“I’ll be right back.” Nathan hurried toward a series of thick ropes that sagged between metal support poles. After stepping over one of the ropes, he bent low, straining to see something shiny on the floor, crumpled foil wrappers. “More Kisses?”
“Kisses?” Clara walked closer, leading Francesca by the hand.
He picked up two pieces of foil and showed them to her. “Wrappings from Hershey Kisses were stuffed under the door.”
“So?”
Tucking the mirror under his arm again, he turned the doorknob. The door suddenly jerked open, and Kelly and Daryl burst through. Spinning around, Kelly grabbed the knob and closed it gently. “Whew!” she said in a hoarse whisper. “That was close!”
“How long have you two been waiting there?”
“Just a minute or so, this go ’round.” She pointed at a watch on Daryl’s wrist. “We timed the guard’s circuit. When he came by to check this door, we ducked into a janitor’s closet. When he left, we knelt here and stuffed a couple of candy wrappers through the crack.”
“How’d you know I’d find them and figure out it was you?”
“We went by the bathroom where we left your mirror and violin. The wrappers and your stuff were gone, so —”
“No more time for chitchat,” Clara said as she led Francesca toward the computer desks. “You can compare notes later.”
Nathan followed, gesturing for Daryl and Kelly to come along. “Clara, this is Daryl, a friend of ours. She’s a computer genius, so she should be a big help.”
“Nice to meet you, Daryl.” After sliding into a desk chair, Clara scanned the laptop. “Let’s see if we can figure this thing out.”
Daryl pointed at a control icon on the screen. “That one says, Dome Mirror Magnitude. Sounds pretty harmless.”
“Let’s try it.” Clara clicked a mouse pad button and slid her finger down the surface. The pinpoints of light on the ceiling faded away. Seconds later, an aerial image appeared, all five of them looking up at the dome.
“It really is a mirror,” Kelly said, tilting her head upward. “That explains why Nathan’s parents looked upside down on the ceiling.”
Clara’s eyes moved all around as if checking the reflection for flaws. “The tour guide told us the entire ceiling is a curved mirror. I suppose it’s similar to the one on Nathan’s wall back in Iowa. They both seem able to show scenes that aren’t reflected images.”
Daryl sat in front of one of the other laptops. “I’ll try to figure out if this station does anything.”
Setting his mirror on the desk, Nathan leaned close to Clara’s computer. A three-dimensional rendering of the room’s telescope filled most of the display area. “Which control did you use to switch to mirror mode?”
Clara pointed at the slider bar widget on the screen. “I dragged it all the way down to the bottom.”
“Let’s turn it back on for a minute.” Nathan moved the slider to near the top. The ceiling faded to purple, a darker purple than before, and the pinpoints reappeared. He set his fingers on the keyboard. “I’ll bet we can adjust the telescope’s position by changing the coordinates in those three text boxes.” He entered new numbers, changing each by a single unit. The telescope in the middle of the room hummed and shifted slightly, as did the entire dome above, moving the opening in the ceiling to match the telescope’s new direction. As if in concert, the stars on the ceiling shifted as well.
Clara aimed her gaze at the ceiling again. “I’ll wager that the mirror’s showing what the telescope sees. It’s just the evening sky.”
Kelly pointed upward. “So that mirror isn’t a dimensional window?”
A tapping noise turned everyone toward Daryl as she clicked her fingernail on the other computer’s desk. “I think the key to the dimensions is on this laptop.”
Nathan scooted over and tried to make sense of what he saw on the screen. “How do you know? It looks pretty complicated.”
“This laptop is Dr. Gordon’s. I remember it from the seminar.” Daryl set her finger over a screen icon. “Look. Three windows labeled Earth Red, Earth Blue, and Earth Yellow. Earth Red is highlighted, so I’m guessing the mirror is showing the stars in the Earth Red dimension.”
She glided the mouse pointer across the screen. A line connected Earth Red and Earth Blue, and when Daryl let the mouse hover over the line, a message popped up saying, “Network Active.”
