Kevin and Larry have come up with a couple of ideas — hot-air balloons and electric fences — that may help the war effort against New Portugal and Canada.  And now things start to change even further for them . . .

Earlier chapters are up there on the menu under “Portal.”

***********************

Chapter 12

Things changed once the meeting with General Aldridge was over.  We all went back to army headquarters, and Lieutenant Carmody and Professor Palmer had a long meeting to figure out what they needed to do.  Kevin and I just hung around in the courtyard, wondering what was going to happen next.

“They wouldn’t just get rid of us now, would they?” Kevin asked.

“No way.  We’re too valuable.”

“Why?  They’ve got what they need from us.”

“But they’ll want more, won’t they?” I pointed out.  “I think we’ll be okay.”

Kevin didn’t look reassured.  Luckily, Peter came along and made us forget about our problems for a while.  “How are your zippers, mates?” he asked us, grinning.

“Don’t have ’em anymore,” I replied.  “It’s hard getting used to these buttons.”

“I bet it is.  The lieutenant is very interested in you lads, you know.”

Peter pronounced the word “loo-tenant.”

“What do you think of Lieutenant Carmody?” Kevin asked.

“Oh, he’s a good enough sort,” Peter replied.  “Plenty ambitious.  I expect he’ll be president one of these days, assuming we still have a president, so you want to stay downwind of him.”

I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I think I got the idea.  The lieutenant and Professor Palmer came out a little while later, looking serious.  “Lots to be done, lads,” Lieutenant Carmody said.  “You’ll stay the night here and return to Cambridge in the morning.  Be sure to remain quiet about where you come from.  No tales of portals and alternate universes and such.  If it comes up, say you were cabin boys on a pirate ship that visited China.  People will believe anything about China.  Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Will we be doing anything to help?” Kevin asked.

“Of course you will,” Professor Palmer replied.  “We just have to get organized first.”  He seemed to understand that we were worried.  “If we actually manage to win this dreadful war, lads,” he pointed out, “you’ll be heroes.”

That was a good thought, although it wasn’t clear how we’d be heroes if we were supposed to keep everything secret.  Anyway, we went back to the hot attic room where we had spent the night before meeting Professor Palmer for the first time, and we waited for the professor and the lieutenant to do their business in the city.  Early the next morning we returned to Cambridge with the professor.  In the barn, the chickens and the pigs were hungry and the cow needed milking, and it almost (but not really) felt like we were coming home.

We took over the cricket fields at Harvard for our work.  Lieutenant Carmody was worried about the Canadians pushing into Cambridge unexpectedly, but here we had the space and the privacy we needed, so he decided to take the risk.  Equipment and people started arriving almost immediately, and the professor spent a lot of time talking with the experts he’d brought in to help.  Most of them started out pretty dubious about the whole thing, but his reputation kept them at it.

The balloons turned out to be the most straightforward thing we attempted.  It was easy enough to start with toy models and then get bigger as people started to understand the idea.  One tricky part was figuring out the right way to control heating the air to make the balloons rise.  That was pretty much a matter of trial and error.  Another problem was creating the big wicker baskets, which involved finding willow trees and reeds in the city.  To obtain the silk for the full-size balloons they held a drive to get all the upper-class ladies in the city to hand over their old dresses, telling them they were for bandages.  The results looked kind of strange, but they worked.

The electricity business was harder.  It was a good thing Kevin had been paying attention when Mrs. DiGenova did the electricity unit in the fifth grade–of course, that was the sort of thing Kevin liked.  I remembered about copper being a good conductor, but I had sure forgotten about zinc in batteries, and I had also forgotten how you could transform the energy in, like, waterfalls or even pedaling bikes into electricity.

Luckily, they found Professor Foster–the guy Professor Palmer thought would be drunk in a ditch somewhere.  I don’t know if he was an alcoholic, but he was really strange.  He was very tall, with frizzy brown hair and the palest skin I’d ever seen.  Someone called him a walking mushroom, and that seemed like a pretty good description.  But the big thing was, he loved electricity.  It seemed to him to be the most wonderful, mysterious thing in creation.  Lieutenant Carmody didn’t want us talking to most of the people who were involved in the projects, but he agreed to let Professor Foster meet with us.

We described batteries to him and he seemed to catch on immediately.  “Yes, yes, an array of capacitors!” he shouted.  “Leyden jars connected in parallel!”

I had no idea what he was talking about.  He brought Professor Palmer, Lieutenant Carmody, Kevin, and me to his laboratory, which was located in a shed behind his house in Cambridge.  It was a dusty place filled with pieces of metal, wires, and bottles of chemicals.  He showed us a jar lined with foil.  At the top of the jar was a ball connected to a shaft.  “Do you see?” he said.  “You use the ball of sulphur to rotate the shaft like so–”

“–and the electrical charge builds up in the foil,” Kevin said.

“Exactly!” Professor Foster exclaimed.  “What a brilliant boy!”  He turned to the lieutenant.  “Would you like to touch the foil?”

Lieutenant Carmody didn’t appear eager to do it, but he reached his hand into the jar and, sure enough, got a shock.

“You see, the current moved from the foil to your hand,” the professor explained.

