by Rudy Rucker
The engines fire up with a hoarse roar. The priest and the rabbi sit and talk. Black clothes, white faces, grey teeth.
“Do you have any food?” the priest asks. He’s powerfully built, young, with thin blonde hair. One hell of a Notre Dame linebacker under those robes.
The rabbi is a little fellow with a fedora and a black beard. He’s got a Franz Kafka mouth, all ticks and teeth. “It’s my understanding that we’ll breakfast in the terminal after the release.”
The priest is getting two hundred for this, the rabbi three. He has a bigger name. If the rushes work out they’ll be witnessing the other escapes as well.
It’s not a big plane, really, and no matter which way Eddie points the camera, there’s always a white piece of Houdini in the frame. Up front you can see Johnny G. in profile, handsome Johnny not looking too good. There’s sweat-beads on his long upper lip, booze sweat. Peace is coming hard to Johnny.
“Just spiral her on up,” Slick Tires says softly. “Like a bed-spring, Johnny.”
Out the portholes you can see the angled horizon sweep by, until they hit the high mattress of clouds. Max watches the altimeter, grinning and showing his teeth. They punch out of the clouds, into high slanting sunlight. Johnny holds to the helix…he’d go up forever if no one said stop…but now it’s high enough.
“Bombs away!” Slick Tires calls back. The priest crosses himself and Moanin’ Max pulls the release handle. Shot of white-wrapped Houdini in the coffin-like bomb-cradle. The bottom falls out, and the long form falls slowly, weightlessly at first. Then the slipstream catches one end, and he begins to tumble, dark white against the bright white of the clouds below.
Eddie holds the shot as long as he can. There’s a big egg-shaped cloud down there, with Houdini falling towards it. Houdini begins to unwrap himself. You can see the bandages trailing him, whipping back and forth like a long flagellum, then thip he’s spermed his way into that rounded white cloud.
On the way back to the airstrip, Eddie and the sound-man go around the plane asking everyone if they think Houdini’ll make it.
“I certainly hope so,” the rabbi.
“I have no idea,” the priest, hungry for his breakfast.
“There’s just no way,” Moanin’ Max. “He’ll impact at two hundred miles per.”
“Everyone dies,” Johnny G.
“In his position I expect I’d try to drogue-chute the bandages,” Slick Tires.
“It’s a conundrum,” the judge.
The clouds drizzle and the plane throws up great sheets of water when it lands. Eddie films them getting out and filing into the small terminal, deserted except …
Across the room, with his back to them, a man in pajamas is playing pinball. Cigar-smoke. Someone calls to him, and he turns—Houdini.
Houdini brings his mother to see the rushes. Everyone except for her loves it. She’s very upset, though, and tears at her hair. Lots of it comes out, lots of white old hair on the floor next to her wheelchair.
Back at home Houdini gets down on his knees and begs and begs until she gives him permission to finish the movie. Rabstein at Pathé figures two more stunts will do it.
“No more magic after that,” Houdini promises. “I’ll use the money to open us a little music shop.”
“Dear boy.”
For the second stunt they fly Houdini and his mom out to Seattle. Rabstein wants to use the old lady for reaction shots. Pathé sets the two of them up in a boarding house, leaving the time and nature of the escape indeterminate.
Eddie Machotka sticks pretty close, filming bits of their long strolls down by the docks. Houdini eating a Dungeness crab. His mom buying taffy. Houdini getting her a wig.
Four figures in black slickers slip down from a fishing boat. Perhaps Houdini hears their footfalls, but he doesn’t deign to turn. Then they’re upon him: the priest, the judge, the rabbi, and this time a doctor as well—could be Rex Morgan.
While the old lady screams and screams, the doctor knocks Houdini out with a big injection of sodium pentathol. The great escape artist doesn’t resist, just watches and smiles till he fades. The old lady bashes the doctor with her purse before the priest and rabbi get her and Houdini bundled onto the fishing boat.
On the boat, it’s Johnny G. and the A-Holes again. Johnny can fly anything, even a boat. His eyes are bloodshot and all over the place, but Slick Tires guides him out of the harbor and down the Puget Sound to a logging river. Takes a couple of hours, but Eddie time-lapses it all…Houdini lying in half of a hollowed log and the doc shooting him up every so often.
