Unfortunately, infuriatingly, Edwin Harkenbach proved to have principles that he took seriously, as if Earth Prime wasn’t already moving past his primitive ideas of right, wrong, and self-restraint. Whether gradually or in a moment of sudden enlightenment, Harkenbach realized that gaining ultimate power was a key purpose of Falkirk’s and of the political elites who ensured the funding of Everett’s Highways. He rebelled.
If Ed had chosen to argue his case with those who financed his work, or if he had gone to the FBI under the illusion that federal law enforcement wasn’t corrupt, or if he had been foolish enough to trust the media to help him blow the whistle, he would be dead by now. There was a point where he could have been stopped, and the project could have flourished without him.
Instead, he’d been cunning enough to forego those options in favor of sabotage. There had once been three transport devices, which Harkenbach had called “the keys to everything.” He destroyed two of them and obliterated every bit of data, in computers and in the cloud, related to the design of the keys.
Only when Ed disappeared with the third key did it become clear that the combined knowledge of his entire staff was insufficient to create new transport devices. The tricky sonofabitch had left his closest associates under the impression that they knew everything about how the keys functioned. In fact, during the year Harkenbach had been on the run, all those geniuses working together feverishly had made no progress toward restarting operations.
Falkirk answered to one of the most powerful political families in the nation, particularly to the senator who was the current flag carrier for that fabled tribe and who knew all the corrupt means by which the shadow state could be used to do what the elite preferred rather than what the American people wanted. Falkirk also answered to a consortium of billionaires, domestic and foreign, who provided capital when money couldn’t always secretly, safely be drained from other government programs to finance Everett’s Highways. None of these people blamed Falkirk for Harkenbach’s treachery, but they were not happy with him, either.
If he could find the rogue scientist, Falkirk had a pharmacy of chemicals and cutting-edge technology with which to drain from the old man all the knowledge needed to make new transport devices. Or if he was able to locate the one remaining key, the project team could reverse engineer it and get operations moving again.
Some of Falkirk’s superiors thought Harkenbach had remained at large because he was able to decamp to another world every time that those searching for him got close. In that other reality, he could travel to another state or even another country before returning to Prime, far removed from the place where he’d almost been captured.
Falkirk felt certain that was not the case. During the first year that multiverse travel had become possible, before he had gone rogue, Ed Harkenbach had visited many alternate realities—and he had become increasingly alarmed about the horrors some of them offered, the gruesome traps into which even a cautious traveler could step, the threats to civilization that might inadvertently be brought back to Prime. Believing that using the key involved as much moral as existential risk, he had stopped traveling a month before he went on the run. Yes, for whatever reason, he’d taken the one remaining key, but even though it was his life’s work and proof of his genius, an in-depth psychological profile concluded that he would destroy it before he would use it.
Falkirk figured he had maybe three or four months to favorably resolve the situation. If he failed, he would lose the patronage o
f the widely esteemed senator and the senator’s fashionable family, and he would not likely get a job ever again in the moneyed swamps of Washington.
That would be the least of his problems.
He knew far too much. In addition to being fired, he would have a mortal accident or a killer stroke, or be shot in the back of the head by a robber, or be assisted into a convincing suicide.
Now he called to the two men—Canker and Wong—waiting at the head of the stairs. When they joined him, he said, “Bag the monkey-boy’s corpse, take it away, and burn it.”
“So you want a bleach crew to clean up the rest of the mess?” Canker asked, surveying the spray pattern of biological debris.
“Hell, no,” Falkirk said. “We aren’t a fucking janitorial service.”
He went downstairs to deal with Constance Yardley. She reminded him of a teacher, Mrs. Holt, from his boarding school days, twenty-six years ago. Mrs. Holt, that sarcastic bitch, had tortured him with past participles and the subjunctive mood and parallel sentence structure. As a boy, he’d had erotic dreams in which she was naked and he broke her fingers with a hammer and cut her extensively.
33
While her father sat at the kitchen table, continuing to pore through Spooky Ed’s book, Amity prepared a dinner salad of butter lettuce, beefsteak tomatoes, black olives, and chopped peperoncinis, topped with chunks of Havarti cheese. There was a large sausage pizza in the freezer, and dark chocolate ice cream with orange swirls for dessert. Comfort food in the comfort of home.
As much as Amity loved their bungalow, it didn’t feel all that comfortable at the moment. For one thing, she kept listening for the clatter of helicopters. And she couldn’t stop thinking how much warmer these rooms would be if the right Michelle lived here.
Amity knew that the heart was deceitful above all things, but she also knew that the heart was a lonely hunter, that the heart was slow to learn, that the heart was an open house with its doors widely flung. Because she’d read enough books to bring an elephant to its knees if they were stacked on its back, and because writers had so much to say about the human heart, she knew a gajillion truths about the heart, many of them in conflict with one another. When a girl was racing toward her twelfth birthday, life was confusing enough without the complication of parallel worlds.
After putting aside the book, her father pressed his fingers to his eyes as if what he read made them ache. “He doesn’t say anything about a key to everything let alone about batteries to power it. But if I understand what he’s saying about something called the ‘quantum wave’ or the ‘de Broglie-Schrödinger electron wave,’ Ed thought that any method of traveling across the multiverse could be continuously powered by radiation emitted by the electrons in this wave when they aren’t constrained in Bohr orbits, whatever the hell that means.”
Putting the big bowl of salad in the refrigerator to keep it chilled and crisp, Amity said, “I found Mom’s recipes in a ring binder. You haven’t cooked any of those meals in a couple years.”
“Ed says time travel will never be possible. We don’t live in just space or time. We live in space-time. The only constant speed of anything in the universe, the only reliable scale, is the speed of light—186,282 miles per second. So it’s also the speed of time. If you’re in a chair reading a book, in one hour you’ve traveled over 670 million miles in space-time. Imagine trying to turn a car around at such a speed. Momentum makes it impossible. There is no brake on light, on time. You can’t stop and go back. And because you can’t go faster than light, you can’t speed ahead to the future. But it’s possible to go sideways.”
“Her recipe for vegetable-beef soup looks really good,” Amity said as she took the pizza from the freezer. “It’s easy enough. If I had all the ingredients, I could make that. I’ve never had her soup. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Mom’s soup for dinner one night, just as though she was here and made it and was at the table with us?”
Picking up the book once more and paging through it, her father said, “Here’s a bit that worries me. The positions of subatomic particles aren’t fixed. They exist in a cloud of possibilities. At the very base of matter, everything in the universe is always in flux, as are the infinite universes in relationship to one another. You know what I think maybe that means?”
Putting the frozen pizza on a baking tray, Amity said, “The oven’s hot, so this’ll be done in like twenty minutes. It’s past dinnertime, and I’m starving. Can you take a break to eat?”
“What I think it means is, the routes to those hundred eighty-seven worlds cataloged in the key are only approximate directions. Things change. So if they change enough . . . maybe you don’t end up where you wanted to go. Maybe you arrive between universes, if there is such a place. In a vacuum. In a void. Dead on arrival.”
Sliding the tray into the oven, Amity said, “Have you heard anything I’ve said?”
He looked at her. “Recipes in a ring binder, Michelle’s vegetable-beef soup, maybe make it yourself, but pizza tonight, dinner in twenty minutes. Did you hear anything I said?”
“Quantum wave, no battery, the speed of light, forget time travel, go sideways, a vacuum, a void, dead on arrival.”