“I built one of these in my basement,” Kevin said while the lieutenant rubbed his hand.

“Remarkable!  Stupendous!”

“Can we kill people with this?” the lieutenant asked.

That shut everyone up for a minute.

“Lightning kills,” Professor Foster said finally, in a much lower tone.  “We cannot capture the power of lightning.”

“But these boys–”

“All I know about is the electric fence,” I said.  “The electricity runs along the wires and just gives you a shock if you touch it.”  But I really wasn’t so sure about that.  I thought about the electric fence in Jurassic Park and how powerful it was.  Could they do something like that here?

“An electric fence would be a sight better than Aldridge’s foolish mounds of earth and pointed sticks,” Professor Palmer pointed out to the lieutenant.

“It all depends on the charge we can build up, store in the battery–what an evocative name!–then transmit along the wire,” Professor Foster said.  He absently turned the shaft in the jar.  “Copper and zinc,” he muttered, “copper and zinc . . . There are practical difficulties, I suppose.”

“We have six weeks,” the lieutenant said.  “Eight at the outside.  Any longer than that, and your work will be useless.”

This seemed to fluster him completely.  “Oh, my.  I don’t see how . . . well, perhaps . . . ”

The lieutenant looked at Professor Palmer.

“I will work with Bartholomew,” the professor said.  “If it can be done, we will do it.”

Lieutenant Carmody nodded, satisfied.  “Let’s get started, then.”

Professor Palmer explained to us about his friend later, when we were back home for the night.  “Electricity has never been taken seriously, I fear.  I have seen those jars used as an entertainment at parties–young ladies think it quite daring to put their hands inside and receive a shock.  So Bartholomew’s interest in electricity has always seemed bizarre, almost amusing, to most people.  To have it become part of the effort to win the war–well, it’s a bit much for him to take in.”

He set up the chess board to play Kevin.  I sat down at the piano and started playing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”.

“Do you think we we’ll be able to win the war?” Kevin asked.

“I’m not a soldier, thank God,” the professor replied.  “I have no idea what it will take to win militarily.  But I do know that we cannot win if we lack the will–if we believe the cause is hopeless and victory impossible.  That is the current situation, thanks to our president’s ineptitude.  Right now it is just a matter of counting out the days to our defeat and hoping it will be as painless as possible.  But defeat is never entirely painless.  Speaking of defeat, I would be paying particular attention to your rook, if I were you.”

“But that could be changing, right?” Kevin asked.  “I mean, the attitude.”

“Let us hope so.  Let us hope.”

#

“Larry, do you notice how we’re saying ‘we’ now?” Kevin asked me that night in our room.

“Huh?”

“When we talk about this place–about New England.  Used to be we’d say, ‘Are you going to win?’  Now it’s, ‘Are we going to win?'”

I thought about that.  “You’re right,” I said.  “We’re part of it now.”

“Not that I’m not thinking about home, you know?” he went on.  “It’s just–we’re here.  This is it.”

“When the war is over,” I said, “all we have to do is go back to Glanbury and find the portal.”

“Yeah.  If we survive.  If we’re not, like, sold into slavery or something.”

“We’ll survive.  We’ll win.  We’ll get back there.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Home.  I realized I hadn’t been thinking about it as much lately.  My fights with Cassie, my annoyance with Matthew and Mom and Stinky Glover . . . all that stuff was starting to seem kind of far away now.  We had a war to win.  And in the meantime, I was getting used to going to the privy, to lighting candles and oil lamps, to living without TV, even to eating watery porridge and salt pork.

Home.

I fell asleep on my lumpy mattress, and my dreams were strange and confused.

#

After a few weeks General Aldridge came to Cambridge to check on our progress.  The hot-air balloons were going well.  We had a small prototype that was tethered to the cricket field by a fifty-foot rope.  It looked kind of goofy, stitched together out of all those different-colored dresses, but it worked.  The general peered up at it as it floated above him.  “People can fly in that contraption?” he asked.

“After a fashion,” Lieutenant Carmody replied.

The general laughed.  “If that doesn’t scare the Portuguese, nothing will.”

As Lieutenant Carmody had expected, we had been less successful with the stuff we were trying to do with gunpowder.  Nobody had a solution for the moisture problem, least of all Kevin and me.  General Aldridge talked with the munitions guys, and then said, “No sense wasting time.  Pack up and return to your units.”

Then there was electricity.  Professor Foster had moved his equipment from his shed to a larger building near the cricket fields.  He was so excited to be explaining his work that he was practically bouncing off the walls.  “The electrical fluid moves along the wire,” he said, showing the apparatus he had set up.  “The side that gains fluid acquires a vitreous charge.  The side that loses fluid acquires a resinous charge.  According to my calculations, the force between the charge varies inversely as the square of the distance.  So it follows that–”

“Touch the wire,” Lieutenant Carmody said.

General Aldridge looked at him.  “What?”

“Touch the wire, sir,” the lieutenant repeated.

The general hesitated, then reached out and grabbed the wire.  “Drat, that smarts!” he shouted, jumping back and glaring at the lieutenant.