Finally they get to a sort of mill-pond with a few logs in it. Moanin’ Max and the judge have a tub of plaster mixed up, and they pour it in around Houdini. They tape over his head-holes, except for the mouth, which gets a breathing tube. What they do is to seal him up inside a big log, with the breathing tube sticking out disguised as a branch-stub. Houdini is unconscious and locked inside the log by a plaster-of-Paris filling…sort of like a worm dead inside a Twinkie. The priest and the rabbi and the judge and the doctor heave the log overboard.
It splashes, rolls, and mingles with the other logs waiting to get sawed up. There’s ten logs now, and you can’t tell for sure which is the one with Houdini in it. The saw is running and the conveyor belt snags the first log.
Shot of the logs bumping around. In the foreground, Houdini’s mom is pulling the hair out of her wig. Big SKAAAAAZZT sound of the first log getting cut up. You can see the saw up there in the background, a giant rip-saw cutting the log right down the middle.
SKAAAZZZZT! SKAAAAZZZZZT! SKAAAZZZZT! The splinters fly. One by one the logs are hooked and dragged up to the saw. You want to look away, but you can’t…just waiting to see blood and used food come flying out. SKAAAZZZZT!
Johnny G. drinks something from a silver hip-flask. His lips move silently. Curses? Prayers? SKAAAZZZZT! Moanin’ Max’s nervous horse-face sweats and grins. Houdini’s Mom has the wig plucked right down to the hair-net. SKAAAZZZZZT! Slick Tire’s eyes are big and white as hard-boiled eggs. He helps himself to Johnny’s flask. SKAAAZZT! The priest mops his forehead and the rabbi…SKNAKCHUNKFWEEEEE!
Plaster dust flies from the ninth log. It falls in two, revealing only a negative of Houdini’s body. An empty mold! They all scramble onto the mill dock, camera pointing around, looking for the great man. Where is he?
Over the shouts and cheers you can hear the jukebox in the mill-hands’ cafeteria. The Andrews Sisters. And inside there’s…Houdini, tapping his foot and eating a cheeseburger.
“Only one more escape,” Houdini promises, “And then we’ll get that music shop.”
“I’m so frightened, Harry,” his bald mom says. “If only they’d give you some warning.”
“They have, this time. Piece of cake. We’re flying out to Nevada.”
“I just hope you stay away from those show-girls.”
The priest and the rabbi and the judge and the doctor are all there, and this time a scientist, too. A low-ceilinged concrete room with slits for windows. Houdini is dressed in a black rubber wet suit, doing card-tricks.
The scientist, who’s a dead ringer for Albert Einstein, speaks briefly over the telephone and nods to the doctor. The doctor smiles handsomely into the camera, then handcuffs Houdini and helps him into a cylindrical tank of water. Refrigeration coils cool it down, and before long they’ve got Houdini frozen solid inside a huge cake of ice.
The priest and the rabbi knock down the sides of the tank, and there’s Houdini like a big firecracker with his head sticking out for a fuse. Outside is a truck with a hydraulic lift. Johnny G. and the A-Holes are there, and they load Houdini in back. The ice gets covered with pads to keep it from melting in the hot desert sun.
Two miles off, you can see a spindly test-tower with a little shed on top. This is an atom-bomb test range, out in some godforsaken desert in the middle of Nevada. Eddie Machotka rides the truck with Houdini and the A-Holes.
Shot of the slender tower l
ooming overhead, the obscene bomb-bulge at the top. God only knows what strings Rabstein had to pull to get Pathé in on this.
There’s a cylindrical hole in the ground right under the tower, right at ground zero, and they slip the frozen Houdini in there. His head, flush with the ground, grins at them like a peyote cactus. They drive back to the bunker, fast.
Eddie films it all in real time, no cuts. Houdini’s mom is in the bunker, of course, plucking a lapful of wigs. The scientist hands her some dice.
“Just to give him fighting chance, we won’t detonate until you are rolling a two. Is called snake-eyes, yes?”
Close on her face, frantic with worry. As slowly as possible, she rattles the dice and spills them onto the floor.
Snake-eyes!
