---Chapter 2
Jax opened up his machine, displaying components that varied slightly from the ones Sara Lancaster had used for her unit. But one part that was the same in both was a fuse-like tube fastened in one side. Jax explained that his electronic-minded friend had called this a 'reality compressor’ that, in the simplest terms, made sure that he came out as himself in every dimension he explored.
“And, golly, there are some bizarre ones out there!” he exclaimed at this point, “so much variety. I would hate to be trapped in just nine of them.”
He went on to show that the green material in his reality compressor had been damaged in the last teleportation. He had almost not made it all of the way through the inter-dimensional barrier, and when he found himself in this world, there had been smoke coming out of the Di-jump.
“That’s when I opened it up to check the components.” He made a face. “I guess I should have replaced the ol’ reality compressor after the first hundred jumps, but it slipped my mind to ask Grummage last time I was home. It’s good thing you have one available here, in this other Di-jump.”
The one in Sara’s device was, indeed, identical.
Jax’s reality compressor was fitted on the ends with a tangle of wires soldered to metal caps in a rather hap-hazard fashion. It took them quite some time to work all of these wires apart and keep them organized while they pulled the compressor out of its end-caps. By the time they were done, both Lenny and Jax were tired and hungry.
“I want to get something to eat and rest my eyes for a few minutes,” Lenny said with a yawn, setting the Di-jump aside on his desk, “how about you come back tomorrow to finish this? If you have a place to stay, that is.”
“Oh, sure, any nook is good enough for me,” Jax jumped up, shrugging his shoulders to loosen them, “Besides, I want to look around this world a bit before moving on. Can I come back at noon to pick my Di’ up?”
“Sounds good.” Lenny led him over to the door, stopping with his hand on it. “By the way, why did you come in the window instead of through the door? It’s a public building. And how did you get up the sheer walls anyway?”
“Magnet grip gloves, made by Hologames inc.” Jax grinned, holding up his hands. “And upgraded with the Electro-Detecto circuts. But, man, it almost pulled my shoulders out of their sockets getting up here!”
With a chuckle, he added, “besides, I wasn’t sure that I could find the right room number once I got inside. Remember, all I was doing was looking for the guy with a bunch of antennas on his window.”
And with that, he was gone out the door, leaving Lenny to stare after him with a sort of puzzled preoccupation. Turning back as the door closed, he went over to gaze down at the two Di-jump machines on the workbench. For just a moment he had the feeling that his whole life was being torn apart and reconstructed around him, like a weaver was impatient with him as her pattern. The feeling passed and he remembered how hungry he was.
---
The next day Lenny awoke feeling fresh and clear-headed. He had tossed and turned some the evening before while trying to go to sleep, his mind still wrestling with what he had learned the day before. Half the time he hardly believed that other worlds, mirrors of his own, could exist. The other half of the time he took it as a simple fact and wondered what sort of place Sara had found herself in, or where Jax would go with his Di-jump next.
After eating breakfast, Lenny set out to see if Dr. Devi was home yet and find something to bring his family as a gift when he went to visit them the next day. He was hoping that his teacher and employer would have returned, so that he could tell him of what had happened and ask his advice in the matter. But Devi’s door was still locked up, the windows dark. There was no answer on his Com-stay. Disappointed, Lenny went to the Grand Shopping Emporium, wandering absently around there until he had picked up a box of chocolates and a bag of mixed, dried fruit to take with him on Sunday.
He was part of the way home when his Car’s AI informed him, “incoming call from Markham Brood.”
“Answer it,” Lenny commanded, giving a little sigh as he wondered what his friend wanted. Usually he enjoyed talking to Mark about cars or mutual acquaintances, but today his mind was focused on more serious things.
“Hey, Lenz,” Markham’s greasy voice came over the communication speakers, “you there, buddy?”
“Yeah, I’m here. What’s up?”
“We need to talk. It’s urgent.” Mark’s tone was more earnest than usual, impressing Lenny with the idea that he was serious.
