Since our little discussion, Norm had been busy. He'd spent every waking hour outside work tinkering with his not-parallel universe gate thingamajig. Both work and sleep had been neglected; he'd called in sick Thursday, slipped out of the office early on Friday, and been working through a case of Red Bull rather than getting shut-eye. There was more than a touch of Christopher Lloyd's Doc Brown about him when I arrived on Friday evening.

That was seven hours ago. I, at least, had stopped for pizza during those hours. Norm had ploughed onward, gibbering about quantum manifolds and flux tensors, and constantly testing the bounds of what was on the other side of his gateway.

He would fiddle with the programming, tell me we were going to hook into yet another different universe, give me a countdown--three seconds--and then activate the rig again.

Several things struck me during the course of this experimentation. Some physically.

Mostly, the portal sucked, in a literal sense. Black gaping void appeared, and my ears popped as the pressure in the garage dropped. This was the point where most of the things striking me happened.

I lost a slice of pizza into test universe number twenty-seven.