The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

  “Wu set them upright, side by side. He slapped one and grey dust flew. He slapped the other. “Where’d you get these?” he asked.

  Frankie stopped working and lit a cigarette. “Off a dune buggy,” he said.

  By this time, I had joined them. “A Volvo dune buggy?”

  “Not a Volvo,” Frankie said. “An electric job. Can’t sell you the wheels separately. They’re a set.”

  “What about the dune buggy?” Wu asked. “Can I have a look at it?”

  Frankie’s eyes narrowed. “It’s on the property. Hey, are you some kind of environment man or something?”

  “The very opposite,” said Wu. “I’m a lawyer. I just happen to dig dune buggies. Can I have a look at it? Good ones are hard to find.”

  I winced.

  “I’ll have to ask Unc,” Frankie said.

  “Wu,” I said, as soon as Frankie had left to find his uncle, “there’s something you need to know about junkyard men. If something is hard to find, you don’t have to tell them. And what’s this dune buggy business, anyway? I thought you wanted interior trim for your P1800.”

  “Forget the P1800, Irv,” Wu said. “It’s yours. I’m giving it to you.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Wu slapped the wire mesh wheel again and sniffed the cloud of dust. “Do you realize what this is, Irv?”

  “Some sort of wire wheel. So what?”

  “I worked at Boeing in 1970,” Wu said. “I helped build this baby, Irv. It’s off the LRV.”

  “The LR what?”

  Before Wu could answer, Frankie was back. “Well, you can look at it,” Frankie said. “But you got to hold your breath. It’s in the cave and there’s no air in there.”

  “The cave?” I said. They both ignored me.

  “You can see it from the door, but I’m not going back in there,” said Frankie. “Unc won’t let me. Have you got a jacket? It’s cold.”

  “I’ll be okay,” Wu said.

  “Suit yourself.” Frankie tossed Wu a pair of plastic welding goggles. “Wear these. And remember, hold your breath.”

  It was clear at this point where the cave was. Frankie was pointing toward the low door into the shed, where he rolled the tyres. Wu put on the goggles and ducked his head; as he went through the doorway he made that same weird pop the tyres made.

  I stood there with Frankie in the sunlight, holding the two wire mesh wheels, feeling like a fool.

  There was another pop and Wu backed out through the shower curtain. When he turned around, he looked like he had seen a ghost. I don’t know how else to describe it. Plus, he was shivering like crazy.

  “Told you it was cold!” said Frankie. “And it’s weird. There’s no air in there, for one thing. If you want the dune buggy, you’ll have to get it out of there yourself.”

  “Wu gradually stopped shivering. As he did, a huge grin spread across his face. “It’s weird, all right,” he said. “Let me show my partner. Loan me some extra goggles.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

  “Irv, come on! Put these goggles on.”

  “No way!” I said. But I put them on. You always did what Wu said, sooner or later; he was that kind of guy.

  “Don’t hold your breath in. Let it all out, and then hold it. Come on. Follow me.”

  I breathed out and ducked down just in time; Wu grabbed my hand and pulled me through the shed door behind him. If I made a pop I didn’t hear it. We were standing in the door of a cave – but looking out, not in. The inside was another outside!

  It was like the beach, all grey sand (or dust) but with no water. I could see stars but it wasn’t dark. The dust was greenish grey, like a courthouse hallway (a colour familiar to lawyers).

  My ears were killing me. And it was cold!

  We were at the top of a long, smooth slope, like a dune, which was littered with tyres. At the bottom was a silver dune buggy with no front wheels, sitting nose down in the grey dust.

  “Wu pointed at it. He was grinning like a maniac. I had seen enough. Pulling my hand free, I stepped back through the shower curtain and gasped for air. This time I heard a pop as I went through.

  The warm air felt great. My ears gradually quit ringing. Frankie was sitting on his tyre pile, smoking a cigarette. “Where’s your buddy? He can’t stay in there.”

