Road Less Traveled (10 page)

Back by the console, Russell frowned. “That's been the only real hitch so far,” she admitted. “We haven't been able to shift our observational focus yet.” She must have seen his expression, because she quickly clarified. “We can't change where we're looking. Not yet, at least. I've got my assistants realigning the arrays slightly. I think I've worked out a rough three-dimensional analogue, so I should be able to adjust the arrays' position and sample visual inputs from another part of that other Eureka without wandering too far astray.” She smiled again. “After breaching the dimensional barrier, shifting our lens by a mile or so shouldn't be much of a problem.”

Carter had learned from long experience that the words “not a problem” often led to trouble in Eureka, but he tried to keep that from his face. Dr. Russell had worked long and hard on this project, and now she was enjoying the glow of success. He didn't want to be the one to dampen that.

“Well, keep me posted,” he said instead, turning back toward the door. “I'd love to see other views of the place, once you've got them up and running. Maybe I'll see myself with a handlebar mustache—I thought about growing one once.” Once. For maybe five minutes total.

Allison laughed. “If we see that, we'll definitely give you a call,” she promised. “Now go away—you're distracting us.” She said the last part with a smile, so he took it as the gentle ribbing it was meant to be. Then he left them there, looking over printouts and screens and discussing things he didn't understand in the least, and headed down to the maintenance department to ask about those containment fields.

 

“Let me know once you've shifted the focus,” Allison
reminded Dr. Russell again as she made her way toward the door herself, a little while later. “I want to be there for that.”

“Of course,” Russell promised. “It shouldn't be more than a few hours, now.”

“Great.” Allison waved and walked out. She still couldn't believe how well the project had done. They'd hoped for some vague information about other dimensions, and about the structure of reality in general. But this! To actually prove the divergent-realities theory, and be able to see into another world so clearly? It was astounding! They hadn't told anyone else yet—Allison wanted to make sure Russell had her findings well documented first—but when they did, the news would turn the theoretical physics world upside down. This could be as big as proving the Earth was round, or that it revolved around the sun!

She was still pondering some of the implications—political as well as scientific—when she spotted a familiar rotund figure up ahead. Familiar, but oddly out of place.

“Vincent?”

The man turned and glanced back at her, his curly brown hair flying about his head as he did. Yes, it was Vincent. But what was he doing here at GD?

“Can I help you?” he asked. He sounded harried, which was also strange. Vincent was one of the most laid-back people she knew, despite having to run Café Diem and fulfilling Eureka's food needs almost single-handedly.

“I was going to ask you the same question,” Allison told him. “What are you doing here? And in that?” She gestured at the white lab coat he had on. She hadn't even known Vincent owned a lab coat.

“Ha ha, very funny,” he snapped. “Was there anything else you wanted to joke about? Perhaps you wanted to know why I was wearing shoes as well?”

Allison bristled slightly despite herself. She'd never heard him take that tone before, and certainly not with her. She liked Vincent, but nobody got away with talking to her like that at GD. “Now, listen—” she started, but he cut her off.

“No, you listen.” He glowered at her. “I'm very busy, and I don't have time for idle chitchat or strange little games. If you need something, you can stop by my lab. Otherwise, I'll thank you to leave me alone.” And he turned and hurried off down the corridor.

“Now just a minute!” Allison took off after him, but for such a short and portly man Vincent proved to have surprisingly long strides. He rounded a corner before she could reach it, and when she did he was gone. She stopped and looked around. Where had he gotten to? She could see down the corridor, and it was empty. There were a few doors along it, but she hadn't heard any of them open. And at least a few of them had restricted access, so he wouldn't have been able to use those anyway.

What was going on here?

She stood there for a minute, looking and listening, half expecting Vincent to pop back up and apologize. He didn't. Finally she shook her head and turned to head back the way she had come. She could ask him about it at Café Diem later—and he'd better have a good explanation! In the meantime, she had work to do.

She just hoped this wasn't a sign that the day was about to become truly surreal. They had plenty of days like that around here, and she almost never got anything done when they occurred.

Carter eyed her warily from his perch on the edge of her desk. Why was he not surprised that his deputy knew exactly what he meant without him having to explain it? Was everyone in this town smarter than he was? Or just better informed? “Yeah, it was weird seeing you up on that screen.” He remembered the image from yesterday. “You were completely dry—unlike me—but otherwise you looked the same.”

Now she was frowning up at him from her desk chair. “Wait, I looked the same? How much the same? Do you just mean my hair and my height and no visible tattoos, or do you mean”—she gestured at her body—“this?”

It took Carter a second to realize she was referring to her uniform. Fortunately, he figured that out before he said anything. That could have been embarrassing. “Oh, yeah, you were still my deputy.”

“Great,” she muttered. “That figures. Even in another dimension I don't make sheriff!”

“I'm sure you did somewhere,” Carter assured her. “Every choice creates a new reality, right? So there've got to be a bunch where you got to be sheriff.”

She brightened. “Yeah, I guess so.” Then she frowned again. “Too bad it isn't one of those we're looking into.”

“Maybe Dr. Russell will be able to switch to a different reality,” he offered, thinking about it. “You know, like changing the channel.” He imagined being able to “channel surf” different realities—seeing himself in different clothes and hairstyles and maybe even jobs—and he shuddered. Maybe seeing one other world was enough.

The office phone rang, and Jo snatched up the receiver immediately. “Sheriff's office, Deputy Lupo speaking.” She put extra emphasis on the word “deputy.” “Uh-huh. Okay, we'll be right there. Thanks.”

“What's going on?” Carter asked, getting to his feet.

“That was Mrs. Murphy, who lives over on Kasold,” Jo explained, standing as well. “She just got a remote alert that something's breached her house's privacy fence.”

