"How much do you drink?"
"Hardly at all. Occasionally when I"m with -- "
"What?"
"Rhonda must be in on this."
"Are you still hanging out with her? She"s bad news. Her family owned Tranquil"s only brothel about eighty years ago, and --"
"No ancient history lessons, please," Julia said.
"Well it wasn"t ancient to my grandfather, who -!"
"All right, pax, pax! Sorry for using that word. So how did you get in here?"
"That"s the gray section, towards the end."
Julia flipped through and tried to read them. "This is worse than "Finnegans Wake"."
"You don"t know the half of it. But as I was reading that, I got blipped to Wildwood Park."
"Blipped?"
"Pinged. You know, there one second, gone the next. Zap! All the way from Arizona to Wisconsin!"
"That"s what "blipped" is. OK, so what were you doing in Wildwood Park?"
"Hard to say. I was reading this over, trying to remember all the math I knew ten years ago, thinking about how I used to come up with ideas for cla.s.s while I walked Roosevelt, about how we used to walk through Wildwood Park on Sundays, how I used to sit on that bench across from the swings, and next thing you know, I"m sitting on that bench looking at the swings!"
"So, you"re saying that if I went through these pages and thought of, say, Nova Scotia, you would have blipped there instead?"
"Sort of. It"s a set of equations that tells you how to travel anywhere instantly. It took a few more tries to get it to work again, but in the last few minutes I"ve been over half the globe."
Julia closed her eyes so Uncle Justin wouldn"t see her roll them.
He tapped her on the arm, and when she opened her eyes, he handed her a brochure in French.
"From the Louvre," he said.
"I thought they"d be closed by now," she muttered.
"They are," Justin replied.
"You realize the damage this will do the economy," she said, flinging her hands in the air in mock exasperation. "No more gasoline, cars, airlines --"
"I don"t need sarcasm right now, Jule," Justin said. "I need some help. Now."
"So," Julia sighed, "my choices are: either accept the possibility that you may have done the impossible, or ostracize you like a kook along with the rest of humanity despite the evidence of my senses.
Right?"
"I think," Justin said, "you"ve finally figured out how the world works."
22. The Plan "If life doesn"t offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one."
-- Anthony J. D"Angelo
Denny walked into the interrogation room to find Neoldner and Kurt giggling inside a cloud of smoke.
"Oh cripes," Denny muttered.
When they heard Denny in the doorway, they stopped moving, slowly turned toward him, and starting giggling again.
Denny clenched his fists and exhaled slowly. "OK, Neoldner, why don"t you take five?"
Neoldner nodded in agreement and stepped into the hallway, giggling all the way out. Once he had left, Denny gave Kurt a quick stare, and suddenly, Kurt"s giggling stopped.
"Whoa, what did you do?" he asked.
"I had to remove whatever it was you didn"t inhale from your bloodstream," he said. His legs suddenly felt limp, and his steadied himself against the wall. "It takes something out of you to work that precisely." Slowly, he moved toward the other chair and sat down.
"When am I going to learn to do that?" Kurt asked.
"If we had a clipboard, we"d start ASAP, but we"re kind of screwed right now. Forrester"s taken, along with his copy; Justin Nelson has another. We were making more, but our copier ran out of toner."
Kurt pondered this for a moment.
"What kind of organization is this?"
"The shoe-string kind."
"Well, if you can"t get your hands on some toner, how do you expect to take over the frigging world?!"
Denny gave Kurt a dark look.
"Sorry..." Kurt muttered.
"As it happens, we"re not trying to take over the "frigging" world.
We"re trying to create our own."
Kurt guffawed and slapped his knee, and stopped when he noticed that same scowl on Denny"s face.
"OK, so, you"re trying to create your own world..."
Neoldner, stumbling his way past door, and still giggling, shouted: "Planet Wisconsin! Woo-hoo!"
Kurt covered the smile on his face with his hand. Denny sighed, stood, and shut the door.
"Not a new planet, a new world. There"s a lot we can do, now that we"ve figured out the secret. Moving from point A to point B in zero time is just one aspect. Moving from one alphabet to another takes organization."