Read Online Parallelities by Alan Dean Foster - Free Book Online

nearly fell on his butt.
    “But why not?” The redhead rose from her crouch like a speeded-up stop-motion film clip of a blossom opening, a svelte vision of down-home Great Plains loveliness. “We all like you. Don’t you like us?” The four of them were staring at him with the same wistful, slightly hurt expressions. It was comely. It was intriguing.
    It was downright creepy.
    “Sure I like you. Who wouldn’t.” He spoke a little too quickly as he continued to back away. “It’s just that I’m not too sure about some things going on in my life right now and it wouldn’t be fair to lay it off on you ladies. Maybe another time, when I’ve got my head in order.”
    “Whatever you say, Max.” An obviously disappointed and not a little confused Sherri concluded with a full-figured parting shrug, a gesture that did nothing to diminish his libido. Then her three sisters shrugged, in precisely the same manner, and that fully accomplished anything that the first shrug had not. Abandoning all pretense at politesse, he turned and ran.
    “That’s a very nice but very flustered young man,” the redhead insisted.
    “Exactly what I was thinking,” added the sister on her left.
    “Of course,” agreed Sherri, and with that the four of themonce again fell to giggling, an a capella chorus of unrestrained feminine amusement.
    Heedless of the heat, Max ran through the sand, across the parking lot, and nearly managed to get himself run down by a cable-company service truck while sprinting across Ocean Avenue. Taking the outside access stairs two at a time, he did not slow down until he was inside the familiar confines of the elevator. Fighting to catch his breath as it ascended, he bolted through the open door the instant the lift reached his floor. The hall was empty, but he ran anyway. He did not stop running until he was back inside his apartment with the door locked and securely bolted behind him.
    Any other time, any other place, he would have gladly sacrificed the balance in his bank account for a date with any one of the Omaha sisters. The opportunity to go out with two of them would have made him wary. In his current state of mind, the presence of four nearly identical, interchangeable lovelies constituted incontrovertible overkill. They were not quite as indistinguishable as the three burglars had been. The differences were slight but noticeable. But the similarities were too similar, the duplication too uncanny. Considered in the light of the previous night’s intruders, they constituted a coincidence the likes of which made him want to run screaming, and not with unrequited passion.
    It was bizarre. It was frightening. It was weird. And the only situation in which he had recently found himself thatequaled it in weirdness was the evening he had spent in the company of a certain Barrington Boles, gentleman surfer and would-be mad scientist. Good ol’ Barry Boles and his parallel-world Lego set. Focusing on Boles and his abortive demonstration was a hope, not an explanation, but at the moment it was the only one Max had. Other than the possibility that he needed glasses, of a very special and unimaginable type.
    He needed some answers, and he needed them fast.
    Abandoning the apartment, he risked traffic citations several dozen times as he raced up the Pacific Coast Highway and through Malibu, putting the Aurora through some maneuvers the engineers at GM had never envisioned. There was a different guard at the compound gate. Patient and skeptical, he refused to buy any of Max’s stories. Nor did the reporter’s obvious agitation help any. But the guard did agree, despite his better instincts, to ring Boles’s house. Evidently he was having a good day, or was in a particularly benign mood—or maybe it was the desperate, panicky look on Max’s face, the expression of a man drowning out of water.
    Be home
, Max implored the unseen inventor.
Don’t have run off to Madagascar or someplace. Be home.
    Still dubious,