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it a corner of the room rather than the center..."

"Or have never been born."

"Or aren't human."

Sanderson dismissed Duncan's last offering with a wave of his hand.

"How many planes are we seeing?" asked McNealy.

"In theory? An infinite number. Or at least too many to count. Buuuut... in reality, each recursive image is smaller than the one before it, so we quickly reach the limit of what the human eye can resolve. That's why I have this..."

In the corner of the room was a wheeled cart upon which a flexible metal arm had been mounted. The free end of the arm held a heavy glass lens, four feet in diameter. Sanderson wheeled the entire assembly to the center of the room and positioned it in front of the sparkling quantum window.

In the image... dozens... hundreds... thousands of identical Sandersons did the same.

"Focusing can be a tad tricky," Sanderson explained as he swung the arm into place. "We're just magnifying the image not just for ourselves, but for all the other versions of us that are looking over our shoulder."

McNealy looked behind him. There was no one there, of course... only the wall of machinery that powered the bridge. In the floating image, the other McNealy's turned as well.

"...everyone in front of us is doing the same. The effect is compounded across all the other lenses. See?"

The other doctors had all positioned their magnifying lenses as well. Each lens enhanced the image directly in front of it, but each image also contained an enhanced image from the bridge in that universe, allowing all of them to see much further down the chain of universes than could be achieved with the naked eye, or with only one magnifying lens.

The doctors squinted into the infinite series of worlds, studying the successively smaller images. At first they searched for differences... a Sanderson without a lab coat, a McNealy with more hair. A Duncan who wasn't there at all. But all the images were identical.

"The question is," Sanderson was talking more to himself than to the other two occupants of the lab. "Is the superposition of alternate places closed... or open? If we could see forever, would we eventually look back into our own universe... or into whatever exists outside of the multiverse?"

"I don't think we'll ever be able to see that far," said Duncan. "We'll reach planes where there is no bridge long before-"

"Did you see that?" McNealy... all of them... pointed at something. "I think someone just turned off their bridge."

"Your eyes are better than mine..." Sanderson

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