《ur》(12)

"Wes? What were those other things on the UR FUNCTIONS menu?"

At first Wesley didn't know what the kid was talking about. Then he remembered that there had been a couple of other items. He'd been so fixated on the BOOKS sub-menu that he had forgotten the other two.

"Well, let's see," he said, and turned the Kindle on. Every time he did this, he expected either the EXPERIMENTAL menu or the UR FUNCTIONS menu to be gone - that would also happen in a fantasy story or a Twilight Zone episode - but they were still right there.

"UR NEWS ARCHIVE and UR LOCAL," Robbie said. "Huh. UR LOCAL's under construction. Better watch out, traffic fines double."

"What?"

"Never mind, just goofin witcha. Try the news archive."

Wesley selected it. The screen blanked. After a few moments, a message appeared.

WELCOME TO THE NEWS ARCHIVE!

ONLY THE NEW YORK TIMES IS AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME

YOUR PRICE IS $1.00/4 DOWNLOADS

$10/50 DOWNLOADS

$100/800 DOWNLOADS

SELECT WITH CURSOR YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE BILLED

Wesley looked at Robbie, who shrugged. "I can't tell you what to do, but if my credit card wasn't being billed - in this world, anyway - I'd spend the hundred."

Wesley thought he had a point, although he wondered what the other Wesley (if indeed there was one) was going to think when he opened his next MasterCard bill. He highlighted the $100/800 line and pushed the select button. This time the Paradox Laws didn't come up. Instead, the new message invited him to CHOOSE DATE AND UR. USE APPROPRIATE FIELDS.

"You do it," he said, and pushed the Kindle across the kitchen table to Robbie. This was getting easier to do, and he was glad. An obsession about keeping the Kindle in his own hands was a complication he didn't need, understandable as it was.

Robbie thought for a moment, then typed in January 21, 2009. In the Ur field he selected 1000000. "Ur one million," he said. "Why not?" And pushed the button.

The screen went blank, then produced a message reading ENJOY YOUR SELECTION! A moment later the front page of the New York Times appeared. They bent over the screen, reading silently, until there was a knock at the door.

"That'll be Don," Wesley said. "I'll let him in."

Robbie Henderson didn't reply. He was still transfixed.

"Getting cold out there," Don said as he came in. "And there's a wind knocking all the leaves off the - " He studied Wesley's face. "What? Or should I say, what now?"

"Come and see," Wesley said.

Don went into Wesley's book-lined living room-study, where Robbie remained bent over the Kindle. The kid looked up and turned the screen so Don could see it. There were blank patches where the photos should have gone, each with the message IMAGE UNAVAILABLE, but the headline was big and black: NOW IT'S HER TURN. And below it, the subhead: Hillary Clinton Takes Oath, Assumes Role as 44th President.

"Looks like she made it after all," Wesley said. "At least in Ur 1,000,000."

"And check out who she's replacing," Robbie said, and pointed to the name. It was Albert Arnold Gore.

An hour later, when the doorbell rang, they didn't jump but rather looked around like men startled from a dream. Wesley went downstairs and paid the delivery guy, who had arrived with a loaded pizza from Harry's and a six-pack of Pepsi. They ate at the kitchen table, bent over the Kindle. Wesley put away three slices himself, a personal best, with no awareness of what he was eating.

They didn't use up the eight hundred downloads they had ordered - nowhere near it - but in the next four hours they skimmed enough stories from various Urs to make their heads ache. Wesley felt as though his mind were aching. From the nearly identical looks he saw on the faces of the other two - pale cheeks, avid eyes in bruised sockets, crazed hair - he guessed he wasn't alone. Looking into one alternate reality would have been challenging enough; here were over ten million, and although most appeared to be similar, not one was exactly the same.

The inauguration of the forty-fourth President of the United States was only one example, but a powerful one. They checked it in two dozen different Urs before getting tired and moving on. Fully seventeen front pages on January 21st of 2009 announced Hillary Clinton as the new President. In fourteen of them, Bill Richardson of New Mexico was her vice president. In two, it was Joe Biden. In one it was a Senator none of them had heard of: Linwood Speck of New Jersey.

"He always says no when someone else wins the top spot," Don said.

"Who always says no?" Robbie asked. "Obama?"

"Yeah. He always gets asked, and he always says no."

"It's in character," Wesley said. "And while events change, character never seems to."

"You can't say that for sure," Don said. "We have a miniscule sample compared to the...the..." He laughed feebly. "You know, the whole thing. All the worlds of Ur."

Barack Obama had been elected in six Urs. Mitt Romney had been elected once, with John McCain as his running mate. He had run against Obama, who had been tapped after Hillary was killed in a motorcade accident late in the campaign.

They saw not a single mention of Sarah Palin. Wesley wasn't surprised. He thought that if they stumbled on her, it would be more by luck than by probability, and not just because Mitt Romney showed up more often as the Republican nominee than John McCain did. Palin had always been an outsider, a longshot, the one nobody expected.