Ur Read online

  He plugged in the Kindle and turned it on.

  * * *

  What convinced Don Allman was the Collected Works of William Shakespeare from Ur 17,000. After downloading it at Don’s request—because in this particular Ur, Shakespeare had died in 1620 instead of 1616—the three men discovered two new plays. One was titled Two Ladies of Hampshire, a comedy that seemed to have been written soon after Julius Caesar. The other was a tragedy called A Black Fellow in London, written in 1619. Wesley opened this one and then (with some reluctance) handed Don the Kindle.

  Don Allman was ordinarily a ruddy-cheeked guy who smiled a lot, but as he paged through Acts I and II of A Black Fellow in London, he lost both his smile and his color. After twenty minutes, during which Wesley and Robbie sat watching him silently, he pushed the Kindle back to Wesley. He did it with the tips of his fingers, as if he really didn’t want to touch it at all.

  “So?” Wesley asked. “What’s the verdict?”

  “It could be an imitation,” Don said, “but of course there have always been scholars who claimed that Shakespeare’s plays weren’t written by Shakespeare. There are supporters of Christopher Marlowe…Francis Bacon…even the Earl of Darby…”

  “Yeah, and James Frey wrote Macbeth,” Wesley said. “What do you think?”

  “I think this could be authentic Willie,” Don said. He sounded on the verge of tears. Or laughter. Maybe both. “I think it’s far too elaborate to be a joke. And if it’s a hoax, I have no idea how it works.” He reached a finger to the Kindle, touched it lightly, then pulled it away. “I’d have to study both plays closely, with reference works at hand, to be more definite, but…it’s got his lilt.”

  Robbie Henderson, it turned out, had read almost all of John D. MacDonald’s mystery and suspense novels. In the Ur 2,171,753 listing of MacDonald’s works, he found seventeen novels in what was called “the Dave Higgins series.” All the titles had colors in them.

  “That part’s right,” Robbie said, “but the titles are all wrong. And John D’s series character was named Travis McGee, not Dave Higgins.”

  Wesley downloaded one called The Blue Lament, hitting his credit card with another $4.50 charge, and pushed the Kindle over to Robbie once the book had been downloaded to the ever-growing library that was Wesley’s Kindle. While Robbie read, at first from the beginning and then skipping around, Don went down to the main office and brought back three coffees. Before settling in behind his desk, he hung the little-used CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.

  Robbie looked up, nearly as pale as Don had been after dipping into the never-written Shakespeare play about the African prince who is brought to London in chains.

  “This is a lot like a Travis McGee novel called Pale Gray for Guilt,” he said. “Only Travis McGee lives in Fort Lauderdale, and this guy Higgins lives in Sarasota. McGee has a friend named Meyer—a guy—and Higgins has a friend named Sarah…” He bent over the Kindle for a moment. “Sarah Mayer.” He looked at Wesley, his eyes showing too much white around the irises. “Jesus Christ, and there’s ten million of these…these other worlds?”

  “Ten million, four hundred thousand and some, according to the UR BOOKS menu,” Wesley said. “I think exploring even one author fully would take more years than you have left in your life, Robbie.”

  “I could die today,” Robbie Henderson said in a low voice. “That thing could give me a freaking heart attack.” He abruptly seized his Styrofoam cup of coffee and swallowed most of the contents, although the coffee was still steaming.

  Wesley, on the other hand, felt almost like himself again. But with the fear of madness removed, a host of questions were cramming his mind. Only one seemed completely relevant. “So what do I do now?”

  “For one thing,” Dan said, “this has to stay a dead secret among the three of us.” He turned to Robbie. “Can you keep a secret? Say no and I’ll have to kill you.”

  “I can keep one. But how about the people who sent it to you, Wes? Can they keep a secret? Will they?”

  “How do I know that when I don’t know who they are?”

  “What credit card did you use when you ordered Little Pink here?”

  “MasterCard. It’s the only one I use these days.”

  Robbie pointed to the English Department computer terminal Wesley and Don shared. “Go online, why don’t you, and check your account. If those…those ur-books came from Amazon, I’ll be very surprised.”