Professor Foster clapped his hands in glee.  “You see?” he said.  “You see?  A fundamental force of the universe, under our control.  Isn’t it marvelous?”

That started a barrage of questions from the general.  How much electricity could you store?  How far would it travel along the wire?  What happened if the wire broke?  Professor Foster answered as well as he could.

“That’s good,” General Aldridge said finally.  “That’s very good.  Lieutenant, we need to talk about deployment.”

“Yes, sir.”

We all walked out of the building.  I was pretty happy.  Professor Foster looked like he was about to levitate with joy.

Outside, a soldier in a fancy red-and-gold uniform was waiting on a large black horse.  He was wearing a big hat with an even bigger white plume on top.  When he saw us he dismounted, stuck the hat under his left arm, and saluted the general.  “Message, sir,” he said.  “The honor of a reply is requested.”

General Aldridge didn’t look happy.  Neither did the lieutenant.  The soldier took a letter out of his pocket and handed it to the general.  He broke the seal, opened it, and studied it for a moment before handing it back.  “All right,” he muttered.

The soldier hesitated.  “Is that your answer, sir?”

“Of course it is, you dimwit,” the general exploded.  “Now begone!”

The soldier hastily got back onto his horse and rode off.

“Er, bad news?” Professor Foster asked.

General Aldridge glared at him for a moment, and then shrugged.  “Depends on one’s point of view, I suppose,” he said.  “My presence is required at Coolidge Palace.”

“Well, uh, that doesn’t sound–”

“Gardner knows,” Professor Palmer said.

General Aldridge nodded.  “Yes, apparently he knows.”

“But surely he can’t complain about–”

“You’re invited as well,” the general said.  “And the boys.  He knows about the boys.  He wants all work stopped until he’s met them.”  He looked at us.  “You’re in luck, lads,” he said.  “You’re about to meet His Excellency, the President of the United States of New England.”

Well, we’re about a quarter of the way through.  The story so far: Larry and his friend Kevin, who live in a suburb south of Boston, have stumbled through some kind of portal into a parallel universe.  Here, there is no “America”; instead they have landed in a  “United States of New England” that’s fighting a war with Canada and New Portugal.  They make their way to Boston, which is preparing for a siege, and no one is optimistic about winning the war.  Kevin shows his multi-function watch to some soldiers, and this eventually brings the boys to the attention of New England’s military commander, General Gardner and his aide, Lieutenant Carmody.  They are (somewhat) convinced that the Kevin and Larry are from another world, but they can’t figure out how the boys can help the war effort.  So they send the boys off to live with Professor Palmer in Cambridge, hoping that he can come up with some ideas.  And that brings us to . . .

Chapter 10

“My housekeeper left to join her daughter’s family in Boston,” Professor Palmer explained, “but I’m used to fending for myself.  Kindly have a seat.”

The kitchen was large and sunny, with a big open fireplace along the inside wall.  We sat in a couple of straight-backed wooden chairs in a corner and watched him putter for a while in silence.  When he was done, we helped him bring the food into the dining room, which was small and dark and kind of stuffy.  We ate cold roast chicken, and it was just about the best chicken I’d ever tasted.  I was beginning to get the idea that food here was either terrible or delicious.  Like the soldiers in the mess hall, he ate with his knife.  His fork only had two prongs, and he used it just to hold down the meat while he cut it.  Weird.

“Before long, meals like this will be but a memory,” the professor said.  “We must enjoy them while we can.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied.  “It’s very good.”

“Yes.  Well.”  He paused, then fell silent and looked down at his plate.  He seemed to be having difficulty starting up a conversation with us.

“Do you believe us?” Kevin asked.

He looked up and blinked rapidly.  “You know, I want very much to believe you,” he replied.  “Knowledge is so hard to come by.  In many ways we have learned little–and forgotten much–since the ancient Greeks.  The idea that somewhere, somehow, another turn was taken, and so much more has been discovered and accomplished–it is deeply exciting.  But then, there is still Occam’s razor.”

“We’re telling the truth,” I said.  “We’re not smart enough to make up all this stuff.”

The professor nodded.  “That is actually the most powerful argument in your favor.  Your theory, though–that we live our lives countless times, in countless different worlds–simply doesn’t feel real.  It is the stuff of fantastical late-night conversations in college common rooms, after too many glasses of port.  Lieutenant Carmody wants weapons.  I want to understand what is real.”

“We don’t drink port,” I pointed out.  I had no idea what port was.

That got him to laugh.  “Let us begin, then,” he said.  “Remove these plates, and I’ll find some paper.”

We cleared the table while the professor got some of that odd-looking yellowish paper that the lieutenant had used, and one of those strange, long pencils.  And we started telling our story once again.

It didn’t go all that well.  Professor Palmer took a lot of notes and asked a lot of questions, but we had the same problem we had before.  Like the lieutenant said, we knew things, but we didn’t understand them.  And the professor was mostly interested in the portal and how that worked and what it meant to philosophy and religion and stuff, and there we couldn’t help him at all.  After a while he began to look unhappy and distracted, like he was getting tired of listening to us.

