Project BTB Page 5

  "Right, yeah, sure thing," he said. Then his eyes narrowed and he glanced back at the arrow. "It's just that it looks somuch like the blaze marks you make."

  "Hey, I know two girls at school who have handwriting you can't tell apart. Coincidence, Dan. Shit happens."

  But as I looked at the blaze again briefly, I got the same feeling. The blazedid resemble my style, complete with a little squiggle on the tail of the arrow. And there was the fact that Dan had a photographic memory-

  I had to suppress that line of thought. I couldn't go there. I couldn't let the vines take over. I needed to keep my logical mind going and get us out of there. I grabbed Dan and headed in the direction that the arrow pointed.

  I started babbling, saying almost anything that came to mind, "Dan, I don't care what your fabulous memory says, it doesn't make sense. I'm not gonna let you give me the slitherin' jeebies anymore. You're the one that's supposed to stay on the road of reason, right? Well,now is the time! Don't go emotion-wobbly on me, buddy!"

  Dan shuddered and seemed to pull out of it. "You're right. What thefuck have I been doing, anyway? Sorry. Let's go soak some sun."

  He seemed superficially okay again, but I remained wary. To my chagrin, I found that I didn't quite trust Dan like I had. Under building pressure, I'd seen himlose it. No, not big-time. But enough to cause serious doubts. Well, Ideal Man is supposed to be independent, too, right? That's what I asked myself, adding under my breath, "So where'syour independent thinking been all these years,ol' bud ?"

  I don't know if Dan heard me or not. If he did, he didn't show it.

  We found more orange arrows as we went. I kept telling myself that just because they looked so familiar, just because my mind and arm couldfeel myself making the motions that would create those kinds of blazes, it was no excuse to toss logic out the window.

  Dan was okay for awhile, but then he started to worry me again. He kept frowning and saying things in a low voice under his breath about how his memory had never let him down before.

  "Knock it off, Dan," I said sharply, throwing him an angry look.

  He look guiltily away and kept walking.

  Even though we were convinced that we were on our way out of the caves, our legs were feeling incredibly heavy, like when you have to walk too far in soaking wet jeans. I knew that it was more than simple fatigue. Underneath what was left of our bravado we were as scared as little kids in their first thunderstorm. Not just me. Dan, too. He just handled it differently. Well, I rationalized, itwas our first experience of the kind. Maybe being frightened wasn't so bad. Maybe it was nature's way of making us wake up. I wasn't entirely clear what I mean by that. I shrugged inside. Well, it was the best I could come up with. Maybe, I thought, doing our best in a situation is all we ever really have as human beings. Not the ideal. Not perfection. Just the best we can muster in a circumstance. Was that what the ideal and perfection were actually about? I shook my head and smiled ruefully. I was getting entirely too deep for myself. Mr. Philosophy, I was not.

  I kept us marching along, my jaw clamped tight in determination. It wasn't long-although it seemed longer then-before the passageway took a slow left turn and we saw light streaming down a straight stretch that wasn't any more than a couple hundred feet long. When we saw it, we both glanced at each other and abruptly halted. This was exactly how we remembered things going out of the entrance of the caves near Salem.

  In one sense, you'd have thought we'd both be breaking into sprints at that streak of daylight. But we didn't. We were reluctant to move at all-either forward or back, like raccoons trapped in the middle of a road, unsure about which way to turn to safety.

  Dan started muttering, "Not possible again."

  I let out a few choice cusswords that I seldom used, grabbed his arm, and forced him to walk with me up to the entrance and into the sunlight.

  It must have been about ten in the morning. The sunshine would have felt good, except that off in the distance it was illuminating Dan's folks' farmyard.

  "Listen," Dan said to me as we strode through the tall grass and scrub down toward the house, "I don't know what happened to us in there. I know I lost it for awhile and I'm sorry. But I have this overpowering feeling that we shouldn't talk about it to my folks yet. I don't know why, but I think we should try to figure it out on our own before we let anyone in on what we went through."

  "Yeah, no problem," I said. I'd been thinking nearly the same thing.

