by Rudy Rucker
“How nice,” Frau Wittman beamed. “Take yourself another sweet-roll.”
“Thanks.”
On the sidewalk Vivian was acting her age for once…staring blankly at the traffic and picking her nose. Feeling like a big brother, Joe gave her the extra bun. He wondered what it would be like to have a sibling…someone close enough to share his secret with. Maybe he could show it to Udo tonight…if Udo’s parents let him come. But they probably wouldn’t—they didn’t like the Army, and they didn’t like Joe’s olive skin.
He said goodbye to Vivian and rode the rest of the way home without any trouble. He’d probably just been hungry. The apartment was a pigsty, an empty pigsty. Joe’s Dad usually went straight to the noncoms’ bar as soon as he got off duty for the day. Joe checked the fridge…nothing but milk and his father’s beer…then went on to his room.
Joe’s room was the one nice spot in the apartment. He had a good stereo from the PX, travel posters on the wall, a couple of plants and an Indian bedspread for a window curtain. The furniture was GI, but at least it was neat.
His heart pounding with excitement, Joe rolled the mirror-ball out onto his bed. The woman…he was sure it was a woman…waved her hands in greeting, then began staring this way and that, taking it all in.
She could only see half the room from the side she was on, and Joe was about to turn the ball so she could see the rest. But then she…turned it herself.
It was strange to watch this happen. one of the woman’s hands came closer and closer to the ball’s surface, and the image of her fingers covered almost everything. The fingers seemed to hold and turn the surface, and the whole little universe turned along. The fingers let go, the hand drew back, and the woman was on the other side of the ball. Joe could see the back of her head.
He leaned over the ball and looked down at her from above. That put the mouth and eyes in the right places, and she looked human, almost familiar. The mouth smiled kindly.
She could see his bookcase from where she was now, and it seemed to be of particular interest to her. She raised an arm and pointed. The arm-image curved halfway round the ball.
Still leery of actually touching the ball, Joe went and got a book and brought it over…a tattered copy of Heinlein’s Starman Jones. The woman held up what seemed to be a camera and he riffled through the pages for her. Maybe her machines would be able to learn English!
Excited by this idea, Joe brought over book after book. His fat, illustrated dictionary seemed to be a particularly big hit. He riffled its pages slowly to be sure they got it all down.
At the end of an hour Joe was feeling weak and hungry again. The Christmas-ball people were busy setting up something that looked like a console-model TV set. Maybe they planned to show him movies? He went out to the kitchen to drink some milk.
When he came back, the little TV screen was on. The woman spoke into a microphone, and words crawled across the screen. English words.
HELLO. MY NAME IS TULPA. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?
Hands shaking with excitement, Joe fumbled out a pen and one of his little blue school-paper pamphlets.
Hello, Tulpa, he printed. My name is Joe. Where are you from?
WE ARE NOT FROM. WE ARE HERE. WE HAVE LANDED YOU HERE WITH OUR MACHINES.
That didn’t make sense. It was Tulpa who had landed on Earth in her little space-squeezed ball. A strange, mind-numbing idea began to form… .
You landed, Joe insisted. You are inside a tiny ball.
Tulpa smiled, her eyes, staring out from under the microphone. YOU LOOK THE SAME TO US. YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE INSIDE A LITTLE BALL.
To prove this she reached out her hand and pressed two fingers against the ball’s surface. Then she…picked up the surface and moved it around. The images in the ball swept and curved. Now he saw the top of her head, now the back of the TV, now the distant sunset. One of Tulpa’s companions danced towards the surface, then away.
No, Joe wrote shakily. You’re inside and I’m outside. I can prove it. He covered the ball with his handkerchief, then pulled it away. I can cover you up!
SO CAN I. Tulpa produced a black velvet pouch. Her fingers grew out to the surface, the images swept, and suddenly the little ball was all black. A shiny, black, imageless mirror.
Just then the apartment door slammed. His father!
“Joey?” the drink-blurred voice called. “Are you here?”
“Yeah, Dad.” Joe put his handkerchief over the ball.
“What a day,” his father called. “What a bitch of a day.” Joe heard him get a beer out of the fridge and snap it open. “What are you doing in there?” The light footsteps approached, and the door swung open.