Finally we took a break, and he showed us his house and where we’d be sleeping.  For a famous professor, his house wasn’t all that big–I think people in this world were used to a lot less space than in ours.  Across from the dining room was a small room he called the “parlor,” which was mostly filled up with a piano.  That reminded me again of the piano lesson I had missed, which wasn’t good.  Next to the parlor was a tiny study crammed with books.  There was a narrow staircase leading to the second floor, which had one good-sized bedroom and one small one.  We were bringing up sheets and blankets to the small bedroom when we noticed a couple of paintings in the hall–one was of a little boy in short pants, the other of a black-haired woman with a sad smile sitting in a chair and holding a fan.  Kevin asked the professor who they were.  He looked like he didn’t want to answer, and then he said softly, “My wife and son.”

“Where are they?” Kevin asked.  “Are they–?”

He shrugged.  “They died many years ago.”

“How did they die?”

I thought that was kind of a pushy question.  The professor again didn’t seem to want to talk about it, but he said, “In an outbreak of the smallpox.”  He gazed at the painting of the child.  “It occurred shortly after Seth’s portrait was completed.”

“Smallpox?” Kevin said.  “I’m pretty sure that’s totally cured in our world.”

The professor turned and glared at Kevin.  “Do not trifle with me, boy!” he shot back angrily.

Kevin retreated a step.  I think he was afraid the professor was going to hit him.  “I didn’t mean to–” he said.  “I mean, I’m sorry, if you don’t want to talk about it . . . ”

“How was it cured?” he demanded.  “Or is that something else you don’t understand?”

“I’m pretty sure they came up with, you know, a vaccine.”

“No, I don’t know.  What is a ‘vaccine’?” he demanded.

This time Kevin had an explanation.  “It’s like when you give someone a tiny bit of a disease, with a shot or something.  Not enough to make them sick, but it gives them immunity when they come in contact with the disease for real.”

“What do you mean, ‘immunity’?”

“You know, when you don’t get a disease, because your body has built up a resistance to the germs.”

The professor shook his head, still not getting it.  “And what are ‘germs’?” he asked.

Kevin looked at me like, Can you believe this?  “They’re tiny, um, organisms that can make you sick,” he said.  “Different kinds of germs give you different illnesses.  They’re really small–you can only see them with a powerful microscope.  Do you have microscopes in this world?”

Professor Palmer continued to stare at Kevin.  Then I noticed that his dark eyes were filled with tears.  “So many people have died of smallpox,” he said.  “And you tell me they could have been saved?”

“We’ve cured a lot of diseases,” Kevin said.

“What about . . . drikana?”

Kevin looked at me.  I shook my head.  The name was kind of familiar, but I couldn’t place it.  “Never heard of it,” I said.

“Me neither.”

“No matter, I suppose,” the professor said softly.  “No matter.”

But that conversation did matter.  It seemed to change the way Professor Palmer acted toward us.  He never really said that he believed us instead of Occam’s razor or whatever, but it was just more or less assumed.  It was more than that, though–before, it had been like what we were telling him was just a puzzle he was trying to figure out.  Now, it was different.  Now, it was sort of personal.  We weren’t going to bring his wife and son back, but maybe we really could help.

#

After supper we all sat in the parlor and talked more about his world.  Professor Palmer was eager to give us his opinions about it.  He seemed a little lonely, with the college closed and the town deserted and nobody to lecture to, and we were the best audience he was going to get.

“This war need never have happened,” he said, “except that those purblind fools in Boston were certain it wouldn’t happen.  They assumed the Canadians and Portuguese hated each other more than they hated us, and would never be able to unite against us no matter how much we provoked them.  Perhaps fifty years ago that was true.  But times have changed.  They realized that they needn’t be friends to be allies, and we were in no position to defend ourselves on two fronts.  So they attacked, and we have been fighting for our lives ever since.”

I remembered the newspaper we’d read and the soldiers’ talk.  “Why hasn’t England helped?” I asked.

“Because we asked too late.  And because England has more than enough problems of its own fighting the Franco-Prussian alliance.  And there continue to be those who never wanted us to become independent of England, and would be happy to see us fail.”

“Sir,” Kevin said, “would you mind–we still don’t understand what’s going on here.  We know about Canada, but what happened to America–you know, what we call this place?  And in our world, the Spanish came here first from Europe.  Portugal didn’t have a whole lot to do with the New World, that I remember.  We think something must have changed way back in your history, to make things end up so different.”

The professor nodded.  “All right.  The theory makes sense.  Let’s see if we can find out.”

It didn’t take that long.  You wouldn’t have to have paid much attention in history class to figure out what the difference was, once you started looking for it.

In this world, Christopher Columbus didn’t discover America.  Professor Palmer had never heard of the guy.

What we learned in school was that the Portuguese, under Prince Henry the Navigator, wanted to find a trade route to India, so they explored south along the coast of Africa, until they rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed north through the Indian Ocean.  They weren’t interested in sailing west across the Atlantic, maybe because they knew more about geography than Columbus and realized they’d have to travel a whole lot further than he thought to reach India.