  “Where else could they have come from?” Wesley asked. “It’s their gadget, they sell the books for it. Also, it came in an Amazon box. It had the smile on it.”

  “And do they sell their gadget in Glowstick Pink?” Robbie asked.

  “Well, no.”

  “Dude, check your credit card account.”

  * * *

  Wesley drummed his fingers on Don’s Mighty Mouse mousepad as the office’s outdated PC cogitated. Then he sat up straight and began to read.

  “Well?” Don asked. “Share.”

  “According to this,” Wesley said, “my latest MasterCard purchase was a blazer from Men’s Warehouse. A week ago. No downloaded books.”

  “Not even the ones you ordered the normal way? The Old Man and the Sea and Revolutionary Road?”

  “Nope.”

  Robbie asked, “What about the Kindle itself?”

  Wesley scrolled back. “Nothing…nothing…noth…wait, here it—” He leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the screen. “I’ll be damned.”

  “What?” Don and Robbie said it together.

  “According to this, my purchase was denied. It says, ‘wrong credit-card number.’” He considered. “That could be. I’m always reversing two of the digits, sometimes even when I have the damn card right beside the keyboard. I’m a little dyslexic.”

  “But the order went through, anyway,” Don said thoughtfully. “Somehow…to someone. Somewhere. What Ur does the Kindle say we’re in? Refresh me on that.”

  Wesley went back to the relevant screen. “117,586. Only to enter that as a choice, you omit the comma.”

  Don said, “That might not be the Ur we’re living in, but I bet it was the Ur this Kindle came from. In that Ur, the MasterCard number you gave is the right one for the Wesley Smith that exists there.”

  “What are the odds of something like that happening?” Robbie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Don said, “but probably a lot steeper than 10.4 million to one.”

  Wesley opened his mouth to say something, and was interrupted by a fusillade of knocks on the door. They all jumped. Don Allman actually uttered a little scream.

  “Who is it?” Wesley asked, grabbing the Kindle and holding it protectively to his chest.

  “Janitor,” the voice on the other side of the door said. “You folks ever going home? It’s almost seven o’clock, and I need to lock up the building.”

  IV — News Archive

  They weren’t done, couldn’t be done. Not yet. Wesley in particular was anxious to press on. Although he hadn’t slept for more than three hours at a stretch in days, he felt wide awake, energized. He and Robbie walked back to his apartment while Don went home to help his wife put the boys to bed. When that was done, he’d join them at Wesley’s place for an extended skull-session. Wesley said he’d order some food.

  “Good,” Don said, “but be careful. Ur-Chinese just doesn’t taste the same.”

  For a wonder, Wesley found he could actually laugh.

  * * *

  “So this is what an English instructor’s apartment looks like,” Robbie said, gazing around. “Man, I dig all the books.”

  “Good,” Wesley said. “I loan to people who bring back. Keep it in mind.”

  “I will. My parents have never been, you know, great readers. Few magazines, some diet books, a self-help manual or two…that’s all. I might have been the same way, if not for you. Just bangin’ my head out on the football field, you know, with nothing ahead except maybe teaching PE in Giles Co
unty. That’s in Tennessee. Yeehaw.”

  Wesley was touched by this. Probably because he’d been hurled through so many emotional hoops just lately. “Thanks,” he said. “Just remember, there’s nothing wrong with a good loud yeehaw. That’s part of who you are, too. Both parts are equally valid.”

  He thought of Ellen, ripping Deliverance out of his hands and hurling across the room. And why? Because she hated books? No, because he hadn’t been listening when she needed him to. Hadn’t it been Fritz Leiber, the great fantasist and science fiction writer, who had called books “the scholar’s mistress?” And when Ellen needed him, hadn’t he had been in the arms of his other lover, the one who made no demands (other than on his vocabulary) and always took him in?

  “Wes? What were those other things on the UR FUNCTIONS menu?”

  At first Wesley didn’t know what the kid was talking about. Then he remembered that there had been a couple of other items. He’d been so fixated on the BOOKS sub-menu that he had forgotten the other two.

