Other Worlds Than These

quick scan of the shelves revealed no sign of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, and those two things together suggested that in this world, the atomic bomb was never dropped on Japan. The implications of that were potentially vast…but Pete dismissed broader speculations from his mind as another film caught his eye. In this world, Kubrick had lived long enough to complete Artificial Intelligence on his own, and Pete had to see that, without Steven Spielberg’s sentimental touch turning the movie into Pinocchio.

“You only get them for three days,” the clerk said, amused, and Pete blinked at her, feeling like a man in a dream. “You going to have time to watch all those?”

“I’m having a little film festival,” Pete said, and he was—he planned to call in sick to work and watch all these movies, and copy them, if he could; who knew what kind of bizarre copy protection technology existed in this world?

“Well, my boss won’t want to rent twenty movies to a brand new member, you know? Could you maybe cut it down to four or five, to save me the hassle of dealing with him? You live near here, right? So you can always bring them back and rent more when you’re done.”

“Sure,” Pete said. He didn’t like it, but he was afraid she’d insist if he pushed her. He selected four movies— The Magnificent Ambersons, The Death of Superman, I, Robot, and Casablanca—and put the others away. Once he’d rented a few times, maybe she’d let him take ten or twenty movies at once. Pete would have to see how much sick time he had saved up. This was a good time to get a nasty flu and miss a couple of weeks of work.

The clerk scanned the boxes, tapped her keyboard, and told him the total, $12.72. He handed over two fives, two ones, two quarters, a dime, two nickels, and couple of pennies—he’d brought lots of cash this time.

The clerk looked at the money on the counter, then up at him with an expression caught between amusement and wariness. She tapped the bills. “I know you aren’t a counterfeiter, because then you’d at least try to make the fake money look real. What is this, from a game or something? It’s not foreign, because I recognize our presidents, except the guy on, what’s this, a dime?”

Pete suppressed a groan. The money was different, he’d never even thought of that. He began to contemplate the logistics of armed robbery.

“Wait, you’ve got a couple of nickels mixed in with the fake money,” she said, and pulled the two nickels aside. “So that’s only $12.62 you still owe me.”

“I feel really dumb,” Pete said. “Yeah, it’s money from a game I was playing yesterday, I must have picked it up by mistake.” He swept up his bills and coins.

“You’re a weird guy, Pete. I hope you don’t mind me saying.”

Nodding dolefully, he pulled a fistful of change from his pockets. “I guess I am.” He had a lot of nickels, which were real—or close enough—in this world, and he counted them out on the counter, $3.35 worth, enough for one movie. He’d go to the bank tomorrow and change his cash for sacks of nickels, as much as he could carry, and he would rent all these movies, five cents at a time. Sure, he could just snatch all four movies and run now, but then he’d never be able to come back, and there were shelves upon shelves of movies he wanted to see here. For tonight, he’d settle for just The Magnificent Ambersons. “This one,” he said, and she took his nickels, shaking her head in amusement. She passed him a translucent plastic case and pennies in change, odd little octagonal coins.

“I’ll put these away, Mr. Nickels,” she said, taking the other movies he’d brought to the counter. “Enjoy, and let me know what you think of it.”

Pete mumbled some pleasantry as he hurried out the door, disc clutched tight to his chest, and he alternated walking and running back to his apartment. Once inside, he turned on his humming stack of A/V components and opened the tray on the DVD player. He popped open the plastic case and removed the disc—simple, black with the title in silver letters—and put it in the tray. The disc was a little smaller than DVDs in this world, but it seemed to fit okay. The disc spun, hummed, and the display on the DVD flashed a few times before going blank. The television screen read “No disc.” Pete swore and tried loading the disc again, but it didn’t work. He sat in his leather chair and held his head in his hands. Money wasn’t the only thing that was different in that other world. DVD encryption was, too. Even his region-free player, which could play discs from all over the world, couldn’t read this version of The Magnificent Ambersons. The videotapes would be similarly useless—he’d noticed they were different than the tapes he knew from this world, some format that didn’t exist here, smaller than VHS, larger than Betamax.

But all was not lost. Pete went out the door, carrying The Magnificent Ambersons with him, since he couldn’t bear to let it go. He raced back to Impossible Dreams. “Do you rent DVD players?” he gasped, out of breath. “Mine’s broken.”

“We do, Pete,” she said, “but there’s a $300 deposit. You planning to pay that in nickels?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I got some real money from home. Can I see the player?” To hell with being reasonable. He’d snatch the player and run. She had his address, but this wasn’t her world, and in a few more minutes the shop would disappear again. He could come back tomorrow night with a toy gun and steal all the DVDs he could carry, he would bring a suitcase to load them all in, he’d—

She set the DVD player on the counter with the cord curled on top. The electrical plug’s two posts were oddly angled, one perpendicular to the other, and Pete remembered that electrical standards weren’t even the same in Europe as they were in North America, so it was ridiculous to assume his own outlets would be compatible with devices from another universe. He rather doubted he’d be able to find an adapter at the local Radio Shack, and even if he could rig something, the amount of voltage carried in his wires at home could be all wrong, and he might destroy the DVD player, the way some American computers got fried if you plugged them into a European power outlet.

“Never mind,” he said, defeated. He made a desultory show of patting his pockets and said “I forgot my wallet.”

“You okay, Pete?” she asked.

“Sure, I was just really excited about seeing it.” He expected some contemptuous reply, something like “It’s just a movie,” the sort of thing he’d been hearing from friends and relatives his entire life.

Instead she said, “Hey, I get that. Don’t worry, we’ll have it in stock when you get your player fixed. Old Orson isn’t such a hot seller anymore.”

“Sure,” Pete said. He pushed the DVD back across the counter at her.

“Want a refund? You only had it for twenty minutes.”

“Keep it,” Pete said. He hung around outside and watched from across the street as the clerk locked up. About ten minutes past 10:00, he blinked, and the store disappeared in the moment his eyes were closed. He trudged away.

That night, at home, he watched his own DVD of The Magnificent Ambersons, with its butchered continuity, its studio-mandated happy ending, tacked on so as not to depress wartime audiences, and afterward he couldn’t sleep for wondering what might have been.

Pete didn’t think Impossible Dreams was going to reappear, and it was 9:00 before it did. He wondered if the window was closing, if the store would appear later and later each night until it never reappeared at all, gone forever in a week or a day. Pete pushed open the door, a heavy plastic bag in his hand. The clerk leaned on the counter, eating crackers from little plastic packages, the kind that came with soup in a restaurant. “Hi.”

“Mr. Nickels,” she said. “You’re the only customer I get after 9:00 lately.”

“You, ah, said you didn’t have money for dinner lately, and I wanted to apologize for being so much trouble and everything…anyway, I brought some food, if you want some.” He’d debated all day about what to bring. Fast food was out—what if her world didn’t have McDonald’s, what would she make of the packaging? He worried about other things, too—should he avoid beef, in case mad cow disease was rampant in her world? What if bird flu had made chicken into a rare delicacy? What if her culture was exclusively vegetarian? He’d finally settled on vegetarian egg rolls and rice noodles and hot and sour soup. He’d seen Hong Kong action movies in the store, so he knew Chinese culture still existed in her world, at least, and it was a safe bet that the food would