  Just then, Wu backed out through the curtain with a loud pop. “I’ll take it,” he said, as soon as he had filled his lungs with air. “I’ll take it!”

  I winced. Twice.

  “I’ll have to ask Unc,” said Frankie.

  “Wu,” I said, as soon as Frankie had left to find his uncle, “let me tell you something about junkyard men. You can’t say ‘I’ll take it, I’ll take it’ around them. You have to say, ‘Maybe it might do, or . . .’”

  “Irving!” Wu cut me off. His eyes were wild. (He hardly ever called me Irving.) He took both my hands in his, as if we were bride and groom, and began to walk me in a circle. His fingers were freezing. “Irving, do you know, do you realize, where we just were?”

  “Some sort of cave? Haven’t we played this game before?”

  “The Moon! Irving, that was the surface of the Moon you just saw!”

  “I admit it was weird,” I said. “But the Moon is a million miles away. And it’s up in the . . .”

  “Quarter of a million,” Wu said. “But I’ll explain later.”

  Frankie was back, with his uncle. “That dune buggy’s one of a kind,” the old man said. “I couldn’t take less than five hundred for it.”

  Wu said, “I’ll take it!”

  I winced.

  “But you’ve got to get it out of the cave yourself,” the old man said. “I don’t want Frankie going in there anymore. That’s why I told the kids, no more rocks.”

  “No problem,” Wu said. “Are you open tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” said the old man.

  “What about Monday?”

  I followed Wu through the packed-together Volvos to the front gate. We were on the street before I realized he hadn’t even bothered to look at the 1800. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to those two,” I said. I was a little pissed off. More than a little.

  “There’s no doubt about it,” Wu said.

  “Damn right there’s no doubt about it!” I started my 145 and headed up the street, looking for an exit from the Hole. Any exit. “Five hundred dollars for a junk dune buggy?”

  “No doubt about it at all. That was either the Hadley Apennines, or Descartes, or Taurus Littrow,” Wu said. “I guess I could tell by looking at the serial numbers on the LRV.”

  “I never heard of a Hadley or a Descartes,” I said, “but I know Ford never made a dune buggy.” I found a dirt road that led up through a clump of trees. Through the branches I could see the full Moon, pale in the afternoon sky. “And there’s the Moon, right there in the sky, where it’s supposed to be.”

  “There’s apparently more than one way to get to the Moon, Irving. Which they are using as a dump for old tyres. We saw it with our own eyes!”

  The dirt road gave out in a vacant lot on Conduit. I crossed a sidewalk, bounced down a curb, and edged into the traffic. Now that I was headed back toward Brooklyn, I could pay attention. “Wu,” I said. “Just because you worked for NAPA – ”

  “NASA, Irv. And I didn’t work for them, I worked for Boeing.”

  “Whatever. Science is not my thing. But I know for a fact that the Moon is in the sky. We were in a hole in the ground, although it was weird, I admit.”

  “A hole with stars?” Wu said. “With no air? Get logical, Irv.” He found an envelope in my glove compartment and began scrawling on it with a pencil. “No, I suspected it when I saw those tyres. They are from the Lunar Roving Vehicle, better known as the LRV or the lunar rover. Only three were built and all three were left on the Moon. Apollo 15, 16, and 17.1971.1972. Surely you remember.”

  “Sure,” I said. The third thing you learn in law schoo
l is never to admit you don’t remember something. “So how did this loonie rover get to Brooklyn?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Wu said. “I suspect we’re dealing with one of the rarest occurrences in the universe. A neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency.”

  “A non-logical metaphysical what?”

  “Wu handed me the envelope. It was covered with numbers:

  “That explains the whole thing,” Wu said. “A neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. It’s quite rare. In fact, I think this may be the only one.”

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “I used to be a physicist.”

  “I thought it was an engineer.”

  “Before that. Look at the figures, Irv! Numbers don’t lie. That equation shows how space-time can be folded so that two parts are adjacent that are also, at the same time, separated by millions of miles. Or a quarter of a million, anyway.”