  “Well, let’s see,” he said, and turned the Kindle on. Every time he did this, he expected either the EXPERIMENTAL menu or the UR FUNCTIONS menu to be gone—that would also happen in a fantasy story or a Twilight Zone episode—but they were still right there.

  “UR NEWS ARCHIVE and UR LOCAL,” Robbie said. “Huh. UR LOCAL’s under construction. Better watch out, traffic fines double.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind, just goofin witcha. Try the news archive.”

  Wesley selected it. The screen blanked. After a few moments, a message appeared.

  WELCOME TO THE NEWS ARCHIVE!

  ONLY THE NEW YORK TIMES IS AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME

  YOUR PRICE IS $1.00/4 DOWNLOADS

  $10/50 DOWNLOADS

  $100/800 DOWNLOADS

  SELECT WITH CURSOR YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE BILLED

  Wesley looked at Robbie, who shrugged. “I can’t tell you what to do, but if my credit card wasn’t being billed—in this world, anyway—I’d spend the hundred.”

  Wesley thought he had a point, although he wondered what the other Wesley (if indeed there was one) was going to think when he opened his next MasterCard bill. He highlighted the $100/800 line and pushed the select button. This time the Paradox Laws didn’t come up. Instead, the new message invited him to CHOOSE DATE AND UR. USE APPROPRIATE FIELDS.

  “You do it,” he said, and pushed the Kindle across the kitchen table to Robbie. This was getting easier to do, and he was glad. An obsession about keeping the Kindle in his own hands was a complication he didn’t need, understandable as it was.

  Robbie thought for a moment, then typed in January 21, 2009. In the Ur field he selected 1000000. “Ur one million,” he said. “Why not?” And pushed the button.

  The screen went blank, then produced a message reading ENJOY YOUR SELECTION! A moment later the front page of the New York Times appeared. They bent over the screen, reading silently, until there was a knock at the door.

  “That’ll be Don,” Wesley said. “I’ll let him in.”

  Robbie Henderson didn’t reply. He was still transfixed.

  “Getting cold out there,” Don said as he came in. “And there’s a wind knocking all the leaves off the—” He studied Wesley’s face. “What? Or should I say, what now?”

  “Come and see,” Wesley said.

  Don went into Wesley’s book-lined living room-study, where Robbie remained bent over the Kindle. The kid looked up and turned the screen so Don could see it. There were blank patches where the photos should have gone, each with the message IMAGE UNAVAILABLE, but the headline was big and black: NOW IT’S HER TURN. And below it, the subhead: Hillary Clinton Takes Oath, Assumes Role as 44th President.

  “Looks like she made it after all,” Wesley said. “At least in Ur 1,000,000.”

  “And check out who she’s replacing,” Robbie said, and pointed to the name. It was Albert Arnold Gore.

  * * *

  An hour later, when the doorbell rang, they didn’t jump but rather looked around like men startled from a dream. Wesley went downstairs and paid the delivery guy, who had arrived with a loaded pizza from Harry’s and a six-pack of Pepsi. They ate at the kitchen table, bent over the Kindle. Wesley put away three slices himself, a personal best, with no awareness of what he was eating.

  They didn’t use up the eight hundred downloads they had ordered—nowhere near it—but in the next four hours they skimmed enough stories from various Urs to make their heads ache. Wesley felt as though his mind were aching. From the nearly identical looks he saw on the faces of the other two—pale cheeks, avid eyes in bruised sockets, crazed hair—he guessed he wasn’t alone. Looking into one alternate reality would have been challenging enough; here were over ten million, and although most appeared to be similar, not one was exactly the same.

  The inauguration of the forty-fourth President of the United States was only one example, but a powerful one. They checked it in two dozen different Urs before getting tired and moving on. Fully seventeen front pages on January 21st of 2009 announced Hillary Clinton as the new President. In fourteen of them, Bill Richardson of New Mexico was her vice president. In two, it was Joe Biden. In one it was a Senator none of them had heard of: Linwood Speck of New Jersey.

  “He always says no when someone else wins the top spot,” Don said.

  “Who always says no?” Robbie asked. “Obama?”

  “Yeah. He always gets asked, and he always says no.”

  “It’s in character,” Wesley said. “And while events change, character never seems to.”

