American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,135

sure if it coincided with our tests, or if our tests… if perhaps our tests were the cause. But it was… it was apocalyptic. I cannot even describe it.”

Mona, remembering her vision at the house, doesn’t doubt it. She nods.

“You were—” His image suddenly grows fuzzy and his words hiss, as if his signal, being projected from wherever he is, is losing its strength. When he returns he’s in a different pose, sitting up. It is an unnerving sight, changing abruptly from one position to the other. He finishes, “—at the time?”

Though she missed the majority of that, Mona takes a wild guess and shakes her head.

“Well,” he says. “I suppose you wouldn’t have been, would you. Did your mother ever”—a flicker of static—“—rk here, or do you have any, erm, theoretical physics background at all?”

“Sure don’t,” she says, and she shakes her head.

“I see. Well. I don’t know how best to explain this, which makes me a bad scientist. It is fairly complicated stuff. I wish your mother had told you a little about it. She was crucial to its development.” Another flutter of static.

“Bruising is also called universal collision signatures,” he says. “It is, in layman’s terms, when one univ—”—his image stutters, shrinks, returns—“—shes into another, like bumper cars. Because there is not just one universe. Think of it like bubb—”—his face freezes, while the rest of his body moves, hands gesticulating excitedly—“—face of water around a waterfall, all rubbing, bumping, popping into one another.”

“Uh-huh,” says Mona, who wishes he would stay still.

“This is what we were meant to examine here. Because if we could understand bruising, we could understand how the world works—how all worlds work—at the most fundament—”

He breaks up again, this time for a long, long time, more than a minute. Mona is sure he isn’t coming back, and, panicking, writes, “BREAKING UP BREAKING UP” on her notepad.

When he comes back, he is saying, “—id you go again? Did you leave? It didn’t look like you walked aw—”

He leans forward and reads her note card. Though he is black and white, she can see he pales a little. “Oh, no. Breaking up? Me? That must be why you faded out just then. Something’s wrong. Whatever connection allows this, I guess it’s”—his face blurs, solidifies—“—ill so much to explain, th—” His image begins strobing, one hand frozen, the other still in motion.

When he comes back, he is standing, his eyes alight, face fixed in mid-shout. “—ongest hall, west side! Do you hear? On the w—” He fills with static, rivers of bursting gray and white. When he returns, he is panicked, yelling, “—ear me? Plank! Plank! Six six two six! Do you hear me? Six six tw—”

Then he begins to fade out, a clearness starting in his center and moving to the edges until he is no more than a faint outline of a man in the air. Then he is gone, as if he had never been there.

Mona sits there, staring around, wondering what just happened. Then she feels it again.

Something clicks. It’s some indefinable change in the room, but it’s the same as when she was staring into the mirror (or the lens, as she reminds herself). But this time it’s like something clicks out of place rather than, as she now feels happened before, clicking into it. She is reminded of those old phone operators in the fifties, taking a cord and plugging it into one jack, then unplugging it and plugging it into another. It’s like the cord just got ripped out of here, the room, the lab, everything. But what could have caused that?

She looks at the lens. She is not sure why, but she is sure it has moved. Perhaps only minutely, but she’s positive it’s changed.

Is it a lens, she now wonders? Or is it an antenna, communicating with someplace very, very far away…

And perhaps when she was staring at it before, she somehow activated it, and it made some kind of connection to… wherever it is Coburn is, the poor bastard. She is not sure how she could do such a thing, yet she feels it’s true.

She looks down at her notes. She did not realize it, but she was desperately scribbling down everything he said in his final moments. Scrawled at the bottom of the paper in pink slashes is:

SIX SIX TWO SIX

It was something he wanted her to know. Something important. Maybe a frequency? Or a code to something? She guesses she’ll have to find out.

Mona