some bubbles burst immediately or don’t make it far—the least-probable possibilities. But some bubbles go the distance. They float on.”

“Nothing disappears. All of time is unfolding all of the time,” Dr. M continues. He picks up the macaroni-shaped toy and shifts one of the tubes. Lights flash on the toy, and now I can see another set of little shapes underneath the ones on top. “Eleven different dimensions. Most of them too small for us to see.”

“Or dimensions much larger than our world, like a big time ship on which our universe is only a stowaway mouse,” Dr. O argues.

“Whoa,” Gonzo says, and really, he’s got that right.

“We’re trying to reach into those endless worlds now. And this little baby …,” Dr. A says, gesturing to the strange daisy tunnel, “is our crowbar into other realities.”

“What is it?” Gonzo takes a step back. He’s got one hand resting on the exit.

“Seventeen miles of magnetized tunnels with one purpose: to open a window into that house next door and the house next door to that one and so on,” Dr. M tells us. He smiles broadly. “I can almost smell the coffee!”

“So it’s a supercollider,” I say.

“StephenfreakingHawking!” Dr. M huffs. “Super is what you call a sale. Super is the size of a hero sandwich when you upgrade for a buck. This …” He gestures to the weirdly shaped door. “This is an Infinity Collider.”

“That’s trademarked, by the way,” Dr. A warns.

“Your particles colliding with the infinite in an infinite number of ways so that none of the regular quantum laws apply—backward, forward, up, down, sideways, inside out, and outside in.”

Balder’s eyebrows shoot up. “Time travel?”

“Parallel-world travel,” Dr. T says with glee.

Gonzo leaves his post by the exit and sits next to Dr. T. “Dude! So, like, you’ve been to other worlds? What’s it like? Are there, like, Teddy Vamps laying waste to droids and shit? Wait—you’ve been, right?”

The scientists shift uncomfortably. “Not as such,” Dr. A says.

“Still a few kinks to work out,” Dr. T says, his smile tight.

“Kinks, like the hinges on the door need oiling or more like bad stuff I really don’t want to know about?” Gonzo asks.

“We’ve never put a person through,” Dr. A tells us.

“Except for once,” Ed pipes up from his blackboard scribblings.

“Yes. Well. Best forget that one, Ed,” Dr. M cautions.

“Come on. We’ll show you our work. It’s snack time anyway,” Dr. O says. She leads us upstairs to a nice comfy game room complete with big-ass TV and sectional sofa.

“What we’re about to show you is a record of all our work here at Putopia,” Dr. T explains. “The Infinity Collider, String Theory, Superstring Theory, M-Theory …”

“Y-theory, Z-theory, Double-Z-Theory …,” Dr. M adds.

Dr. O chimes in. “Subatomic particles, partner particles, gravitrons, maybetrons, perhapsatrons …”

“The Theory of Everything …”

“The Theory of Nothing …”

“The Theory of Somewhere in Between …”

“What we’re working on now is a supplement to the Theory of Everything,” Dr. T explains. “The Theory of Everything Plus a Little Bit More.”

“Because who doesn’t want a little more?” Dr. O asks. “Okay, Ed—start ’er up.”

The room darkens and a video burbles to life on the TV. A younger-looking Dr. M waves to the camera nervously and places an orange tabby with a purple collar inside the chamber of an earlier model of the Infinity Collider, which is half the size of the current one and not nearly as elaborate. “In you go, Schrödinger,” he says to the cat. “May you find a dimension where the mice are plentiful and the tuna fresh.”

Schrödinger’s meowing protests are cut short by the closing of the door. Then there’s a hum, and then a flash, and when the door is opened again, Schrödinger is lying inside the chamber, motionless.

“He was a good kitty,” Dr. T says with a sniffle.

The clips jump around in a very disjointed history of Putopia—scientists in their younger days, mapping out equations on a blackboard. A photo of them in a band at a dance, the banner spelling out the name THE MIGHTY MIGHTY BOSONS. A soccer game in full swing. A progression of those weird macaroni toys, each one different from the last.

“What are those things?” I ask.

“Calabi Yau manifold,” Dr. O says, like it’s as basic as toast or socks.

“Right. I knew that,” Gonzo says. He rolls his eyes at me.

Dr. M bounces the model from hand to hand. “They’re geometrical models that represent the many curled-up dimensions of space we’re not even aware of yet.” He shrugs. “It’s a math thing.”

The movie plays for another minute. I notice that there are a lot of scientists in the beginning, not so many in the later shots.

“What happened to everybody else?”

Dr. T’s expression is flat. “We lost our funding. More money for tanks and missiles, less for finding God particles.”

“Ah—there’s eternity in a kiss!”

I whip my head back to the screen. “Wait! Pause it!” I shout. The image freezes on an Asian man with surprised eyes. I point excitedly at the screen. “That’s Dr. X! Do you know him? Is he here?”