So in our world Columbus went off and sold Spain on his idea, and that’s why Spain reached the New World first, why it became a huge empire, at least for a while, why Balboa discovered the Pacific and Cortez conquered Mexico and all that stuff.  And America got named almost by accident when a mapmaker decided a guy named Amerigo Vespucci deserved some credit for his explorations.

That was us.

In Professor Palmer’s world, the Portuguese did sail west and discover the New World.  It wasn’t even Columbus’s idea; he never entered the picture.  It was Portugal, not Spain, that got all the silver and gold.  It was Portugal that became the big empire, with Spain just another loser country in Europe.

France still explored and settled what would become Canada, and England colonized the eastern part of “America.”  But the British colonies never expanded the way they did in our world.  They stayed along the Atlantic coast, hemmed in by the Portuguese, the Canadians, and the Indians.  And that’s the way it stayed.

Professor Palmer showed us a map that night.  New England was a lot bigger than it was in our world–it looked like it included New York and Pennsylvania–but New Portugal was huge; it extended all the way from, like, Virginia, west to what’s Texas in our world, then south through Mexico and into South America.  Canada was big, too, stretching down into the Midwest.  On the map New England looked like this little stone stuck between two huge boulders.

How could it avoid getting crushed?

Well, things weren’t always quite as bad as they looked on the map.  New Portugal was too big, too spread out to be much of a nation.  It was more like a bunch of half-independent states, usually at war with each other.  And Canada had mostly been friendly with New England and an enemy of New Portugal.

But right now England was busy fighting a war against France and Prussia (which was sort of like our Germany), so it couldn’t do much to help with the defense of its former colony.  Canada and New Portugal saw this as an opportunity to carve up the little nation between them.  New England had been trying to extend its borders by skirmishing with both countries, and that gave them the reason they needed to invade.

It all seemed so strange, so different, as we talked about it.  There had been no American Revolution, no Civil War.  New England had stayed part of the British Empire until 1925.  Slavery ended there when it ended in the rest of the Empire, in the 1830’s, although it still existed on a small scale in some areas of New Portugal.  The whole western part of the continent remained largely unexplored and was inhabited mostly by Indians (who were called by their tribal names, because no one ever thought they came from India).

Some people were just as famous in this world as they were in ours–Beethoven, for example.  But many either hadn’t existed or, if they did, never became well-known.  Shakespeare had died young and was remembered for just a couple of poems.  Mozart, Van Gogh, Mark Twain–who were they?  Professor Palmer had never heard of them, and lots of others we mentioned.

And where were all the inventions, the medicines, the discoveries?  Why was this world, like, two hundred years behind ours?

The answer became obvious to Professor Palmer as we talked.  “You told me this afternoon that you had never heard of drikana,” he said.  “That may explain a great deal.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“A horrible disease–worse even than smallpox or consumption.  A person afflicted with drikana has uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea.  It is as if everything in his body is trying to escape as quickly as possible.  Most people die within two days of the disease’s onset.  It is also highly contagious.  If it shows up in a city, it will kill a third of the inhabitants in a month.”

Kevin and I looked at each other.  I remembered where I’d heard the word before.  “A soldier asked us about drikana when we were coming into Boston,” I recalled.

Professor Palmer nodded.  “They need to be vigilant to keep the disease from entering.  An outbreak would be devastating, with the city so crowded with refugees.”

“Drikana sounds kind of like Ebola,” Kevin said.  “That’s a deadly virus from Africa.”

“And what is a ‘virus’?” the professor asked.

Kevin tried his best to explain.  “Kind of like germs, I think, only it’s harder to come up with medicines for a virus.  I think.”

“There is no cure for drikana,” the professor noted.  “Early settlers in the New World were the first to come down with it.  ‘Drikana’ was the name of a native tribe near the site of the first outbreak.  Unfortunately the survivors returned to Portugal and brought the disease with them.  It devastated Europe, and five hundred years later it still devastates us.  For a few years it seems to lie dormant, until people begin to hope that it is finally gone–but always there is a new outbreak, just as devastating as the last.

“Surely that accounts for the difference between our worlds,” he went on.  “How many geniuses has the disease claimed before they could make their discoveries?   How much time and effort have we spent in dealing with it that we could have spent in the search for knowledge?”  He looked pained again, as he had when talking about the death of his wife and son.  “And how many lives have we wasted fighting useless wars like this one?” he murmured.

“Well, it’s not like there are no wars in our world,” Kevin pointed out.  And we talked about the Civil War and the World Wars and Iraq, the concentration camps and the A-bomb and chemical weapons.  I don’t think it made the professor feel much better.

“Knowledge doesn’t bring wisdom, certainly,” he said.  “No reason to assume otherwise.  More advanced weapons just allow you to kill each other more efficiently.  Still, a world without drikana, with smallpox cured . . .  I daresay most people would make the exchange.”

I know I would have.

“Well,” he said, “this is the world we have, and we must make the best of it.  Time for bed.  Tomorrow we will set to work again.”

We went up to our room, and for the first time in this world we had clean sheets and soft pillows.  The mattresses were lumpy and, of course, we still had to pee in a pot or go outside to what the professor called the “privy.”  But we weren’t complaining.

“Drikana,” Kevin whispered in the darkness, as if trying out the disease’s name.

