I threw down the antique joystick in frustration: thanks to my spastic control of his vine-swinging, Tarzan had crashed into a tree, been eaten by an alligator, and fallen into quicksand three times each in the last five minutes.
This was Jack's game. Why in the hell was I sitting here losing at it when he was hours late for dinner and the ITD was going to be officially unveiled in the morning?
As archivist, I wasn't needed for the technical finishing touches on the Interdimensional Transport Device, and as physicist, Jack was. But there was no reason I couldn't head over to the lab, jot a few notes, and drag him home for some much-needed sleep. I grimaced at my drawn features in the hall mirror, fluffed my dark hair, and left our apartment.
The ITD Complex, in the subterranean depths of the Manhattan Applied Sciences Center, was a brief tube ride away. Once inside its various security fields, I checked Jack's office and the vending area, and then opened the thick plastisteel door to the project room with my card. Five Visiglas sections away was Jack.
With a leggy redhead on his lap.
Jack glanced up, looking first startled, then scared. He said something urgent to the redhead and got up, dumping her off his lap; she didn't seem a bit concerned. Then he went to one of the ITD chutes, pulling her along, and as I slid open the door to the next section he twirled the lock and swung open the heavy, round steel door of the cylinder.
And then the redhead looked over her shoulder, to see what he was reacting to ... and I saw that she was me.
I'd been a waitress while in college. From her outfit, it appeared that in her universe she had stayed one. She twirled her hair the same way I do, and her catty smile looked painfully like mine--only with the dimple on the other side, since her face was not my own seen in a mirror.
Jeez, I thought, how can you be jealous of yourself? I'd assumed that doppelgangers were just theories. Looking at myself in his arms made me reconsider clawing her eyes out: the do-unto-others rule took on new significance. But Jack was the culprit here. He was yanking both our chains.
I was through the third 'glas partition by the time he managed to get her legs into the chute and close the hatch. His fingers danced over the switches before it had even closed completely, sending her into God knew what dimension. As I entered the fifth section I saw that he had triggered the autoset controls. He was climbing into the cylinder. He was going to follow her.
"What the hell are you doing?" I was yelling as I came through the last partition--but he was gone.
Regroup, I told myself, trying to quell my anger and astonishment. Sit down. Think this through.
I reset the controls and followed them.
The ITD Drop is not a fun ride. First you stuff your body into a cylinder that looks from the outside and feels from the inside like a drawer in a morgue. Then there is a sensation like sensory-deprivation free-fall. It was tempting to urp, despite the close quarters. But fury sustained me, and in literally no (objective) time I was standing in a cathedral-size, luminescent mall.
Nobody took any notice of me. At either end of the vast space, caterpillar-like escalators stretched up almost as far as the eye could see. Everything was immaculate, all polished chrome and glass, and down the middle of it all ran an endless, gleaming newsstand.
I stepped closer to it; there must have been thousands of newspapers and magazines. "I'll take a Post-Dispatch, a Times-Newsday-Standard, a Murdoch Daily News, a Newhouse Gazette-Examiner, and a Timeweek," I heard a man on the other side say, and through the glass I saw periodicals drop neatly, one by one, into his outstretched arms. If it were Sunday, I thought, this guy would need a forklift.
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