Road Less Traveled (18 page)

“Walter? Walter Perkins?”

“Yes?” Walter stopped and frowned. “Do I know you?”

Carter mentally smacked himself. “No, of course not. Sorry. Have a good day.”

Walter nodded and walked away, though he glanced back over his shoulder once, clearly confused.

Carter sighed. Walter Perkins had been the cause of the very first incident he'd dealt with in Eureka—the same incident that had cost Sheriff Cobb a leg and led to his stepping down as Eureka's sheriff, and Carter's taking his place. Walter was a scientist at GD, a quantum physicist researching tachyons and wormhole theory. He'd built a tachyon accelerator in his basement, away from GD's prying eyes, but had lost control of it. At first they had thought he'd died helping them shut down the accelerator, but later they'd learned that he'd simply been shunted into an energy form that had flickered in and out of material existence. Allison and Zane and others had helped Walter regain proper cohesion, and then promptly put him in lockdown for violating GD security protocols.

It had been one helluva way to get to know the town, and the new job.

And now here he was, Walter Perkins, wandering the streets free as a bird.

But of course, this wasn't their Walter Perkins, who was presumably still in solitary detainment. Carter made a mental note to check on that. This was the other reality's Walter Perkins. Apparently his experiment had never occurred, or had been dealt with in some other way, not requiring Carter's help and not killing Walter or turning him into an electronic ghost, either.

Unreal.

For a second he considered going after this Walter Perkins and letting him know what had happened to his alternate self, warning him in case he was playing with a similar experiment. Then Carter shrugged. Would a guy like Walter really listen to some crazy-sounding “you could destroy the world” sort of warning from a guy he didn't even know?

Probably not. Why would he? Carter wouldn't, if their situations were reversed. Even if he told Walter about the divergent realities, the guy still didn't have any reason to accept his word about what had happened to Walter himself. For all he knew, Carter was an escaped nutjob, telling crazy stories to anyone who'd listen.

Carter shook his head as he resumed his path to the restaurant's counter. He was going to have to get used to this, seeing people he knew but who didn't know him and who were just a little different from their usual selves. He couldn't keep jumping, or stopping to stare, every time he saw one of them. Still, he'd have to let Allison know that at least one more alternate version had popped up in Eureka. And not just visually, either.

They'd bumped into each other. Literally.

And Walter had been carrying a to-go bag.

 

“I don't know what we're doing back here,” Jo com
plained, pacing down the corridor. Fargo quickened his own pace to keep up with her. “I already checked the lab and didn't find anything useful. And Carter looked over the security logs—nothing there either. This is a waste of time.” She glanced around. “The Thunderbird lab isn't even on this level!”

“No, it isn't,” Fargo agreed, “but you know as well as I do that things around here have a habit of being connected in ways you'd never expect. And it's not like we have any other leads to pursue, right? So why not prowl the halls here for a little while, in case something pops up?”

She glanced at him, one eyebrow raised. “Prowl the halls? You've been reading gumshoe novels again, haven't you?”

Fargo looked away so she wouldn't see him blush. So what if he enjoyed the old pulp detective stories and the noir tales that came after them? And so what if he occasionally imagined himself as starring in them, wearing a battered fedora and suspenders and an old, cheap suit, smoking a cigarette and carrying a forty-five in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other? He had a vivid imagination.

Of course, the images of Jo as his femme fatale, wearing a slinky dress and a little velvet hat with a filmy veil that drifted over her face but only drew attention to her eyes behind its shadowy curtain, her full lips visible just below the veil's fluttering edge—well, that didn't hurt any, either.

But probably best not to tell her about that part.

“It isn't making any sense!” a voice insisted from a nearby doorway. “There had to be a trigger of some sort! Most likely electrical or electromagnetic in nature. But what?”

Fargo grinned at Jo. “See? Told you this would be useful!”

