by Rudy Rucker
When Fefferfuff had finished setting the controls, he drifted over to settle down on top of little Ö and his bed. The two of them seemed to be symbiotic parts of a single organism. An animated lichen. The gauzy cloud-person wrapped himself round and round the lively soda-straw. The result was a long pale object about the size and shape of a human mummy. A hole opened in one end to address Jack Stalk.
“We shaping like humans in your honor.” Arms and legs articulated out of the form, then fingers, a nose and a chin. It looked something like the Pillsbury dough-boy.
There was a thump and the engines stopped. They’d landed. As far as Jack Stalk could figure out, he’d been brought here to star in a live sex-show, co-starring a giant lichen in drag. Fuuuugh! What a way to lose your virginity!
The dough-boy opened the ship’s door and…she was right outside, smiling at him with that weird double-bow mouth, her hair flaming red. The planet’s surface looked like blue jello.
“Hello, Jack-Stalk. Let’s getting down to business.”
The humanoid form lay down on the blue jello and pulled up her skirts …
“What should be under skirts?” Ö-Fefferfuff stage-whispered in Jack Stalk’s ear. “What normally looking like? We fix up just like.”
“Not keeping a girl waiting all day,” the supine one warbled, nancing her skirts back and forth. There were several other Tulpans standing around holding things that might have been guns…but were probably cameras. Jack made his move.
With quick, economical motions, he pushed the Ö-Fefferfuff dough-boy out of the hatch, stepped back, locked the door, and walked over to the control panel. If he wasted time using the conventional rockets, the Tulpans would get him. Better to use the FTL drive right away. Jump right out. Back to Earth, back to Louisville, back to Micha.
A Tulpan’s voice crackled over the ship’s comm-unit. “Not making a false move, Jack-Stalk! Above all not using the FTL drive without matching velocity to cosmic nullity! Uncontrolled hyperjumping very bad, come back yesterday!”
Another Tulpan voice, perhaps Ö-Fefferfuff’s, broke in. “If you really…not loving Lucy, we can painless re-model. Better maybe she matching dream-girl Micha? You giving us please one sex-show and I safely driving you home like taxi.”
Something finally snapped in Jack Stalk’s psyche. He wanted out, far out, right now. He pushed the big FTL button on the control panel.
The Tulpans watched in dismay as their ship wavered, sagged and disappeared.
“You’re a fool,” the one with the comm-unit told Ö-Fefferfuff.
“God is a fool,” the dough-boy shrugged. “He wrote the script, not me.”
“What’s going to happen?” the imitation Lucy asked, flowing back into an upright position. “Jack-Stalk didn’t match velocities! He jumped without adopting the cosmic frame of reference!” They spoke in Tulpan.
One of the cameramen spoke up. “Since we’re moving away from Earth, this means that he’ll get back before he left …”
“Oh no!” Lucy shrilled. “What if he causes a paradox? What if he warns his past self not to be abducted by Ö-Fefferfuff? If he’s not abducted, then he doesn’t come here, so he doesn’t go back, so he doesn’t warn himself, so he is abducted, in which case he does go back, and …”
“Oh, shut up,” the Tulpan with the comm-unit snapped. “We’ve all heard it before. What do you think, Ö-Fefferfuff, you unruffled fool?”
Ö-Fefferfuff had let himself slump into the sluglike Posture of Noble Ease. “No problem, chief. Grandma’s in her rocker and all’s right with the cage.” A serious student of the Tweetie and Sylvester cycle, he enjoyed showing off his erudition. “But seriously, Ü-Ramalam, are you familiar with Ä-Eddywed’s explanation of the recession of distant galaxies? He claims that, in cosmic time, the galaxies are actually shrinking, and that’s why they look farther apart. Thus, when Jack-Stalk arrives, perhaps one or two Lucy shows before leaving, he will …”
Jack Stalk stared out his stolen ship’s porthole, presumably at the Sun. After fiddling around with the instrument panel for awhile, he’d been able to dope out the controls for the attitude jets. He was, after all, a budding engineer. He’d rolled the ship around till he found what looked like the closest and brightest star. That had to be the Sun. If not …
He pushed the thought back, pointed the ship towards that bright star, and cut in the conventional rocket drive. He would have liked to try another hyperjump…but maybe hyperjumps were bad for nearby planets. The thought that he might have destroyed Tulpa didn’t particularly bother him. Hell, what difference was one less inhabited planet in a whole galaxy? But Earth…Earth was special. Earth had Micha on it. Not to mention Louisville.
