The Ninth Golden Age of Science Fiction Megapack

by Dave Dryfoos

  “Our luscious luck will be ludicrously lucrative,” he boasted to Carrie, grinning at my fruitless struggles to escape his iron grip. “With the machine in my hangar and the hangar a part of your boarding-house we each have a fifty-percent interest in this pricelessly profitable Pump. We’ll be participating partners in a pleasantly productive promotional enterprise.”

  Almost before he had finished talking, Carrie flung herself into his arms with a staggering thump. “Oh, Herc,” she cooed, “what a sweet way to ask for my hand! Partners! Not a single one of my other husbands ever thought to be so—so delicate. I never dreamed your proposal would be this romantic, with me over forty by several years.”

  “Several decades, darling,” Herc found breath to say brutally as he ducked under her headlock. “There seems to be a silly sort of slip somewhere, Sister. Our partnership will be purely platonic!”

  Carrie stared at him for a long silence, pitiful tears dribbling from her eyepouches. Then she let him have it right in the ears like a disappointed fire-siren.

  “The idea!” she raged. “After what I’ve cooked for you and all! Herc Hardhart, you’re—you’re as beastly as a zoo! You eat like a hog, act like a wolf, look like a hippo and talk nothing but bull! Wiz,” she commanded, turning imperiously to me “throw this lyin’ tiger out with the other alley tomcats!”

  I’d moved away when Carrie made Herc accidentally let me go and I wanted to stay away. Herc looked down like a huge red-painted water-tower with two flexing fists and a vicious leer.

  But you know how women are. I had to do something. For Honor and the Space Pump I rared back on tip-toe.

  “Go pack your things,” I demanded, “or we’ll call ten cops!”

  “Lie low, larrikin,” said Herc contemptuously, “or living locally there’ll be one lily-livered little lunkhead the less!”

  “He can’t say that to us!” Carrie objected. “Poke his jaw, Wiz!”

  But in that basement I had no chair to stand on. I could only punch his prominent middle.

  It was a haymaking swipe that buried my right to the elbow with the sound and feel of hitting an air-mattress. I leaned against him, dragging my fist from the cave it’d made for itself.

  Herc laughed jeeringly. The vibration of his innards tossed me to the wall.

  “We’re not hurt!” Carrie encouraged. “Up and at him!”

  With my breath knocked out I slid down the wall, was almost sitting when Carrie waddled to my side.

  “Don’t let that throw you,” she said, and picked me up like a sack of sugar.

  She set me on my shaking feet. I was woozy. The room was going around. Thinking to help, Carrie shoved me toward Herc. I staggered, and lurched unseeing into the reduction-cone of my Space Pump.

  Instantly the floor came up and almost hit me.

  I’d shrunk! I felt crazily smaller than an ant’s uncle, heavier than a lapful of Carrie. The smooth concrete floor seemed to have broken out in a rash of mountains and was strewn with boulders of dust.

  Everything in sight had been magnified almost beyond recognition. And I was as helpless as if my underwear had turned to steel.

  It took me a minute to figure out why. My body had retained all its weight but my muscles had shrunk until they were almost microscopic. It was a struggle to breathe even—but the air shrunk in the energy-cone flowed into my lungs by gravity because I was on my back.

  Everything confused me—I was a stranger to myself. At first I even thought I was my own ghost.

  Herc and Carrie thought so too. When I got adjusted I could hear them arguing.

  “I did not kill him!” Carrie sobbed.

  “Yes, you did,” Herc insisted. “You are a madly menacing murderess, Madam. And for profit—for the proceeds of the Pump. You bopped boarder Bye to bag big bounty.”

  That foxy skunk was a rat! I’d have given my checked garters to have been able to reassure Carrie—and to have pointed out that Herc was trying to gull her and she should give him the bird. I yelled but she couldn’t hear. My voice had shrunk to the size of Hardhart’s conscience.

  “Your nervousness is not necessary,” he went on cold bloodedly, “if you purchase protection through partnership. Follow my fifty-fifty formula to fame and fortune and we won’t worry where Wiz went.”

  Carrie didn’t answer right away. I couldn’t turn my head to see her. I had to lie there wondering whether she’d end her days as an honest jail-bird, railroaded for murder by that redheaded hogger, or die rich and unhappy as his thieving partner.

  I knew what I’d have done in her place. The thought chilled.

  “The very idea!” she said finally, “Making me a proposition like that! You were the one fighting Wiz when he disappeared! I’ll testify against you in every court of the land—and be believed, too!”

  I fell in love with her then and there. But you know how women are. She went right on talking.

  “There’s only one kind of partnership interests me in the slightest, Herc Hardhart. Remember, a wife can’t testify against her husband!”

  It was Herc’s turn to hesitate. “Carrie,” he said at last, choking on the words, “my life and liberty are lost unless we pursue happiness together as groom and bride.”

