by Rudy Rucker
“But—”
Bitter raised his hand for silence. “A related point: There is no one you. An individual is a bundle of conflicting desires, a society in microcosm. Even if some limited individual were seemingly to take control of our universe, the world would remain as confusing as ever. If I were to create a world, for instance, I doubt if it would be any different from the one in which we find ourselves.” Bitter took my hand and shook it. “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get home for Sunday dinner. Big family reunion today. My wife Sybil’s out at the airport picking up our oldest daughter. She’s been visiting her grandparents in Germany.”
Bitter shook hands with the others and took off, leaving the four of us on the church steps.
“What’d he say?” I asked Sondra.
Sondra shook her head quizzically. Her long, frizzed hair flew out to the sides. “The bottom line is that he wants to have lunch with his family. But tell me more about Harry’s project.”
“How well do you know Harry?” put in Nancy.
“We’ve been seeing each other off and on for about six months. He introduced himself to me at the Vienna Café. It’s a nice bar and grill in New Brunswick.”
“He’s no good,” said Nancy emphatically. “You should steer clear of him, Sondra. Do you know what he said when I told him about world hunger? He said, ‘There’s too damn many people anyway.’ Isn’t that horrible? And what was it he said at Serena’s christening, Joe? Something about dying?”
“’Born to die’ is what he said: ‘Fletcher, you’ve just made something else that has to die.’ I know it sounds bad, but there is a certain point to it. If there were no more people, there’d be no more suffering.” I was trying to sound as cool as Alwin Bitter. “We want to be alive. Fine. But that means we have to accept the suffering that comes along with living. Don’t you agree, Sondra?”
“I’m all for accepting reality,” said Sondra with a laugh. “Though I’m not sure that Harry is. Were you serious when you said that he was building a machine to give him control over the universe? Harry Gerber? I love Harry, Joe, but—”
For the first time I really let myself imagine the kind of world that Harry might design. The guy had no respect for the ordinary human things that make life worth living. Weirdness was all he cared about. Weirdness and sex and plenty to drink.
“I better go up to New Brunswick,” I said abruptly. “Before he gets carried away.”
“I didn’t mean, Is it a good idea?” said Sondra. “I meant, Do you seriously believe it’s possible? After all, Harry’s just a TV repairman. There’s a big step from that to—”
“Go, Joey,” Nancy urged. “Before it’s too late.”
“This is getting awfully hysterical,” said Sondra. For such a plain woman, she had extraordinary presence. “Maybe I better come along.”
“You’ve got your reception to go to,” I reminded her. “And by the way, welcome to our church.”
“Yes,” said Nancy, “we’ve been meaning to come more often. But are you going back to New Brunswick after the party, Sondra?”
“Yes.”
“Well, stop in at Harry’s shop then and make sure Joe’s on his way home. When he and Harry start working on something, they lose all track of time. Maybe there isn’t any big danger, but still—”
“I’ll check up on them, Nancy.”
“Thanks.”
Nancy and I strolled home together, each of us holding one of Serena’s hands. She liked us to swing her in the air. Nancy didn’t say much—I could tell she was doing some thinking.
“If it works,” she said after a while, “if it works, what are you going to ask for?”
“Five million dollars.”
“And for me?”
“What do you mean? The money’s for both of us.”
“I want more than money. I want you to make a wish for me.”
“All right. What do you want?”
“Make Harry eliminate world hunger. Make him come up with something that turns dirt into food.” Nancy smiled happily at the thought. “That’ll show him!”
7
100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000
HARRY’S shop was locked tight. I pounded and pounded, but nobody came, not even Antie. I decided to try in back. There was a two-story wooden porch. Harry was sitting on the steps in the afternoon sun. He was wearing pajamas and looking through a stack of dirty magazines.
“Hey, Harry!”
“Say, Fletch. You’re in time for lunch. Antie’s stewing some chicken and my pet lizard, Zeke. He got some wounds and today he died.” Harry gave me one of his wet, unfocused smiles.
“The lizard!” I yelped. “I saw him in your store window yesterday! Was he the—”
“That’s right. Tonight, when I go back to visit you on Friday, Zeke will jump forward from Thursday to visit you on Saturday. Fifty-five hours each way, with the visits lasting about fifteen minutes. It balances out. I noticed the marks on Zeke when I fed him Thursday, but of course I didn’t realize. He was all shot up, poor thing. Antie found lots of little bullets in him when she skinned him today.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed yesterday.”
“If I’d gotten killed, then it couldn’t have happened, could it? Poor Zeke. I’m sorry I threw those rocks at him. But the noise was just so—”
“Harry, I don’t think this should go any further. I know that there’ll be a time paradox if we don’t build the blunzer today, but after seeing what you did yesterday, I’d almost rather—”
“Aw, come on, Fletch. Don’t be so—”
“I was talking about it this morning with Nancy and Sondra.”
“Sondra Tupperware?”
“She was at our church today, the First Church of Scientific Mysticism. She’s the new assistant.”
“Oh, yeah, she told me about that. I think mysticism’s a bunch of crap. All regions are a bunch of crap.”
