Other Worlds Than These

“Not in the target world, it isn’t,” said Moshe. “And that’s where it would have to be enforced, nu?”

“It’s not as if I can find a lawyer from that world to represent my interests now.”

“It makes no sense for me to have dissatisfied customers.”

“How do I know you won’t just strand us there?” said Hakira. “It might not even be a world with a breathable atmosphere—a lot of angles are still mostly hydrocarbon gas, with no free oxygen at all.”

“Didn’t I tell you? I go with you. In fact, I have to—I’m the one who brings you through.”

“Brings us? Don’t you just put us in a bender and—”

“Bender!” Moshe laughed. “Those primitive machines? No wonder the near worlds are never found—benders can’t make the fine distinctions that we make. No, I take you through. We go together.”

“What, we all join hands and…you’re serious. Why are you wasting my time with mumbo jumbo like this!”

“If it’s mumbo jumbo, then we’ll all hold hands and nothing will happen, and you’ll get your money back. Right?” Moshe spread his hands. “What do you have to lose!”

“It feels like a scam.”

“Then leave. You came to me, remember?”

“Because you got that group of Zionists through.”

“Exactly my point,” said Moshe. “I took them through. I came back, they didn’t—because they were absolutely satisfied. They’re in a world where Israel was never conquered by the surrounding Arab states so Jews still have their own Hebrew-speaking state. The same world, I might add, where Japan is still populated by self- governing Japanese.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch. Except that we use a different mechanism that is not approved by the government and so we have to do it under the table.”

“But why does the other world allow it?” asked Hakira. “Why do they let you bring people in?”

“This is a rescue,” said Moshe. “They bring you in as refugees from an unbearable reality. They bring you home. The government of Israel in that reality, as a matter of policy, declares that Jews have a right to return—even Jews from a different angle. And the government of Japan recently decided to offer the same privilege to you.”

“It’s still so hard to believe that anyone found a populated world that has Japanese at all.”

“Well, isn’t it obvious?” said Moshe. “Nobody found that world.”

“What do you mean?”

“That world found us.”

Hakira thought about it for a moment. “That’s why they don’t use benders, they have their own technology for reslanting from angle to angle.”

“Exactly right, except for your use of the word ‘they.’”

And now Hakira understood. “Not they. You. You’re not from this world. You’re one of them.”

“When we discovered your tragic world, I was sent to bring Jews home to Israel. And when we realized that the Japanese suffered a similar tragic loss, the decision was made to extend the offer to you. Hakira, bring your people home.”

2024—Angle ?

“I told them I didn’t want to see you.”

“I know.”

“I was sitting there playing cards and suddenly I’m almost killed!”

“It never happened that way before. The chair usually just…slid. Or sometimes floated.”

“It was smashed to bits! I had a concussion, it’s taken ten stitches, I’ll have this scar on my face for the rest of my life!”

“But I didn’t do it, I didn’t know it would happen that way. How could I? There were no wires, you know that. You saw.”

“Nossa. Yes. I saw. But it’s not a ghost.”

“I never said it was. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“What, then?”

“I don’t know. Everything else I think of sounds like fantasy. But then, telephones and satellite tv and movies and submarines once sounded like fantasy to anyone who thought of such ideas. And in this case, there’ve been stories of ghosts and hauntings and poltergeists since…since the beginning of time, I imagine. Only they’re rare. So rare that they don’t often happen to scientists.”

“In the history of the world, real scientists are rarer than poltergeists.”

“And if such things did happen to a scientist, how many of them might have done as you urged me to do—ignore it. Pretend it was a hallucination. Move to another place where such things don’t happen. And the scientists who refuse to blind their eyes to the evidence before them—what happens to them? I’ll tell you what happens, because I’ve found seven of them in the past two hundred years—which isn’t a lot, but these are the ones who published what happened to them. And in every case, they were immediately discredited as scientists. No one listened to them any more. Their careers were over. The ones who taught lost tenure at their universities. Three of them were committed to mental institutions. And not once did anyone else seriously investigate their claims. Except, of course, the people who are already considered to be completely bobo, the paranormalists, the regular batch of fakers and hucksters.”

“And the same thing will happen to you.”

“No. Because I have you as a witness.”

“What kind of witness am I? I was hit in the head. Do you understand? I was in the hospital, delirious, concussive, and I have the scar on my face to prove it. No one will believe me either. Some will even wonder if you didn’t beat me into agreeing to testify for you!”

“Ah, Leonard. God help me, but you’re right.”

“Call an exorcist.”

“I’m a scientist! I don’t want it to go away! I want to understand it!”

“So, Beto, scientist, explain it to me. If it isn’t a ghost to be exorcised, what is it?”

“A parallel world. No, listen, listen to me! Maybe in the empty spaces between atoms, or even the empty spaces within atoms, there are other atoms we can’t detect most of the time. An infinite number of them, some very close to ours, some very far. And suppose that when you enclose a space, and somebody in one of those infinite parallel universes encloses the same space, it can cause just the slightest bit of material overlap.”

“You mean there’s something magic about boxes? Come on.”

“You asked for possibilities! But if the landforms are similar, then the places where towns are built would be similar, too. The confluence of rivers. Harbors. Good farmland. People in many universes would be building towns in the same places. Houses. All it takes is one room that overlaps, and suddenly you get echoes between worlds. You get a single chair that exists in both worlds at once.”

“What, somebody in our world goes and buys a chair and somebody in the other world happens to go and buy the same one on the same day?”

“No. I moved into the house, that chair was already there. Haunted houses are always old, aren’t they? Old furniture. It’s been there long enough, undisturbed, for the chair to have spilled a little and exist in both worlds. So…you take the chair and put it on top of the door, and the people in the other world come home and find the chair has been moved—maybe they even saw it move—and he’s fed up, he’s furious, he smashes the chair.”

“Ludicrous.”

“Well, something happened, and you have the scar to prove it.”