The Tulpan ship was fast…the engines seemed to be based on powerful mass-converters. But it was still a long way to the Sun. He kept track of the days by making food-paste smears on the bulkhead. Fefferfuff had showed him how to run the food synthesizer on the way out.
After two weeks the Sun…if it was the Sun…had grown to a distinct little disc, and Jack Stalk began decelerating. Once a day he would cut the engines and roll the ship around, watching for planets. On his third day of searching, he spotted a bright dot a few degrees above the Sun. Above the sun, damn, that meant he wasn’t in the plane of the ecliptic. He was coming down on the solar system from above…or up from beneath, not that up and down really meant anything out in …
On second thought Jack Stalk realized that it was good to be looking down on the solar system. He dialed up the porthole’s magnification and began looking for planets. It wasn’t hard, once he got the hang of it…after all, sunlight was bouncing up off each of them. It was just a matter of…there, that blue-white one had to be Earth…it was the next one in from the red one, Mars.
Jack managed to hit the plane of the ecliptic pretty near Earth, but he hadn’t decelerated enough, and had to spend a frustrating three days watching Earth sliding back above him. From time to time he wondered what sort of fuel the rocket’s mass-converter used…and how much of it was left. It was another long week till he finally got back up near the Earth, and this time at a reasonable speed.
The planet looked big, really big, turning majestically beneath him. Landing was going to be touchy…if he came in too fast there’d be no correcting it. And what if someone’s Air Force fired a missile at him?
Jack Stalk spun the dial on the comm-unit, hoping to eavesdrop on some military transmissions.
FZZAT! The screen sprang to life. A smooth, handsome male face stared out at him. “What do you mean by coming here like this? What is it that you…want, Jennifer?”
Cut to Jennifer’s tear-stained face. “Oh, Brad, don’t you understand? I’ve fallen in love with you. You can’t just use a woman and walk …”
Jack Stalk smiled happily. A soap opera. He was back to Earth for sure. He decided to just watch TV for a while, relax, wait for the news, find out the date. It had been Saturday, August 22, 1981, when the Tulpans had nabbed him. Since then had been close to two months. Would Micha still be waiting? As the soap opera on the TV screen played itself out, Jack Stalk’s own soap opera spun in his mind.
On that last Saturday, he and Micha had gone swimming in a quarry on Jack’s brother’s farm, a few miles west of Louisville. It had just been the two of them, so they’d gone nude. The water in the quarry was deep and unimaginably pure. You could see blue-gills hovering, ten, twenty, thirty feet below. Jack loved to dive and come up under Micha, marveling at her big strong buttocks and huge buoyant breasts.
There was even a cave cut into the quarry wall, and Jack and Micha swam in there for some serious necking. It had been nice, not too rocky, and not much flotsam except for an old grey tennis-ball.
Micha’s lips, posing and pouting, had planted kisses, soft and hard, all over him. He’d revelled in her white curves…this was the first time he’d seen her naked all over…and had noticed that from the side she was an almost perfect sine-wave. Kissable neck at zero, plump nipple at
one-half pi, tiny waist at pi, delectable summit of firm asscheek at three-halves pi, and the divinely soft folds of thigh against buttock at two pi. He’d told her this, and she, also an engineering student at The University of Louisville, had been amused.
They might have even made love, at last, at last…if Jack’s brother Daryl hadn’t showed up. Typically, Daryl had made his presence known by firing a shotgun and hollering, “COME ON OUT OF THAT CAVE,” over the outside speaker of his pickup truck’s CB.
He was just-kidding-around-of-course, as usual, but Micha’d been so freaked that Jack had had to swim back, tell Daryl to cool it, get Micha’s suit, and swim it out to the cave.
They swam in side by side, and Jack had been touched-to-the-quick by Micha’s brave and nervous smile, her lower lip set just so against her upper. On second thought, it hadn’t been the smile itself that really got him—it had been her control over it, and the way she would compress her lips over and over again in her enigmatic, slightly menacing pout.
