"See you in a bit."
Jeremy watched his client duck through the red curtain. Then he opened a drawer and rifled it, coming up with a package of Twinkies. He put his sneakered feet up on the console, tore open the package, and began to eat.
After a not inordinate length of time, Max came running back through the curtain, his face pale. He was out of breath.
"That was quick," Hochstader said mildly.
"What. , what happened…" Max puffed, "to the place where I work? It's… it's gone!"
"Well, the economy's in a terrible state."
Max took a minute to wheeze and hack, then yelled, "I looked all over the building! The name of my firm isn't even on the directory! I looked in the phone listings. Fenton Associates doesn't exist! But you're still here. Your office, this place-" Max looked around, then scratched his head. "Where the hell is this place, anyway?"
"I told you," Jeremy said through the last bite of Twinkie. "It's in another world. This is Castle Perilous. Look, let's go back into the office. I need a soda and there's no machine here. I'd have to go all the way down to the dining hall. Come on."
Jeremy led the way back through the curtain.
Max followed. Back in the office, Max stopped and turned about, struck by the place somehow looking subtly different. It was a little neater. Hadn't that computer been on a smaller table along the opposite wall?
"Who moved the furniture?" Max asked vaguely.
"Wait a sec," Jeremy said. "I'll be back." He walked out the door, into the hallway of the office building.
Max sat on a rickety chair.
"Twilight Zone," he said, nodding. "I've found it. It's a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. It's all in my mind. I'm crazy. Crazy as a common loon."
Jeremy returned shortly, slurping a can of soda. "Okay, I guess I gotta explain things."
"Yeah," Max said. "What the bloody hell is going on?"
"Well, first you gotta understand about Castle Perilous." Jeremy sat at his microcomputer and threw one leg up on desk. "I stumbled into the place a few years ago. I got into trouble, and I was going to, you know, snuff it. I jumped off the roof of a building, but I didn't splatter in the alley like I was supposed to. I went through a spacetime warp, or whatever you want to call it, and I wound up inside the castle."
"Castle," Max said dully.
"Yeah, it's this humongous castle, and it's in another world, see. Not our world, not Earth. Earth is just one of the thousands of worlds that you can get to, by going through Castle Perilous. It's a gateway."
"Gateway," Max said, trying to follow.
"Yeah. You step through a door or a window inside the castle, and… jeez, you could be anywhere. On an alien planet, or some goofy world where they fight with swords, or anywhere. It's a lot of fun, really, living in the castle. I mean, it gets hairy sometimes, and things start shaking, and crazy aliens come through every now and then and try to take it over. But Lord Incarnadine always chases 'em out, and everything's-"
"Lord who?"
"Incarnadine. He's the king. The master of Castle Perilous, Lord of this and that. He's King of the Realms Perilous, and other stuff. I always wondered how he could be a lord and a king at the same time, but he says his traditional title, in the castle's world, is `Lord.' Like a duke, or earl, or something. Which makes him vassal, really. But inside the castle, it's a world in itself, and in that respect he's a king, of the realms of Perilous. See what I mean?"
Max opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. He shook his head.
Jeremy said, "Look, I know it's hard to believe, but it's true. You saw the lab, how crazy it is. I could take you out into the hall and show you a window. It'll look out onto the castle's world. But if I take you to the next window, you'll look out and see, like, a totally different world."
Max took great pains to say, "Hochstader, listen to me. Tell me this. What the hell happened to this world?"
"I was coming to that. Like, I said, Earth is just another of the castle's worlds, and you get to it by going through a portal, like the one in the next room. That's a portal leading back to the castle. It's a passageway between two worlds, the castle's and ours. Got that?"
"Got it. I guess."
"Okay. Now, you see, what I did was de-tune the portal a little bit."
"What?"
"De-tuned it. I did it with the castle mainframe. Just tweaked it a little. And what you get when you do that to a portal is basically the world you started with, but one that's a little different."
"Different?" Max said.
"Yeah, but the differences are minute. Like, for instance, in this de-tuned Earth, the place where you work doesn't exist, but everything else is pretty much the same."
"I see. Why?"
Jeremy shrugged. "Hard to say. Maybe in this variation of Earth's history, things happened a little different. Was it your business?"
"No, it belongs to a guy by the name of Herbert G. Fenton."
"Okay, so maybe in this world, Herbert G. Fenton didn't start that business. Maybe he started another business, or none at all. Maybe he doesn't exist in this world, or got killed long ago."
"You know, now that you mention it…" Max got up and walked to the fly-specked window. "Now that you mention it, Herb is forever talking about that car accident he was in a few years ago, and how he almost got-"
Max trailed off, gazing out into the night. Then he turned toward Jeremy with a strange look.
Jeremy grinned, raising his arms. "So there's your answer. What's important, though, is what happened to you in this variation of Earth."
Max frowned. "Me?"
"Yeah, you. Your history, your life story is going to be different in this different Earth. Your situation might be a little different. Or a lot different. Or… well, tell you the truth, I've been in this world before. Did some snooping, some detective work. And I think I have a deal for you."
"A deal for me."
"Yeah."
Hochstader got up and strode to a coat tree in a corner, undraped a blue and white athletic jacket, and slipped it on. He grinned at Max. "Feel like taking a little night air?"
The taxi made its way quickly through sparse late-evening traffic. It had begun to rain earlier, but now only a light drizzle fell. The cab driver was the silent type, seeming uninterested in the strange conversation that was going on in his back seat.
"Tell me again," Max pleaded. "This "aspect." It's a whole different world?"
"Universe, actually," Hochstader corrected. Passing lights briefly illuminated his boyish, perpetually grinning face. "And really not very different in most respects from the one we came from. But as far as your situation is concerned… well, that's another matter."
Max slumped back in the seat, his mind full of cobwebs. He looked out, seeing shadows that threatened halfconceived nightmares. "I don't understand…"
"It's all so simple," Jeremy Hochstader said. "Let me ask you this. If you had to state your main problem in twenty-five words or less, how would it go?"
Max's thoughts drifted back to the endless hours of psychotherapy, of soul-searching, of futile digging at the root of his problems.
"Easy. I'm a total failure. Everything I've ever tried or ever done has come to doodly squat."
"Yeah, I figured," Jeremy said. "I can empathize with that. My life's the same way, or would have been if I hadn't discovered the castle. The castle is a fun place to live, don't get me wrong, but there's one thing that's wrong with it."
"What?"
"It's not Earth. It's not home. I initially got the idea of searching for another Earth that was even better than the one I was born in. So I de-tuned the Earth portal, tried different tunings, each just a couple of decimal points off. At first I couldn't find any differences at all, until I heard a news broadcast. There was a different president, and he was the guy who was vice president in our world. The guy he replaced had a sudden heart attack. And I got this other idea: people have better lives in some worlds than in others." Max raised his shoulders. "So?"