Nathan let out a low whistle. “A multidimensional computer network!”
The three windows had captions underneath that showed the date and time for each dimension. Nathan glanced at his watch. Earth Red’s time matched his, so that settled which dimension was theirs. Earth Yellow showed December of 1978, and Earth Blue showed September of this year; five days in the future.
Kelly slid in between Nathan and Daryl, crossing her arms as she studied the screen. “How can they know the date and time in the other dimensions?”
“Sun, moon, and star positions.” Daryl looked up at the ceiling. “If they can precisely monitor the heavens in each dimension, they can know exactly what time it is there.”
Nathan bent closer. “Watch how the seconds change on Earth Blue. Sometimes they go slow, and sometimes they go fast. And on Earth Yellow, they’re going a lot faster. What’s up with that?”
“Like I told you before,” Daryl explained, “the dimensions are in parallel, but they aren’t anchored to each other in time. It’s sort of like three boats on a river that catch different cur-rents. Sometimes one will go faster than the other, then it might slow down again.”
Kelly leaned in. “It looks like Earth Yellow is trying to catch up with the others.”
Daryl set her finger on the mouse pad. “Let’s switch it and see what happens. I want to get a look at the future.” She clicked on the Earth Blue icon. Less than a second later, the mirror flickered, and the stars shifted slightly.
“That didn’t do much,” Nathan said, backing away from the desk as he looked up. “But I guess we shouldn’t expect it to. It’s only five days, and it’s about the same time of night.”
Daryl squinted at the screen. “Here’s a selector in the corner that’s set to ‘Optical Telescope.’ The other option is ‘Radio Telescope.’”
Clara flicked her thumb behind her. “Interfinity has a hookup to a radio telescope about ten miles away. That selector probably allows them to control it from here.”
“Let’s check it out.” Daryl clicked on the radio telescope option. The mirror on the ceiling flashed, and the starry canopy changed to a frenzied jumble of tiny multicolored shapes — polygons, ribbons, ovals, and indistinct globules — each one morphing from one shape to another. “Looks like I hit the jackpot.”
Nathan and Kelly stared upward. It was mesmerizing, almost hypnotic.
Daryl leaned back in her chair to get a look. “It’s probably a computer rendering of the radio noise from space. Some programmer translated it into a visual array.”
Shaking her head, Clara turned to Nathan. “But what good is it? It looks like a chimpanzee’s finger painting.”
“Maybe all the information is there,” Nathan offered. “It just has to be decoded.”
Francesca tugged on Nathan’s shirt. “Aren’t the sounds amazing?”
Lowering himself to a crouch, Nathan gazed into her eyes. “What sounds are you talking about?”
“Can’t you hear them? It’s like every shape up there is singing a note, but they aren’t in harmony.”
Nathan looked at Daryl. “Is there a volume control?”
“Maybe this is it.” As Daryl adjusted a slider bar, thousands of dissonant musical notes poured from speakers embedded somewhere in the walls.
Nathan covered his ears. “It’s like the worst orchestra in the world. Every musician’s on a different page, and Clara’s chimp is conducting.”
“I hear a melody” Francesca said. “It’s all mixed up inside the noise, but I hear it.”
“Do you recognize it?”
; Francesca shook her head. “But I think I could play it.”
Nathan looked at her eyes. Her pupils reflected the cacophony of colors up above, just as his mother’s eyes had done. He hustled over to his case, flipped it open, and handed her his violin. As she settled it under her chin and curled her fingers around the neck, her brow furrowed. “Yours is bigger than mine, but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Just do your best, sweetheart,” Clara said. “I’m sure it will be fine.”
She hovered the bow just above the strings, her eyes closed as she concentrated. Then, setting the bow hairs lightly on the A string, she played a long, quiet note, moving her fingers along the string to adjust the sound. She then shifted to the E string and did the same. Blinking for a second, she said, “This is hard. The melody is fast and intertwined with the noise.”