Before anyone else can react, the scientist has pushed the button, a merry twinkle in his faraway eyes. The sudden light filters into the bunker, shading all the blacks up to grey. The shock wave hits next, and the judge collapses, possibly from heart attack. The roar goes on and on. The crowded faces turn this way and that.
Then it’s over, and the noise is gone, gone except for…an insistent honking, right outside the bunker. The scientist undogs the door and they all look out, Eddie shooting over their shoulders.
It’s Houdini! Yes! In a white convertible with a breast-heavy show-girl!
“Give me my money!” he shouts. “And color me gone!”
============
Note on “Tales of Houdini”
Written in Summer, 1980.
Elsewhere, Ace Books, 1981.
I remember reading a cartoon-story about Houdini in Children’s Digest when I was young. My own “Tales of Houdini” arose orally; it was a story that I made up for the children one day while we were driving on a Sunday outing from Heidelberg to the nearby town of Speyer, all five of us in a 1972 Taunus, Sylvia and I in front and the three kids in back. I rehearsed the story in my mind a few times, and then, right after we moved back to the States, I used my mother’s portable Olivetti to knock it out in one go. Bruce Sterling included the story in his classic cyberpunk Mirrorshades anthology of 1986. The cameraman “Eddie” in this story was based on my friend Eddie Marritz, who still is a cameraman to this day.
The Facts of Life
The Tulpan resembled an ordinary plastic soda-straw. He was warpsick, and lay trembling on his tiny jellybed. One end of him…his name was Ö…was oozing orange foam, and the other end of him was piping a distress signal.
Jack Stalk wanted to help, but he didn’t trust his legs. Or arms, for that matter. He thought back on the crowded, chiming passage through hyperspace. Now you see us, now you don’t.
It was horrible to come down from the mindless joy of the warp, down into a crowded piece of machinery, a hundred thousand light-years from home. From Micha. Jack could see her full face, smell her sweet body. Micha. If they hadn’t quarreled this never would have happened.
He felt he should sit up and do something, help Ö , look out a porthole, ask more questions…but he could only lie there, staring at the blank ceiling which now looked, in some indefinite way, alive…like a face, really.
“Hello, Jack-Stalk,” the ceiling said. “Ready for conversing topics of mutual interest?”
It was Ö ‘s cloud-person, Fefferfuff by name. Fefferfuff was up there, a centimeter thick, a talking carpet of cloud.
“Are we there yet?” Jack asked.
“Position yes, velocity no. Our planet always moving some 700 km/sec relative to the cosmic background. After matching them up then we landing Tulpa.”
As Fefferfuff said this, he reached a tendril down to the control board. Jack could feel the ship’s engines cutting in, and the welcome pressure of acceleration. The solid g-force felt good to Jack. He felt good enough to sit up and take a look at little Ö , still skirling his distress.
The distress-call was a repeated pattern of kinetic tone images. There was a downward tone, a thrust and grab, a twirling sound, three blips and a harmonious resolution.
Jack slid his hand down the side of Ö ‘s bed until he found a slit. He pushed his hand in, removed an object and laid it on the bed. It was a tightly furled piece of material. A Tulpan suitcase. Jack unrolled it as Ö squeaked approvingly.
The fabric…slippery and somewhat elastic…was lined with little pockets holding various shapes. One pocket seemed full of little balls. Jack took out three and laid them near the Tulpan’s intake end.
“Geople helping geople,” Fefferfuff observed. Ö vacuumed up the pills. He looked, then, like a short boa constrictor who’d just eaten three cantaloupes. He stopped foaming and humped himself up like a numeral “2.”
“Gleephwee buzz buzz,” Ö said, “Ah wove Wucy.”
“I love Lucy,” Fefferfuff repeated, his husky voice solemn with emotion. “You love Lucy. Lucy loves you. Geople loving geople.”
Jack Stalk tried once again to explain. “That was just a comedy show. Twenty, thirty years ago. I hardly ever watched it. I mean if you want to talk about old TV shows, how about Rod Serling? Ed Sullivan? ‘Sergeant Bilko?’”
“Hahahahahahaha,” Ö said, imitating canned laughter.
“Lucy is waiting,” Fefferfuff said serenely. “Waiting for average fellow. You lucky dog.”