  “You can’t say that for sure,” Don said. “We have a miniscule sample compared to the…the…” He laughed feebly. “You know, the whole thing. All the worlds of Ur.”

  Barack Obama had been elected in six Urs. Mitt Romney had been elected once, with John McCain as his running mate. He had run against Obama, who had been tapped after Hillary was killed in a motorcade accident late in the campaign.

  They saw not a single mention of Sarah Palin. Wesley wasn’t surprised. He thought that if they stumbled on her, it would be more by luck than by probability, and not just because Mitt Romney showed up more often as the Republican nominee than John McCain did. Palin had always been an outsider, a longshot, the one nobody expected.

  Robbie wanted to check the Red Sox. Wesley felt it was a waste of time, but Don came down on the kid’s side, so Wesley agreed. The two of them checked the sports pages for October in ten different Urs, plugging in dates from 1918 to 2009.

  “This is depressing,” Robbie said after the tenth try. Don Allman agreed.

  “Why?” Wesley asked. “They win lots of times.”

  “But there’s no rhyme or reason to it,” Robbie said.

  “And no curse,” Don said. “They always win just enough to avoid it. Which is sort of boring.”

  “What curse?” Wesley was mystified.

  Don opened his mouth to explain, then sighed. “Never mind,” he said. “It would take too long, and you wouldn’t get it, anyway.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Robbie said. “The Yankees are always there, so it isn’t all luck.”

  “Yeah,” Don said glumly. “The military-industrial complex of the sporting world.”

  “Soh-ree. Does anyone want that last slice?”

  Don and Wes shook their heads. Robbie scarfed it and said, “Why not peek at the Big Casino, before we all decide we’e nuts and check ourselves into Central State?”

  “What Big Casino might that be, Yoda?” Don asked.

  “The JFK assassination,” Robbie said. “Mr. Tollman says that was the seminal event of the twentieth century, even more important than the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. I thought seminal events usually happened in bed, but hey, I came to college to learn. Mr. Tollman’s in the History Department.”

  “I know who Hugh Tollman is,” Don said. “He’s a goddam commie, and he never laughs at my jokes. But he could be right about the Kennedy assassination,
Wesley said. Let’s look.”

  * * *

  They pursued the John-Kennedy-in-Dallas thread until nearly eleven o’clock, while college students hooted unnoticed below them, on their way to and from the local beerpits. They checked over seventy versions of the New York Times for November 23rd, 1963, and although the story was never the same, one fact seemed undeniable to all of them: whether he missed Kennedy, wounded Kennedy, or killed Kennedy, it was always Lee Harvey Oswald, and he always acted alone.

  “The Warren Report was right,” Don said. “For once the bureaucracy did its job. I’m gobsmacked.”

  In some Urs, that day in November had passed with no assassination stories, either attempted or successful. Sometimes Kennedy decided not to visit Dallas after all. Sometimes he did, and his motorcade was uneventful; he arrived at the Dallas Trade Mart, gave his hundred-dollar-a-plate luncheon speech (“God, things were cheap back in the day, weren’t they?” Robbie remarked), and flew off into the sunset.

  This was the case in Ur 88,416. Wesley began to plug in more dates from that Ur. What he saw filled him with awe and horror and wonder and sorrow. In Ur 88,416, Kennedy had seen the folly of Vietnam and had pulled out over the vehement objections of Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense. McNamara quit and was replaced by a man named Bruce Palmer, who resigned his rank of U.S. Army general to take the job. The civil rights turmoil was milder than when Lyndon Johnson was President, and there were almost no riots in the American cities-partly because in Ur 88,416, Martin Luther King wasn’t assassinated in Memphis or anywhere else.

  In this Ur, JFK was elected for a second term. In 1968, Edmund Muskie of Maine won the Presidency in a landslide over Nelson Rockefeller. By then the outgoing President was hardly able to walk without the aid of crutches, and said his first priority was going to be major back surgery.

  Robbie ignored that and fixed on a story that had to do with Kennedy’s last White House party. The Beatles had played, but the concert ended early when drummer Pete Best suffered a seizure and had to be taken to Washington DC Hospital.