“Where at?”
“Your place. I’ll be there soon,” his voice caught for a moment, before he added darkly, “real soon.”
“Okay, I’m coming in on my car. Just a few minutes out.”
“Got it.”
With that, the communication was broken. Wondering what could have upset easy-going Mark Brood so much, Lenny pushed his foot on the accelerator. With a slight increase in the humming noise’s level, the Stato-drive responded smoothly. In only a few minutes Lenny was gliding to a stop in the third level of the garage. Markham was already there, his favorite car parked in an empty space while he leaned on the outside of it.
'Candy’, the favorite car, was a color that made Lenny think of purple taffy, pulled out thin. It’s rounded lines and soft curves amplified the affect of grinning skulls painted down the sides, while sparks of silver gleamed off of the hood where Mark had 'upgraded’ it with various devices. Everything was perfectly clean, even the wipers glistening silver, as they were of the high-end chrometape type. Candy was one spoiled girl.
Lenny stopped in his lot and jumped out, nodding to Mark as he walked up. “What’s happened?”
Markham Brood was the same age as Lenny and just as slim, but somewhat shorter. His hair was lank and greasy, his red vest stained with oil and his face could best be described as 'weasely’. But he was the sort of guy who would give his second-best car to a man for pity’s sake, or save a girl from any peril for a fragile smile.
“They’ve found out.” Mark jumped forward suddenly to grip him by the shoulders, shaking them wildly. “We’ve got to talk, man! They’ve found out about you!”
His voice echoed in the large space of the garage. A cold shaft seemed to touch Lenny’s stomach. “Who? Who’s found out, Mark?”
“Not here.” The mechanic looked around. “Might be overheard. Your place, come on.”
They hurried through the tunnel structure into the apartment building, where Lenny quickly opened the door for them to go through. Inside, he demanded again to be told who it was that knew.
Mark was so agitated that he paced up and down the length of the room.
“The cops, man, the Fuzz! They came around my place this morning askin’ questions about you. Where you lived, what you did, if I knew anything about you.”
“And you told them?”
“Nothing! I said that you had gone out of town, that I didn’t know you more than as a guy with a car I had worked on.” Mark spun around, looking at him fiercely. “It wasn’t me that told, you know?”
Lenny nodded. “I know. They must have just seen something on a security camera, or heard something from someone...I don’t know who. I’m usually careful with what I do...”
“Someone must have squealed. Who knows about it, besides me?” Markham demanded.
“Just Dr. Devi, and he wouldn’t tell because he’s caught up in it,” Lenny withheld the fact that Sara Lancaster knew as well, but that wouldn’t change anything, because she had been out of town, out of that world perhaps, for weeks. Besides the fact that she would never have told on him.
“You musta’ let it show sometime, then.” Mark shook his head in despair. “But look, it’s no good sittin’ around talking about it. You’ve got to make yourself scarce, Lenz. Go out of town. Take a trip for a while. The cops might show up here any moment.”
Lenny jerked his head up to look around the room, face blank. Leave his apartment, with everything in it? Leave his peaceful, content, if not joyously happy, life in Belltoh for the unknown?
“I couldn’t leave...” He started, but Mark didn’t let him finish. Gripping him by the shoulders again, the mechanic shook him hard. “You’ve got to! You’re in too deep to get rid of the evidence. It’s all throughout you, man! A cyborg can’t fool anyone that he’s fully human once the cops start investigating. All it takes is a good metal detector!”
“Shush!” Lenny put a hand over his friend’s mouth, suddenly angry. Just because he had electro-mechanical implants didn’t mean he enjoyed being called a cyborg. And anyone could be listening through the thin apartment walls.
Cybernetics were illegal in Belltoh. The penalty was high for someone who carried them. But Dr. Devi was a professional at installing them and Lenny had wanted the upgrades they gave too much to let a little thing like the law get in the way. He knew how to hide the evidence from casual eyes. Everything was covered up so that it could not be seen from the outside. But once the police started digging deeper...