“Drikana,” I repeated, lying on my bed and staring up at the ceiling.

“Some little germ somewhere, can’t even see it, and it wipes out half the world, sets progress back centuries.”

“Do you think we’ll get it?” I asked.

“Maybe the worst danger in this world isn’t the Portuguese or the Canadians,” he replied, not quite answering my question.

“Have you ever been in the hospital?”

“Just to the emergency room once,” he said, “when I broke my thumb.”

“I don’t even know if they have hospitals here.”

“If they do, doesn’t sound like they’d be much use.”

I fell silent, thinking about how safe I’d always felt at home.  My mom was crazy about safety, but even if she weren’t, there were doctors and ambulances and firemen and policemen around . . .  Bad things happened, sure, but they had never happened to me.   And it had never really occurred to me that they could happen to me, maybe just because Mom was always so worried.  With her protecting me, what could go wrong?

Drikana.

Kevin was silent.  I listened to my heart beating in the quiet room.  I have to rely on myself now, I thought.  I had to grow up.  There just wasn’t any choice.  No use feeling sorry for myself; no use thinking about the past and my home and family and what I could have done to not get into this mess.  No use hoping they’d find the portal and find this world and magically save me.  A germ or a virus or whatever could kill me tomorrow, but I couldn’t worry about that.  I could only do my best, and try to stay alive.

Thanks to Kevin’s multi-function watch, he and Larry get to meet with General Aldridge, the head of the New England forces in Boston.  He and Lieutenant Carmody decide to send them off to Professor Palmer in Cambridge to see what he can learn from them.  They’re making progress!  But they’re no closer to making their way home . . .

The fabulous first eight chapters of the novel are up there under “Portal” in the menu.  What could be more convenient?

*******************

Chapter 9

Peter, Lieutenant Carmody’s driver, came for us the next morning, just as we were waking up.  He was a big man with long, bushy sideburns and a large mustache.  “The Lieutenant would like for you to come to his quarters,” he explained.  He talked slowly, as if he wasn’t sure we could understand him.

We followed him down a couple of floors and along a short corridor, until we reached a door with Lieutenant Carmody’s name on it.  Peter rapped on the door and opened it without waiting for an answer.  We all went in.

The lieutenant’s room was large, with a bed, a desk, and a comfortable-looking chair, in which he was sitting.  There was a rug on the floor and curtains on the window.  On the desk was a vase with a single flower in it.  The place looked pretty homey after where we’d slept the last two nights.

The lieutenant got up from the chair and greeted us.  Like yesterday, his uniform was crisp and clean.  He wrinkled his nose when he got a whiff of us.  “Peter, I believe we’ll have to get these lads washed,” he said.  “Then let’s have them put on their new clothes.”  He pointed to the bed, where a couple of outfits were laid out–dark pants, shapeless shirts, and clunky shoes.  They weren’t much to look at, but that was okay by me; it would be good not to have people staring at us anymore.  “Bring their clothes back here, Peter,” he went on.  “I’ll hold on to them.  Lads, I’ll meet you in the mess.”

“Yes, sir,” Peter said.  “Grab the clothes, lads, and follow me.”

We went downstairs and out a back door, into an enclosed area next to the stables.  Laundry hung on lines, and there were buckets filled with water sitting on wood stoves that were tended by an enormous woman with sweat pouring off her.  Next to the stoves were tables with towels and big blocks of yellow soap on them.  A few soldiers were standing at the tables and pouring water over themselves.

“Grab a bucket, lads, and go to it,” Peter said.  And to the woman he said,  “Bessy, we need to get these lads cleaned up.”  I was a little embarrassed about taking my clothes off in front of the woman, but there was nothing to be done about it.  Anyway, it felt good to wash.  “Hand those clothes over when you’re ready,” he ordered us.

We did as we were told.  Peter was intrigued by our boxers–it turned out that only rich people wore underwear here–but he was totally fascinated by the zippers on our pants.  We showed him how they worked, and he couldn’t stop zipping and unzipping.  “How the devil does it do that?” he asked.

It was something else we couldn’t exactly explain.

My new shirt didn’t fit very well.  The pants were itchy, especially with nothing on underneath them.  The shoes were incredibly heavy compared to my sneakers.  “You look terrible,” Kevin said.

“So do you.”

But at least we were reasonably clean.

Peter brought us to the mess, where Lieutenant Carmody had breakfast waiting for us–porridge and tea again, but also scrambled eggs, which tasted great.  The lieutenant nodded his approval at our outfits.  “You look like you’re just off the farm.  And you smell much better.  Now finish up.  We have to get you over to Cambridge.”

After we were done, he hurried us out to the courtyard, where Peter was waiting with the carriage.  The three of us got in, and we rattled off over the cobblestones.  The streets were filled with horses and carriages and big wagons and those strange-looking bicycles, not to mention a hog or two and some nasty dogs.  Lieutenant Carmody tapped his fingers impatiently as we made our way through the noise and the traffic.  “You’d think it was life as usual in the city,” he said.  “More refugees adding to the confusion, I suppose.  It’ll be midday before we get to Harvard.”

“We have Harvard in our world,” I said.  “My father went there.”