  "Do you think wecan figure it out?" I asked, getting an inexplicably lonely feeling.

  Dan inhaled deeply, held his breath for a moment, then blew it out in a long, controlled sigh.

  "Everything's got to have a reason," he said with conviction, "everything. Sooner or later we ought to be able to understand it."

  "It's the 'later' that I'm worried about," I said.

  "You and me both. I keep remembering about all those counter-intuitive things that seem to have no business existing," he said, his face more haggard than I'd ever seen it.

  We met Dan's mom in the kitchen. Aunt Edna loved Dan to no end and, I'm sure, loved me, too. She was always glad to see us. However, there was a puzzled streak to her smile.

  "Why, what on earth are you two doing back so soon?" she asked, punctuating the question with a spatula she'd been using to stir cake batter.

  "Uh, so soon?" I asked. I don't think she even noticed the question. Aunt Edna had a tendency to override conversations with her own thoughts.

  "Did you forget something?" she asked. "Or- Oh, my!"

  She'd noticed our grimy clothes for the first time.

  "You two look terrible! If I didn't know better, I'd say you'd been gone for days!"

  "Well, ofcourse we-" Dan started to say in his my-mom's-wacky tone, but I elbowed him in the ribs. He was about to spill stuff we'd agreed not to mention. Besides, there was some kind of undercurrent running through the room and it was making me uneasy. The little red light in my head was blinking furiously. I wanted to get usaway from Aunt Edna.

  "It probably looks that way," I said in my best persuasion voice, "but then how long do you think two teenagersought to take to look like this?"

  She laughed, "Oh, you're probably right. I've said before that teenage boys are the only creatures other than two-year-olds who can get filthy as sin before they have their shirts on in the morning. Even so, I would have thought you'd be grown up enough to keep from getting disheveled for at least an hour."

  Dan's mouth fell open and I took over again before something moronic spilled out of Sir Genius.

  "Uh, we have to get some things we forgot up in Dan's room, Aunt Edna. Sorry, but we're in kind of a hurry."

  She winked and chuckled and wave us off.

  I hustled Dan out of the kitchen and up the stairs to his room.

  When I closed the door and had some assured privacy, Dan immediately burst out, "What the hell was Mom talking about, 'at least an hour'?"

  I shook my head and held up both hands.

  "Dan, what color is your mom's hair?"

  "Huh? What's that got to do with anything?"

  "Answer the question, Dan. What color?"

  "Well, it's always been kind of a strawberry blond."

  "I thought you told me she has this 'natural' thing about not using hair dyes."

  "Sure, so what?"

  "Just now downstairs I distinctly saw red hair on her head. Not strawberry blond-red, red as a carrot."

  "Aw, that's nuts," Dan said. "She'd never dye her-"

  Then he stopped because his memory was seeing red, too.

  "I can't imagine her doing that," he said, scratching behind one ear.

  "Me neither. And since when did she like checkered gingham curtains on her kitchen windows?"

  "Since never. She hates that stuff. Says it looks like bread wrappers."

  "Right. And since when would she be so forgetful that she'd think her son and nephew had been gone an hour when in fact they'd been gone for several days?"

 
; "She wouldn't. She's wacky, but not that wacky. Besides, she's the one I inheritedmy recall genes from."

  I nodded and said, "Now you're starting to get it. Look around, Dan. Look at the stuff in your room. Look closely."

  He did, then whistled in astonishment.

  Superficially everything was normal. But little things were off. Dan was a big fan of Sean Connery's James Bond movies. He didn't like the Roger Moore versions of recent years. He always had aGoldfinger poster over his dresser. It wasn't there. In its place was a picture of James Dean. Dan thought Dean was a wimp. Dan had always been a houseplant nut. He loved to grow them in his windows, experimenting with different soils and nutrients and so on. In place of the plants on the sills were clay sculptures; some quite new, showing a lot of talent. But Dan hadn't had an interest in sculpture since the fifth grade. The bedspread was a light blue. Dan preferred dark blues and blacks. His 35-gallon aquarium was there, but it didn't have Dan's Japanese Koi that he'd raise for two years from the fry stage. Instead, somebody'd turned the aquarium into a terrarium with a couple of ugly lizards inside. Dan once had a short-lived fascination with reptiles, but that had been years ago. The list went on, right down to the missing chemistry set that Dan had owned since he was seven.