“Ah, okay.” Carter hitched up his belt. “I'll check it out. Why don't you collect Fargo and start making those inquiries about fences and whatnot for the Thunderbird? We're running out of time on tracking it down before it hatches.” He'd already struck out with the containment fields; the maintenance guys at GD had told him that all the labs used the same basic field for their experiments and just modified it as necessary, so anyone in the building would know how the field worked and how to shut it off or at least cut through it. That included maintenance and security but not the janitorial staff, so at least they knew the janitor hadn't done it. But they still had a building full of suspects, plus anyone outside who had access to similar equipment. Which put the ball squarely in Jo's court for now.

She grimaced but nodded. “Fine, I'll go get him.” She paused. “You know, I may ask Taggart what he knows about all this.”

“Good idea.” Taggart was the resident expert on wild animals and strange creatures, as well as their local hunter. He might know something about the Thunderbird that would make it easier to catch. He also might have some ideas on who would want such an unusual animal, and ways they could get it out of Eureka without setting off any alarms.

And Jo was definitely the one to ask him about it. Taggart had harbored a major crush on her for years—like many of the men in Eureka—but she had actually dated him for a while. That had ended shortly before she started going out with Zane, but she and Taggart were still close, and he'd be far more likely to tell her what he knew, especially if it was something he wasn't supposed to talk about.

“Let me know how it goes,” Carter said as they both headed out the door. Jo nodded and turned to her car, while he stepped over to his Jeep. As usual, Jo peeled out first. Carter just laughed and shook his head, then he pulled out and took off in the direction of Kasold Drive. Time to see about a privacy fence.

 

It didn't take much deduction to figure out which house
belonged to Mrs. Murphy. The street was lined with handsome ranches and Tudors, all with nice big lawns and long driveways. Eureka had plenty of space, so all its residents could have big homes and large yards.

But only one of those yards was throwing off sparks.

He pulled up across the street and got out. A handful of kids were lingering nearby, eyeing the crackling stretch of grass, and Carter ambled over to them. “What's going on?” he asked.

One of the boys—they looked to be around junior high age—shrank back, but the other three stood their ground. None of them said anything for a second, however. And none of them met his eyes.

Carter was both a cop and a dad. He knew guilt when he saw it.

“Okay, somebody had better start talking,” he warned, “or I'm going to get irritable. And you really don't want that to happen.” He let the threat hang in the air between them. Then one of the boys gulped and glanced up at him.

“It's our fault,” the boy explained. “We didn't mean it, honest.”

Carter nodded and kept his face and posture unthreatening. “Okay, start at the beginning. What's your name, anyway?”

“Ray,” the boy answered. “Ray Aventura.” He was short and skinny, with thin, slicked back dark hair and a narrow face. Twenty years ago he'd have worn Coke-bottle glasses with tape around the middle and a pocket protector. At least here in Eureka he didn't have to worry about being picked on for stuff like that. Here, nerds were king.

“All right, Ray, what happened?”

One of the other boys tugged at Ray's sleeve, like he was trying to stop him from saying anything, but Ray shrugged him off. “Mrs. Murphy, she's got this privacy fence,” he explained. “It zaps you if you get too close to her property.” Carter nodded—plenty of Eureka residents had something like that. “But she's got hers set really wide. It actually covers half the sidewalk. And she's got a piece on the lawn by the street, too. If you walk exactly down the middle of the sidewalk, you can usually avoid getting zapped. Much.” He grimaced, as did the other boys. Carter didn't blame them. The privacy fences were nonlethal, but that didn't mean they didn't hurt.

“Have you talked to her about resetting it?” he asked.

All the boys nodded. “Lots of times,” one of them said, speaking up for the first time. “But she won't. She says it's her property and she has a right to protect it.”

Carter frowned. That was true as far as her own lawn went, but the sidewalk was town property and anyone could walk on it. “So you decided to teach her a lesson,” he guessed. He could see from their expressions that he'd pegged it.

“It's not that hard,” Ray told him with just a touch of pride. “The fence is just a low-grade energy field. If you can isolate its harmonic frequency, you can manipulate it, even shut it down.”

“Only things didn't go as planned.”

The boys all shook their heads. “She must have a secondary generator, which has a slightly different frequency,” Ray guessed. “It creates an oscillation field instead of a single harmonic. When we tried to tap into the frequency and shut it down, it overloaded instead.” He glanced at the lawn, which was still coughing up sparks. “And that happened.”

Carter nodded. “Okay. Any idea where she keeps the generator?”

“Sure.” Ray pointed at the side of the house. “It's that little box right there, next to the door. We tried to shut it off ourselves, but we couldn't get close.” Carter noticed the boy had a scorch mark on his arm and another on one cheek.

“Better that you didn't,” he told them. “That would have been trespassing, and Mrs. Murphy could actually press charges.” He gave them his best reassuring grin. “But she asked me to help, and I'm the sheriff—I'm allowed to walk on people's lawns.” One of the boys actually chuckled. “Wait here, okay?” They all nodded.

He left the boys there, trusting them to stay put, and made his way across the street to Mrs. Murphy's driveway. He could feel his hair standing on end as he set foot over the curb, and gritted his teeth. This was going to sting like hell.

“Ow! Damn it!” The spark had arced to his left hand, and he shook it off as hurried up the driveway. Did she have her privacy fence set above normal levels? It certainly felt that way, and that would explain the second generator. He'd have to speak with her about that. But first things first.

“Ow!”

“Ouch!”

“Hey, come on!”

He finally reached the side of the house and saw the small black box—and realized he had no idea how to turn it off. And he didn't have time to ask. Each shock had been more painful than the last one, and it had been all he could manage to stay on his feet the last time. Another like that and he'd pass out, which wouldn't do anybody any good—least of all him.