“Maybe the violin’s too big after all,” Nathan said.
“That’s not the problem. I love how it sounds. It’s way better than my own.”
Nathan’s throat tightened as her words rebounded in his mind. Better than her own. That was her own violin, or at least it would be in a different dimension. He patted her gently on the back. “Just keep trying.”
Francesca continued playing notes, sometimes several in succession that kept to a reasonably melodic scheme. As the minutes ticked by, her connected phrases lengthened, creating several measures that began to prod Nathan’s memory. “That’s starting to sound like something familiar, but it’s a little off.”
“I missed some of the notes.” She set the bow on the strings again. “This should be how it goes.”
The notes sang out, now blending together beautifully Nathan stared at the colors on the ceiling as she played and whispered to himself, “It’s Dvořák, from the New World Symphony.”
The shapes broke apart and seemed to bleed their pigments into each other, creating new forms, indistinct and miscolored — humanoids with knobby blue hands and spaghetti-thin green torsos. As they blended, Francesca’s eyes brightened with the same white light that shone from the eyes of her adult namesake, yet not quite as brilliant and without the expanding beams.
He touched Francesca’s shoulder. “Can you play it louder?”
She moved away from him and, dipping her head and arms, began stroking her instrument with passion. Her fingers danced along the neck like charmed ballerinas, while her bow flew back and forth in a hypnotic sway. Heavenly music filled the room, rising like angelic prayers to the mirrored roof. Her eyes began to blaze. The colors sharpened, as if called to order by the musician’s bow. The shapes molded into real human forms, two men standing in some kind of dimly lit room.
Nathan let his mouth drop open. He tried to keep an eye on the scene above while, at the same time, watching his mother, in the guise of a youthful prodigy, play her part of this strange New World performance. She was a miniature model of the lovely woman he once knew, now a bright-eyed china doll slowly turning on a music box. But there was something more. She had become a generator of musical energy a pint-sized dynamo who could somehow feed on the sounds of the ages and pour out their vitality in a visible spectrum. Her eyes had become a conduit for her magical gift of perfect interpretation.
Up above, the men in the mirror image sharpened to photo-realistic quality, moving about their scene in apparent real time. Daryl pointed skyward. “That’s Dr. Gordon!”
As if drawn by the music, Clara walked with a swaying rhythm to the center of the room. Nathan joined her, mesmerized by the scene above, an exact copy of their own chamber, yet populated by a different set of characters. Gordon was there, all right, standing next to the telescope in the middle of the room. Mictar stood next to him, looking as pale as ever. They seemed to be talking to each other in the Earth Blue dimension.
Nathan strained his eyes, trying to pick up an important detail, a bandage on Dr. Gordon’s cheek. So there had to be two Dr. Gordons, one on Earth Blue who tried to kill him and Kelly, and one on Earth Red who showed up at the high school.
As the scene continued to brighten, a third person, a woman, came into view in the background. With her hands tied behind her back, she sat in one of the rolling swivel chairs, her head up and her chin firm. Although her dark locks fell haphazardly over her face and across her shoulders, there was no mistaking her identity.
His tongue suddenly dry, Nathan could barely speak. “That’s my mother.”
The figures in the image began to change their shapes, becoming muddled and indistinct. Nathan swung his head toward the younger Francesca. Her bow elbow sagged, and her fingers slowed on the violin’s neck. Although her eyes still flashed like brilliant stars, she seemed worn out, far more fatigued than normal playing would cause. Whatever this amazing display of musical decryption and light emanation was, it obviously took its toll on her.
“Do you want to stop?” he asked.
Francesca shook her head. After taking a breath, she increased her volume again, reaching for a second wind as she whipped her bow across the strings. One of the hairs snapped and flew above her bow like a spider thread caught in a breeze.
The reflection clarified. Mictar’s thin, pale lips moved, but no voice came out. Leaning toward the older Francesca, he set his long fingers around her throat. His voice broke through the chaotic noise. “If you don’t tell me the secret of Quattro, I will feed on your eyes.”