“Alright, you’re right,” Lenny admitted, releasing his friend and stepping away, “I’ve got to get out of here. But so have you. If they find you here, we’re both sunk.”
“Okay, but you’d better leave town,” Mark passed a hand across his brow, wiping the ratty lengths of hair out of the way. He started for the door, then stopped and turned back with his hand held out. “It’s been good knowing you, Lenz. I hope we meet again some day. But if we don’t...best of luck to you.”
“You too, man.” They exchanged one fierce handclasp before Markham Brood was gone.
Shaken, Lenny turned mechanically to his bed and started picking up articles of clothing tossed around it. He put them in a rucksack from under the bed, packing in a few items from a set of drawers nearby. With the clothes, which were mostly the silver or black full-body suits favored by men in Belltoh at the time, he put in some of his tools and electronics. He needed to make sure that he had the things to keep himself running at all times.
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Looking over his workbench, he saw the Di-jump machines and paused. Slowly, he slipped Sara’s into his pocket. Then he picked Jax’s up and looked it over. With a glance at his watch, he saw that there was still thirty minutes until noon. Looking at the device, he hesitated. He did not know if he should fix it now, or leave it with an explanatory note saying that he had been forced to leave without notice. Suitably vague in case the police found it first, of course.
But where was he going to go? Anywhere he knew of, the police could find him.
“I can’t go back home to the family,” he muttered, shaking his head. “That would just drag them into this mess. How did this all happen? Was I really so careless? Aggh, what a mess.”
He paced up and down for a minute, before looking out of the window. The streets were empty of police cars and even the garage did not seem to hold one on the inside of its tinted walls. Hastily, Lenny threw himself into his chair and began to reassemble the Di-jump machine around its reality compressor. The least he could do was make sure that Jax could leave this world safely...
“Leave this world.”
Slowly, Lenny set down the electronics and stared off into space for a long minute. Sara had left the world, somehow, and was out there on a different one. Jax seemed to jump from one dimension to another as easily as a frog leaps lily pads. After a moment, Lenny went back to work with redoubled effort.
He had just finished when the door slid open without his having unlocked it. Heart jumping up into his throat, Lenny spun about in his chair. The only people who could get in private doors without authorization were the police.
But he let out his breath in a gasp a moment later. It was only Jax, standing there with that habitual grin on his face.
“Hey, Len, did I scare you?” He said mockingly, striding in.
“How did you open my door?”
Jax wiggled in the air a device which looked like a TV remote control. “Electric lock-picker. Made by Spy Gizmoz. A great little toy.”
Though he generally did not favor the gesture, Lenny could not help rolling his eyes. “Yeah, Great. It almost scared me into a fit. But look, I finished the Di-jump.”
“Awesome!” Jax skipped over to look down at it. “Now, as long as you didn’t mix up the wires so that I come out as a fried egg, everything should work just right. How can I repay you for your work?”
“I don’t want money.” Lenny had already made sure that his wallet was in his bag. “But I do have a favor to ask of you in return. Though I’m afraid it’s a big one.”
He reached over and picked up his bag of goods from the floor. “I want to come with you.”
A bright light seemed to come over Jax’s face, his mouth opening in something between a gape of surprise and a smile of pleasure. After what seemed like a long moment it shut and he exclaimed, “hey, I thought that I was going to have to conk you over the head or something to get you to leave all this. You really mean it? You actually want to come with me?”
“Personal reasons are forcing me to leave town.” Lenny made a bitter face. “Besides...I might find Sara out there somewhere. Did you want me to come with you?”
“Heck yeah.” Jax slapped the machine so hard that Lenny was afraid it might break. “I was going to ask you to come, if you didn’t ask me. As I said, I’m looking for people to help me find out what is going on with the power between worlds. I searched the town and couldn’t find anyone who looked like they had the brains you do. Besides, what could be better than an electronics nerd to take along on Di-jump trips in case something breaks down?”
