Pandora's Gun (18 page)

Wheeler’s medic wrapped a compression bandage around Peter’s chest and gave him a pill he said was a muscle relaxant. “You’ll want to talk to your own doctor tomorrow, but I think it’s just a cracked rib. You’re lucky he didn’t put more pressure on it.”

Standing to the side, in Wheeler’s command tent, Christy looked on. “See,” she said, “if he worked out, he’d have muscle to protect his skeletal structure. He needs to pump iron.”

The medical area was at the tent’s far end. Dark canvas formed the wall behind the medic’s partners. Wheeler stood on the other side. Behind her, tables filled with electronic equipment were lit by lights hanging from the long pole that formed the tent’s peak. Soldiers sat at most of the tables, reading screens while spouting indecipherable jargon to each other, like, “We have LOSA on the UFT, locked and charted.”

Finally, Peter felt he could take a deep breath. From the time that Wheeler’s crew rushed in to pick him up, and during the long ride in a shiny black SUV with heavily tinted windows, until the medic had done his magic, Peter had been breathing in short, painful hitches. His head swam, and he was petrified that the next breath he wouldn’t be able to get enough air. Once Wheeler decided that Peter probably wasn’t going to die, she’d spent the ride talking earnestly to Christy.

Peter swung his legs off the bed. He sat unsteadily. “You cut my shirt off. What am I supposed to wear?” The medic dug into a cabinet next to one filled with boxes and bottles. He tossed Peter a shirt that looked exactly like the one he was wearing, complete with CARTER on an embroidered patch above the pocket. It didn’t fit badly. “I thought you guys only had helicopters,” Peter said to Wheeler. “Where’d the cars come from?”

“Your army was listening for the copters. We opened the rift to bring in a couple of less conspicuous forms of transportation. Dante texted us when he saw what was going on in the cafeteria.”

Christy said, “He must have run like a quarter of a mile to get out from under the jamming too. Tough choice for him, I’ll bet, toss a cherry bomb, call the cops, or come in and help.”

“What happened in there? How did Blue-suit . . . disappear?” He shivered, thinking about Blue-suit flying into the orange world.

Wheeler nodded toward Christy. “She set a trap.”

Christy closed her eyes. “I knew I could open the portal behind the door, but couldn’t he rift his way out once he got there? I mean, if the Cyclops-dogs didn’t get him first, or that . . . being on the hill?”

“’Cyclops-dogs? Good name for them. That’s one of the few worlds we know that you can rift into with such a small device, and he couldn’t rift out. It’s not a human-friendly place. The air’s wrong for us, for one, and if that didn’t render him unconscious within seconds, there’s the . . . what did you call it? . . . ‘being’ on the hill. If you look at it, I mean really see it, it burns out your brain. He’s gone. We claimed the first brother from the police. Christy flushed the second brother into orange world, and their partner rifted away without what they came for. I know that sounds unlikely, but it’s true. You are back to normal.”

“You can’t say anything ‘unlikely,’ as far as I’m concerned. We’ve been living in unlikely for a week,” said Peter.

“According to Christy,” said Wheeler, smiling for the first time Peter could remember, “we’re done here. Through your efforts, the largest threat to our world and yours went through that rift and it can’t get back. The technology in the bag can’t be duplicated if the bag is gone.”

“That’s incredible, that one gun could be so dangerous. If didn’t even look that well-made.” Peter buttoned the borrowed shirt. He couldn’t feel the grinding in his chest at all, and he felt unusually content. He wondered if that was the muscle relaxant. He thought about asking if Carter wouldn’t give him a couple more to take home, just in case.

“Yes,” said Wheeler. She checked a tablet a soldier gave her, checked an item, then gave it back. “The gun, as bad as it was, though, wasn’t the worst danger. It was the component motherboards. He had dozens of them. Properly assembled, not crudely, like his gun, the people using them would have been unstoppable.”

“What?” Peter asked. “You mean those bricks?” He thought about the first time he’d picked one up, and it felt like it buzzed.

“One of those ‘bricks’ is the heart of his gun. The gun is just a tiny power source, like a flashlight battery, and a trigger to activate the component. The bricks are what this is all about. The two brothers and their friends would use, sell or distribute them as they saw fit. Our only hope was to stop the plan before they had a chance to split the bricks up. We almost had them in our world. They were on the run, so they dumped the bag in a trash bin, planning on coming back later, but the trash was rifted out before they returned, which is how it ended up here.”

Peter wrinkled his brow. “Our little dump is a part of an inter-dimensional sanitation system?”

Wheeler laughed. She seemed to genuinely be in a good mood now. Peter thought she came across much less grim in this happier frame of mind. “It was an accidental one. A really big shipment through a rift can have ‘spillage.’ We can track the spillage. Your ‘dump’ was the result of pushing too much through at the same time with out-of-tune commercial equipment. I like to think about how they felt when they went to retrieve the bag and everything had been rifted away.”

In the background, soldiers were moving equipment from the tent. They folded tables and stacked chairs.