Joe’s father was a slight man, a bantam-weight gypsy with a metallic voice. He was an alcoholic, a lifer retread sergeant, a lonely man who had never forgiven his wife for escaping into suicide. His eyes looked flat behind his flesh-colored GI glasses. Flat but observant.
“What’s all the books out for? And what’s that under the hankie? You’re not smoking pot are you?”
Joe snorted contemptuously. “Sure, Dad, I’m high on angel-dust. I’m really flying.” He tucked his hands into his underarms and flapped his elbows like chicken-wings. “And meanwhile I’m writing up a report for my literature class.”
“So what’s with the snot-rag? What’s under it?” Veteran of twenty years of barracks inspections, Joe’s father was not to be distracted.
“It’s just a ball I found. A funny glass ball.” Chancing it, Joe raised a corner of the hankie. Okay. It was still black from Tulpa’s pouch. He took the hankie all the way off.
Joe’s father leaned wonderingly over the ball. “Funny how it doesn’t reflect. It looks like one of those crystal balls. You know your Aunt Rosie…she used to do that stuff. Show people their dead relatives.”
“That’s interesting,” Joe said, not really listening. He had to put the ball away before …
Three pink spots appeared on the ball’s surface. The blackness slid down off the ball. Tulpa stared out at them, smiling uncertainly.
Joe’s father grunted like a man punched in the heart. “That’s her,” he croaked. “That’s your no-good traitor mother who left me all alone.”
Tulpa stared intently at Joe’s father, trying to read his expression.
“You’re crazy,” Joe said, shaking his father’s shoulder. “This has nothing to do with you.”
His father twisted out of Joe’s grip and shoved him aside. “It’s her, I tell you. Safe in heaven and laughing at me.”
Tulpa had both hands up, waving the calm down gesture she’d learned from Joe. She looked frightened.
Joe’s father’s voice rose to parade-ground intensity. “I’LL GET YOU, ARLENE!”
Before Joe could stop him, his father snatched up the ball and threw it against the wall.
The ball winked out of existence. Two punctured sheets of spacetime snapped apart…too far. The universe shattered.
============
Note on “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge”
Written in Spring, 1981.
The 57th Franz Kafka, Ace Books, 1983.
“The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge” has an odd history. After writing it, I sent it to Robert Sheckley, who was then the fiction editor at Omni. He called back to say he was going to buy it, provided I made a small change to the ending. I was overjoyed, as Omni was at that time the top-paying SF market. My wife and I were about to go to New York for a conference anyway, so we arranged to meet Sheckley, which was great fun. Sheckley suggested the Hamlet quote for the head of the story. My wife and I had dinner with him and his then wife, Jay Rothbel. The waiter behaved like an out-of-control Sheckley robot and Sheckley and I almost got run down crossing the street. It was all perfect. But then I didn’t hear anything from Sheckley for quite some time.
When I next talked to him, he told me that his boss at Omni had told him not to use “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge.” Also Sheckley told me that he was being eased out of
the Omni job. So in the end I never did sell a story to Omni. I was working on my novel The Sex Sphere around this same time, and just to get some immediate use out of “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” I used an altered from of it as Chapter Twelve of that book.
Pac-Man
It was hot. Polly was driving Rhett home from work. Pretty Polly, fresh out of college, driving her husband home from his job at the arcade. Rhett had been fresh out of college three or four years earlier, but it hadn’t took.
“Eat her, Polly, eat her fast,” cried Rhett. A fifty-year-old woman in a pink alligator shirt and lime-green Bermudas was in the crosswalk.
“Pac-Man, Rhett?”
Rhett made change and serviced the machines at Crasher’s, a pinball and video arcade in the new Killeville shopping mall. He left about a third of his pay in the machines, especially Pac-Man and Star Castle. Sometimes, when Rhett had been playing a lot, he’d come home still in the machine’s space, the Pac-Man space today, a cookie-filled maze with floorping monsters that try to eat you while you try to eat all the cookies, and there’s stop-signs to eat too: they make the monsters turn blue and then you can eat them back till they start flashing, which is almost right away on the third and fifth boards …
“Yeah. I broke a hundred thousand today.”
