Page 115 of Under Story

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One night in March, Laurel wakes long before sunrise. Eli isn’t there. When she stands, the creaky floorboard whines, as always. She wraps her shawl around her shoulders before padding downstairs.

Snow falls steadily. The first floor of the house is dark, but a soft glow comes from the basement.

Eli sits at his desk, which is strewn with materials: wire, scattered batteries, a mound of tiny copper discs. Before him is a Styrofoam box. A battery has been attached to the left side, a laser to the right. On the top is a button, as well as a thumbnail-sized screen.

“Are you making a robot?” Laurel asks.

Eli smiles. “It’s a universe detection device. We’d put it through the portal.”

He looks both proud and sheepish. Eli has always been a thinker more than a doer, and the device has a clumsy, mad-scientist quality.

“How does it work?” she asks.

“It measures entropy. Do you remember the conversations we had when we got here? You were learning about composition, and I said that it made sense, because of the laws of entropy.”

Laurel tries to remember the details. “Entropy is a measure of disorder, right? In our universe, energy disperses. Here, it builds up.”

“Exactly.” Eli retrieves the Best Guesses notepad from McMurdo. Below a new question—How can we measure entropy?—is a drawing: a cross-section of the Styrofoam box.

“This is what the device looks like inside: two chambers connected by a pipe.” The chamber on the left is labeled Hot, the right one Cold. Between them, in the pipe, is a sliding copper disc. “The left chamber is attached to a heat coil and a battery, which are triggered when you press the button. In our world, entropy dissipates, so heat would spread from the hot side to the cold one. The laser detects how far it travels, and the results show up on screen. U1—for Universe One—indicates our world. This world is U2.”

“Can I try it?”

“Go ahead.”

She presses the button on the top.

“It takes a little while,” Eli admits. “That’s one of the things I have to work on.”

“I’ll wait with you.” Laurel hugs her shawl closer. In the harsh light of the desk lamp, Eli’s face looks pallid. “How often do you come down here?”

“Very.” Eli shrugs. “All-nighters aren’t as hard as they used to be.”

“Getting younger will do that for you.”

“And it’s already summer in Antarctica. I can sleep after the cruise.”

“Let’s say that the device works perfectly. How would we bring Silas through the portal? If he panics, he’ll stop breathing,” says Laurel. “I don’t think they even make dive suits his size.”

Eli opens his laptop. On screen is a large, padlocked Pelican case.

“We are not,” Laurel says, “dragging Silas through the ocean in a box.”

“ ‘Crushproof. Insulated. Watertight,’ ” reads Eli. “I honestly think it could work.”

“He’ll need oxygen!”

“I thought of that, too. We’d get him a regulator and a small tank of compressed air. It wouldn’t be hard to teach him how to breathe through the mouthpiece.”

Laurel is struck by Eli’s foresight, and by how much work he’s done without her. She grazes his scalp with her fingers. It still feels surreal to be so close to him, to touch him whenever she wants to.

The screen on the box glows faintly.

“U2,” Laurel reads. She shakes her head. “Incredible.”

“I’m still working out the kinks,” says Eli, but she can tell that he’s excited. The next morning, she pulls up the Heroic Expeditions website. The last cruise of the season departs in November. As she takes out her credit card, she hopes that her double is doing the same.