Chapter 7
Verse
Sarah woke up Saturday morning to the rattle of her windows and the fizz of snow driving against the glass. The wind howled. It made her hunker down under her duvet. Her dad’s cheerful whistling, the sizzling of bacon, and the sweet smell of pancakes summoned her, but she wasn’t yet ready to poke her nose out of the covers. Finally, the thought of the mystery she had to solve made her scoot out of bed and dash for the shower.
The sluice of warm water made her forget about the wind and the snow outside. She couldn’t wait to meet up with Matt again and investigate his discs. Everything she’d witnessed so far told her that Dr. Barnes was involved in something very unusual and, by the looks of Nadine, maybe even sinister. She let the water splash over her as she thought about Dr. Barnes in the midst of what looked like the Atlantis catastrophe. The panic in his eyes—it had seemed so real. Maybe he really was in some ancient past. And maybe, just as Matt suspected and feared, he was dead now. She hoped not.
She slipped out of the shower and dried herself absentmindedly. The wind screamed outside. She shivered, but she wasn’t really cold anymore.
Sarah drifted to the kitchen, her mind still far away. Her father placed a steaming plate of pancakes in front of her.
“I see you’re wide awake,” he said.
“Hmm,” she nodded, sawing off a piece of pancake. She popped it into her mouth.
“It tastes better with syrup, you know.”
“Hmm,” she said, gnawing on the next slice.
He snapped his fingers in front of her face as he sat down with his own plate. “Are you sleeping, or are you just somewhere else?”
“What? Oh, I was just thinking.”
“Deeply, by the looks of it.”
Sarah smiled and bit another piece. “Oh! Is this ever gross.” She grimaced.
Her dad couldn’t help but laugh. “Like I said, syrup would help.” He handed her the bottle. She smothered her pancakes with the thick golden liquid.
“Now that’s the Sarah I know. What’s on your mind, dear, that you forgot all about your sugar fix?”
“Oh, just things. Can I go over to Matt’s?”
“If it’s okay with Nadine.”
“Matt said Nadine was working today. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if I kept him company.”
Her father gazed out the window, lines developing on his forehead. “That boy seems to be alone an awful lot.”
“Yeah,” said Sarah. “But not anymore. He’s got a friend.”
“Yes, he does, doesn’t he?” He turned back to her with a buoyant smile. “Well, it’s okay with me, as long as you check in for lunch. Bring Matt along, if you like.”
“Great,” said Sarah as she stuffed the last bite into her mouth. “Gotta go.” She leaped up from the table.
“What about some bacon?”
“No room,” said Sarah, launching towards the closet. She grabbed her parka and boots.
Her dad followed her, munching on a slice of bacon. “Might I just say something first?”
“Sure.”
“I know you’re getting involved in some sort of mystery, but keep the spy stuff to a minimum, please. Nothing dangerous or illegal, okay?”
“I’m an angel, you know that.” Sarah winked.
He pursed his lips and leaned over. “Don’t fly too high, if you get my drift.”
“Oh Dad, you’re so sixties.” She turned and ran out into the blinding snow.
“I’m not that old,” he yelled after her and shut the door.
Sarah covered the block in seconds and tramped through the thick snow to Matt’s house, shaking her head at the drift-covered driveway that rarely saw a shovel. As she approached the door, the shutters flapped against the brick; the windows rattled so ferociously she was sure a poltergeist inhabited the old mansion.
Ignoring the slithery feeling the house gave her, she climbed the porch steps and rang the bell. No light lit up in the quiet house. No curtain was thrust aside. She rang again. Not a peep, except for the eerie rattling and clapping of the shutters. She knocked. Nothing. With clenched fists she gave in to her frustration. She started pounding.
The blinds on the upper level were tweaked apart. Two jade eyes peered out.
Sarah pounded again. “Come on, Matt.”
A few minutes later the door creaked open. Matt’s pale face poked out of the doorway. His hair was spiked up on one side and crushed flat on the other. He stepped aside and gestured with a sweep of his hand for her to enter.
“You know,” she said, “if I didn’t know you already, you’d scare the heck out of me.”