He led the way to the door and knocked on the frame, since the door was already open. It was a large lab, with arrays of computers and consoles, one enormous video flatscreen mounted on the far wall, and several smaller ones positioned at other locations around the room. A handful of lab techs scurried about, checking various panels and wires and circuits and readouts, while a tall blond woman stood by the main console, conferring through the screen with—

Herself.

Aha! Fargo had heard about the extradimensional visualization project, of course—he made it a point to keep up on all the latest experiments at GD, so that he could help Allison stay informed and on top of everything. And of course Carter had talked about Dr. Russell's recent breakthrough. He'd hoped to stop by and take a look at some point, after this whole Thunderbird egg thing was over. But what he'd just overheard made him wonder if somehow the two weren't actually connected.

“Dr. Russell?” he called out as he stepped down into the lab and approached her. He could feel Jo behind and slightly to one side of him. Must be a military thing.

“Yes? Oh, hello, Fargo.” Dr. Russell turned and gave him a brief smile. “Hello, Deputy Lupo. What can I do for you?” Fargo had a bit of a crush on Russell as well—she was tall, blond, gorgeous, and a genius; what was not to like?—and in his head she suddenly became another femme fatale, a lady in trouble, garbed in a tight but demurely long skirt and a plain white blouse that was buttoned to her collarbone but strained against her impressive chest, clutching a pocketbook to her side and gazing at him with her big eyes, pleading for his help in solving this problem that was threatening her very life. He gulped and tried to push the image away. He had a girlfriend now, and Julia was awesome. But that didn't mean he didn't occasionally have these little . . . scenarios anyway.

“Sorry, I couldn't help overhearing,” Fargo answered, forcing himself to concentrate on the real world. “You were saying something about an electrical trigger?”

“Yes, well.” Russell leaned against the console and brushed a stray wisp of hair from her forehead. “Something reset my input arrays and caused my equipment to somehow do more than just absorb and process electromagnetic input. We wound up linking our two worlds instead, and that shouldn't have happened.” Behind her, her other self nodded. “There wasn't any tampering—nobody but myself and my assistants touched any of the equipment, and everything here is selfcontained, so there's no way anyone could have gained access from outside this room. Which means it probably wasn't deliberate—no sabotage, no pranks, nobody trying to hack in and steal the software. We figure it must have been some sort of electromagnetic activity instead. Something interfered and screwed with the settings somehow.” She sighed. “But until we know what it was, we won't be able to backtrack and filter out that alteration to see exactly what happened and why. And how to fix it.”

“Could it have been the Thunderbird?” Jo asked, stepping forward. She'd obviously thought the same thing Fargo had. “It's a bioelectric entity, and one got loose upstairs yesterday morning. It shorted out all of the systems in its own lab—maybe the effect somehow registered down here as well, and that's what made your systems go haywire?”

“It's possible,” the other Dr. Russell agreed from the monitor, and Fargo glanced over at her. That was uncanny. She looked exactly the same, only she had long hair in a braid instead of the sort of pageboy cut this Dr. Russell did. He tried, unsuccessfully, to banish the sudden image of both Russells as damsels in distress, twin blond bombshells begging for his attention. Now was definitely not the time for such flights of fancy!

“The lab's heavily shielded, of course,” the other Russell continued, “but if this Thunderbird produced sufficient energy, it could have leaked through. Especially if it was on some wavelength that slipped past our safeguards.” She nodded at him. “Good thinking, Sheriff.”

Fargo tried to ignore the glare Jo sent his way at that, or the sudden flush of both pleasure and jealousy he felt for himself. Not fair at all!

“Do you have readings on this Thunderbird?” their own Russell asked. “We could analyze them, run them through our logs, and see if the system registered the presence of those particular energy signatures.”

“Uh . . . no, we don't,” he had to admit, scuffing one shoe on the floor. “There were two eggs, and the first one hatched. It sort of blew out the security systems when it did, and fried the lab's equipment, so we don't have any clear traces of it.” He could feel the heat of Jo's gaze on his neck, and deliberately avoided looking her way. Yes, he might have had something to do with that. But he'd been trying to help!