“What do you believe in, Harry?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Well, Nancy and Sondra and I were talking, and I realized how disastrous it could be for someone like you to get any kind of control over the world. Do you remember what you said to Nancy when she was talking about world hunger?”
“Sure. ‘There’s too damn many people anyway.’ It’s true, Fletcher, and you know it. Don’t give me this holier-than-thou routine.”
“Are you going to bring some terrible plague down on us, Harry? Would you kill off the whole human race?”
“I’d save these girls.” Harry grinned and patted his stack of magazines.
“Dinner’s ready,” called Antie from inside the house.
The whole floor above Harry’s shop was an apartment. Apparently Antie had been expecting me; two places were set in the dark old dining room. Harry and I took our seats, and Antie brought in the meal.
Besides the lizard stew, we had fried potatoes, cucumber salad, fresh rolls, a plate of hot sauerkraut, and a bottle of good red wine. Harry ate with his hands.
“The lizard’s not bad,” I observed between forkfuls. The meat was pale and spongy, a bit like soft-shelled lobster. It gave me a good feeling to be eating something that had tried to kill me only the day before.
“Mmmpf,” said Harry by way of agreement. He chewed with his mouth open, then swallowed. “I’ve always had a thing about Godzilla. It’s no surprise I picked on poor Zeke for the counterweight.”
“But that’s just so irresponsible, Harry. You could have used a shoe or something, and then yesterday would have been no problem. A giant shoe would have blocked our way for a while, and then it would have disappeared. How do I know what other craziness you’re going to pull? What if you crack the Earth in half or something? You’re not into disaster movies, are you?”
“Nah, not really. I got enough of that stuff when I was little. My Dad used to read the Book of Revelations to us every night.”
“Oh, brother. That’s all we need. L
ook, Harry, it’s time we had a serious talk. I’ve seen both you and Zeke travel through time, so I know the blunzer is going to work. We’re going to build it today and tonight you’ll be master of space and time, at least for a while. God knows I would have picked someone else, but at least you’re my friend and I can count on you to make me rich while you have the power, right?”
“No problem. You want gold, or what?”
“Gold’s too high profile. Give me five million bucks in paper currency. Used bills, small denominations.”
“Okay. What else?”
“Well—this is Nancy’s idea. She wants you to make something that will turn dirt into food. A machine or something that’s simple to reproduce and—”
“No more world hunger,” said Harry expansively. “Fine by me. If I can do it, I will. Let’s go downstairs.”
“One last thing. All that money isn’t going to do me any good if you turn the solar system into cheese or something.”
“I don’t like cheese.”
“You know what I mean, Harry. The blunzer’s effects have to be self-limiting. It has to stop working after an hour or two. And then everything has to go back to the way it was.”
“Back to the way it was? You don’t want your money to disappear, do you? Or Nancy’s cure for world hunger?”
“Make a few reasonable changes in our world, fine. And then let’s go over to an alternate universe, like I said yesterday. First you do the jump to Friday, and make the money and everything, and then we go over to another world so you can work out without wrecking things here.”
“That sounds good. As long as I’m master of space and time I’ll be able to hold open a magic door to the world of my heart’s desire. We’ll stay two hours and then come back here just before the blunzing wears off. As soon as it wears off, the magic door’ll close, and we’ll be free to enjoy the few changes I made here.”
“Well”—I hesitated, still worrying—“it sounds pretty reasonable. But what if one of the changes you make in our world turns out to be really lethal? If we don’t realize till after the blunzing wears off, we’ll be stuck with it.”
“No we won’t. We’ll only use up half of those red gluons, so there’ll be enough for you to get blunzed and fix everything.”
“Like a second wish.”
“Sure. ‘The Peasant and the Sausage.’ ”
“Then I guess we’ve got an agreement.”
“How do you know I’ll stick to it?” Harry gave me one of his horrible smiles.
“Do I have a choice?”
“You worry too much, Fletch. Come on, let’s get started.”
Jack McCormack had delivered the goods. The stuff was all in Harry’s workshop, stacked by the back door.
“Here’s the basic idea,” said Harry, slowly pacing back and forth. “We put the hotshot table in the fridge and I lie on it. It’s cold in there, and we’ve got it electromagnetically isolated with the copper foil. Just before I get the injection, the chamber is flash-pumped to vacuum. I’ll have an air tank, so no problem.”
“No problem? What about the shot? What kind of shot do you get? What happens to you then?”
“Planck juice. I get blunzed.” Two made-up words. Harry was flying.
“Blunzed I’ve heard, Harry. But what’s this Planck juice?”
“Okay. That’s going to be your and Antie’s job. The idea is that you get Antie to pour half the gluons out of the magnetic bottle and into the microwave cavity. It makes a super-quantum fluid, right?”
“I guess.”
“Do you know what gluons are, Fletcher?”
“Well, they’re real small. They have something to do with quarks.”
“Gluons are the particles that stick quarks together. A proton is three quarks with some gluons in there holding the quarks together. The gluons come in three colors: red, blue and yellow. Red are easiest to get.”
“Fine. You’ve got gluons mixed with microwaves to make a super-quantum fluid. Then what?”