“How does your FTL drive work?” Jack Stalk asked, just to change the subject. He’d heard about little else but Lucille Ball from these two ever since they’d nabbed him. It had been a classic UFO snatch. Lights in the sky. Unattached young man has a fight with his girl, goes out for a walk, and is never seen again. Missing person number 765 for the year 1981. No one but Micha would really care…and she’d forget before long. He had to get back!
“Grandma dreams she moves Tweety-Bird’s cage,” Fefferfuff said, presumably in answer to Jack’s question. “Tweety dreams Grandma. We dream God. God dreams us here, he dreams us there.”
“Znnt, znnt,” Ö said by way of illustration. He swayed back and forth like a happy little cobra.
“But what type of engine have you got in this thing?” Jack insisted. He needed to find out how to fly it back. “I mean this isn’t a Tibetan prayer-wheel you’ve got here, it’s a fantastically sophisticated ship with a faster-than-light drive! We’d give anything for this on Earth.” A sudden inspiration struck. “We could probably arrange to turn the real Lucille Ball over to …”
A porthole irised open. “We already got good-looking Lucy on Tulpa. Waiting for you. You lucky dog.”
Jack Stalk could see the small blue disk of a planet out there. They were coming up on it, matching velocities. He still couldn’t see why, if the Tulpans had an FTL drive, they couldn’t have just jumped right from downtown Louisville, where they’d nabbed him, to the surface of their home planet. Instead they had spent a whole week powering out of the solar system…allegedly to “match velocities with the cosmic background.” And now they were using the rockets again, this time to switch from cosmic rest to the motion of Tulpa. It seemed stupid.
“Hewwo,” Ö said, sounding like a wetly blown kazoo, “Hewwo, Earthwing.” This, along with “Ah wove Wucy,” was the extent of his spoken English. Of course Ö, the soda-straw, didn’t need to speak English. Fefferfuff could create the necessary sound waves by vibrating the particles of his gaseous body. And Fefferfuff, who was part of Ö…or was it the other way around…Fefferfuff was a linguist, a student of Earth’s televised culture. He had some very strange ideas about Earth.
“Jack-Stalk,” the cloud person asked then, “In your sex orgies what is the precise role of the twenty-piece steel mixing-bowl set? Is the wearing of black mouse-ears a signal of genotypic sterility? Or is it rather functioning as signal for coital adjacency? We are so very curious about your reproductive processes.”
“If you’re so interested in that stuff you should spend some time on Earth and look around…instead of watching television all the time. Sex is part of everyday life. No big deal. It’s just …” Jack broke off, strangely embarrassed, and made the traditio
nal hand-gesture for coitus: The extended right forefinger is thrust repeatedly into a circle formed by the left thumb and forefinger. In point of fact, Jack was still a virgin.
“You and Lucy must do this for all of us,” Fefferfuff said. “We never seeing it on television. Excretion as well. Until Ö and I picking you up we thinking that human body-chemistry so advanced that there no bodily wastes. In the cases of Fred-Flintstone or Walter-Cronkite, for instance …”
Jack stopped listening. He’d been kidnapped by incredibly advanced aliens…and all they were interested in was doo-doo and weenies.
They were from the planet Tulpa, on the other side of the galaxy, about a hundred thousand light-years from Earth. Something about the symmetry of the galactic gravitational field made it easy for them to jump across to our side and back. They’d been doing the jumps for twenty or thirty years now, but had never actually landed on Earth before this. They hadn’t had the conventional rocket power up till now.
Prior to this visit, the Tulpans had gotten all their information about Earth by intercepting TV broadcasts. On the basis of total minutes broadcast, they had concluded that Lucille Ball was the most important person on Earth. Apparently they had developed some sort of Lucy simulacrum.
Once again, Jack leaned over the ship’s control panel, trying to puzzle it out. The big button there must activate the FTL drive…he’d seen Fefferfuff reach a tendril down to it just before the jump. And those two rows of lights had something to do with the velocity. Before the jump, the Tulpans had wasted days maneuvering the ship till each pair of lights was glowing evenly. The conventional rocket controls were over there and …
Fefferfuff drifted down from the ceiling to shroud the control panel. The engines shifted to full roar. The ship was sliding down into the gravitational well of the planet Tulpa. Jack lurched back to his jellybed.
