The Broken Universe (3 page)

“If your first priority isn’t my daughter, I don’t want you around her.”

“It is, sir. It is.”

“You’re not mixed up with thugs, are you?”

John nodded. “I didn’t know they were thugs, but yes, our investors turned out to be not very nice people.” Not nice people from another universe, actually.

“Is it straightened out now?”

“I don’t know—”

“Don’t worry, Daddy,” Casey said from the stairs. “He’s not going anywhere without me again.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Mr. Nicholson sighed.

“You trust my judgment, don’t you?” Casey asked.

“More than your brother’s, that’s for sure.”

“Then you should know I trust John with all my heart,” she said. “And that should be good enough for you.”

“You’re right, honey.” Casey hopped down the last step, landing next to her father. She reached up on tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.

“Yes, all the men in my life properly understand that I am usually right.”

She led John out the door.

“Have fun, baby.”

“Yes, Daddy.”

As the door closed behind them, John said, “How long did you let me suffer before you cut in?”

“Long enough,” she said with a smile.

He sighed. “Let me tell you the whole story.”

CHAPTER
3

“As far as I can tell,” Henry was saying as they walked across the parking lot of the pinball factory, “at least ninety percent of the top managers and executives of Grauptham House have disappeared. The stock is in free fall because no one knows where they are.”

“We know,” Grace said.

“Nowhere they can be found,” John added. He unlocked the door and ushered them into the reception area that they never used. Grauptham House was the huge conglomerate that had funded Pinball Wizards, Inc., through a venture capital company called EmVis. They owned Pinball Wizards. The company was effectively controlled by the Alarians, who had wanted very much to get out of Universe 7650 where they had been trapped for a long time. Now they’d done it, thanks to John’s transfer gate.

John pushed open the swinging doors that led into the factory. He hit the light switch and huge overhead fluorescents flickered to life.

“Oh, crap,” Grace said.

The floor of the factory was strewn with wreckage. Half-finished pinball machines lay tipped over, their glass covers shattered. Buckets of parts had been dumped on the floor. Kilometers of wire had been unrolled off their spools.

“They trashed it,” Henry said. “The bastards.”

“They were looking for the transfer gate,” John said.

Grace peered at the mess, her face inscrutable. Then she found her way through it to the metal stairs that led to her office. She shut the door behind her without a word.

Henry stared after her for a moment. “What do we do now?”

John, unsure if he was referring to the mess or to Grace, said, “Start cleaning up, I guess.”

*   *   *

They started in the back room, sweeping, ordering, sorting, until there was enough space for John to bring in the box of wires, circuits, and metal that was the remains of the transfer gate from the Rayburn barn.

Henry reached into the box. “I can’t stand to look at another circuit board.”

“I know,” John said. They had spent weeks trying to reproduce what John had done in one feverish night. They had his plans for a transfer gate, but it had been far from easy to make a new one in Universe 7651.

As they sorted the pieces, John asked, “Is Grace all right?”

“Yesterday was the most animated I’ve seen her in a while,” Henry said. “When she was shooting things and throwing grenades.”

“Oh.”

“I can’t even touch her,” Henry said softly.

“What do you mean?”

“Intimately,” Henry said. John found himself blushing. “She can’t stand to be touched.”

“Henry. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, well…” Henry seemed to shake himself. “Sorry for bringing it up to you.”

“It’s okay. Maybe we can get her some help now that we’re back in our own universe,” John said.

“She won’t do that,” Henry said. “I mentioned it last night. She screamed at me.”

“Maybe if I did.”

“Don’t.”

“Okay, but Henry … She can’t go through this alone.”

“I’m here with her. That should be enough.”

“Okay,” John said. After a moment, he added, “Hand me that circuit board, will ya?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

After an hour, Grace came down and leaned against the table they were working on.

“All our records are ripped up or gone,” she said. “They took everything of any value from the office. Even my typewriter.”

“I’m sorry, Grace,” John said. “I—”

She cut him off. “For what? It’s just some stupid company we built. Some stupid idea we had when we didn’t know there were other more interesting universes out there.”