Lieutenant Carmody gave me a look, as if he still wasn’t ready to believe this stuff about parallel universes. “What does your father do?” he asked.

“He’s a computer programmer.”

“And what is that?”

“Well, he writes software programs that, um, make computers work.”

The lieutenant shook his head.  “Software?” he asked.  “Programs?”

I tried, but I couldn’t make sense of it for him; finally he waved me silent in frustration and turned away to stare out the window at the traffic.

Finally we reached a river.  I guessed it was the Charles River, which separates Boston from Cambridge, but it didn’t look anything like the Charles in our world, which always seemed pretty peaceful and calm when we drove by, with joggers and rollerbladers whizzing around its banks, and lots of little sailboats out on the water.  This version of the Charles didn’t have much in the way of banks, with trees and bushes up to its edge, and only a couple of rowboats making their way towards the other shore.  The bridge we crossed was small and rickety, and I got a little scared that if the horse became excited he could crash through the railing and send us all down into the water.  But we made it across okay, and then we were in Cambridge and traveling along the Massachusetts Road, the lieutenant informed us.

Cambridge wasn’t anything like our version either, of course.  We passed by the usual farms and small shops; when we reached the part where the college was, the houses got nicer, and some of the buildings were pretty impressive, but there was nothing like the craziness of Harvard Square, which my dad brought us to a couple of times.  In fact, the place looked pretty deserted, especially compared to Boston.

“That’s where I lived when I attended Harvard,” Lieutenant Carmody said, pointing to a large brick building.  It was exactly the sort of thing my dad said when he brought us to Harvard Square.  Big whoop, Cassie would reply, and she wouldn’t even look at his dorm.

“Where is everyone?” Kevin asked.

“The students are all in the army,” the lieutenant replied.  “And most of the townspeople have retreated across the river into Boston.  Cambridge will not be defensible if the Canadians choose to advance on it.  And they will advance before long.”

“Why is Professor Palmer still here?”

“Because he’s a contrary old sod,” the lieutenant muttered.  I didn’t exactly understand the words, but I got the idea.

We kept going, and eventually Peter pulled up in front of a big white house down a dirt lane.  We got out, and the lieutenant went over and knocked on the door, but there was no answer.  He shook his head and walked around back.  We followed him.

In front of a red barn a gray-haired man with a small beard was tossing apples into what I figured was a cider press.  My family went apple-picking every fall, and they’d had gizmos like it in the orchards.  We approached.  “Good morning, Professor,” the lieutenant called out.

The professor looked up.  “Ah, William,” he replied.  “Nice to see you.”  He didn’t seem at all surprised.  “Don’t you have a war to fight?”

“Ninety percent of war is preparation.”

“So you’re preparing?”

“You might say so.”

Professor Palmer glanced at us with little interest.  “And who are these fellows?” he asked.

Lieutenant Carmody introduced us.  The professor gave us a brief nod and offered us a cup of cider.  It was delicious.

“Don’t you have friends to stay with in Boston?” the lieutenant asked him.  “I can’t imagine you’d enjoy having the Canadians show up at your doorstep one morning to take you prisoner.”

“I have every confidence that President Gardner will find a way to make this entire unpleasant episode go away,” Professor Palmer replied, and I was pretty sure he was being sarcastic.  “He’s still talking to the British, isn’t he?”

“Yes, but there’s that little matter of the naval blockade to deal with.  The British ambassador can agree to whatever we want, but he still has to find a way to inform Parliament of the agreement.  And as to whether they would accept his recommendations . . . ”  The lieutenant shrugged.  “We don’t have as many friends in London as we used to.”

“William, I was having a very pleasant morning here, and now you’ve gone and ruined it,” the professor said.  “Are you telling me His Excellency doesn’t have a plan to extricate us from this disastrous situation he has allowed to develop?”

The lieutenant smiled.  “Like you, I have every confidence in His Excellency.”

“Pah.”  The professor spat on the ground.  “Now, there must be a reason for visiting me with these young men in tow.”

“Indeed.  We have something to show you, professor, and a story to tell.”

Lieutenant Carmody took out the watch and handed it to the professor, who studied it while we waited.  He didn’t touch any of the buttons at first, just turning the thing over in his hands.  Then Kevin showed him how to use it.  After that the professor sat down on a tree stump and started playing with it.  “Square roots,” he muttered.  “To eight decimal places.  Remarkable.”  He stood up finally.  “And what is the story you have to tell, William?” he asked.

“It’s a very strange one–if you choose to believe it.”  We all sat down, and he repeated what we had told him, the way he had to General Aldridge.

The professor scratched his head and stared at us as he listened.  “Do you remember your philosophy courses, William?” he asked when Carmody was finished.

The lieutenant smiled.  “How could I forget them?”

“Do you recall the discussion of Occam’s Razor?”

“The principle of parsimony,” he replied.  “The simplest explanation is generally the best.”

The professor nodded.  “Such a pity you chose soldiering instead of the groves of Academe, William.  You were one of our brightest students.  So, can we not apply Occam’s Razor here?  Why postulate an infinitude of universes and the like?  Can’t we explain the current situation by suggesting that two boys with active imaginations have somehow come upon a device from China–amazing though it is–and concocted a silly story to go with it?”