“Why?” asked Matt, yawning.
“Because you really do look like a corpse in the morning.”
He grinned as he scratched his scalp, raising more porcupine quills in the tangled mass. “What time is it, anyway.”
“I don’t know. Nine or ten.” She swept in, carrying a swirl of snow with her. “Were you going to sleep the day away?”
“I usually do,” said Matt.
Sarah shrugged out of her coat. She heaved it at him while she took off her boots. Matt caught the coat, looked at it oddly, and tossed it to the floor beside his.
Sarah wrinkled her nose. “You really are a slob, you know.”
“Uh huh,” said Matt. “Your point is?”
“Never mind. Is Nadine home?”
Matt walked into the kitchen. He glanced at the empty coffee cup in the sink. “No, she must already be gone. I think she’d rather be anywhere than here with me.”
Sarah shook her head. “How can you live this way?”
“Oh, I’ve survived. Self-reliance and all that rot. Come on. I’ll get dressed while you boot up the computer. We have work to do.”
Sarah followed him upstairs. Halfway down the hall, she peeked into Nadine’s immaculate bedroom, just to be sure the woman was gone, and . . . because it drew her eyes. The bed was satin-smooth, not a fiber out of place, and adorned with a lacy violet bedspread. A dark mahogany headboard and matching armoire added a touch of the macabre. But what troubled Sarah the most was how clean it was. There wasn’t a stray blouse or bra anywhere, not even a speck of lint on the creamy carpet. Nadine’s makeup and perfume were assembled on a vanity in neat colour-coded rows. She turned back to Matt’s room. It was hard to believe it was the same house. She had to wade through the clothes to get to his desk, which was made of cheap clapboard. As she tossed aside faded jeans and ratty sweatshirts, she began to see an evil stepmother comparison.
“Doesn’t she ever buy you anything new?” asked Sarah.
Matt grunted. “No. I just get hand-me-downs from a friend of hers. Even the cell phone and my computer are her cast-offs.”
“Why? She can afford it, can’t she?”
“Of course she can. She’s rich because of Dad’s videos. Everything she owns is new. But that doesn’t mean I should get any of the money. I owe her instead, ’cause Dad left her with a spoiled brat to look after while he gallivanted around the world.”
Sarah touched his shoulder. He shrugged her hand off. “It’s okay. I’ve learned to live with it. I used to think she cared a little. Whenever someone interviewed her about a new discovery Dad had made, she would hold hands with me and tell everyone what a wonderful kid I was. But as soon as the cameraman walked away, she’d drop my hand, shoo me into the house and forget about me again. When I made her a drawing or a present at school, she’d smile, pat my head, and I’d find it in the trash a day later.”
“Oh, Matt. How awful. But she must have looked after you as a baby.”
Matt snorted. “Right. She had nannies look after me when I was younger. And those ladies actually showed me what a parent might be like. But as soon they started snooping or asking where Dr. Barnes was, she fired them.” He wrenched open a drawer, and yanked out a clean pair of faded jeans and a hockey sweatshirt.
Sarah didn’t know what to say. How could anyone be so mean?
??
?Let’s not talk about it anymore. We have better things to do than talk about Nadine.” Matt grinned and winked, as if he’d dismissed her from his mind. Without a second thought, he pulled off his pajama top. When he reached for his bottoms, Sarah flushed and turned away.
“Matt,” she admonished.
“What?” he said.
“You really like to shock people.”
“So?”
“So, you don’t have to shock me. I’m your friend, so don’t try to drive me away.”
“I’m not,” said Matt. “I just don’t see what all the fuss is about. Are you blushing? I mean I’m not that cute.”
Sarah giggled. “You’re crazy.” She heard him zip up his jeans. She flicked on the computer, then turned back to him, relieved to find him fully dressed. “I’m surprised you weren’t trying to work on this last night.”
“Too risky,” said Matt. “If Nadine had walked in, all that work we did would have been for nothing.”
“I guess you’re right,” said Sarah. “Funny thing. I didn’t really look at it as work.”
