UR

transfixed.
    “Getting cold out there,” Don said as he came in. “And there’s a wind knocking all the leaves off the—” He studied Wesley’s face. “What? Or should I say, what now?”
    “Come and see,” Wesley said.
    Don went into Wesley’s book-lined living room-study, where Robbie remained bent over the Kindle. The kid looked up and turned the screen so Don could see it. There were blank patches where the photos should have gone, each with the message IMAGE UNAVAILABLE, but the headline was big and black: NOW IT’S HER TURN . And below it, the subhead: Hillary Clinton Takes Oath, Assumes Role as 44 th President.
    “Looks like she made it after all,” Wesley said. “At least in Ur 1,000,000.”
    “And check out who she’s replacing,” Robbie said, and pointed to the name. It was Albert Arnold Gore.
    .
     
    An hour later, when the doorbell rang, they didn’t jump but rather looked around like men startled from a dream. Wesley went downstairs and paid the delivery guy, who had arrived with a loaded pizza from Harry’s and a six-pack of Pepsi. They ate at the kitchen table, bent over the Kindle. Wesley put away three slices himself, a personal best, with no awareness of what he was eating.
    They didn’t use up the eight hundred downloads they had ordered—nowhere near it—but in the next four hours they skimmed enough stories from various Urs to make their heads ache. Wesley felt as though his mind were aching. From the nearly identical looks he saw on the faces of the other two—pale cheeks, avid eyes in bruised sockets, crazed hair—he guessed he wasn’t alone. Looking into one alternate reality would have been challenging enough; here were over ten million, and although most appeared to be similar, not one was exactly the same.
    The inauguration of the forty-fourth President of the United States was only one example, but a powerful one. They checked it in two dozen different Urs before getting tired and moving on. Fully seventeen front pages on January 21 st of 2009 announced Hillary Clinton as the new President. In fourteen of them, Bill Richardson of New Mexico was her vice president. In two, it was Joe Biden. In one it was a Senator none of them had heard of: Linwood Speck of New Jersey.
    “He always says no when someone else wins the top spot,” Don said.
    “Who always says no?” Robbie asked. “Obama?”
    “Yeah. He always gets asked, and he always says no.”
     “It’s in character,” Wesley said. “And while events change, character never seems to.”
    “You can’t say that for sure,” Don said. “We have a miniscule sample compared to thecthec” He laughed feebly. “You know, the whole thing. All the worlds of Ur.”
    Barack Obama had been elected in six Urs. Mitt Romney had been elected once, with John McCain as his running mate. He had run against Obama, who had been tapped after Hillary was killed in a motorcade accident late in the campaign.
    They saw not a single mention of Sarah Palin. Wesley wasn’t surprised. He thought that if they stumbled on her, it would be more by luck than by probability, and not just because Mitt Romney showed up more often as the Republican nominee than John McCain did. Palin had always been an outsider, a longshot, the one nobody expected.
    Robbie wanted to check the Red Sox. Wesley felt it was a waste of time, but Don came down on the kid’s side, so Wesley agreed. The two of them checked the sports pages for October in ten different Urs, plugging in dates from 1918 to 2009.
    “This is depressing,” Robbie said after the tenth try. Don Allman agreed.
    “Why?” Wesley asked. “They win lots of times.”
    “But there’s no rhyme or reason to it,” Robbie said.
    “And no curse,” Don said. “They always win just enough to avoid it. Which is sort of boring.”
    “What curse?” Wesley was mystified.
    Don opened his mouth to explain, then sighed. “Never mind,” he said. “It would take too long, and you wouldn’t get it, anyway.”
    “Look on the bright side,” Robbie said. “The Yankees are always there, so it isn’t all luck.”
    “Yeah,” Don said glumly. “The military-industrial complex of the sporting world.”
    “Soh- ree. Does anyone want that last slice?”
    Don and Wes shook their heads. Robbie scarfed it and said, “Why not peek at the Big Casino, before we all decide we’re nuts and check ourselves into CentralState?”
    “What Big Casino might that be, Yoda?” Don asked.
    “The JFK