《ur》(10)

Henderson tried to ask questions as they crossed the mediocre quad. Wesley shook them off, but he was glad Robbie Henderson had come back, and glad that the terrified part of his mind had taken the initiative and spoken up. He felt better about the Kindle - safer - than he had since discovering the hidden menus. In a fantasy story, Robbie Henderson would see nothing and the protagonist would decide he was going insane. Or had already gone. Reality seemed to be different. His reality, at least, Wesley Smith's Ur.

I actually want it to be a delusion. Because if it is, and if with this young man's help I can recognize it as such, I'm sure I can avoid going mad. And I refuse to go mad.

"You're muttering sir," Robbie said. "Wes, I mean."

"Sorry."

"You're scaring me a little."

"I'm also scaring me a little."

Don Allman was in the office, wearing headphones, correcting papers, and singing about Jeremiah the bullfrog in a voice that went beyond the borders of merely bad and into the unexplored country of the execrable. He shut off his iPod when he saw Wesley.

"I thought you had class."

"Canceled it. This is Robert Henderson, one of my American Lit students."

"Robbie," Henderson said, extending his hand.

"Hello, Robbie. I'm Don Allman. One of the Allman Brothers. I play a mean tuba."

Robbie laughed politely and shook Don Allman's hand. Until that moment, Wesley had planned on asking Don to leave, thinking one witness to his mental collapse would be enough. But maybe this was that rare case where the more really was the merrier.

"Need some privacy?" Don asked.

"No," Wesley said. "Stay. I want to show you guys something. And if you see nothing and I see something, I'll be delighted to check into Central State Psychiatric." He opened his briefcase.

"Whoa!" Robbie exclaimed. "A pink Kindle! Sweet! I've never seen one of those before!"

"Now I'm going to show you something else that you've never seen before," Wesley said. "At least, I think I am."

He plugged in the Kindle and turned it on.

What convinced Don Allman was the Collected Works of William Shakespeare from Ur 17,000. After downloading it at Don's request - because in this particular Ur, Shakespeare had died in 1620 instead of 1616 - the three men discovered two new plays. One was titled Two Ladies of Hampshire, a comedy that seemed to have been written soon after Julius Caesar. The other was a tragedy called A Black Fellow in London, written in 1619. Wesley opened this one and then (with some reluctance) handed Don the Kindle.

Don Allman was ordinarily a ruddy-cheeked guy who smiled a lot, but as he paged through Acts I and II of A Black Fellow in London, he lost both his smile and his color. After twenty minutes, during which Wesley and Robbie sat watching him silently, he pushed the Kindle back to Wesley. He did it with the tips of his fingers, as if he really didn't want to touch it at all.

"So?" Wesley asked. "What's the verdict?"

"It could be an imitation," Don said, "but of course there have always been scholars who claimed that Shakespeare's plays weren't written by Shakespeare. There are supporters of Christopher Marlowe...Francis Bacon...even the Earl of Darby..."

"Yeah, and James Frey wrote Macbeth," Wesley said. "What do you think?"

"I think this could be authentic Willie," Don said. He sounded on the verge of tears. Or laughter. Maybe both. "I think it's far too elaborate to be a joke. And if it's a hoax, I have no idea how it works." He reached a finger to the Kindle, touched it lightly, then pulled it away. "I'd have to study both plays closely, with reference works at hand, to be more definite, but...it's got his lilt."

Robbie Henderson, it turned out, had read almost all of John D. MacDonald's mystery and suspense novels. In the Ur 2,171,753 listing of MacDonald's works, he found seventeen novels in what was called "the Dave Higgins series." All the titles had colors in them.

"That part's right," Robbie said, "but the titles are all wrong. And John D's series character was named Travis McGee, not Dave Higgins."

Wesley downloaded one called The Blue Lament, hitting his credit card with another $4.50 charge, and pushed the Kindle over to Robbie once the book had been downloaded to the ever-growing library that was Wesley's Kindle. While Robbie read, at first from the beginning and then skipping around, Don went down to the main office and brought back three coffees. Before settling in behind his desk, he hung the little-used CONFERENCE IN PROGRESS DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door.

Robbie looked up, nearly as pale as Don had been after dipping into the never-written Shakespeare play about the African prince who is brought to London in chains.

"This is a lot like a Travis McGee novel called Pale Gray for Guilt," he said. "Only Travis McGee lives in Fort Lauderdale, and this guy Higgins lives in Sarasota. McGee has a friend named Meyer - a guy - and Higgins has a friend named Sarah..." He bent over the Kindle for a moment. "Sarah Mayer." He looked at Wesley, his eyes showing too much white around the irises. "Jesus Christ, and there's ten million of these...these other worlds?"

"Ten million, four hundred thousand and some, according to the UR BOOKS menu," Wesley said. "I think exploring even one author fully would take more years than you have left in your life, Robbie."