“My that’s a lot.” The uneaten fifty-year-old preppie was out of the road now. Polly eased the car forward.
“Sixteen boards,” added Rhett.
In Pac-Man, each time you eat all the cookies and stop-signs, the screen blinks and then goes back to starting position. Almost all the video games include some similar principle. Killing off all the monsters in Space Invaders, blowing up the central ship in Star Castle, making it through the maze in Berzerk: in each case one gets a reset, a new board. The rules of the game usually change somewhat with each new board, so that as one moves to higher levels, one is exploring new space, probing unknown areas of the machine’s program.
“There was an incredible show after the fifteenth board,” Rhett continued. “All the monsters came out and took their robes off. Underneath they were like pink slugs. And then they acted out their roles. Like the red one is always first?”
Polly smiled over at Rhett. He was long and skinny, with a pencil-thin mustache. He knew that he was wasting his life on the video machines, and she knew, but it hadn’t seemed to matter yet. They had time to burn. They were married and they both had college degrees: till now that had been enough.
“I went for the interview, Rhett.”
“Yeah? At the bank?”
“I think I can get it, but it looks kind of dinky. I’d just be a programmer.”
“You don’t know computers.”
“I do too. I took a whole year of programming, I’ll have you know.”
“A useful trade,” mused Rhett. “Killeville College prepares its students for a successful career in modern society. The New South. Why did I have to major in English?”
“You could get a better job if you wanted to, Rhett.”
Rhett’s fingers danced across the phantom controls.
“Tfoo, tfoo, tfoom!”
The next day, Polly decided to take the bank job. It was dinky, but they paid five dollars an hour, and Mr. Hunt, the personnel officer, promised that there were opportunities for rapid advancement. After signing up and agreeing to be there Monday, Polly drove over to the mall to tell Rhett.
The mall was a single huge building jigsawed into a lake of asphalt. Crasher’s was in the middle, right by Spencer Gifts. It was dark and air-conditioned with a gold carpet on the floor. A row of machines was lined up along each wall, pinball on the right, video on the left. Polly liked the pinballs better; at least there you were manipulating something real.
The pinballs glowed and the videos twinkled. A few youths were playing, and the machines filled the room with sound.
Intruder alert, Intruder alert.
mmmmmwwwwwhhhhaaaaaAAAAAAAAAA-KOW-KOW-KOW!
Welcome to Xenon.
Doodley-doodle-doodley-doo.
Budda-budda-zen-zen-BLOOOO!
Try me again.
There at the back was Rhett, grinning and twitching at the controls of Star Castle. He wore a news-vendor’s change apron.
“I took the job,” said Polly, coming up behind him.
“Just a minute,” said Rhett, not looking up. “I’ll give you change in a minute.” He took her for a customer, or pretended to.
A fat spaceship rotated slowly at the center of the Star Castle screen. Surrounding it were concentric rings of light: force-fields. Rhett’s ship darted around the perimeter of the rings like a horsefly, twisting and stinging, trying to blast its way to the machine’s central ship. Eerily singing bombs pursued Rhett, and when he finally breached the innermost wall, the machine began firing huge, crackling space-mines. Rhett dodged the mines, firing and thrusting all the while. One of his bullets caught the central ship and the whole screen blacked out in a deafening explosion.
“That’s five,” said Rhett, glancing back. “Hi, Polly.”
“I went to see Mr. Hunt like we decided, Rhett. They’re really giving me the job.”
“Far out. Maybe I’ll quit working here. The machines are starting to get to me. This morning I saw a face on the Pac-Man screen.”
“Whose face, Rhett?”
The new board was on the screen and Rhett turned back to the controls. Wi-wi-wi-wi-wi-wi-wi went his bullets against the eeEEeeEEeeEEeeEEee of the smart bombs and the mmmmMMMMwaaaaaa of the force-fields.
“Reagan,” said Rhett, sliding his ship off one corner of the screen and back on the other. “President Reagan, man. He thanked me for developing the software for some new missile system. He said that all the Pac-Man machines are keyed into the Pentagon, and that the monsters stand for Russian anti-missiles. I ran twenty boards. Nobody’s ever done that before.”
