by Rudy Rucker
There was a lot of tension the next morning. Crasher’s didn’t open to the public till ten, so Rhett and Polly had it to themselves. Rhett fed a quarter to the Pac-Man machine and got to work. “What a way to spend Saturday,” complained Polly. “That machine doesn’t connect to anything, Rhett. You might as well be shouting into a hollow tree. President Reagan isn’t in there.”
Rhett didn’t look up…didn’t dare to. Three boards, six.
Horvath arrived, rapping at the metal grill that covered the entrance. As usual, he was wearing shapeless baggy pants and an oversized white nylon shirt. His glasses glinted blankly in the fluorescent light. Polly let him in.
“How’s he doing?” whispered Horvath eagerly.
“Ten boards,” shouted Rhett. “I’m in the groove today. Ten boards and I haven’t lost a man yet!”
Horvath and Polly exchanged a glance. After all the nasty, wild things Rhett has said last night, there was no question in her mind that Rhett had imagined his vision of the President. Surely Dr. Horvath knew this, too. But he looked so expectant! Why would an important professor take the trouble to come watch her crazy husband play Pac-Man at nine in the morning?
Horvath walked over to stand behind Rhett, and Polly trailed after. There is a single control on a Pac-Man machine, a sort of joystick. It controls the movements of a yellow disk on the screen: the disk moves in the direction in which you push the joystick. It’s not quite a disk, really; it’s a circle with one sector missing. The sector acts as a munching mouth, a hungry Chinese, a greedy Happy-Face, a Pac-Man. As you move it around, the Pac-Man eats the cookies and stop-signs in the maze. Muncha-uncha-uncha-uncha. Later there are also cherries, strawberries, grapes, birds, and bags of gold. Gloooop!
Rhett was on his fifteenth board now, and the four monsters that chased his yellow disk moved with a frightening degree of cooperation. But, uncha-uncha-uncha, the little Pac-Man slipped out of every trap, lured the monsters away from every prize. Uncha-uncha-uncha-uncha-gloop! Rhett ate a bag of gold worth five thousand points. That made a hundred-and-three thousand points. Horvath was transfixed, and even Polly was a little impressed. She’d never seen Rhett play so well.
The next few boards took longer. The monsters had stopped speeding up with each board. Instead they were acting smarter. Rhett had to expend more and more time on evasive action. The happy little Pac-Man moved about in paths so complex as to seem utterly random to anyone but Rhett. Seventeen boards. Nineteen.
On the twentieth board the monsters speeded back up. Rhett nearly lost a man. But then he knuckled down and ate the whole board in one intricately filigreed sweep.
The screen grew gray and full of static. And then there he was— Mr. President himself.
“Ron-Boy Ray-Gun,” said Horvath nastily. “I don’t believe it.”
“See?” snarled Rhett. “Now who’s crazy?”
”…thank you for helping our country,” the video screen was saying. Reagan looked friendly with his neat pompadour and his cocky, lopsided smile. Friendly, but serious. “Your photograph and fingerprints have been forwarded to the CIA for information retrieval. An agent will contact you to make payment in the sum of one thousand dollars. This offer cannot be repeated, and must be kept secret. Let me thank you again for making this a safer world.”
“That’s it,” said Rhett, straightening up and kicking the kinks out of his long, skinny legs.
“Are you sure?” demanded Horvath, strangely tense. “Couldn’t there be a higher level?”
“The screen’s blank,” shrugged Rhett. “The game’s over.”
“Push the Start button,” suggested Horvath.
“Pac-Man doesn’t give free games,” replied Rhett. “And I’ve got to open up in a few minutes.”
“Just try,” insisted Horvath. “Push the button.”
Rhett pressed the Start button with his skinny forefinger. The familiar maze appeared on the screen. The monsters moved out of their cave and the little Pac-Man started eating. Uncha-uncha-uncha-unch. Mesmerized by the sound, Rhett grabbed the joystick, meaning to dodge a hungry red monster.
But when Rhett touched the control, something about the image changed. It thickened and grew out of the screen. This was no longer a two-dimensional video image, but a three-dimensional hologram. The Pac-Man was a smiling little sphere sliding around a transparent three-dimensional maze. Rhett found that he could control his man’s movement in the new dimension by pushing or pulling the joystick. With rapid, automatic motions he dodged the monsters and set his man to eating cookies.
Polly was not so accepting of this change. “How did you know that would happen?” she demanded of Horvath. “What are you up to, anyway?”
“Just don’t disturb Rhett,” said Horvath, pushing Polly away from the machine. “This is more important than you can realize.” His hands felt strange and clammy.
Just then someone started shaking the steel grate at the entrance.
“Let them in,” called Rhett. “It’s almost time. I don’t believe this machine!” His face was set in a tight, happy smile. He’d eaten every cookie in his cubical maze now, and with a flourish of music it reset itself. Twenty-second board.
“Hey!” shouted the man at the grate. “Let me in there!”
He already had his wallet out. Can’t wait to spend his money, thought Polly, but she was wrong. The man had a badge to show her.
“CIA, Miss. I’m looking for Rhett Lyndon.”
“That’s my husband. He’s playing Pac-Man. Do you have the two thousand dollars?”
“He can only collect one. But he shouldn’t have told you!” The secret agent was a fit, avid-faced man in his thirties. He reminded Polly of a whippet. She rolled back the grate and he surged in, looking the whole room over at once.
“Who’s the other guy?”
