Save the Dragons!. Martin Berman-Gorvine
Are you in boarding school, like me, and must put up with them twenty-four hours a day?
You know, though, this bookstore is the strangest place. Have you met Gloria yet? I have not, though she keeps leaving me notes and mugs of tea. I do like the new colour she painted the door, though. Blue is my favourite. What is yours?
I probably will not be able to get here next weekend at all, since my parents are traveling from Gingo Teag, down south in Nanticoke Colony. They have the entire journey all planned out so my little sister Jodie can see everything in the capital. Would you meet me in Parliament Plaza, under the statue of Sir Andrew Jackson, at five o’clock Tuesday evening, and we could go to the kinetoscope? You should be able to recognise me without any difficulty—I am a tall, skinny bloke and will wear a navy blue down topcoat.
Your humble servant,
Tom Purnell
P.S. What is a cell phone?
I sighed as I put down Tom’s letter and began absently stroking Tiferet’s ears—the cat was curled up in my lap. Parliament Plaza, huh? Not Independence Square. And I noticed all the British spellings and expressions, like “bloke” instead of “guy.” Well, if this was for real, it confirmed what I’d suspected since I first stumbled on Gloria’s Gateway Books—that what I had here was a gateway to parallel worlds.
I knew all about parallel worlds from last year’s AP Physics class with Miss Chen. She’s very popular at my high school; the boys of course drool over her since she’s hot, but everyone loves her for her exciting class lectures. In May, when most people’s thoughts were already on summer vacation, she managed to keep our attention for the quantum mechanics unit by telling us that everything we thought we knew about atoms was wrong.
“You learned something like this, right?” she said, patting a little kid’s mobile of the solar system that dangled from a stand on her desk. A bright orange Jupiter promptly broke off and rolled away and immediately became the object of a game of catch. “That actually helps illustrate my point,” she said cheerfully. “Not knowing what you guys have done with that particle is a good illustration of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You see, what you’ve learned in school until now, this mini-solar system idea, is called the Bohr model of the atom, after the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. But quantum mechanics tells us that subatomic particles are not in fact like little balls,” she added, casually knocking the model over with a swipe of her hand.
“Instead, these particles are sort of miniature dice. You can’t know everything about them at any given time, no matter how good the tools you have to measure them. If you know an electron’s momentum, you can’t know its exact position, only probabilities of where it might be. If you know its position, the momentum is a matter of chance. And so on. Now, my man Al Einstein—he hated this idea. ‘God does not play dice with the universe,’ he said. But for once in his life, he was wrong. God positively loves these things,” she said, producing a large pair of fluorescent green fuzzy dice and tossing them at Tony Bertelli, who started awake. Everyone laughed.
“He built the entire universe with them,” Miss Chen continued, as Tony sheepishly tossed the dice back to her. “Maybe more than one universe. See, there’s this crazy out-there idea that most physicists don’t like, but that nobody has ever been able to disprove, that every time we have this quantum uncertainty about a subatomic particle, all the possibilities come true—only in different universes. The electron may be here, or it may be there,” she said, as Jupiter bounced out from under the front row of desks and rolled to a stop at her feet, “or we may have one universe where it ends up here, and another where it ends up there.”
“But then trillions of new universes would be created every second,” I objected.
“That’s right,” Miss Chen agreed, picking up Jupiter and peeling it with her hot pink fingernails. The giant planet was really a navel orange. “Every possibility you can imagine, and more, is real somewhere. There’s a universe where this is an apple I’m eating. There’s a universe where dinosaurs still walk the Earth. Most incredible of all, there’s a universe where Tony was not out with Gina O’Donnell all night, and has actually not had to sleep through this entire class,” she said, beaning him awake again with a large juicy section of orange.
Then she got into the mathematics. My head still hurts at the memory. At least she made it up to us by having a fun class where we got to make paper from scratch, after we took the AP test, which of course I bombed.
Well, Miss Chen. I may suck at the math, but I’ve got something better than that. Actual proof that the many-worlds theory is true!
So I understood what was going on, sort of, but how was I going to explain it to Tom? Well, I decided to give it a try. I took a piece of notebook paper out of my bookbag, along with an actual fountain pen that was part of a calligraphy set that Nana had given me for Confirmation. I’d never used it before.
I tried to explain what Miss Chen had said, though I knew my explanation wasn’t anywhere near as good as hers. I sounded clumsy and ridiculous. Besides—it occurred to me after I’d already written about Bohr, Einstein, and Werner Heisenberg—what if all these famous scientists aren’t known in Tom’s world? Even the word “physics” might not be used in a world where science was still called “natural philosophy,” as it used to be called two hundred years ago. Part of me wanted to crumple up everything I had written so far and start over from scratch, but my second attempt would probably be even worse than the first, and so I just kept writing—
See, so that’s why I can’t meet you in Parliament Plaza. In my Philadelphia, there is no Parliament Plaza! My city isn’t even the capital of my country, which is the United States of America, not Great Britain or whatever you call your union of America and England. It seems like the only place we can meet is here, in Gloria’s Gateway Books and Records. Here our worlds touch, for some reason. And maybe more than just our two worlds, judging by all the weird books on the shelves.
Next weekend I can’t come because it’s Thanksgiving—if you have that holiday in your world. Well, here it’s a big national holiday that starts on Thursday the 23rd. And I have to go out of town to stay with my father all through the holiday weekend. I won’t get home till Sunday the 26th. (My parents are divorced, and my dad lives outside Washington, DC. Ha, you probably don’t have that city in your world at all!)
So can you please, please come here next Monday evening the 27th at 5:00, after your family goes home? Your midterms should be all over by then, right?
Yours truly,
Teresa
Well, “yours truly” was pretty lame-o compared to “your humble servant,” but it was the best I could do. Though maybe there were one too many “pleases” in that letter. I added a P.S.: Where is Gingo Teag? I never heard of it. Then I folded the letter in half and put it exactly where I had found Tom’s letter, in the same spot on the floor where I had found the loose pages from his journal. I weighed it down with my battered old copies of Madeline L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door and A Swiftly Tilting Planet—the only sequels to A Wrinkle in Time that I’d been able to find in the disaster area of my room, but those are the best ones anyway. As I stood up I knocked a couple of books off the shelves and had to bend over again to pick them up. The books were The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens, and Josef in the Promised Land, by Franz Kafka. (Doesn’t Gloria use alphabetical order? Maybe they have a different alphabet where she comes from.)
I stood up and put Tom’s letter in my bookbag, yelping as the cramps in my thighs turned into pins-and-needles. Maybe I’d been crouching down reading too long. Then I started going through the piles of books I’d moved last time to make the doorway. I silently promised Gloria I’d only take one home this time—Mom would kill me if I lost my replacement phone, and the only other thing of value I’d been able to find that morning was the framed certificate from when I won the spelling bee in third grade. But who cares about spelling? Most kids my age sure don’t, not when their computers can spell anything for them. Still, I must admit I’m a little proud of having spelled “porphyry” right when I was only eight. Maybe the certificate will be okay as payment