  “So we’re talking about a sort of back door to the Moon?”

  “Exactly.”

  On Sundays I had visitation rights to the big-screen TV. I watched golf and stock-car racing all afternoon with my wife, switching back and forth during commercials. We got along a lot better now that we weren’t speaking. Especially when she was holding the remote. On Monday morning, Wu arrived at the door at nine o’clock sharp, wearing coveralls and carrying a shopping bag and a toolbox.

  “How do you know I don’t have court today?” I asked.

  “Because I know you have only one case at present, your divorce, in which you are representing both parties in order to save money. Hi, Diane.”

  “Hi, Wu.” (She was speaking to him.)

  We took my 145. Wu was silent all the way out Eastern Parkway, doing figures on a cocktail napkin from a Bay Ridge nightclub. “Go out last night?” I asked. After a whole day with Diane, I was dying to have somebody to talk to.

  “Something was bothering me all night,” he said. “Since the surface of the Moon is a vacuum, how come all the air on Earth doesn’t rush through the shed door, along with the tyres?”

  “I give up,” I said.

  We were at a stoplight. “There it is,” he said. He handed me the napkin, on which was scrawled:

  “There what is?”

  “The answer to my question. As those figures demonstrate, Irv, we’re not just dealing with a neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. We’re dealing with an incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. The two areas are still separated by a quarter of a million miles, even though that distance has been folded to the width of a centimetre. It’s all there in black and white. See?”

  “I guess,” I said. The fourth thing you learn in law school is to never admit you don’t understand something.

  “The air doesn’t rush through, because it can’t. It can kind of seep through, though, creating a slight microclimate in the immediate vicinity of the adjacency. Which is probably why we don’t die immediately of decompression. A tyre can roll through, if you give it a shove, but air is too, too . . .”

  “Too wispy to shove,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  I looked for the turn off Conduit, but nothing was familiar. I tried a few streets, but none of them led us into the Hole. “Not again!” “Wu complained.

  “Again!” I answered.

  I went back to Boulevard. Vinnie was behind the counter today, and he remembered me (with a little prodding).

  “You’re not the only one having trouble finding the Hole,” he said. “It’s been hard to find lately.”

  “What do you mean, ‘lately’?” Wu asked from the doorway.

  “Just this last year. Every month or so it gets hard to find. I think it has to do with the Concorde. I read somewhere that the noise affects the tide, and the Hole isn’t that far from Jamaica Bay, you know.”

  “Can you draw us a map?” I asked.

  “I never took drawing,” Vinnie said, “so listen up close.”

  Vinnie’s instructions had to do with an abandoned railroad track, a wrong-way turn onto a one-way street, a dog-leg that cut across a health club parking lot, and several other ins and outs. While I was negotiating all this, Wu was scrawling the back of a car-wash flyer he had taken from Vinnie’s counter.

  “The tide,” he muttered. “I should have known!”

  I didn’t ask him what he meant; I figured (I knew!) he would tell me. But before he had a chance, we were bouncing down a dirt track through some scruffy trees, and onto the now-familiar dirt streets of the Hole. “Want some more moon rocks?” I asked when we passed the kids and their stand.

  “I’ll pick up my own today, Irv!”

  I pulled up by the gate and we let ourselves in. Wu carried the shopping bag; he gave me the toolbox.

  The old man was working on an ancient 122, the Volvo that looks like a ‘48 Ford from the back. (It was always one of my favourites.) “It’s electric,” he said when Wu and I walked up.

  “The 122?” I asked.

  “The dune buggy,” the old man said. “Electric is the big thing now. All the cars in California are going to be electric next year. It’s the law.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “So what, anyway?”

  “That makes that dune buggy worth a lot of money.”

  “No, it doesn’t. Besides, you already agreed on a price.”

  “That’s right. Five hundred,” Wu said. He pulled five bills from his pocket and unfolded them.

  “I said I couldn’t take less than five hundred,” the old man said. “I never said I couldn’t take more.”