“Yeah, I guess it isn’t that important,” John said.

She glanced at him. “I got ahold of Viv,” she said. “She’s on her way over.” Viv was the floor foreman.

“No one else?” Henry asked.

“She was the first one I could get ahold of,” Grace said. “The bank account is overdrawn. I have no idea what orders came in, what shipped, and what’s in build.” She shrugged.

“We can figure it out,” John said.

“Or what?” Grace said. “Does it even matter?”

“Grace—” John started to say, but she walked off before he could add anything more. He had the same feelings—what did it matter? Why didn’t he want Grace to think that way?

“I’m tired of this,” Henry said. “Let’s see if we can get a pinball machine working.”

They managed to find two panes of glass that were unbroken, a wonder in the shambles. The pinball machines that Pinball Wizards built weren’t the single-player models John remembered from his universe, though that’s what they were based on. The Wizards had modified the design to be a head-to-head model played by two players at a time. John still preferred the traditional pinball, but the head-to-head version was what sold.

The door opened again, and there was Viv, the short, compact foreman who’d kept all the assemblers in line.

She shook her head at them. “Don’t just show up here and expect that we’d all be slaving away for you as if nothing had happened.”

“Um,” John said.

“We’re not waiting around when there’s police involvement and shootings,” she said. “We’re not putting ourselves in jeopardy for a job. Right?”

“We didn’t expect that, Viv,” John said.

“Doesn’t matter what you did or didn’t expect,” Viv said. “It happened, didn’t it. And there was violence … right here. I don’t like violence.”

John realized how angry Viv was, and how scared she must have been. The guilt he felt for getting Grace and Henry wrapped up in all this was blown bigger by what had happened to Viv and the workers.

“You’re right, Viv,” John said. “I’m sorry I put you through all that. It wasn’t fair to you and the other workers.”

“Yeah, there’s no place for violence,” she said, but softer.

“You’re right.”

She blinked at John, and then said, “Where have you guys been?”

“We had to run for our own safety,” John said.

“Is it safe now?”

“I don’t know,” John answered honestly. “Safer.”

Viv nodded. “I see.”

John waited for her to go on, but her anger had ebbed. “What happened while we were gone? We don’t know, and we’re only back as of yesterday.”

“Well, after the shooting, the police came,” Viv said, her eyes unfocusing as she remembered. “They asked a lot of stupid questions, but we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know who had taken Grace and Henry or who had shot Casey. We didn’t know anything.” She paused. “I don’t like police much, and this was just like them. Nothing happened at all.

“So, not much work got done that day, and I didn’t even bother pushing the guys. I just let them jaw. But the next day was payday. So everyone came back. Only, no one is here to cut the checks. Grace, Miss Shisler, she cuts the checks by hand. No payroll company or nothing, and when you all are gone, there’s no one else to ask about pay. So the boys all left. No way they’re staying for another week if last week wasn’t paid for.”

“We owe them all money,” Grace said. “We’ll get it to them.”

“Good,” Viv said. “So, we all went home. I told the guys I’d call them if I could get their pay.”

“Any chance any of them will come back to work?” Henry asked. “You know, in case we need to build some more pinball machines.”

Viv shook her head. “The ones that you want back have jobs again. The ones that don’t have work, you don’t want back. If we’re back in business, we should just start from scratch. We lose some ramp-up time, but I can train any group of guys to do this.”

“Don’t you have a job?” John asked.

“Yeah, I got another one,” Viv said. “But they don’t let a mouthy broad be foreman like you guys do. So … I guess you can have me for a second chance. But if there’s violence, I’m outta here, big job title or not.”

“That seems fair,” Grace said.

“You guys gonna start building again or not?” she asked, scanning the disarray.

“We don’t know,” John said. He looked at Grace. She was looking at the shop floor. Then she looked at John with a wan smile. He nodded at her slightly, and she returned it after a moment.

“Can you tell me which orders were built on that last day?” Grace asked Viv.

“Sure, I remember that,” Viv said. Viv and she climbed the stairs to the office.

