He had it in mind to spiral outward from Earth’s fountain, square by square, mapping carefully as he went. He wouldn’t need much. You didn’t really get hungry in the Neitherlands. He brought a loaf of bread, a good bottle of wine, warm clothes, six ounces of gold, and a stun gun.

“The first world was a complete bust,” he said. “Desert everywhere. Incredible dunes, but no people at all that I could find, so I buttoned right back out of there. Next one was ice. Next one was pine forest. That one was inhabited—sort of a Native American thing. I stayed there two weeks. No love, but I lost about ten pounds. Also scored a fuck-ton of wampum.”

“Wait, hang on. These worlds were the same all over? Like each one had a single climate and that’s it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t even know if these other worlds are spheres, you know? Or discworlds or ringworlds whatever else. Maybe they don’t work the same way. Maybe they don’t have latitude. But I wasn’t about to hike to another climatic zone just to find out. Much easier just to hit the next fountain.

“God, the things I saw. Really, you should do it sometime. Some days I would hit a dozen worlds. I was just like free-falling through the multiverse. A giant tree that didn’t have any beginning or end. A sort of magnetic world, where everything stuck to you. One was all stretchy. One was just stairs, stairs and stairs and stairs. What else? There was an upside-down one. A weightless one, where you drifted around in outer space, except that space was warm and humid and smelled sort of like rosemary.

“And you know what’s real? Teletubbies! I know, right? Crazy, crazy stuff.”

“You didn’t . . .”

“No, I did not hit that shit. Totally could have. Anyway. Not everything was that exotic. Sometimes I’d find a world that was just like ours only one tiny thing would be different—like the economy was all based on strontium, or sharks were mammals, or there was more helium in the air so everybody had little high voices.

“I did meet a girl, after all that. Man, it was so beautiful. This world was mostly mountains, like one of those Chinese paintings, just rising out of the mist, and actually everybody looked kind of Asian. They lived in these ornate hanging pagoda cities. But there were hardly any of them left—they were always fighting these endless wars with other people on other mountains, for no special reason. Plus they fell off cliffs a lot.