The porch, then rushing whiteness, and then the same porch in a different world.
Ed was disappointed to see no lights at all in the bungalow. He expected Jeffrey and Amity to be awake and preparing breakfast, as they had been at this time on the morning of the eleventh. During the past year, in one of the many conversations that he’d had with Michelle on the porch in their world, she’d said that Jeffrey had been an early riser, up before the sun, but perhaps that was not the case with the Jeffrey in this timeline. Ed should have visited a few mornings to establish this man’s pattern rather than assuming his habits on this world were alike to those when he had been alive on Michelle’s.
He could ring the doorbell or, with Michelle, port back where they had come from and visit here again in half an hour or an hour, when perhaps there would be lights, and he would be able to proceed as planned. Rousing father and daughter from sleep to confront them with such a monumental development as the return of Michelle seemed not only inconsiderate, but also sure to diminish the emotional impact of the moment. With his flair for drama, Ed wanted this to play out just right.
Intuitively perhaps, Michelle said, “Something’s wrong here.”
On some deep level Ed must have felt the same thing, for he had unconsciously shifted the key to everything from his right hand to his left and reached under his sport coat to draw the Springfield Armory .45 Champion from the Galco Side Snap Scabbard on his belt.
The door before them was yanked open, and John Falkirk stepped onto the threshold, a pistol in a two-handed grip, aimed at Ed’s head. Even in the poor light, the agent’s surprise was unmistakable, his gaze sliding from Ed to Michelle and then back to Ed again, eyes wider than before. “What’s this bitch doing here, where’d you find her? She’s long gone.” If not for his surprise and confusion, surely Falkirk would have squeezed the trigger as the door swung open, putting a round point-blank in Ed’s face before he could employ the key to escape.
Of course Ed knew there were John Falkirks on many worlds, just as there were Ed Harkenbachs. But two days earlier, on the eleventh, the Ed in this world had been safe in his tent in the woods, brewing his morning coffee on a battery-powered hot plate, while Jeffrey and Amity had been making breakfast without a care. There had been no reason to believe that Falkirk was in the neighborhood. A lot had happened in forty-eight hours.
If the Ed who was native to this world remained a pacifist, the Ed native to the world where Michelle was a widow had become a less peaceable guy. Maybe Falkirk delayed firing not only because of his surprise and confusion, but also because he thought the Ed before him must be the one of his acquaintance in this timeline, a meeker adversary. Whatever the case, the agent hesitated to shoot for perhaps three seconds, which gave the Ed before him—at the moment the only Ed that mattered—time to draw the .45 Champion and squeeze off three rounds in rapid succession.
Rocked off balance by the first direct hit, Falkirk fired a shot that Ed heard as both a thunderous crash and a whistling past his left ear. Falkirk was knocked off his feet by Ed’s second and third rounds, his gun flying from his hand when he slammed backward onto the foyer floor. As further proof that Ed’s ugly experiences in the darker timelines of the multiverse had purged him of pacifism, he stepped forward and squeezed off two more rounds at what he had reason to assume was already a corpse.
As shouts of alarm rose from the dark rooms at the back of the bungalow, Ed holstered the .45 and glanced at the key to everything. He’d kept one finger on the screen, so the device hadn’t switched off. Michelle clutched his arm. He pushed the button marked Return.
The human brain and the infinitely layered consciousness of the mind within that gray matter, in conjunction with a body composed of trillions of cells, each with thousands of proteins, formed the most complex structure in creation. Ed and Michelle each contained more gigabytes of data than the physical universe itself. Now those two rich data streams were transmitted from the porch of one bungalow to the porch of another bungalow, with the moon low in each world, the night quiet here as it was not elsewhere. The front door was closed; if he opened it, no corpse would be sprawled on the foyer floor.
Michelle stumbled to the porch railing and grabbed it to steady herself. She stood hunched over, maki
ng small sounds of distress and gasping for breath.
Ed sat in one of the rocking chairs and pocketed the key to everything. He drew the .45 Champion and ejected the half-depleted magazine and replaced it with one that was fully loaded.
When Michelle turned to face him, he said, “Well, that was hardly the big romantic moment I anticipated.”
Loss and seven years of widowhood had toughened this woman, but she wasn’t accustomed to being present at gunfights. “Who was that man back there?”
“The nefarious John Falkirk. I told you about him earlier when I explained all this.”
“He’s some kind of federal agent. You shot a federal agent.”
“He’s a corrupt swine who’s out for nobody but himself. He’d have killed me to get the key to everything, and then he would have killed you. He’s after me in that world to get my key, but this one would suit him just as well.”
“Where were Jeffy and Amity? That was their house in that world, right?” As the worst explanation occurred to Michelle, anxiety sharpened her voice. “Damn it, where were Jeffy and Amity?”
“That’s a question we must ponder carefully.”
She stood over him, visibly shaking. “Ponder carefully? How can you be so blasé?”
Holstering the pistol, he said, “Well, I’m a scientist, dear. As best we can, we have to put emotion aside and rely on reason. We scientists tend to ponder carefully. A few of us, anyway.”
“Were they prisoners in their own house? Were they . . . were they dead in there?”
He shook his head. “I believe that’s unlikely.”
“Unlikely? But maybe they were? Maybe they were dead in there?”
Indicating the other rocking chair, Ed said, “Have a seat, dear. Try to calm down.”
“I saw a man shot to death. Maybe Jeffy and Amity are dead. Dead again! I’m not going to calm down for the rest of my life.”
“Not if you don’t make the effort,” Ed said.
She paced to the head of the porch steps. She turned and stared at him. “There’s a whole side to you I didn’t know. Shooting people, indifferent to Jeffy and Amity . . .”