“Looks like we’re six weeks behind,” John said. “And no workers to help us. We need to get the pinball machines rolling out the door again.”

“Do we?” Henry asked. “Do we need to do anything? What if we just stopped?”

“Is that what you want?”

“Everything seems so futile,” Henry said. “Now that I know we’re living in just one of a million universes, and I’m just one of a million Henrys. I wonder…”

“What?”

“I wonder if there are Graces out there who aren’t … broken,” he said. “Is that wrong? I know it is. I know it is.”

“Henry…”

“She’s not the same anymore, and I can’t do anything about it.”

“Henry, I’m so sorry. It’s my fault.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Henry said. “It’s my fault. I could have fought harder when they grabbed us. I could have offered to talk first. I could have traded you for her life. But I didn’t! I was scared.”

“Henry, you gotta stop that,” John said. “You can’t blame yourself for what Visgrath did. We were all powerless. John Prime is the one who saved us all.”

John had spent months hating Prime, trying to find some way back to his home universe and pay Prime back, but when the time came that he could travel back—after he had built his own transfer gate—John found he needed Prime.

“Yeah, but why did it have to be Prime? Why couldn’t I have saved us? And does it really matter if I do anything? When there’s all those duplicates of me flailing about doing the same things?”

“But you’re not doing the same thing as them,” John said. “You’re here building a company and doing something good and helping Grace get by. All those things are important right here, right now.”

“I guess.”

Upstairs in the office, the phone rang.

“No, this company is like nothing else,” John said. “It’s a transdimensional company. With offices in Universes 7650 and 7651!”

Henry laughed despite himself.

“Think what we can do,” John said. “We have three transfer devices, one here on my chest and one transfer gate in 7651 and another here in 7650. We can use that.”

“To do what?”

“Whatever we want.”

“Yeah, I guess we could do a lot,” Henry said, his eyes looking off into space. “We could—”

Grace stuck her head out the door of the office and shouted down. “That was our Vegas sales guy. He’s wondering where his order for fifty machines is. It was due there yesterday, cash on delivery.”

“Fifty?”

“Yeah, apparently he didn’t even notice that we weren’t here for six weeks while he worked the deal.”

John looked around. Fifty?

“Come on, you apes,” Viv said as she trotted down the stairs. “We better get it together if we want to ship some units today.”

“Is this what you want to do, Grace?” John asked.

Grace looked at him. “It’s our company, isn’t it?”

*   *   *

They managed to find, fix up, and scrounge seven machines by evening, with all of them working assembly on the floor. Everyone except for Henry, who started sneezing halfway through the afternoon and retired to the couch in the upstairs office.

“I hab the flu,” he said as he climbed the stairs.

While they ate delivered pizza, Grace called shipping companies, trying to find one that would load the first part of the shipment to Las Vegas that night.

“No way tonight?” she said into the phone. “First thing in the morning then. Fine. Good.” She hung up. “We can get these out tomorrow. Arrive in three days. What about the rest?”

“We don’t have the parts for forty-three more,” Viv said.

“Maybe ten more,” John said. “Then we start running out of stuff.”

“And we can’t build more than one per day per person,” Viv said. “Less because you guys aren’t on top of the game and don’t know my system.”

“Hey, we built the first one,” John said.

“You R and D guys think you know the best way to put your gadgets together,” Viv said. “Well, you’re wrong. Putting something together isn’t the same as assembling it. You hired me to manage your assembly.”

“Can we get more people?”

Viv shrugged. “Maybe. There’s always workers if you got money. Whether you got money…” Another shrug.

“We’ll make a payroll,” Grace said, though John wasn’t sure. “And we have the money from this order.”

“I’ll make some calls to some guys I know,” Viv said. “Put an ad in the paper for tomorrow, if you can. It’ll take time away from the build work to interview the guys, but we can do it.” She turned around and laid her screwdriver into its spot in the tool chest. “Well, I’m outta here. Got a date.” She sauntered out. “See ya all tomorrow.”

Grace collapsed into a desk chair.

“That felt good,” she said.

“You sound surprised,” John said.