  Before Wu could answer, I pulled him behind the 122. “Remember the second thing we learned in law school!” I said. “When to walk away. We can come back next week – if you still want that thing.”

  “Wu shook his head. “It won’t be here next week. I realized something when Vinnie told us that the Hole was getting hard to find. The adjacency is warping the neighbourhood as well as the cislunar space-time continuum. And since it’s lunar, it has a monthly cycle. Look at this.”

  He handed me the car wash flyer, on the back of which was scrawled:

  “See?” said Wu. “We’re not just dealing with an incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency. We’re dealing with a periodic incongruent neotopological metaeuclidean adjacency.”

  “Which means . . .”

  “The adjacency comes and goes. With the Moon.”

  “Sort of like PMS.”

  “Exactly. I haven’t got the figures adjusted for daylight savings time yet, but the Moon is on the wane, and I’m pretty sure that after today, Frankie will be out of the illegal dumping business for a month, at least.”

  “Perfect. So we come back next month.”

  “Irv, I don’t want to take the chance. Not with a million dollars at stake.”

  “Not with a what?” He had my attention.

  “That LRV cost two million new, and only three of them were made. Once we get it out, all we have to do is contact NASA. Or Boeing. Or the Air & Space Museum at the Smithsonian. But we’ve got to strike while the iron is hot. Give me a couple of hundred bucks and I’ll give you a fourth interest.”

  “A half.”

  “A third. Plus the P1800.”

  “You already gave me the P1800.”

  “Yeah, but I was only kidding. Now I’m serious.”

  “Deal,” I said. But instead of giving Wu two hundred, I plucked the five hundred-dollar bills out of his hand. “But you stick to the numbers. I do all the talking.”

  We got it for six hundred. Non-refundable. “What does that mean?” Wu asked.

  “It means you boys own the dune buggy – whether you get it out of the cave or not,” said the old man, counting his money.

  “Fair enough,” said Wu. It didn’t seem fair to me at all, but I kept my mouth shut. I couldn’t imagine a scenario in which we would get our money back from the old man, anyway.

  He went back to work on the engine of the 122, and Wu and I headed for the
far end of the yard. We found Frankie rolling tyres through the shed door: pop, pop, pop. The pile by the fence was as big as ever. He waved and kept on working.

  Wu set down the shopping bag and pulled out two of those spandex bicycling outfits. He handed one to me, and started taking off his shoes.

  I’ll spare you the ensuing interchange – what I said, what he said, objections, arguments, etc. Suffice it to say that, ten minutes later, I was wearing black and purple tights under my coveralls, and so was Wu. Supposedly, they were to keep our skin from blistering in the vacuum. Wu was hard to resist when he had his mind made up.

  I wondered what Frankie thought of it all. He just kept rolling tyres through the doorway, one by one.

  There were more surprises in the bag. Wu pulled out rubber gloves and wool mittens, a brown bottle with Chinese writing on it, a roll of clear plastic vegetable bags from the supermarket, a box of cotton balls, a roll of duct tape, and a rope.

  Frankie didn’t say anything until Wu got to the rope. Then he stopped working, sat down on the pile of tyres, lit a cigarette, and said: “Won’t work.”

  “Wu begged his pardon.

  “I’ll show you,” Frankie said. He tied one end of the rope to a tyre and tossed it through the low door into the shed. There was the usual pop and then a fierce crackling noise.

  Smoke blew out the door. Wu and I both jumped back.

  Frankie pulled the rope back, charred on one end. There was no tyre. “I learned the hard way,” he said, “when I tried to pull the dune buggy through myself, before I took the wheels off.”

  “Of course!” Wu said. “What a fool I’ve been. I should have known!”

  “Should have known what?” Frankie and I both asked at once.

  “Wu tore a corner off the shopping bag and started scrawling numbers on it with a pencil stub. “Should have known this!” he said, and he handed it to Frankie.

  Frankie looked at it, shrugged, and handed it to me:

  “So?” I said.