Matt smiled. “Neither did I.” He sat down in the swivel chair and motioned for her to sit beside him.
Sarah sat. She noticed the strange book again, perched on the corner of his desk. “Matt, I have to ask. Why do you have a book about the First Nations? You don’t seem to care about anything in history class except catching up on your sleep.”
Matt sighed, shook his head, and swivelled towards her on the chair. “You’re awfully nosey today, aren’t you?”
“But it just doesn’t make sense.”
“It was my dad’s, okay? I found it in the closet in Nadine’s room one day when I was looking for some clue that would tell me where he’d gone, and what had happened to him. I found this book in a box—something she hadn’t gotten around to throwing out. I thought it might have meant something to my dad. Even if it didn’t, it was the only thing I had left of him, you know?”
Sarah nodded. No wonder the book looked like it had been spun through the washing machine and then through the dryer. He’d probably read it over and over, just because his father had thumbed through it, maybe only once. Sarah touched his arm.
“It’s okay,” Matt said. “It’s just a book. Now let’s stop talking about it and start figuring out what dad was up to. Reading that book never helped me find him. But this might.”
He turned back to the computer and logged on.
“Verse?” she asked, when she saw him type his password.
Matt gave her a sidelong glance. “You really are a snoop.”
“Sorry.” She shrank down in her chair.
“Never mind,” said Matt. “I guess I can trust you with this. I’ve trusted you with everything else.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s something I heard in Dad’s videos. He repeated it a few times, but it didn’t fit in with his commentary on the Mayans, or the Romans.”
“Verse,” she said, contemplating. “I wonder if he was referring to poetry.”
The computer played a note that told them it was fully alert. Matt inserted the disc. The screen came alive with equations and computations. Matt studied it. Sarah tilted her head.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Nah,” he said.
He scrolled down through the jumbled mathematics. The equations were endless.
“Is this making any sense to you?”
Sarah shook her head. “It has to have some meaning, but we’re not scientists. How are we supposed to figure it out?”
“There must be something to it,” said Matt. “It’s guarded like a bank vault.”
Sarah stared until her vision blurred, but she got nothing. “It’s not helping. Let’s check something else.”
“Okay. What next?” He looked at her expectantly, his eyebrows hooked upward.
“The Internet.”
“If you say so.” Matt turned back to the computer, clicked on his direct access and engaged the Internet. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“Let’s try some of your equations.”
Matt plugged in the first few. “Pythagorean theorem for distance,” he said. “Einstein’s relativity. The third one here says it equates time with distance and distance with time. I think it means time is relative to speed and distance. Einstein said the faster you go, the slower time passes.”
“But you’d have to go awfully fast to go backward in time. Faster than we can travel.”
“Hmm,” he said noncommittally. He typed out another equation. “Planck’s constant. I think we’re getting into quantum physics.”
“Forget it,” said Sarah. “Let’s look for something less technical.”
“Like what?”
“Time travel.”
Matt squinted at her. “That might give us a list of novels.”
“Try it, okay?”
“Okeedoke.” He entered the subject, then waited. There were four hundred and sixty-six million listings. “Where do you want to start first?”
“Well, I guess we should narrow the search. How about ‘science of time travel?’”
Matt tried again. That reduced it to 1500.
“This one,” said Sarah, pointing to an ABC Science News article.
“Star Trek? Sarah I don’t think—”
“Do it,” she insisted.
Matt complied, his face puckered in doubt. “My dad isn’t into science fiction.”
“No, he’s into science,” said Sarah. As she scanned the article, she felt like she was getting mired in mud. “This is too deep for me. More quantum physics. We haven’t even finished photosynthesis in school.”
“I thought you were smart,” said Matt.
“Hey, I like history. Math too. But advanced science is not my thing.”
“Well, it’s mine,” he said. “I’m not my father’s son for nothing. See this here. It explains the theory that there are multiple universes. Not just one, but many overlapping. So if that’s the case, for real, then maybe different times can be happening at the same time as ours. Get it?”
Sarah scrunched her nose. “Different times along with our time?”