“We could,” the lieutenant agreed.  “Except that, if you’re right, they have concocted a better story than any I’ve ever heard.”

“And there’s zippers, begging your pardon, sir,” Peter said.  I had forgotten about Peter.  He was tending his horses by a water pump, close enough to overhear the conversation.  “On their trousers, sir.”  And he described that other miraculous invention, which apparently he couldn’t get out of his head.  “You don’t need buttons on your fly,” he explained.  “The thing just goes up and down, smooth as you like.”

The professor stared at us some more.

“Ask them about baseball,” the lieutenant urged.  “General Aldridge was much impressed with the little one’s discussion of a sport on his world.”

Professor Palmer raised an eyebrow.  “Solomon is not a fool like our president,” he said, “but he is also not a philosopher.  Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to catechize them.”

So he began asking us questions–not about baseball, thank goodness, but about everything else on our world–politics and history and science and religion and lots more.  For the first time we got to explain about America.  We talked about how it became the most powerful country in the world.  We talked about watching TV and playing video games and surfing the net.  We talked about men landing on the moon, which got the professor to raise his eyebrow again.  I described how I had touched a moon rock when my family visited the Air and Space Museum in Washington.  That seemed to astound him more than anything else we said.

Like the lieutenant, the professor pressed us for explanations that we just couldn’t give.  I mean, I have some vague idea of how a car works.  You put gas in the tank, you turn the key, you move the thing so it points to “D”, you step on the accelerator . . .  But to explain it so that it made sense to someone who has never heard of a car–I couldn’t do it.  Kevin was a little better, because he read so much and liked to do science experiments and stuff, but even he didn’t make a lot of sense when the professor really pushed him.

After a while I figured we were screwing up pretty badly, and I started to get depressed.  We’d been better off with Kevin explaining earned run averages to General Aldridge.  Finally the professor stopped his questions and poured everyone more cider.  Then he looked at Lieutenant Carmody.  “What do you want from me, William?” he asked softly.

“We’re at war, Professor,” the lieutenant replied.  “Our nation’s survival is in jeopardy.”

“You expect these boys to conjure weapons for you?”

“I want whatever they can give us.”

Professor Palmer looked away.  “Another world,” he murmured.  “A thousand wonders to explore.  And what do we seek?  Better ways of killing.”

The lieutenant gestured towards the professor’s house.  “Everything you have,” he said, “–your life itself–is being protected by a few thousand soldiers, with dwindling supplies and little hope of reinforcement.  We don’t have time to explore wonders; we need to survive.”

“They’re just boys,” the professor pointed out.  “Obviously they don’t understand–”

“And that’s why I’ve come to you,” the lieutenant interrupted.  “They know things but don’t understand them.  You don’t know, but you can understand.  Together, perhaps you can come up with something.”

“You’re asking for a miracle.”

“Well, why not?  If these boys are to be believed, their very presence here is a miracle.”

“How long do we have?” the professor asked.

The lieutenant shrugged.  “We assume the enemy will lay siege to the city before the final attack.  If so, we can hold out a couple of months.  By winter it will be hopeless.  But the president will likely surrender long before that.  And the terms will not be favorable.”

The professor shook his head sadly.  “How did it come to this?”

“That’s for others to work out,” the lieutenant replied.  “Soldiers simply fight the war they are given.”

“That’s why you should be more than a soldier, William.  But in the meantime, what is your plan?”

“The boys will stay here with you,” he said.  “We need to keep this secret, not least because of how the president might react if he found out.  While they’re here, you learn what you can from them.  Whatever might help us.  I’ll return to check on your progress.”

“And if there’s nothing?”

“Then there’s nothing.  You will have listened to some entertaining stories while you wait for the Canadians to arrive, and the rest of us will march resolutely towards our fate.”

The professor looked at Kevin and me, and I could tell he didn’t like the idea of having us move in with him.  “I’m an old man,” he started to say, “and–”

“Nonsense,” Lieutenant Carmody interrupted.  “This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and you know it.  You are the best person in New England for the task, and you know that as well.  Don’t lose the opportunity just because you’re set in your ways.”

“I suppose,” the professor said finally, as if he was agreeing to have his foot amputated or something.  “Very well.”

Lieutenant Carmody nodded in satisfaction and immediately stood up.  “Excellent.”  He turned to us.  “I trust you lads will do your best.  There is much at stake here.”

“Yes, sir,” we both replied.

“Good.”  He shook hands with Professor Palmer, then motioned to Peter to get the carriage ready.  In a couple of minutes they were clattering off down the lane, and we were alone with the professor.

It was very quiet.  Kevin and I stood by the cider press, waiting.

“Well, then,” the professor said.  “I suppose–I suppose you’re hungry.”

I wasn’t, actually, but we both nodded.

“So perhaps we should dine?”

“Okay,” I said.

“Pardon me?”

That word again.  “I mean sure.  Fine.”

“Well, then,” he murmured again, and he started off towards the house.

Kevin and I looked at each other.  “Weird,” Kevin whispered.  And we followed him inside.