The thought induced a sharp if transient pain in her heart, as though some wicked voodooist somewhere had stuck a pin in an Amity doll.
Daddy took a lightweight jacket from the foyer closet and pocketed the key to everything.
Out the front door, across the porch, down the steps, onto Shadow Canyon Lane, left toward Oak Hollow Road and Suavidad Beach.
The heavens low and gray and mottled black. The air still and heavy, oppressed by the weight of the pending storm.
Crows wheeled across the sky, dozens of them in constantly shifting configurations that seemed to mean something, if only she had been a witch who could read the ephemeral script of birds in flight.
14
In this version of Suavidad Beach—where perhaps Ed Harkenbach had never been on the run from mysterious government agents and had never been homeless in the canyon and had never visited Jeffy on his front porch—the economy was evidently in a recession. Even for April, with rain-sodden clouds lowering toward release, few tourists were afoot on Forest Avenue or Pacific Coast Highway, where most of the shops and galleries were located. Some storefronts were without tenants, the windows papered over, while in the version of the town from which he and Amity had come, not enough retail space existed to satisfy the demand.
As they passed through town, Jeffy surveyed everything with more suspicion than curiosity, with more anxiety than suspicion.
Quantum physics, on which most technological advances had been based for decades, predicted the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes side by side, each invisible to the others and yet all subtly affecting one another, somehow sharing a destiny so complex and strange as to defy understanding. There might be worlds where the United States had never existed, where no European power settled this continent, perhaps where an Aztec culture of violent gods and slavery and human sacrifice flourished through the centuries, spreading northward.
Clearly, he and Amity were in a world much like the one they had left, but even such a place as this might harbor surprise
s more ominous than bad weather and an economic recession.
Was this version of America a stable democracy, or might it be teetering on the brink of tyranny? In less than ten minutes, he saw a man, a woman, and then another man dressed all in black fatigue-style garments made of soft pajama-like fabric. Each wore a black, knitted seaman’s cap. This outfit appeared too strange to be just a fashion trend. Although they didn’t travel in a group, they looked like members of a cult, one with fascist tendencies.
He wanted to be out of here. He wanted to be home.
“Stay close,” he advised Amity, and he took her hand, which seemed terribly small and fragile.
The day was cool, but the chills that raked through him had nothing to do with the air temperature.
Overhung by the massive crowns of mature phoenix palms, the library stood on Oleander Street, adjacent to the city hall. The handsome Spanish Revival building featured a roof of dark slate instead of orange barrel tiles. On the ridgeline perched thirteen large crows like the living totems of some clan of malicious wizards that had taken over the library for the storage of their ancient volumes of dark, forbidden knowledge. The birds craned their necks and worked their beaks without a shriek or caw, as if casting silent curses on all who dared enter the building under them.
Inside, the librarian at the main desk was a severe-looking woman with a shock of kinky white hair, vaguely reminiscent of Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein, although less appealing, her eyes squinted and her lips compressed as though she took offense at everything upon which her attention fell. Jeffy had never seen her in the library of his and Amity’s world. The woman didn’t greet them, didn’t seem aware of them. Grimly, she paged through one of the books in a tall stack, scowling as though searching for paper-devouring silverfish. Abruptly she slammed it shut, grunting with satisfaction, as if she found one of the critters and squashed it with pleasure.
The facility included more aisles of books than some libraries offered these days, as well as a computer alcove with four public-access workstations. The place was not as brightly lighted as the library in the Suavidad Beach from which Jeffy and Amity had come. Pale dust bunnies gathered in some corners, and a thin film of dust dulled the computer. The faintest scent of mildew ebbed and flowed in the still air, as if essential maintenance had been deferred in chambers adjacent to this one.
Jeffy and Amity seemed to be the only patrons at the moment. They sat side by side at a computer and googled Edwin Harkenbach, whose middle name proved to be Marsten.
In the internet sea, data relating to Ed didn’t amount to a mere island; it was a small continent. Bow-tied Dr. Harkenbach, sixty-four, was a theoretical physicist with three PhDs. He had written twenty-six books and over five hundred articles, had delivered almost four hundred major speeches, and received scores of awards for teaching, writing, and research.
Bewildered by the volume of material on his subject, Jeffy resorted to Wikipedia for a thumbnail biography, where he discovered that the prolific Harkenbach, always highly visible in the field of physics and in academia, had abruptly lowered his public profile four years earlier. No new books or articles had appeared since then, and he had made only a few appearances at conferences.
“I bet that’s when he started work on the project,” Amity whispered as she took Snowball from a jacket pocket and cupped him in her hands.
“What project?”
“The key to everything project.”
Jeffy nodded. “About that time, he must’ve gotten busy spending all those billions.”
The mouse’s head popped up between Amity’s crossed thumbs. He looked left and right, nose twitching, intrigued by the library.
According to Wikipedia, Harkenbach’s wife, Rina, died of cancer when they were both thirty-five, and he never married again. He and Rina had no children, and work evidently became everything to him.
Reading along with her father, Amity said, “He’s not really Mr. Spooky. He’s more like Mr. Sad.”
A megabillion-dollar research project involving an epic quest as exotic as the search for parallel universes would have been a black-budget operation carried out with great secrecy. It wasn’t likely that Ed had given a speech or written an article about it.
However, the government would have chosen Ed to lead such an undertaking only if he was profoundly interested in the multiverse theory long before seventy-six billion was dropped on him. He might have written extensively on the subject years before he was given the opportunity to seek a way to access the infinite continuum of worlds.