“The fluid is guided into the vortex coil.”
“The vortex coil!” This was getting exciting.
“The vortex coil. Think of a food processor, Fletch. The super-quantum fluid plops into the vortex coil and skaaaaazzt!”
“It’s blended.”
“Blended into Planck juice, Fletcher, Planck juice being a continuous pre-quark force-medium with no distinguishing characteristic features whatsoever. It doesn’t know what the value of Planck’s constant is supposed to be.”
“It doesn’t know.”
“But I’ll tell it! I’ll lie to it! The first thing I’ll show the Planck juice will be a one-meter tunnel of wave guide! So the Planck length will seem like one meter instead of 10-33 centimeters! That’s a hundred-decillion-fold amplification, Fletcher!”
“Harry, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The Planck length is the size level at which quantum uncertainty takes over. The Planck juice will be manipulated into behaving as if the Planck length were one meter. And I’ll absorb the juice. What the blunzer is going to do for me is to greatly magnify the uncertainty around me. Things will do what I tell them to!”
“Let’s backtrack a little, Harry. We’ve got the Planck juice in the wave guide now. The wave guide takes it to the hotshot table, which injects it into your brain and—”
“I get blunzed.” Harry jumped up and down with excitement. “Let’s get to work, Fletch. You’re going to be in charge of the sequencing.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It’s possible that all of central Jersey’ll go up when those gluons hit the vortex coil. But of course—”
“We know it’s going to work,” I chortled. “Or you wouldn’t have been able to make Godzilla happen yesterday.”
Harry and I went over the procedure a few more times, and then he and Antie and I got to work putting everything together. Time passed. Before I knew it, night had fallen. Someone was pounding at the front door.
“Who is it?” called Antie in her old woman’s voice. “Who’s there?”
“Sondra. Let me in, guys.”
8
Magic Doors
“SONDRA, the point is to see it work. We know it works. That’s why we built it. Fletcher, you talk to her. I’m going in the chamber now.” Harry hovered near the heavy, copper-swathed door like a fat man entering a steam-bath.
“Good luck, Harry.” I stepped forward and shook his hand. “The effects will last till midnight, right?”
“If I’ve got it calibrated correctly. We’ll only use a hundred grams of the gluons. First I’ll take care of the time travel and then I’ll open up a door to another world.”
“Why?” Sondra burst out. She’d been asking questions ever since we’d let her in, and she didn’t seem to like the answers she’d been getting. I wished she would go away and let us destroy the universe in peace.
“Look,” I said, “could you please just get out of the way?”
“So it’s no girls allowed, huh? What if I call the cops?”
“Antie’s a girl,” said Harry. “Sort of. We’re not doing anything illegal.” He stood there, thinking, his hand on the fridge’s door latch. “Sondra, I’m going to be master of space and time for two hours. Is there something you’d like me to do for you during that period of time? Wouldn’t you like to have blond hair and a bod that won’t quit?”
“He can make you look like Beva LeClaire,” I suggested. Beva was the latest Hollywood sex symbol, the Marilyn Monroe of the 1990s. “Wouldn’t you like that, Sondra?”
“I’d rather be able to fly.”
“Done,” said Harry. “Now shut up and watch.” With a last nervous smile Harry stepped into the cubical blunzing chamber. A cloud of frost crystals billowed out, and then the refrigerator door slammed shut.
I slid aside a piece of the copper sheathing and peered in through the window we’d set into the door. Harry lay down on the hotshot table, waved his fist, and fitted on a breath
ing mask.
“Turn on the microwave, Antie.”
“Check, Dr. F.”
Harry slid back into a posture of noble ease. I covered up the little window and energized the copper sheathing.
“Antie, get the gluons.”
Antie pincered up the heavy little magnetic bottle with one hand, grasping the lid with her other hand.
I opened the microwave cavity, which was a little black box like a miniature woodstove. A broad spectrum of radiation streamed out.
“Pour, Antie.”
Antie came close and began pouring the gluons into the cavity. The gluons made up a sort of fluid, precious and sparkling as Christ’s blood. The microwave energy field soaked the fluid right up.
As the gluons merged into the microwave field, the room filled with ethereal singing: faint, shifting notes almost too high to detect. A droplet of gluons slid down the lip of the magnetic bottle and burned the tip off one of Antie’s fingers. I slammed the door of the little microwave cavity and breathed a sigh of relief. The first stage was completed.
“What was that stuff you poured in?” Sondra wanted to know. “It looked all irridescent, like fire and water mixed.”
“Those were red gluons,” I explained. “Usually they’re hidden inside the protons and neutrons. I think they come in blue and yellow, too.”
“Buried jewels,” marveled Sondra. “Did they cost much?”
“You know it. We’re saving half of them for the next time.”
“Shall I energize the vortex coil, Dr. F.?”
“Check, Antie.”
Antie threw the knife switch on the heavy power cable leading to the vortex coil, which was a hulking cone-shaped unit right next to the blunzing chamber. Ozone filled the air, and sparks crackled up and down the vortex coil’s ridgy slopes. I saw the streetlights outside begin to dim.