Wheeler led them outside to the SUV.

Peter said, “You know, an all-black SUV with tinted windows as part of a conspiracy involving inter-dimensional smuggling and world-ending technology is a bit of a cliché. You could have gone with something original, like a station wagon.”

She gave him a quizzical look. “One of my men will drive you home.” She put her hands behind her back. “You’re welcome to tell anyone you want about what’s happened this week. It won’t matter to us, but there isn’t much chance you’ll be believed.”

Peter shook his head. “Probably not.”

Christy said, “This world jumping trick you guys have, it’s something you invented?”

“Surprising, isn’t it,” said Wheeler. “We’ve had the technology for years. At first it required a huge amount of equipment and energy. Only wealthy firms or governments could afford to use the technique, and we didn’t know the possibilities in the beginning, but things get smaller and cheaper. A person-sized rift unit could fit in a suitcase. That’s the way our world went. You have fans without propellers. A Dyson fan? We don’t have that. No cell phones either. Worlds advance along different lines. That’s how the ‘gun’ came about, combined technologies from different worlds using different approaches to solving problems; all possible in your world. Nothing that defies physics. They just haven’t been done here yet. I’ve been to a place where they discovered space travel, but they’re doing it in wooden spaceships. Almost no metals in their dimension.”

Wheeler shook each of their hands. “It has been an education, working with you. Thank you again for your help.”

“We won’t be able to talk to you again, will we?” said Peter. The prospect saddened him some. He’d read that science fiction’s appeal was in its “sense of wonder.” It was a literature that reminded readers, even if it was just in their imagination, that the universe contained infinite possibilities, that surprise and awe were still possible, even when existence seemed boring and mundane. He didn’t think that he’d forget the events of this week, but they would only exist in his memory. Memories fade. He almost couldn’t picture his mother’s face anymore. Memory slowly absorbed her, burnished away her edges, made her hard to see. Today the universe opened for Peter, like a brilliant flower. Tomorrow the memory would start to lose its shape. Today he saw the tent and helicopters; he could touch them. Today he heard Wheeler’s voice and saw the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Tomorrow . . . well, tomorrows erase todays.

“No. We won’t come back. You don’t have the means to reach us.” She touched her forehead, as if tipping her cap, and opened the SUV door for them.

Wheeler said, “What will you tell your parents?

No lies came to mind. Peter thought that he might just try to tell his dad exactly what happened. After all, Dad had been sleep-rayed, he’d seen Blue-suit and knew that he’d wanted something of Peter’s. In fact, his dad was the next closest human being to know what had been happening. The school and army would never know who the fake FBI guy was, assuming they ever discovered he was fake. The army would never find out who piloted the very quiet helicopters that they’d been hunting for several days. The destruction in the dump glade would remain a mystery forever. Peter’s dad, at least, deserved a chance to know the truth. And who could tell, Peter thought, Dad is cool. He might believe me. Christy and Dante would have a tougher time talking to their parents than he would.

“Did you already take Dante home?” he asked.

Wheeler looked down. “We couldn’t find him. We’re hoping that he is on his way now. I have an agent watching his house to let us know when he gets there. I didn’t want to alarm you, but we have good equipment for picking up rift signatures. From our readings, it looks like two people went through. We don’t know who the extra person was.”

“It couldn’t be Dante,” said Peter. “Why would he go with him?”

“We don’t know that it was Dante,” said Wheeler. “It’s just that he’s not home yet, and he was near where the third man was when he jumped from this world. If Dante tried to capture him or to stop him from fleeing, he could have been caught in the rift field. Somebody extra went through.”

“Then you need to follow him,” said Christy. She stood beside Peter, holding his elbow hard. “We have to get him back.”

Wheeler shook her head. “There’s no way to tell where they went in all the infinite choices. We couldn’t land where they landed no matter how often we tried unless we knew the settings on their machine. The rift is a perfect hideout.”

On the ride home, Peter and Christy didn’t talk. Peter’s thoughts ran on a twinned track. In one version, Dante was walking into his house, triumphant after the long night. They had won! The gun was safe and the two Blue-suits and their partner were gone. In the other track, though, Peter pictured Dante outside the Student Union in the darkened parking lot. He’s thrown his cherry bomb. Soldiers rush the building. A bright, orange light appears at the back of the cafeteria where the first Blue-suit would disappear. Then, Dante sees a man who is also studying the scene. He’s not a policeman, soldier or college student. Maybe he’s someone that Dante and Peter had seen at school in the last week, hanging around. He was Blue-suit’s silent partner. Maybe Dante recognized him. The man standing in the parking lot opens a suitcase or a small chest . . . Wheeler said that the rifting equipment was bigger than the gun . . . and he starts to adjust controls within it, or maybe it has a hologram screen that pops into existence, like the gun, and Dante recognizes it for what it was. He rushes forward.

What did he hope to accomplish?

Peter thought, it doesn’t matter what Dante had in mind, he always rushes forward. That is his style.