“Yeah. You see the other earths are all the same earth, only in different universes. So similar things are happening but not always at the same time as our present. So you could step from one time to another, only in a different universe that looks, acts, and smells the same. We’re in a multiverse.”
A light bulb snapped on in Sarah’s head. “Verse, Matt. That’s where you got your password.”
Matt blinked. “You’re right. Multiverse. It is the word Dad mentioned. It must be the key.” He studied the article again. “It’s all theory, though. But this is interesting. They say that the closest universes will have almost identical histories. Maybe an atom or a photon that’s different. A photon is a small particle of light,” he added, probably because Sarah couldn’t keep the confused look from her face. “But the ones farther away will have different pasts—like maybe we lost World War II, or 9/11 didn’t happen. And there’s supposed to be this quantum foam between the universes, like tiny wormholes. If you can tap into it, enlarge a wormhole with some sort of negative energy, you could slip from one to the other”
“Huh?” said Sarah. “What is negative energy?”
Matt scratched his head. “Well, they say here that all ordinary matter has positive energy. But exotic matter with negative energy can be made by squeezing energy out of a vacuum created in a tiny gap between two metal plates. Just like what we saw in the lab. So when you bring these two plates close together, photons of long wavelengths can’t exist between the plates, so it excludes some of this energy from the system. And as they get closer, a force takes over and pulls the plates together. That means the energy density between the plates has to be negative.”
“Right,” said Sarah rolling her eyes. “I totally understand.”
“Just think of it this way. That machine must tap into this quantu
m foam with negative energy and then creates a wormhole that might be large enough for a human being to pass through.”
“So you think your dad turned on the tap?”
“I’d say he broke the dam. Imagine if he’s discovered time travel. It sure seems like he’s travelled to the past, with all his videos from strange and ancient-looking places, but why hasn’t he come home?”
“Maybe the experiment turned sour. Maybe somehow he became trapped.” Sarah crushed her cheek on her hand. “So now we know how. Sort of. The question is how do we help your dad?”
“Assuming he’s still alive,” said Matt, his mouth tightening.
“It just doesn’t make sense. If this machine could transport him into another time through a wormhole, it should be able to transport him back. But he just seems to jump to different times and different places.”
“This is hopeless,” said Matt. “We finally found the answer to one puzzle, but we have dozens more to solve.”
Sarah slipped her hand onto Matt’s shoulder. This time he didn’t shrug it off. “It’s a start, Matt. We have an idea of what happened to him now. If we work together, maybe we can get him back.”
“Where do we go next, though?”
“Where your dad went. The lab, of course.”
“So how do we get into the lab, with eagle-eye Nadine always perched there?”
“At night,” said Sarah. “When she’s tucked away in bed dreaming of my dad.”
Matt grinned. “She’s quite interested in him, isn’t she?”
“As long as the feeling’s not mutual,” Sarah snapped. “God forbid that I end up with her for an evil stepmother, too.”
They both laughed. “So when should we carry out our secret mission?” asked Matt.
Sarah tapped her lips. This was going to be tricky. “I don’t know. Dad has bed-check every night. He was kind of suspicious of our vanishing act yesterday. We’ll have to wait a few days just to lull him into complacency.”
“Lull him into what?”
“We’ll get him to relax. Hopefully the Prime Minister will spring some delicious scandal and keep him busy up on Parliament Hill.”
“Where did you learn to talk?”
“My dad’s a politician,” said Sarah. “Where do you think? And I read a lot. You should try it more often.” She glanced at the book beside the computer, but she didn’t get any response from Matt other than a grin.
“I’d rather fight Zargocian the Sphinx in Battle of the Planets.”
Sarah sneered. “See, that’s what I mean. At least you’re up on science or you’d be a brainless twit.”
“At least I’m not a nerd, like my dad. Look where it got him.”
“He’s probably had more excitement than any of us will ever have,” said Sarah. “Nerds are often geniuses and either make a lot of money or,” she smiled, “travel through time.”
“And die,” said Matt, his grin disappearing.
“And live,” said Sarah.
The wind howled outside as if to emphasize her words. Both of them shivered, but their eyes were sparkling.