  “Oh, darling,” she gushed, “you’re so sweet! But don’t kiss me yet—we’re probably not alone. Wiz must be on the floor somewhere. And we can’t just steal his invention right out from over his nose. Find him, Herc, dear.”

  “Find, finish and forget,” said Herc grimly.

  I didn’t like the tone of his voice. All he had to do was turn off the machine, and I’d be asphyxiated for want of concentrated air my shrunken lungs could breathe. And I figured he’d shut down the Pump to hunt me in safety.

  Luckily he didn’t. I could hear him grunting as he squatted and decided he was putting his eye close to the floor, staring along its surface to find me. He must have thought me alive because from here on he whispered rather than talked aloud.

  First thing I knew, a pair of lever-jawed pliers closed on my head and I was dragged from under the energy-cone. Then, with a heave and a groan, Herc lifted me to my bench and tossed me onto the vise-anvil.

  I knew he wanted to kill me but was too dizzy to worry about impending death. As a matter of fact I was already half dead. There wasn’t enough oxygen for me in unshrunken air and my chest was too heavy for its muscles. I was suffocating.

  Herc located my sledge-hammer. I saw it flash through the air toward my head. He was going to hammer out a solution to his problem, all right!

  His first blow landed with a crash. It didn’t hurt! Succeeding blows partly snapped me out of it. The double-dealer wielding the double-jack was giving me artificial respiration though he didn’t know it.

  His repeated blows forced air in and out of my lungs until my head cleared a little. Not enough, though—I was lightheaded and foolish like a high-latitude flier who forgets to cut in his mask.

  What I wanted was shrunken air. So when Herc put me on the edge of the vise, trying to cut me in two, I gave a clumsy wiggle and rolled off.

  Landing was a shock. I tore through something soft and was stuck fast in evil-smelling darkness, right next to a large warm object I couldn’t make out.

  “My corn!” Herc yelled. “The cad has conked my corn!”

  He was lying, of course. I had just grazed his foot, and had pierced the insole of his shoe, netted and held there by his strong—and strong-smelling—nylon socks. But I still weighed my regular hundred twenty-five pounds.

  Herc must have picked up his foot in two hands and tried to shake me loose, because he lost his balance and fell. I felt myself twisting and turning as I swung with the movements of his foot, still stack in the stinking shoe. Only half-conscious before, I was partly revived by the thud as Herc hit the concrete floor.

  He lay on his back like a beetle
that’s been turned over, feebly waving his overweighted foot. And one wave passed me through the rear cone of my Two-Way Space Pump.

  Instantly I found myself restored to full size. I was standing on Herc’s sore toe, the sledge within reach on the bench. I lunged out dizzily and grabbed it. Then I swung the hammer within an inch of Herc’s red nose.

  “Had enough?” I demanded brusquely.

  Herc looked at the hammer and at my face and at Carrie, standing with arms akimbo behind me. He knew when he was licked.

  “Let me up,” he pleaded. “Get off my toe and let me up! I’ll be good.”

  Before he had time to change his mind, I ran him out of the house and threw his clothes out after him.

  But you know how women are. Carrie was weeping when I joined her in the kitchen—sobbing and consoling herself with a peanut-butter, jelly, margarine, tomato and sardine sandwich.

  “You—you bully, you!” she howled. “You ran my fiancé right out of my own house. Now I’ll go to my grave a lone, lorn widow—poor, too.”

  “Why Carrie Coles,” I said, surprised. “You’ve got it all wrong. I was saving you from a fate worse than death. And a fine widow of your accomplishments won’t stay single long.”

  Her tearful face brightened in a sparkling smile with bits of sandwich showing at the corners. “Always indirect, aren’t you, Wiz, dear,” she fluttered. “It’s so sweet of you to ask. And of course I will. Just imagine, Carrie Coles Bye, wife of Wiz Bye, the famous inventor!

  “Now you’ll not have to move your wonderful Pump. Isn’t it just too thrilling? Dear, to celebrate our engagement I’m going to get busy right now, making some nice Chinese bird’s-nest soup—with matzoh balls in it.”

  A wonderful woman, Carrie. She made me set up in business, pointed out how Herc Hardhart had promised to get her rich and gave me the incentive to buy huge billets of tool-steel, sharpen them, shrink them in my Two-Way Space Pump and sell them as cutting-tool bits to big manufacturers. That was the start of my career.

  But a man not only needs an idea and a process, as I had, he needs a special incentive if he’s to become really rich. Carrie furnished that too.

  You see, she wouldn’t let me rebuild my Cybernetic Cooker—still thought it insulting. So, just as her cooking had given me the original idea, it now gave me the ambition to become really rich—so rich, in fact, that it was soon out of the question for my wife to prepare her own meals. You know how women are.

  But in the long run all that I am or hope to be I owe to my aching stomach. And now please excuse me—it’s time I swallowed a pill and took a powder.