“Thanks.” Lenny gave him an ironic look. “Now, can we get going? I need to be out of town as soon as possible.”
“Right. That sort of problem. I get into them on almost every world.” Jax began pulling wires out of his pocket and sticking them into jacks on the side of the Di-jump. As he worked, he explained in his usual gushing manner that Di-jump machines got left behind when their creators did not think to add grounding wires connecting to the human they were supposed to be transporting.
“It doesn’t zap you, really,” he said with a shrug, “or not much. Just makes you part of the circuit so that you don’t get left behind. Oh, which reminds me, we need a metal surface of some sort to stand on. I haven’t figured out why, yet, but it’s necessary. Anything steel, iron, copper, gold or Dritite will work. Really any conductive metal.”
In the end, Lenny brought a large roasting pan from the kitchen and set it in the center of the floor. He felt pretty ridiculous, standing in a roasting pan with another young man, having alligator-clips fastened to his fingers with long wires running from them. The other hand was wrapped tight in the carrying handle of his rucksack.
“Ready?” Jax asked, tapping on the buttons of his Di-jump.
Lenny took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure what would happen next, he only hoped that the whole thing wasn’t a hideous joke being played on him.
With a nod he gave his permission. Jax poked at one of the central buttons on his machine. For a moment the room with all of his life in it was clear before him. Then there was a shock and it blurred.
But life is full of anomalous emotions. Lenny had expected the shock to be a large one, like the time he had accidentally touched a high-voltage outlet in Dr. Devi’s lab.
Instead, the jump between worlds felt a little like stepping out of a hot shower into a cool room. There was a slight shock, the change from warm to cool and the feeling that he was immediately somewhere different. He found that, despite trying to keep them open, he had closed his eyes after the room blurred. Opening them now, the first thing that struck him was the drabness.
Somehow, he had expected that any other world he went to would be more colorful than his own, more full of life and adventure. But the first impression of the world he had come to now was death and ruin.
They were standing on the dirt because the roasting pan had disappeared. They were on top of a low cliff overlooking a shallow valley. Around them old fence posts, creaking barb wire and broken-down lamp posts stood looking on like skeletal buzzards. Hanging from the tallest lamp post was a dead body, horrendously ripe and not quite human.
In fact, it looked more like a giant rat than anything.
Down below the cliff the boys stood on, a broken asphalt road ran away towards the horizon with beat-down, ragged buildings on either side. At one time they had been tall skyscrapers of brick and steel, but now their walls were stained with rust, many of them had crumbled across the road or into each other. Giant, rusty girders stuck like fractured bones from their upper stories, or lay on the ground in twisted positions of frozen agony. Garbage spilled fluttering from hidden side streets, seeming to beckon for help from the onlookers.
“Wheew.” Jax stepped towards the edge of the cliff, whistling between his teeth. “This is a bad one.”
Lenny looked up at the dead body, which was suspended by a rope around its throat. They had actually made it to a different world. It was strange, how easy it was to accept the fact.
“It certainly is a bad one...Jax, do all the dimensions you go to have humans in them?”
“Not necessarily.” The traveler glanced back at the body and gave a pale grin. “some of them seemed to be mostly inhabited by, um, creatures.”
“Creatures.” Lenny repeated flatly, before shaking his head. “Dead creatures, who have either committed suicide in a rather public place or been lynched. What have I got myself into?”
“There’s better worlds.” Jax shrugged, pointing at the road leading into the city. “Come on, let’s see who else lives here. They can’t be all bad. No world has only bad people on it.”
“But it can have all insane ones,” Lenny returned critically. He still followed as Jax led the way down the cliff, scrambling through unpleasantly sticky mud, down onto the broken paving of the road. Careful of their steps, they made their way under the looming shadows of the buildings. At first Jax chattered about how the power flux that ran between the worlds had first been discovered and his friend Grummage had experimented with receivers until he could understand it and use it for traveling between them.
