《ur》(9)

But now they could.

They could speak to him.

He threw back the bedclothes. The Kindle was calling him. Not in a human voice, but in an organic one. It sounded like a beating heart, Poe's tell-tale heart, coming from inside his briefcase instead of from under the floorboards, and -

Poe!

Good God, he had never checked Poe!

He had left his briefcase in its accustomed spot beside his favorite chair. He hurried to it, opened it, grabbed the Kindle, and plugged it in (no way he was going to risk running down the battery). He hurried to UR BOOKS, typed in Poe's name, and on his first try found an Ur - 2,555,676 - where Poe had lived until 1875 instead of dying in 1849, at the age of forty. And this version of Poe had written novels! Six of them! Greed filled Wesley's heart (his mostly kind heart) as his eyes raced over the titles.

One was called The House of Shame, or Degradation's Price. Wesley downloaded it - the charge for this one was only $4.95 - and read until dawn. Then he turned off the pink Kindle, put his head in his arms, and slept for two hours at the kitchen table.

He also dreamed. No images; only words. Titles! Endless lines of titles, many of them of undiscovered masterpieces. As many titles as there were stars in the sky.

He got through Tuesday and Wednesday - somehow - but during his Intro to American Lit class on Thursday, lack of sleep and overexcitement caught up with him. Not to mention his increasingly tenuous hold on reality. Halfway through his Mississippi Lecture (which he usually gave with a high degree of cogency) about how Hemingway was downriver from Twain, and almost all of twentieth century American fiction was downriver from Hemingway, he realized he was telling the class that Papa had never written a great story about dogs, but if he had lived, he surely would have.

"Something more nutritious than Marley and Me," he said, and laughed with unnerving good cheer.

He turned from the blackboard and saw twenty-two pairs of eyes looking at him with varying degrees of concern, perplexity, and amusement. He heard a whisper, low, but as clear as the beating of the old man's heart to the ears of Poe's mad narrator: "Smithy's losin' it."

Smithy wasn't, but there could be no doubt that he was in danger of losing it.

I refuse, he thought. I refuse, I refuse. And realized, to his horror, that he was actually muttering this under his breath.

The Henderson kid, who sat in the first row, had heard it. "Mr. Smith?" A hesitation. "Sir? Are you all right?"

"Yes," he said. "No. A touch of the bug, maybe." Poe's gold-bug, he thought, and barely restrained himself from bursting into wild cackles. "Class dismissed. Go on, get out of here."

And, as they scrambled for the door, he had presence of mind enough to add: "Raymond Carver next week! Don't forget! Where I'm Calling From!"

And thought: What else is there by Raymond Carver in the worlds of Ur? Is there one - or a dozen, or a thousand - where he quit smoking, lived to be seventy, and wrote another half a dozen books?

He sat down at his desk, reached for his briefcase with the pink Kindle inside, then pulled his hand back. He reached again, stopped himself again, and moaned. It was like a drug. Or a sexual obsession. Thinking of that made him think of Ellen Silverman, something he hadn't done since discovering the Kindle's hidden menus. For the first time since she'd walked out, Ellen had completely slipped his mind.

Ironic, isn't it? Now I'm reading off the computer, Ellen, and I can't stop.

"I refuse to spend the rest of the day looking into that thing," he said, "and I refuse to go mad. I refuse to look, and I refuse to go mad. To look or go mad. I refuse both. I - "

But the pink Kindle was in his hand! He had taken it out even as he had been denying its power over him! When had he done that? And did he really intend to sit here in this empty classroom, mooning over it?

"Mr. Smith?"

The voice startled him so badly that he dropped the Kindle on his desk. He snatched it up at once and examined it, terrified it might be broken, but it was all right. Thank God.

"I didn't mean to startle you." It was the Henderson kid, standing in the doorway and looking concerned. This didn't surprise Wesley much. If I saw me right now, I'd probably be concerned, too.

"Oh, you didn't startle me," Wesley said. This obvious lie struck him as funny, and he gave voice to a glassy giggle. He clapped his hand over his mouth to hold it in.

"What's wrong?" The Henderson kid took a step inside. "I think it's more than a virus. Man, you look awful. Did you get some bad news, or something?"

Wesley almost told him to mind his business, peddle his papers, put an egg in his shoe and beat it, but then the terrified part of him that had been cowering in the farthest corner of his brain, insisting that the pink Kindle was a prank or the opening gambit of some elaborate con, decided to stop hiding and start acting.

If you really refuse to go mad, you better do something about this, it said. So how about it?

"What's your first name, Mr. Henderson? It's entirely slipped my mind."

The kid smiled. A pleasant smile, but the concern was still in his eyes. "Robert, sir. Robbie."

"Well, Robbie, I'm Wes. And I want to show you something. Either you will see nothing - which means I'm deluded, and very likely suffering a nervous breakdown - or you will see something that completely blows your mind. But not here. Come to my office, would you?"