“So people keep telling me, yes. But I need it, for now, anyway. When I’ve done with it—” He shrugged. “So, the sooner I get what I need, the sooner you get the bottle. Understood?”
Mr Nordstrom gave him the sort of look you might expect to see on the face of a tiger which, as it’s about to pounce on a quivering fawn, notices that the fawn’s just pulled a gun on it. “Sure,” he said. “What else can I tell you?”
Theo shrugged, picked up the bottle-reader again, turned it upside down, and put it back on the table. “Mishaps aside,” he said, “this gadget seems to work pretty well.”
“It’s all right, I suppose,” Mr Nordstrom said. “But it has significant drawbacks. You see, it’s not real.”
Theo raised an eyebrow. “So?”
Mr Nordstrom smiled. “It’s like the difference between sex and masturbation. This machine isn’t that much better than your garden-variety virtual reality, except you don’t have electrodes up your nose. What’s in the bottles is five hours taken at random, remotely, from a parallel universe. You’ve got no control over who you are in it, what you can do there, what’s going to happen. Pieter had some way of—” He paused and scratched his chin. “Well, it’s a bit like drilling a hole in a barrel and siphoning off a bit of what’s inside. He didn’t have to go there, he could do it from here. But he was doing it blind. So, it’s pot luck. You could get five hours of thrilling adventure and extreme sensual pleasure, or you could end up with five hours of speeches from a party conference. People aren’t going to pay good money for that.”
Theo grinned. “I can imagine.”
“Also,” Mr Nordstrom went on, “it’s prohibitively expensive. One of those bottles costs best part of a million dollars, and Pieter couldn’t figure out a way of bringing the unit cost down. That’s why he decided we had to move on to phase two.”
“YouSpace.”
“I thought we’d decided we weren’t going to call it that. Anyway, yes. That was the plan. This is really just a dead end.”
“You seem to like it.”
Mr Nordstrom laughed. “Well, I paid for it,” he said, “I figure I might as well get some use out of it. But it’s pretty poor stuff, mostly. Apart from the Vietnam thing, I’ve been to a fairy-tale world where dragons exist and magic really works…”
“Interesting.”
“It should’ve been, yes. But I spent five hours as a clerk in their equivalent of the Inland Revenue. Or there was the one where women outnumber men six hundred to one. I had high hopes of that.”
Theo’s eyes widened a little. “Yes?”
“Oh, it was all right,” Mr Nordstrom said, “if you enjoy spending a morning alone on a fishing boat in the middle of the ocean. No control, you see. You’ve got to be able to jump in at the right time and place, or the customer simply won’t want it. It’d be like having a TV that insists on making you watch the Ring cycle live from Bayreuth.”
Theo thought for a moment. “When you got back from Vietnam,” he said, “you were in pretty bad shape.”
“Ah.” Mr Nordstrom smiled. “That time, we got lucky. Well, luckyish. Nineteen ninety-six Merlot. It’s five hours in a hospital in the twenty-seventh century. Unfortunately we’ve only got a few bottles of that left.” He pulled a face. “We started off with two cases. Like I said, you just don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for when you go through that arch.”
Theo pursed his lips. “It sounds like hours of boredom punctuated with brief incidents of violence and fear,” he said. “What’s the fun in that?”
“Why do Canadians watch ice hockey? Something to do, I guess. Besides, like I told you, I paid for it. Well.” He frowned. “I embezzled the money that paid for it. It’ll be me that gets slung in jail when the auditors figure out where it’s gone. So, why not?”
Theo wasn’t listening. Something Mr Nordstrom had said had set off a chain reaction in his head. Pieter left it to you in his will. Perfectly true; but the YouSpace bottle hadn’t been all he’d inherited –
A small bottle.
A brown manila envelope.
A pink powder compact.
An apple.
“And anyway,” Mr Nordstrom was saying, “seventy million of that ninety-two million was what Fedeyevski, you know, the Russian oligarch, ripped off from some mid-eastern dictator, who skimmed it off oil company sweeteners, so who that really belongs to I’d