“Five jumps and he’s not any closer!” Edd ranted, his usual bundle of nerves.

“Untrue,” said Ed, always the reasonable one. “He’s not dealing drugs anymore. That’s a step in the right direction.”

Eduardo was drawing an elaborate decision tree on a wall, and a great deal of the final branches ended with a skull and crossbones. And Eddy was, as always, manning the QuIRT like a video game junkie, in an attempt to get a handle on the big picture. He told me the colorful visual on the screen was “a real-time array of vermiform vectors and quantum particulates.” I told him to use fire arrows if he wanted to beat the boss.

“We think we’re nearing the end of the line,” Ed told me in a calm, even-handed way.

“Meaning?”

“We have reason to think we’re getting close to a correction.”

They had mentioned the idea of a correction before—in which the whole planet gets deemed a bad egg and goes down the cosmic garbage chute.

“Why do you think that?” I asked.

“Oh, no reason,” said Edd, dripping multidimensional sarcasm. “Just the dark matter gathering beyond Neptune’s orbit. Just a few trillion cosmic strings tangling like a vacuum cleaner cord.”

Eduardo added another line to his tree of possibilities. “It does seem like the universe is preparing for something.”

“Preparing and actually proceeding are two separate things,” said Ed, then he took me aside and explained. “When a sub-loc is truly irritating to the fabric of time and space, it becomes like an itch that the universe needs to scratch.”

“More like chafing,” offered Eduardo.

“Right,” agreed Edd. “You’re chafing the universe. Don’t chafe the universe!”

“The point is,” said Ed, “just because there’s a reason to scratch, it doesn’t mean that the universe will do it.”

Then Teddy came to my defense. “There’s nothing to worry about if Ash moves in a more soothing direction.”

“Good point,” said Ed, “which means that your next jump needs to be a complete about-face. No more half measures, no more fails. This next jump is do or die.”

“I think he can handle it,” said Teddy, giving me a surreptitious wink. “Why don’t you let me work with him this week and get him as prepared as possible.”

Meanwhile, Eddy’s screen flashed something that looked suspiciously like “game over,” and Eduardo sighed, drawing another skull and crossbones.

20

All the Easy Answers

There are things we tell ourselves. Clever snippets of common wisdom that help us find a moral compass. But witticisms rarely hold up to scrutiny.

A penny saved is a penny earned? False. Plenty of people save pennies they never earned. An apple a day keeps the doctor away? Yeah—right until the day it doesn’t and you die.