Balling his fists, Nathan spoke through clenched teeth. “Leave her alone!”
Mictar shoved her backwards. She tipped in her chair and, unable to brace herself because of her bonds, toppled over. As she looked up at him, her expression defiant, he pointed a long, skeletonlike finger. “Take her to her room!”
Mictar stalked away in one direction while Dr. Gordon helped their prisoner up and led her in the other. Seconds later, the room in the reflection lay vacant.
“We’ve got to get there!” Nathan yelled.
“But how?” Kelly spun around to Daryl. “Is there a button on the computer that’ll send us?”
As the younger Francesca played on, her chest heaved, and her brow furrowed tightly.
“A flash of light!” Nathan dug into his pocket and yanked out the keys. He aimed the flashlight at the ceiling, but the enormous room swallowed its tiny glow.
Clara hurried toward the wall. “I’ll look for switches.”
“Quick!” Nathan called. “Before Francesca gets too tired!”
Daryl sprinted to the other side of the room. “They have to be around here somewhere.”
While Nathan rushed back to the desk to grab his mirror, Kelly stooped in front of Francesca, speaking a mile a minute. “You can do it! You play like an angel! I wish I had talent like yours. Just hang in there and keep making beautiful music!”
Francesca let out the slightest whimper but played on, her intonation staying true. Nathan rejoined her, breathing heavily. “Just a few more notes! Just a few more!”
“I found the switches!” Daryl called.
Lights blinked on from all around the base of the perimeter. Trumpet-shaped track lights aimed their white beams toward the ceiling. The flashes gathered at the top of the dome, each one splitting into a hundred thin shafts of light that rebounded toward the floor, some piercing Nathan, Kelly, and Francesca, while other shafts surrounded them in a laser-beam cage.
The ceiling reflection slowly filtered toward them, sliding down the laser pathways and along the entire perimeter wall. Within seconds, the scene from the other dimension spread over the trumpetlike fixtures, blocking out their glow. Clara and Daryl faded away along with the failing lights.
Francesca stopped playing. Kelly clutched Nathan’s arm, her nails digging into his skin. Tensing his muscles, he ducked his head, unable to tell if the reflection was descending and enveloping them or if they were rising into its enfolding arms.
Soon, their surroundings clarified. They remained inside the observatory dome, but the telescope was turned in a different direction, only two laptop computers rested on the workst
ation table, and the tour group door stood wide open. The mirror above displayed the starry sky, a darker purple now, with more yellowish-white pinpoints.
Nathan swung his head toward the light switches. Clara and Daryl were nowhere in sight. A motor hummed. He spun back toward the elevator entrance just as the red numeral switched from a two to a one. “He must be taking Mom to a room downstairs. We have to follow him.”
Kelly stepped up near the elevator call button. “Think it’s safe to wait for it to come back?”
“Can’t risk it. It might show up with Dr. Gordon or Mictar in it.”
Pivoting on her heel, she nodded toward the tour door. “We could go that way, but if this dimension is the same as ours, we’d need a code to get into the secure area.”
“I don’t know that code. I just caught the door before it closed.”
Francesca raised her violin bow. “I know the numbers. The guard couldn’t cover the pad with his hand, because he was carrying me.”
“The code might not be the same in this dimension,” Nathan said, “but it’s worth a shot.”
The elevator motor kicked in with a low thud and began humming. The number above the door changed to “two.”
Kelly sucked in a quick breath. “They’re coming back!”
Nathan gave Kelly the mirror, repacked the violin and bow, and took Francesca’s hand. “Come on!”
They raced through the open door and down the carpeted hall. Kelly turned into another corridor, whispering, “This way.” After hustling to the end of the hall, she jerked open a door leading to a stairwell. Once they all filed inside and the door swung closed, Nathan pulled Kelly and Francesca into a corner. “Let’s think for a minute.”
Leaning against a wall, Kelly held a hand against her chest. “Thinking’s good. I think my heart’s kicking my lungs.”