  "Omigod," Dan said softly. His lips and face looked as drawn and white as mine felt. His eyes turned to me as he said in a tight, anguished voice, "Ol' bud, this isn't my home!"

  "I don't think so, Dan," I said.

  "Let's get out of here," he said urgently.

  We bolted out of the room, down the stairs, and through the kitchen so fast that we couldn't make out what Aunt Edna yelled, looking bewildered and beautiful in the red hair that she'd never had.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8

  A few minutes later, we stood just inside the cave entrance with our hands braced on our knees, huffing and puffing. We'd still had our packs on when we ran from the farmhouse all the way back up to the caves.

  "We've got to go back," Dan said, panting.

  "That isnot your place," I said emphatically, thinking that his brain had gotten derailed again.

  "No, I don't mean that. I mean that we've got to go back down through the caves. All the way."

  "Aw, frack, Dan, that's as crazy as a three-dollar bill."

  "No, wait! I've been thinking. Somewhere inside there we had to have taken a wrong turn."

  "That's the understatement of the week!"

  He shook his head. "I'm not saying this right. Listen, I think I know where it happened."

  "Oh."

  Suddenly I was interested. A theoretical wrong turn was one thing. A wrong turn that we could pinpoint was another.

  "I think it had to be in that section where we both got our balance out of kilter," he said, his eyes starting to gleam. "I believe it was back after we passed the ring. I've been recalling some obscure physics papers I stumbled on down in the basement at Oregon State one rainy afternoon last year when I had time on my hands. What I found was that some researchers think there might be such a thing as alternate realities. Has to do with quantum possibilities. They think that all things that could happen,do happen, somewhere. Or at least a lot of the stronger possibilities do. They believe we might be able to control passage among them, so-"

  "So they're nuts, Dan! That sounds like low-grade science-fiction. Heck, you yourself have told me you think the alternate reality stuff is nothing but bird droppings."

  "Well, I used to think so, but..." He waved his hand around, indicating the cave walls. "But maybe not now. I can't come up with any other hypothesis. Can you?"

  He looked at me for a second like he thought I could. No way. That kind of reasoning was Dan's department, no matter how screwed up on simpler things he could get sometimes.

  I sighed, looked down into the gloomy cave passage, glanced at Dan, smiled weakly, lifted my eyebrows, and said, "Okay, what choice do we have? Whatever the frack happened, whatever we stumbled into, this place sure isn't where we belong. Let's go home."

  Dan held out his hand and we shook.

  Low on supplies and tired, we headed back down into the caves.

  We had surprisingly little trouble finding the steamy area and the geyser. We also found good green blaze marks. As we'd theorized, they were in a passage that branched off from, paralleled, and by-passed the geyser area, reconnecting later on. In a few hours we walked wearily out the entrance to the Darkhorse side of the caves.

  We didn't get back to my house, though. Oh, at first it looked like mine. However, as with our experience at the farmhouse, there were those littledifferences . Things that didn't belong. Parents who didn't look and act quite the same. Contexts that should have been tweaked one way were tweaked another.

  That's why, after resupplying ourselves and stealing some rest in the woods, we went back through a third time, trying to slip into the reality that was ours. It didn't work. So we tried again. And again. And again. Over and over.

  Sometimes everything was so close to what we remember as "real" that we almost stayed. But we never did. We knew we had to find exactly our reality, because it wouldn't do to have two of me and two of Dan in the same place. Several times early on we accidentally caught glimpses of our other selves, and it spooked us to our cores. It was like that old saying about someone walking on your grave-except that this felt like someone was walking on your life. I'd never felt anything like it, and I never wanted to again. After that, we were careful to avoid any chance of contact.