“Ah, that's too bad.” Russell sighed. “Without the readings, we can't do anything more than speculate. We're checking all of our data for anomalous readings anyway, of course, but even if we find any, we won't know for certain they came from your Thunderbird.”

“It's not
my
Thunderbird!” Fargo snapped, suddenly exhausted from all this pointless searching, and irritated that everyone seemed to hold him responsible for this mess in the first place. “I didn't create the thing! I didn't steal it! And I definitely don't have it!” He could feel Jo watching him, and both Drs. Russell as well. Watching, and judging. And blaming. That was it! He just couldn't take all the silent accusations anymore. He turned and stormed for the door, heading off in a random direction down the corridor. He didn't even care where he went right now, as long as it wasn't here.

“Uh, sorry about that,” Jo told the two Russells. “This whole Thunderbird thing has been pretty stressful, and I think the pressure's just getting to him. But I'll let you know if we figure out some way to check the Thunderbird's energy signature.” She turned and hurried after Fargo. She actually felt sorry for the wiry little researcher. She knew he was trying his best, and she was frustrated with their lack of progress as well. And yes, they did tend to pick on him a bit, and blame him when things went wrong, and roll their eyes at him, and ignore him.

But that was no reason to be upset, was it?

“We can't just have these people wandering around
town,” Carter said again. And again, Allison shook her head.

“What do you want me to do, Carter?” she asked. “Have you arrest them?”

He considered it, ignoring the way she rolled her eyes at him. “No, that wouldn't work,” he decided finally. “We don't really have that kind of space. Besides, it's not like they've done anything wrong. And they are Eureka citizens.”

“Yes, some of them twice over,” Henry joked. They were in Allison's office at GD, and Carter had just told them about his run-in with Walter Perkins. “You're right, though—we need to do something about them. It's not safe to have them on the loose. We have no idea what could happen when they interact with people here, and it could be dangerous.”

“Like ‘touch your other self and go boom' dangerous?”

Henry laughed. “You've been watching too many bad science fiction movies,” he teased. Then he turned serious again. “But there could be some electromagnetic discharge,” he conceded. “We're occupying the same spatial coordinates as the other Eureka, but in a different dimension. Like having two sounds in the same receiver but at a different frequency. If they touch, they could cancel each other out, or build upon each other, or both warp from the contact. We can't be sure.”

“Well, touching anything in general doesn't seem to be a problem,” Carter pointed out. “Café Diem didn't explode when Walter got his lunch to go. And we didn't blow up when we ran into each other, though that was only for a second.”

“That's a good sign,” Allison agreed.

They all thought about it for a minute.

“What about keeping them here?” Carter said finally. “You've got the space for it. You could put them in a conference room or something, bring in some coffee and donuts, set up a movie. That way we'd know exactly where they were.”

She thought about it. “Well, I guess they've already got security clearances, so there's no problem with letting them in GD. And you're right, that way they'd be comfortable but out of harm's way until they return to their own reality. And it'd be better than trying to cram them all into your little jail cell.” She grinned at him.

“Great.” Carter headed for the door. “I'll do a sweep of town, look for anybody acting out of the ordinary—which should be fun, since nobody here acts normal anyway. If I find anybody from the other Eureka I'll escort them back here.”

“I can help with that,” Henry offered, also turning to go. “And I'll let Vincent know to send any strays here as well.”

Carter nodded his thanks. “You set up the conference room,” he told Allison, “and let me know which one it is so I can bring our guests there directly.”

“I'll take care of it right now,” she assured him, turning back to her computer as he left. She needed a room that was big enough to fit a decent number of people, comfortable enough to hold them for a while, and preferably close to the main lobby but not near any sensitive areas. She called up GD's floor plan and then started checking the various possibilities for the one that would best suit their needs.