There was a big hole in the force-fields now. The fat, evil ship at the center spat a vicious buzz-bomb. Rhett zapped it wi-wi-wi from the other side of the board. Then the ship. BLOOOOOOOO!
“Six,” said Rhett, glancing up again. “I’m really hot today. I figure if the Pentagon put out Pac-Man, maybe someone else did Star Castle.”
Polly wondered if Rhett was joking. In a way it made sense. Use the machines to tap American youth’s idle energy and quirky reflexes. A computer can follow a given program as fast as you want, but a human operator’s creative randomization is impossible to simulate. Why not have our missiles trace out Pac-Man monster-evasion paths? Why not tap every run that gets past twenty boards?
“Did President Reagan say you’d get any money?” asked Polly. “Did he offer you a job?”
“No job.” Wi-wi-wi-wi-wi-wi-wi. “But he’s sending a secret agent to give me a thousand dollars. If I tell anyone, it’s treason. Aaaaaauugh!” Crackle-ackle-ackle-FTOOOM. Rhett’s ship exploded into twirling fragments.
“Change, please?”
Rhett changed a five for one of the customers, then turned his full attention on Polly.
“So you’re taking the job at the bank? They’re really hiring you?”
“Starting Monday. Did you really see Reagan?”
“I think I did.”
“Why don’t you phone him up?”
“It was probably just a tape. He wouldn’t know me from Adam.” Rhett fed another quarter into the Star Castle machine. “I’m gonna work on this some more. See who’s behind it. Will you hand out change for me?”
“Okay.”
Polly tied on Rhett’s change apron and leaned against the rear wall. Now and then someone would ask her for more quarters, always boys. White males between fourteen and thirty-four years of age. Interacting with machines. Maybe, for men, women themselves are just very complicated video machines… . Polly pushed the unpleasant thought away. There was something more serious to think about: Rhett’s obsession. The whole time she made change, he kept plugging away at Star Castle. Ten boards, fifteen, and finally twenty.
&
nbsp; But no leader’s face appeared, just the same dull target with its whining force-fields. A flurry of bombs raced out like a flight of swallows. Rhett let them take him, then sagged against the machine in exhaustion.
“Polly! Are you working here?” A big sloppy man shambled up. It was Dr. Horvath, Polly’s old Calculus professor. She’d been his favorite student. “Is this the best job a Killeville College math major can aspire to?”
“No, no.” Polly was embarrassed. “I’m just helping Rhett. Rhett?” Wearily her husband straightened up from the Star Castle machine. “Rhett, you remember Dr. Horvath, don’t you? From the graduation?”
“Hi.” Rhett gave his winning smile and shook hands. “These machines have been freaking me out.”
“Can I tell him, Rhett?”
“Go ahead.”
“Dr. Horvath, this morning Rhett saw President Reagan’s face on the Pac-Man screen. Rhett says the Pentagon is using the twenty-board runs to design the new anti-anti-missile system.”
Horvath cocked his big head and smiled. “Sounds like paranoid schizophrenia to me, Polly. Or drug psychosis.”
“Hey!” said Rhett. “I’m clean!”
“So show me der Führer‘s face. I’ve got time to kill or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Right now I’m too wrecked,” confessed Rhett. “I just blew the whole afternoon trying the break through on Star Castle. But there’s nothing there.”
Horvath gave Polly a questioning look. He thought Rhett was crazy. She couldn’t leave it at that.
“Come in tomorrow, Dr. Horvath. Come in before ten. Rhett’s fastest in the morning. He’ll show you…and me, too.”
“At this point Rhett’s the only one who’s been vouchsafed the mystical vision of our fearless leader?” Horvath’s pasty, green-tinged features twisted sarcastically.
“Put up or shut up,” said Rhett. “Be here at nine.”
That night, Rhett and Polly had their first really big argument in ten months of marriage. Ostensibly, it was about whether Polly should be allowed to read in bed when Rhett was trying to sleep. Obviously, it was also about her reluctance to make love. But deep down, the argument was triggered by the slippage of their relative positions: Polly was moving into a good, middle-class job, but Rhett seemed to be moving down into madness.