“Hey,” Daryl had called when she got out of the water. “What’s a sexy girl like you doing with my baby brother? What’s he got that I don’t?”
Micha didn’t say anything, just pouted and flashed her eyes from the one to the other. Where Jack was skinny, almost hollow-chested, Daryl was big and muscular. Jack had a visionary’s wide brown eyes, Daryl a soldier’s green slits. Now that he’d taken over the family farm, Daryl liked to play the redneck.
“You’re a real idiot,” Jack said quietly, “Shooting off that gun.”
“Whatsamatter, bro?” Daryl laughed. “Didn’t you get a chance to shoot yours?” He chuckled lewdly, ingratiatingly, and stuck a corner of his tongue out at Micha. “Y’all come on up to the house and have a drink,” he called then, and drove off in his pickup.
“Let’s not stay long,” Micha urged, as they followed Daryl in Jack’s old VW.
But they had stayed long, too long. For all their resentment of each other, the two brothers did enjoy drinking bourbon together. Daryl needled Jack about getting so educated at Daryl’s expense, and Jack needled Daryl about hogging most of their inheritance. But on another level, each respected the other for being different. And here, on the family farm, in the haze of alcohol, it was almost like being kids again, kids with all the time in the world. Daryl’s wife brought out food and old jokes. Micha quietly sipped at a glass of white wine, setting and resetting her full lips.
They’d finally left around ten, and on the drive back downtown, Micha had spoken her piece. “So, so, Jack, you still wish you were a farmboy. And you let you bully of a brother walk all over you. Did you see the way he looked at me? Thank God I waited for my suit in that disgusting cave, or he probably would have shot you and raped me on the spot! And I thought you came from a nice family.”
“But,” Jack protested, staring hard at the drink-blurred road, “It was nice in the cave, I thought. That…that wasn’t so disgusting, was it?”
“Oh, it was all right,” Micha said coldly. “Until your brother came. A horrible big bug crawled on me when you were getting my suit. And then him staring at me like that all evening…oh, just take me home.”
In the car, outside her apartment-house, Micha had sat with him for five minutes, passively letting herself be kissed and apologized to…but she’d refused to let him set their next date.
Jack had driven the five blocks to his own apartment building, parked the car, and, too depressed to go in, had taken a walk. There had been a storm brewing, with high flashes of heat lightning, and he had wandered onto the University of Louisville campus, finally sitting on the administration building’s steps, next to their copy of Rodin’s The Thinker. The rain had started, all at once, and Jack just sat there, lashed by the liquid curtains. Lightning had forked and zigzagged down the sky, striking once, twice, three times nearby.
And then the Tulpans’ spherical ship had touched down. At first Jack had thought it was ball-lightning. He’d even fumbled out a pen, useless in the rain, to take some notes on the phenomenon…but by then Fefferfuff had flown out and begun pulling him towards the ship. With Micha mad at him he hadn’t even felt like struggling.
On the comm-unit’s screen, an ugly man was reading a sheet of paper. The five-thirty local news. School board. Sewage. Lay-offs at Ford and GE. “And now the weather. Charlie?”
The weatherman’s bald head filled the screen. He scribbled the usual incomprehensible bullshit on a plastic map. He was so bald that when he turned his head, you could see a lot of folds and meat-tucks in back. Jack amused himself by pretending that these mashing wrinkles made up the weatherman’s real face. But then he heard something which brought him up with a start.
“Today is Friday, August 21, 1981. The hottest temperature on record for this date was 104 in 1956, the lowest a cool 64 in 1949. The weather for tomorrow, Saturday, August 22, 1981, will be hot, with thundershowers expected in the late afternoon and evening.”
The date was printed right there on the screen. This was the day before Jack had left! But …
Jack dialed his receiver up and down the spectrum, and picked up another news show. The same thing. One of the Tulpans, he now recalled, had said something about this: Uncontrolled hyperjumping very bad, come back yesterday.
Come back yesterday. What an opportunity! At the very least he could head off the fight with Micha by giving himself some sound advice when it would do the most good. Or, even better, he could somehow head off Daryl…prevent him from fouling up Jack’s big chance to get laid.
Grinning with excitement, Jack nudged the ship out of orbit. The Earth fell up at him, huge and welcome as Micha’s ass.
