Ricochet Joe

by Dean Koontz

encounters with what his maternal grandmother, Dulcie Rockwell, called “Dedicated Practitioners of Evil,” or DPEs.

“Everything in the universe was once condensed into something smaller than a pea. Which is why, thirteen billion years after the big bang, atoms at one end of the universe still have an eerie connection with atoms at the other end of the universe. Set up the same experiment in a lab in Los Angeles and one in Boston, run them simultaneously, and events in one lab instantly affect the outcome in the other lab three thousand miles away. It’s called ‘spooky effects at a distance.’”

We think time flows from the past through the present to the future. But time doesn’t flow. All time—past, present, future—existed in the first instant of the universe’s creation. Textbooks will tell you so. Time is not a river. It’s an invisible ocean encompassing the universe, with tides that run in all directions simultaneously.”

“Time is ours to use,” she said. “But we fail to understand it, and so we ride it always in one direction, straight to the grave.”

“There are some scientists who believe that the universe is in fact an infinite number of parallel universes, and that perhaps we never die. If the forward motion of time is only our perception and not true, then perhaps when we appear to age and die, we actually continue in a parallel universe . . . and so on and on.”

“All time—past, present, future—existed in the instant the universe came into being, but also in all the infinite number of universes that exist alongside one another. Time is one big ocean encompassing all those possible worlds. And so for those who truly understand time and the uses to which it can be put, not only the past and future can be visited, but so can universes floating far, far away from theirs in the sea of time.”