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than for the fact he might not be able to follow through with the plan.
    “I’ll be fine,” he said, waving a dismissive hand as he staggered off in search of his pickup truck.

 
     
    7
     
    Frost couldn’t take her eyes off the tree. She knew how close it was to town, but as they left Main Street and headed over the rise, the south of Refuge opened up, and she saw just how tall the massive tree stood. Refuge stood atop a three-hundred-foot-tall hill. The tree dwarfed them.
    Winslow, both hands on the steering wheel, smiled at her. “Impressive, isn’t it?”
    “It’s incredible,” Frost said. “But how could a tree grow so large?”
    “We know nothing about the ecological evolution of this world, but it’s certainly possible for trees to grow beyond what we’re used to. All they need is enough room and time to grow.”
    From the back seat, Griffin asked, “But wouldn’t it take thousands— millions —of years to do that?”
    Winslow gave the same amused expression at the rearview mirror. “Again, we know nothing of this world beyond what we can see. It would be like an alien visiting Earth, touching down in Amarillo, Texas and assuming the whole planet smells like cow piss. We’re only seeing the tiniest fraction of what’s out there.”
    They drove on for another minute in silence, winding down the road. The normal sized trees, one-hundred-foot pines, on either side of them, looked like toothpicks compared to the monstrosity that towered ahead of them.
    Griffin spoke again from the back. “What’s the Echo?”
    Winslow glanced again at the rearview mirror. “Pardon?”
    “Back at Soucey’s. I heard you tell Carol we’d ‘find a way out of the Echo’. What is it?”
    Winslow didn’t answer for a long moment. Frost watched him from the corner of her eye, wondering if he was irritated Griffin had overheard a possibly private conversation.
    Winslow cleared his throat and sighed. “It’s wishful thinking, is what it is.”
    “Meaning?” Griffin asked.
    “Meaning I don’t know if there is any way out of the Echo.”
    Dodge leaned forward from the back seat. “Are you saying this will never end?”
    “I honestly don’t know. But right now, I haven’t the slightest clue what is causing this ongoing shift between what appear to be...other Earths. Parallel Earths.”
    “But what’s the Echo?” Griffin asked.
    “Yes, the Echo. It’s a theory a NASA colleague of mine developed. His name was Markus Pätzel, and he posited that millions and millions of years ago, at the beginning of time—”
    “The Earth isn’t millions of years old,” Dodge said.
    “Tell that to the fossil records,” Winslow said dryly. “Anyway, Markus posited that at the beginning of time, the Big Bang created such a massive and devastating force, that it’s been echoing ever since. After all, our universe is still expanding, which helps to prove this theory. However, Markus went even further. He believed that not only did the Big Bang create our reality, but also countless other realities. Infinite realities. And the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics agrees. With the many worlds point-of-view, all possible alternative pasts, presents and futures are real. Every time we make a decision, a new universe is created. The differences between worlds might be subtle—in one I fold my toilet paper, in one I bunch—or they might be drastic.” He motioned to the large tree looming ahead of them.
    “You’re joking,” Griffin said.
    Winslow shrugged. “They’re not my theories, but Markus was quite brilliant. Eccentric, perhaps, but so were Einstein and many other geniuses. The problem for Markus, of course, was that there was no way to prove his theory. Now, however…”
    He let it hang there, the foreign landscape beyond Refuge saying all that needed to be said.
    “Okay,” Griffin said, “so let’s assume your friend’s theory is accurate, and there are infinite realities.”
    “The Big