At three o'clock on that Tuesday morning, Wesley lay feverishly awake, wondering if he might be cracking up himself. He had forced himself to turn off the pink Kindle and put it back in his briefcase an hour ago, but its hold over him remained every bit as strong as it had been at midnight, when he had still been deep in the UR BOOKS menu.
He had searched for Ernest Hemingway in two dozen of the Kindle's almost ten and a half million Urs, and had come up with at least twenty novels he had never heard of. In one of the Urs (it happened to be 6,201,949 - which, when broken down, was his mother's birth date), Hemingway appeared to have been a crime writer. Wesley had downloaded a title called It's Blood, My Darling!, and discovered your basic dime novel...but written in staccato, punchy sentences he would have recognized anywhere.
Hemingway sentences.
And even as a crime writer, Hemingway had departed from gang wars and cheating, gore-happy debs long enough to write A Farewell to Arms. He always wrote A Farewell to Arms, it seemed; other titles came and went, but A Farewell to Arms was always there and The Old Man and the Sea was usually there.
He tried Faulkner.
Faulkner was not there at all, in any of the Urs.
He checked the regular menu, and discovered that Faulkner was not available in what he was coming to think of as his reality, either, at least not in Kindle editions. Only a few books about American literature's Count No'count.
He checked Roberto Bolano, the author of 2666, and although it wasn't available from the normal Kindle menu, it was listed in several UR BOOKS sub-menus. So were other Bolano novels, including (in Ur 101) a book with the colorful title Marilyn Blows Fidel. He almost downloaded that one, then changed his mind. So many authors, so many Urs, so little time.
A part of his mind - distant yet authentically terrified - continued to insist it was all an elaborate joke which had arisen from some degenerate computer programmer's lunatic imagination. Yet the evidence, which he continued to compile as that long night progressed, suggested otherwise.
James Cain, for instance. In one Ur Wesley checked, he had died exceedingly young, producing only two books: Nightfall (a new one) and Mildred Pierce (an oldie). Wesley would have bet on The Postman Always Rings Twice to have been a Cain constant - his ur-novel, so to speak - but no. Although he checked a dozen Urs for Cain, he found Postman only once.Mildred Pierce, on the other hand - which he considered very minor Cain, indeed - was always there. Like A Farewell to Arms.
He had checked his own name, and discovered what he feared: although the Urs were lousy with Wesley Smiths (one appeared to be a writer of Westerns, another the author of porno novels such as Hot Tub Honey), none seemed to be him. Of course it was hard to be a hundred per cent sure, but it appeared that he had stumbled on 10.4 million alternate realities and he was an unpublished loser in all of them.
Wide awake in his bed, listening to one lonely dog bark in the distance, Wesley began to shiver. His own literary aspirations seemed very minor to him at this moment. What seemed major - what loomed over his life and very sanity - were the riches hidden within that slim pink panel of plastic. He thought of all the writers whose passing he had mourned, from Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow to Donald Westlake and Evan Hunter; one after another, Thanatos stilled the magic voices and they spoke no more.
But now they could.
They could speak to him.
He threw back the bedclothes. The Kindle was calling him. Not in a human voice, but in an organic one. It sounded like a beating heart, Poe's tell-tale heart, coming from inside his briefcase instead of from under the floorboards, and -
Poe!
Good God, he had never checked Poe!
He had left his briefcase in its accustomed spot beside his favorite chair. He hurried to it, opened it, grabbed the Kindle, and plugged it in (no way he was going to risk running down the battery). He hurried to UR BOOKS, typed in Poe's name, and on his first try found an Ur - 2,555,676 - where Poe had lived until 1875 instead of dying in 1849, at the age of forty. And this version of Poe had written novels! Six of them! Greed filled Wesley's heart (his mostly kind heart) as his eyes raced over the titles.
One was called The House of Shame, or Degradation's Price. Wesley downloaded it - the charge for this one was only $4.95 - and read until dawn. Then he turned off the pink Kindle, put his head in his arms, and slept for two hours at the kitchen table.
He also dreamed. No images; only words. Titles! Endless lines of titles, many of them of undiscovered masterpieces. As many titles as there were stars in the sky.