  We took odd jobs to stay alive, always having to be careful to get work away from our home towns so we wouldn't be recognized. As best we could, we continued our education. This mainly consisted of Dan loading up on books and teaching himself, and tutoring me on the side. Basic knowledge of things like physics and biology seemed to be the same everywhere, in all the alternate realities. Oh, there were some differences in history, such as who invented what, but nothing substantive. Dan took heart from that. He said it meant that there was still an overarching super-reality in which all basic laws applied. Whenever we could, we went back through the caves, trying to locate our "home" reality.

  Quite a number of times, Dan brought in jury-rigged electronic devices and test equipment that he he'd "borrowed" from various locations. I remember a Geiger counter and a miniature mass spectrometer and a few other things. Most of it was beyond my grasp. Dan did his genius-level best to analyze the ring and anything else he could in order to figure out, and maybe control, what was going on down in the caves. He never succeeded.

  Then, on one of our trips through, we made a major mistake. I guess the odds were that it was bound to happen some day. Dan went through that disorienting section just a little too far ahead of me. When I went through, he wasn't there. No poof. No fizzle of electrons or snap of a reality gate. Just gone. He'd edged into somewhere else just a tiny bit different. It was enough. I haven't seen him since. Not in almost thirty years.

  Oh, yeah, sure, I've looked for him. Desperately. After all, he was not only my cousin and best friend, but my only link to my old life. After awhile, though, I got tired of the search. It was as simple as that. Alternate reality or not, I had to make something of my life. I'd reached my early twenties and it was time to "get on with it," as we used to say. I couldn't keep searching forever. As the sailors say, Dan was lost at sea. You can't wait on life's shore forever.

  My life in this place-I call it Reality 1000, because that's the number I decided to stop looking at-isn't all that bad. It's close to what I grew up with in a lot of ways. There's only one crucial difference. In this place, by sheer good fortune, a person like me never existed. When I came into town, I was just another immigrant. I'd been planning to leave the state when I reached Reality 1000 in order to avoid running into anyone who'd recognize me from my old life-or mistake me for my counterpart. It was nice not to have to do that. It was nice to have the familiarity, however askew it was in smaller ways, to cushion the building of a new life.

  I've had
to learn some things, of course. Like how to use a twenty-four letter alphabet. No "y" or "z" in this one; and to remember to shake with my left hand; and to play cards with an extra face (a Prince, ranked between the Jack and the Queen). Nothing major.

  As with the laws of physics, there seemed to be a law that prevented any major deviation from the norm in cultures. Most of the time, anyway. I stepped into some nutty, scary places now and then.

  There was one where the United States had degenerated into a theocracy that used cannibalistic rituals to celebrate holidays. There was another where most of the people looked like how the Neanderthals were described in anthropology journals, complete with heavy brows and hunched walks, and yet everything else was almost identical to my old world. There was one place that turned my blood into icewater. There were ruins of human civilization, but no humans. What flora and fauna existed did not appear to resemble anything earthlike. What had happened there, I never found out. I was too scared to stay and explore. But it made me realize something Dan and I had never thought about: if we could slip through that reality gate, whatelse might slip through? What legends of gremlins and sprites and so on might be explained by "normal" creatures sliding from their own place into an unfamiliar one? Well, I had enough trouble. I tried to keep thoughts like that from crowding to the forefront of my mind.

  And now? Oh, I'm fairly happy here. I'm all right, I guess. Despite the ancient ache that grinds inside my skull occasionally, missing Dan, missing the old world and all that was and might have been, I continue to hope. I particularly hope that I'll see Dan again. Because, you see, if he didn't slip into a really bizarre place, a primitive one, perhaps, where people are so different that they lynched him or stoned him, thinking he was a freak, or witch, or madman, then there's a chance. There's a chance that that curious, magnificent mind of his will find an answer to what happened. It might find a way to control the slippage from one reality to another. Then, he ought to see the arrows I sprayed in Darkhorse, pointing the way into this world, the last blazes I ever made, the ones with the words, "This way ol' bud" sprayed above them.