for what you took last time, my dear. Consider that you have paid in advance for this time.
“Right-o.”
I wanted to find a gift for Reverend Marks, whose wife Belinda was a retired opera singer. They loved music and had a wonderful stereo system in their home in Chestnut Hill—I’d been invited there for Sunday dinner many times. I liked their company, which I suppose made me an odd duck. I suspected that I was a substitute son for them—they did not talk about it, but their only son had been killed in the Florida War thirty years ago. But when I was with them I forgot how homesick I was for Nanticoke Colony, where Mum and Dad and my little sister Jodie lived in our little wooden house on Gingo Teag Island, by the sea. Jo was something of a violin prodigy at age twelve, and when she came to Philadelphia I knew she would love the Marks’ stereo, which is connected to the British Library’s master babbage in Brandywine, down near the Nanticoke line.
“That’s what we spend all our money on.” Mrs Marks had gestured apologetically at the modest helping of fried oysters on my plate, the last time I went to their house.
“I am very grateful. You know this is a genuine taste of home for me,” I had said.
Now I headed to the back room. I had to find a gift to pay back her kindness. I stopped short. Someone had dismantled enough of the shelving to make a doorway, stacking the books that had been on the shelves in messy piles. I proceeded to tidy them before walking into what I thought of as the secret chamber. This time the room smelled resiny, like the little stand of loblolly pines in back of our house on Gingo Teag. And my journal pages lay on the floor, right where I must have dropped them.
Chapter 3
18 November
Dear Teresa,
I would love to meet you here! But I am afraid I promised to help my friend Dennis revise tomorrow afternoon. He hasn’t a prayer of passing his natural philosophy midterms if I do not help him. You are so brilliant I am certain you do not have any trouble with that subject. Anyone who loves a good used bookstore as much as you do probably does not have any difficulty in school. Except for the kind that other students cause…you know what I mean, I expect. Are you in boarding school, like me, and must put up with them twenty-four hours a day?
You know, though, this bookstore is the strangest place. Have you met Gloria yet? I have not, though she keeps leaving me notes and mugs of tea. I do like the new colour she painted the door, though. Blue is my favourite. What is yours?
I probably will not be able to get here next weekend at all, since my parents are traveling from Gingo Teag, down south in Nanticoke Colony. They have the entire journey all planned out so my little sister Jodie can see everything in the capital. Would you meet me in Parliament Plaza, under the statue of Sir Andrew Jackson, at five o’clock Tuesday evening, and we could go to the kinetoscope? You should be able to recognise me without any difficulty—I am a tall, skinny bloke and will wear a navy blue down topcoat.
Your humble servant,
Tom Purnell
P.S. What is a cell phone?
I sighed as I put down Tom’s letter and began absently stroking Tiferet’s ears—the cat was curled up in my lap. Parliament Plaza, huh? Not Independence Square. And I noticed all the British spellings and expressions, like “bloke” instead of “guy.” Well, if this was for real, it confirmed what I’d suspected since I first stumbled on Gloria’s Gateway Books—that what I had here was a gateway to parallel worlds.
I knew all about parallel worlds from last year’s AP Physics class with Miss Chen. She’s very popular at my high school; the boys of course drool over her since she’s hot, but everyone loves her for her exciting class lectures. In May, when most people’s thoughts were already on summer vacation, she managed to keep our attention for the quantum mechanics unit by telling us that everything we thought we knew about atoms was wrong.
“You learned something like this, right?” she said, patting a little kid’s mobile of the solar system that dangled from a stand on her desk. A bright orange Jupiter promptly broke off and rolled away and immediately became the object of a game of catch. “That actually helps illustrate my point,” she said cheerfully. “Not knowing what you guys have done with that particle is a good illustration of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You see, what you’ve learned in school until now, this mini-solar system idea, is called the Bohr model of the atom, after the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. But quantum mechanics tells us that subatomic particles are not in fact like little balls,” she added, casually knocking the model over with a swipe of her hand.
“Instead, these particles are sort of miniature dice. You can’t know everything about them at any given time, no matter how good the tools you have to measure them. If you know an electron’s momentum, you can’t know its exact position, only probabilities of where it might be. If you know its position, the momentum is a matter of chance. And so on. Now, my man Al Einstein—he hated this idea. ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ he said. But for once in his life, he was wrong. God positively loves these things,” she said, producing a large pair of fluorescent green fuzzy dice and tossing them at Tony Bertelli, who started awake. Everyone laughed.
“He built the entire universe with them,” Miss Chen continued, as Tony sheepishly tossed the dice back to her. “Maybe more than one universe. See, there’s this crazy out-there idea that most physicists don’t like, but that nobody has ever been able to disprove, that every time we have this quantum uncertainty about a subatomic particle, all the possibilities come true—only in different universes. The electron may be here, or it may be there,” she said, as Jupiter bounced out from under the front row of desks and rolled to a stop at her feet, “or we may have one universe where it ends up here, and another where it ends up there.”
“But then trillions of new universes would be created every second,” I objected.
“That’s right,” Miss Chen agreed, picking up Jupiter and peeling it with her hot pink fingernails. The giant planet was really a navel orange. “Every possibility you can imagine, and more, is real somewhere. There’s a universe where this is an apple I’m eating. There’s a universe where dinosaurs still walk the Earth. Most incredible of all, there’s a universe where Tony was not out with Gina O’Donnell all night, and has actually not had to sleep through this entire class,” she said, beaning him awake again with a large juicy section of orange.
Then she got into the mathematics. My head still hurts at the memory. At least she made it up to us by having a fun class where we got to make paper from scratch, after we took the AP test, which of course I bombed.
Well, Miss Chen. I may suck at the math, but I’ve got something better than that. Actual proof that the many-worlds theory is true!
So I understood what was going on, sort of, but how was I going to explain it to Tom? Well, I decided to give it a try. I took a piece of notebook paper out of my bookbag, along with an actual fountain pen that was part of a calligraphy set that Nana had given me for Confirmation. I’d never used it before.
I tried to explain what Miss Chen had said, though I knew my explanation wasn’t anywhere near as good as hers. I sounded clumsy and ridiculous. Besides—it occurred to me after I’d already written about Bohr, Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg—what if all these famous scientists aren’t known in Tom’s world? Even the word “physics” might not be used in a world where science was still called “natural philosophy,” as it used to be called two hundred years ago. Part of me wanted to crumple up everything I had written so far and start over from scratch, but my second attempt would probably be even worse than the