But soon even Jax was impressed by the eerie silence and grayness of the ruined city, falling quiet as they trudged down the rubble-filled street.
Though the sun was shining above them, the city seemed to be swallowed in a haze of drabness. A fog of depression sat over it, making the shadows appear deeper and the light feel tainted.
At one point Jax said suddenly, “well, we have to let the Di-jump cool down before using it again. I always like to give it some time to rest, as the components all heat up in the jump. But it gives us time to look around.”
Lenny just grunted in return. A paper bag tumbled across their path, making them both jump in surprise. Around one corner of a building they found a heap of moldering bones, blunt, brutal weapons still clutched in the skeleton’s claw-like hands. It was an unfriendly world, even to its own inhabitants.
Eventually Lenny asked, “what are we looking for here?”
There did not seem to him to be any reason to wander around the city. They could just stay put somewhere to wait for the Di-jump to cool of, incurring less of a chance of a dangerous meeting.
“Someone who might know about what, exactly, is causing the corruption of the central energy core. Or another person to join our compan--” Jax began, only to be cut off by a crazy wailing sound from somewhere nearby. They both stopped in their tracks, freezing with bated breath until the sound had died away.
Lenny gave his companion a pointed look. “Like that sort of person?”
The traveler’s face had turned decidedly pale. Grasping Lenny’s wrist, he pulled him over into a dark alleyway beside the road. They crouched in the shadows near a rusty staircase leading to the building’s roof, looking out at the empty road.
“I don’t know what that noise was,” Jax gasped, “but I wish it wouldn’t have happened!”
“Probably just the inhabitants,” Lenny said vindictively, mentally sending a signal to arm the energy cannon hidden in his right wrist. Noticing something strange on the banister of the staircase next to them at the same time, he looked closer. It was a purple stain, darker in the center and glowing around the outside. Holding a finger towards it, he felt waves of frigid air coming from it.
“Jax...look at that.”
The traveler glanced over once, briefly. “Oh yeah, those show up everywhere in the worlds that have been drawn together by the power center. I think it has something to do with the evil that has invaded the world. The corrupt power’s mark on the world.”
“I hope those marks don’t spread too much,” Lenny returned.
Before Jax could say anything about it, they heard the noise of an engine running roughly somewhere down the street in the direction they had been traveling a moment before. As they stood listening, it began to come nearer, mixed with a sound like that of howling dogs.
“Quick, up the steps,” Jax ordered, “it looks like this building still has a roof to stand on. We can see better from up there.”
“Without being seen,” Lenny added in agreement, following him up the rusty metal steps. They creaked and swayed at every step, making him grit his teeth. But the sounds of a large engine and crazed canines was coming closer below them. It seemed like a long time before they reached the flat, hot roof on top of the building, but it must have been only a few minutes. As they crouched near the edge of it looking down, a wild scene unfolded below them.
First to come into view was a stubby figure wearing a gray trench coat and what looked like an improvised metal helmet. It was of strange proportions, as the character seemed to have a long snout which the nose guard mostly covered. He stumbled and looked over his shoulders as he ran, short arms outstretched before him in terror as he dashed down the road. Behind him came something from a nightmare.
It was a hulking vehicle somewhere between a semi-truck tractor and a bus, with a huge, spiked blade on the nose and heavy armor all around. It had six wheels on each side, turning knobby rubber tires. Black exhaust smoke poured out of a tall stack on one side, while the engine labored and coughed menacingly under its load. The rig was not only covered in heavy, spiked plates on the outside. Crouching all over it, waving clubs and blades in their claw-like hands, was a pack of terrifying creatures. Lenny could not decide at their distance distance whether they were people dressed up in furs and claws, or if they were rat-like creatures with painted faces and rickety armor.
In front of the vehicle of terror ran a pack of wild, raving dogs, each held back to the rig by a long rope tied to their spiked collar. Because of the overloaded weight of the truck, it was not overrunning these mad hounds of war, but the whole contraption was slowly catching up on the single creature sprinting down the road.