“The professor?”
Studs pointed with the Glock nine to the other corner of the treehouse. The far corner. I was surprised to see an old man, sitting on the brown sofa next to the potted palm. He was wearing a grey cardigan over blue coveralls. “Where’d he come from?” I asked.
“He comes and goes as he pleases,” said Studs. “It’s his Universe.”
Universe? Suddenly it all came perfectly clear; or almost clear. “Dr. Radio Dgjerm?”
“Rah-dio,” the old man corrected. He looked tiny but his voice sounded neither small nor far away.
“Mother took in boarders after dad died,” Studs explained. “One day I showed Dr. Dgjerm the old treehouse, and when he saw the TV he got all excited. Especially when he turned it on and saw that it still worked. He bought the cell phones and set up the system.”
“It doesn’t really work,” I said. “There’s no picture.”
“All those old black and white shows are off the air,” said Studs. “Dr. Dgjerm had bigger things in mind than I Love Lucy anyway. Like creating a new Universe.”
“Is that what’s swelling up the inside of the treehouse?” I asked.
Studs nodded. “And incidentally, helping my career.” His medals clinked as his chest expanded. “You’re looking at the Employee of the Year, two years in a row.”
“You already told me that,” I said. I looked at the old man on the sofa. “Is he real small, or far away?”
“Both,” said Studs. “He’s in another Universe, and it’s not a very big universe.”
“Not big yet!” said Dr. Dgjerm. His voice sounded neither tiny nor far away. It boomed in my ear; I found out later, from Wu, that even a small Universe can act as a sort of resonator or echo chamber. Like a shower.
“My Universe is small now, but it’s getting bigger,” Dr. Dgjerm went on. “It’s a leisure Universe, created entirely out of Connective Time that your Universe will never miss. In another year or so, it will attain critical mass and be big enough to survive on its own. Then I will disconnect the timelines, cast loose, and bid you all farewell!”
“We don’t have another year,” I said. “I have to unplug the TV now.” I explained about the Butterfly Effect and the hurricanes. I even explained about my upcoming wedding in Huntsville. (I left out the part about my Honeymoon, which was supposed to be going on right now, as we spoke, just three doors down and a half a floor up!)
“Congratulations,” said Dgjerm in his rich Lifthatvanian accent. “But I’m afraid I can’t allow you to unplug the D6. There are more than a few hurricanes and weddings at stake. We’re talking about an entire new Universe here. Shoot him, Arthur.”
Studs raised the Glock nine until it was pointed it directly at my face. His hand was alarmingly steady.
“I don’t want to shoot you, Irv,” he said apologetically. “But I owe him. He made me Employee of the Year two years in a row.”
“You also took a sacred oath!” I said. “Remember? You can’t shoot another Ditmas Playboy!” This wasn’t just a last-ditch ploy to save my life. It was true. It was one of our by-laws; one of only two, in fact.
“That was a long time ago,” said Studs, looking confused.
“Time doesn’t matter to oaths,” I said. (I have no idea if this is true or not. I just made it up on the spot.)
“Shoot him!” said Dr. Dgjerm.
“There’s another way out of this,” said a voice behind us.
7.
“A more civilized way.”
Studs and I both turned and looked at the TV. There was a familiar (to me, at least; Studs had never met him) face in grainy black and white, wearing some sort of jungle cap.
“Wu!” I said. “Where’d you come from?”
“Real time Internet feed,” he said. “Video conferencing software. My cosmonaut friend patched me in on a rogue cable channel from a digital switching satellite. Piece of cake, once we triangulated the location through the phone signals. Although cellular video can be squirrelly. Lots of frequency bounce.”
“This is a treehouse? It’s as big as a gymnasium!” exclaimed an oddly accented voice.
“Shut up, Dmitri. We’ve got a situation here. Hand me the gun, Blitz.”
“You can see out of a TV?” I asked, amazed.
“Only a little,” Wu said. “Pixel inversion piggybacked on the remote locational electron smear. It’s like a reverse mortgage. Feeds on the electronic equity, so to speak, so we have to get on with it. Hand me the gun, Studs. The Glock nine.”
Studs was immobile, torn between conflicting loyalties. “How can I hand a gun to a guy on TV?” he whined.
“You could set it on top of the cabinet,” I suggested.
“Don’t do it, Arthur!” Dr. Dgjerm broke in. “Give the gun to me. Now!” Studs was saved. The doctor had given him an order he could obey. He tossed the Glock nine across the treehouse. It got smaller and smaller and went slower and slower, until, to my surprise, Dr. Dgjerm caught it. He checked the clip and laid the gun across his tiny, or distant, or both, lap.
“We can settle this without gunplay,” said Wu.
“Wilson Wu,” said Dr. Dgjerm. “So we meet again!”
“Again?” I whispered, surprised. I shouldn’t have been.
“I was Dr. Dgjerm’s graduate assistant at Bay Ridge Realty College in the late seventies,” explained Wu. “Right before he won the Nobel Prize for Real Estate.”
“Which was then stolen from me!” said Dr. Dgjerm.
“The prize was later revoked by the King of Sweden,” explained Wu, “when Dr. Dgjerm was indicted for trying to create an illegal Universe out of unused vacation time. Unfairly, I thought, even though technically the Time did belong to the companies.”
“The charges were dropped,” said Dgjerm. “But try telling that to the King of Sweden.”
Studs fingered the Nobel Prize medallion. “It’s not real?”
“Of course it’s real!” said Dgjerm. “When you clink it, it clinks. It has mass. That’s why I refused to give it back.”
“Your scheme would never have worked, anyway, Dr. Dgjerm,” said Wu. “I did the numbers. There’s not enough unused vacation time to inflate a Universe; not anymore.”
You always were my best student, Wu,” said Dgjerm. You are right, as usual. But as you can see, I came up with a better source of Time than puny pilfered corporate vacation days.” He waved his hand around at the sofa, the potted palm. “Connective Time! There’s more than enough to go around. All I needed was a way to make a hole in the fabric of space-time big enough to slip it through. And I found it!”
“The D6,” said Wu.
“Exactly. I had heard of the legendary lost D6, of course, but I thought it was a myth. Imagine my surprise and delight when I found it in my own backyard, so to speak! With Arthur’s help, it was a simple bandwidth problem, sluicing the Connective Time by phone from La Guardia, where it would never be missed, through the D6’s gauge boson rectifier twist, and into—my own Universe!”
“But it’s just a sofa and a plant,” I said. “Why do you want to live there?”
“Does the word ‘immortality’ mean anything to you?” Dgjerm asked scornfully. “It’s true that my Leisure Universe is small. That’s okay; the world is not yet ready for vacationing in another Universe, anyway. But real estate is nothing if not a waiting game. It will get bigger. And while I am waiting, I age at a very slow rate. Life in a universe made entirely of Connective Time is as close to immortality as we mortals can come.”
“Brilliant,” said Wu. “If you would only use your genius for science instead of gain, you could win another Nobel Prize.”