Call Me Ishmael

Chapter 8

Author's Note: Always fasten your seatbelt in a moving vehicle. You can buy this book at Amazon, B&N, and at Smashwords for any other device.

My father insisted on buying the coffee.  It was fitting, I guess, since coffee was the cause of our predicament.  The four of us sat around a little wooden table, our knees nearly touching, and blew on hot foaming mugs of the spiciest coffee I had ever encountered.  After the third sip, I felt that perhaps old Dad could not be blamed for dashing out for a quick cup, meteor or no meteor.  The coffee was absolutely delicious.

“Where have you been, dad?  Can I call you dad?”

“Of course, son.  Frankly, those ‘daddy’ remarks were giving me the heebie-jeebies.  But now to answer your first question, I’ve been a lot of places, for a long time.  Since I left the cabin that day, I’ve never been able to stay in one spot very long.  They keep moving me around.”

Bertram sipped his coffee, placed the mug on the table, and dabbed at his goatee with a white silk handkerchief.  “Pardon my interrupting, Mr. Ville, but who are these people you’re referring to as ‘they’?”

Dad muttered something and shook his head.  “Hard to say.  They looked like people I knew, but there was always something funny about them.  Sometimes they’d have an eye that spun, ticking coming from their ear, stuff like that.  It got so I can’t trust anyone.” 

Finnie finished her croissant and wiped her perfect fingers on her paper napkin.  I could not help but notice that she very carefully placed the napkin so that it covered her hand with the scar and the silvery nail.  “Mr. Ville.”

“Please, call me Mel.  Everyone else does.  Except you, Ishmael.  Dad is fine.”

“Fine.  Mel.  Bear with me, because this is crucial.  We need to return to our base and report, and I need to know if your work can be reproduced in the time we have left.”  Finnie sipped her coffee and nodded toward a clock on the lime-green wall.  “We only have about thirty-eight hours until the implosion.”

My father shook his head.  “Forget it, Finnie.  My device is not reproducible.  Not in the amount of time that’s left.  I remember after the Roswell crash, it took twenty years to use that technology to put the first man from our dimension into space.  No, there’s just one hope, really, and I don’t have the foggiest idea how to go about pursing it.”

“One hope is infinitely better than none, Mel.”  Finnie repositioned her napkin.  “What is the one possibility?  We must get back to our base, and if there is anyway to prevent this catastrophe, we have to attempt it.  What is the one hope?”

My father drained his coffee cup.  “It’s simple, but it’s impossible.  It occurred to me just a few moments ago, when I was trying to decide whether to get a latte or the spicenut.  In that moment, this dimension split, and although I took the spicenut here; in that new dimension, I got a latte.”  He sighed.

Finnie tapped the tabletop, and the sound was louder than a fingernail had any reason to be.  “And?”

Now I got excited.  “Well, think about it.  When he went for coffee, that was a decision.  Somewhere, there’s a dimension in which he didn’t.  In that dimension, he stayed in the building and got his things out.  Somewhere, out there, there is a hope.”

My father watched a customer at the counter.  The tall woman was oblivious to the impending end of all things, so she was getting the low-cal latte.  She picked up a sugar packet, clucked her tongue, and dropped it back in the small dish of pink packets.  “There goes another one,” he sighed.  “Another dimension, complete and identical to this one, up to that moment.  In that dimension, she put the sugar in her latte.  How, among these trillions of possibilities, do you expect to find the right one?”