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Zone,” he said, nodding. “I’ve found it. It’s a dimension not only of sight and sound, but of mind. It’s all in my mind. I’m crazy. Crazy as a common loon.”
    Jeremy returned shortly, slurping a can of soda. “Okay, I guess I gotta explain things.”
    â€œYeah,” Max said. “What the bloody hell is going on?”
    â€œWell, first you gotta understand about Castle Perilous.” Jeremy sat at his microcomputer and threw one leg up on desk. “I stumbled into the place a few years ago. I got into trouble, and I was going to, you know, snuff it. I jumped off the roof of a building, but I didn’t splatter in the alley like I was supposed to. I went through a spacetime warp, or whatever you want to call it, and I wound up inside the Castle.”
    â€œCastle,” Max said dully.
    â€œYeah, it’s this humongous castle, and it’s in another world, see. Not our world, not Earth. Earth is just one of the thousands of worlds that you can get to, by going through Castle Perilous. It’s a gateway.”
    â€œGateway,” Max said, trying to follow.
    â€œYeah. You step through a door or a window inside the Castle, and . . . jeez, you could be anywhere. On an alien planet, or some goofy world where they fight with swords, or anywhere. It’s a lot of fun, really, living in the Castle. I mean, it gets hairy sometimes, and things start shaking, and crazy aliens come through every now and then and try to take it over. But Lord Incarnadine always chases ‘em out, and everything’s—”
    â€œLord who?”
    â€œIncarnadine. He’s the king. The master of Castle Perilous, lord of this and that. He’s King of the Realms Perilous, and other stuff. I always wondered how he could be a lord and a king at the same time, but he says his traditional title, in the Castle’s world, is ‘lord.’Like a duke, or earl, or something. Which makes him vassal, really. But inside the Castle, it’s a world in itself, and in that respect he’s a king, of the Realms Perilous. See what I mean?”
    Max opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. He shook his head.
    Jeremy said, “Look, I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s true. You saw the lab, how crazy it is. I could take you out into the hall and show you a window. It’ll look out onto the Castle’s world. But if I take you to the next window, you’ll look out and see, like, a totally different world.”
    Max took great pains to say, “Hochstader, listen to me. Tell me this. What the hell happened to this world?”
    â€œI was coming to that. Like I said, Earth is just another of the Castle’s worlds, and you get to it by going through a portal, like the one in the next room. That’s a portal leading back to the Castle. It’s a passageway between two worlds, the Castle’s and ours. Got that?”
    â€œGot it. I guess.”
    â€œOkay. Now, you see, what I did was de-tune the portal a little bit.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œDe-tuned it. I did it with the Castle mainframe. Just tweaked it a little. And what you get when you do that to a portal is basically the world you started with, but one that’s a little different.”
    â€œDifferent?” Max said.
    â€œYeah, but the differences are minute. Like, for instance, in this de-tuned Earth, the place where you work doesn’t exist, but everything else is pretty much the same.”
    â€œI see. Why?”
    Jeremy shrugged. “Hard to say. Maybe in this variation of Earth’s history, things happened a little different. Was it your business?”
    â€œNo, it belongs to a guy by the name of Herbert G. Fenton.”
    â€œOkay, so maybe in this world, Herbert G. Fenton didn’t start that business. Maybe he started another business, or none at all. Maybe he doesn’t exist in this world, or got killed long ago.”
    â€œYou know, now