The ship maneuvered surprisingly well, and in the space of five hours, Jack had it down to an altitude of what looked like two or three km. He was hovering somewhere out over the Pacific Ocean, sunny blue wave-patterns marching past below. By now it would be almost midnight in Louisville. He set his wristwatch to twelve. He toyed with the idea of whipping across America and slitting his sleeping brother’s throat…but thought better of it. He was too tired.
So Jack Stalk lay down on his jellybed and slept.
When he awoke it was night on the Pacific. Ten in the morning, Louisville time. He flew east, into the dawn. As he flew, he kept searching up and down the radio bands, nervous about military pursuit planes…but no one seemed to notice him.
He was crossing the Mississippi when he first suspected that something might be wrong. A swallow flew at him. This was surprising in itself, since it looked as if he was about two km up. But the real shocker was the bird’s size. The thing was as big as a jetliner! Powering along with its maw spread, it attacked him!
Jack Stalk took evasive action and increased his altitude. By the time he’d found Louisville, he had himself convinced that the business with the bird had just been an illusion. After all, the porthole had still been set on a pretty high magnification.
He knew Louisville well, and it wasn’t hard to find his brother’s farm. Before landing, Jack checked the time. Two in the afternoon. Great. Daryl hadn’t busted in on them till about three-thirty. All he had to do was land in the woods, cover the ship with brush, and go distract his brother for a couple of hours. Meanwhile his past self would get laid in the cave and, hopefully, drive downtown to spend the night with Micha. When that thunderstorm started, he’d be happy in Micha’s soft bed—instead of out getting kidnapped by the Tulpans.
But then…? Jack had a moment of doubt. If he didn’t get kidnapped by the Tulpans, then he wouldn’t be here in a second body to do all this. So what! So this body would disappear or something. Jack looked at his hands, white and slender. Disappear? So what, so what. His other self, the real self would wake up in bed with yummy milky Micha. Could any man die for a better cause?
Jack centered the ship over a copse of trees in the middle of the pasture nearest Daryl’s house. He could see Daryl on his tractor, mowing the next pasture over, too busy to look up. Jack cut the engine power and let the shi
p slide down to Earth.
He had to fight back a moment of panic as he came down into the trees. They were so big! How could they be so big? Gently jiggling the attitude jets, he wriggled past the huge trunks and branches. It seemed to go on for kilometers. Finally there was the grass…coming up…and up…a jungle of high golden stalks scissoring past the porthole…what?
With a tiny thud the ship finally hit solid ground. Jack was beginning, vaguely, to get the picture. Cautiously he opened the hatch. The yellow-grey field grass rose a hundred meters above him. Beneath him were root-tendrils, as big as the tunnels in a man-sized, 3-D maze, twined this way and that. Something large, dark and chitinous was scrabbling towards the ship …
Jack slammed the hatch and powered back up into the treetops. Now he understood why the trees looked so big. His ship was the size of a tennis ball. He was the size of a grasshopper. He had jumped into the past and it had made him small.
Suddenly he remembered a paradox he’d read about in the first pages of Martin Gardner’s classic, Relativity for the Million. It had been called Poincaré’s Paradox:
“Suppose that one night, while you were sleeping, everything got a hundred times as small as it was the day before. EVERYTHING—electrons, atoms, wavelengths of light, you yourself, your bed, your house, the Earth, the Sun, the stars, the spaces between the stars. When you awoke would you be able to tell that anything had changed? Is there any experiment you could perform that would prove you had altered in size?”
“No,” Poincaré and Gardner had answered. “There would be no way to tell. For size is relative.” Fine. But, Jack Stalk thought, what about time-travel? What if the universe really is shrinking…maybe not quite uniformly, and that’s why the galaxies seem to get farther apart…what if it does get a hundred times smaller every week…what if that’s true and one day some poor guy manages to travel back in time?
Relative to the time-traveler, all the yesterday people are two hundred meters tall. And a tree is two kilometers high. And …
A crow protecting its territory darted out and struck the Tulpan spaceship a glancing blow with its beak. Bobbing and weaving, Jack took the ship back up high. From there things looked fine. It was just that he wasn’t nearly as high as it felt like he was.