“Beat it, pig!” shouted Horvath.
Polly had always known Dr. Horvath was a radical, but this outburst really shocked her. “You can leave, Dr. Horvath. We have some private business to discuss.”
Rhett glanced over with a brief, ambiguous smile. But then he had to give his full attention back to the game. The maze he was working seemed to have grown. It stuck more than a meter out of the machine now.
“I can do better than the Pentagon’s lousy thousand,” hissed Horvath. “I can give you anything you want, if only Rhett can help us defeat the Rull.”
“Freeze,” screamed the secret agent. He’d drawn a heavy pistol out of his shoulder-holster.
But rather than freezing, Horvath flowed. His whole body seemed to melt away, and thick gouts of green slime came surging out the bottoms of his pant-legs. The agent fired three wild shots anyway, but they only rippled the slime. And then a pseudopod of the stuff lashed out and struck the CIA man down. There was a moment’s soft burbling while the alien flowed over and absorbed its prey.
And then, as suddenly as it had started, the ugly incident was over. The slime flowed back from the agent, revealing only a clean spot on the carpet, and Dr. Horvath’s clothes filled back up. The head reappeared last of all, growing out of the nylon shirt’s collar like a talking puffball.
“I’ll admit it, Polly,” it was saying. “I’m an alien. But a good alien. The Rull are the bad ones. They don’t even eat what they kill. We are, of course, fantastically advanced compared to you primitive bipeds. But we need your animal shiftiness, your low cunning!”
“Rhett,” screamed Polly. “Help! Horvath is an alien!” She darted past the slimy deceiver to stand near her husband, as near as she could get.
Rhett’s upper body and head were inside the maze now; it had grown that much. A glowing two-meter cube of passages surrounded him. The Pac-Man and the monsters raced this way and that. Bobbing and weaving, Rhett watched and controlled the chase. The planes of the hologram bathed his features in a golden, beatific light. The Pac-Man completed its circuit of a randomized space-filling curve…and the cube flickered to rest.
“Thirty,” said Rhett.
With each uncha Polly imagined a planet disappearing into some huge group-Horvath. Rull-monsters darted this way and that, trying to foil the Pac-Man, but crazy Rhett was too fast and random for anyone. She wondered what to ask Horvath for. Riches, telepathy, the power of flight?
Suddenly the board was empty. Rhett had done it again! The huge maze drew back into the Pac-Man machine’s screen. The image of a jubilant alien appeared, burbling thanks. And then the screen blanked out.
“That was our leader,” said Horvath. “We can’t thank you enough. Anything you want is yours. Make a wish.”
“PAC,” said Rhett distantly. “P,A,C. P is Pentagon, A is Alien…I wish I could find out what C is.”
“You got it,” said Horvath. “Just push the Start button. And thanks again.” With a slow zeenting noise the alien disappeared, feet first.
“Was he for real?” said Rhett.
“I can’t believe it,” wailed Polly. “You just blew our big wish. Who cares what C stands for!”
Rhett shrugged and pushed the Start button. There was a sizzling sound, and slowly the machine, and then the room, dissolved into clear white light.
“Greetings,” boomed a voice. “This is the Cosmos speaking. I wonder if you could help me out?”
============
Note on “Pac-Man”
Written in Summer, 1981.
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, June, 1982.
I wrote “Pac-Man” on summer vacation at the Outer Banks of North Carolina. My son Rudy Jr. and I had just discovered video arcades, and we spent a lot of time in them. Even though he was only nine, Rudy was much better at them than me. And now, nearly twenty years later, one of my favorite projects for teaching my computer science students is to have them write Pac-Man and Asteroids games.
When I sold this story to Asimov’s, the editor George Scithers thought it would be legally risky to use the trademarked name “Pac-Man,” and he insisted that we call it “Peg-Man.” Instead of having “P.A.C.” stand for “President, Alien, Cosmos,” P.E.G. stood for “President, Extraterrestrial, God.”
This is the first of several stories set in “Killeville,” a Twilight Zone kind of town inspired by Lynchburg, Virginia, where my family and I lived from 1980 to 1986.
Pi in the Sky
The fragmented shells beneath Jane’s feet began to flicker and sway. She took her husband’s arm.
“Let’s go back, Morris.”
“Already?”
“I’m dizzy. The sun…it’s too much.”
Morris looked at her closely, his dark eyes concerned. She leaned against him, smiling weakly.
“You’re right,” said Morris. “It’s too much at noon like this. Let’s go back to Andrew’s.”
Jane shaded her eyes and looked back along the beach. The beach sand was pure white; the hot waves were pale blue. Grand Turk Island, March 22, 1992. This was their honeymoon.
Jane’s brother, Andrew, lived here, and they could stay with him for free. Andrew made his living teaching the occasional tourist to skin-dive.
Back at the house there was nothing doing. The shutters were closed against the heat. Andrew was lying on a couch, smoking and listening to soft Hawaiian music. In the next room, Andrew’s wife Julie lay on their bed’s white sheets, reading a Borges anthology.
“You see,” said Andrew as they came in. “I told you.”
“You were right,” grinned Morris. He did not enjoy talking to his brother-in-law.
“I almost had sunstroke,” said Jane. “Morris, too. It was like being hit on the head with a hammer.”
“At three we’ll go out in the boat,” promised Andrew. “We can go down off the shelf today.”
“Great,” said Morris. “How deep?”
With slow, economical gestures, Andrew lit another cigarette. “As the spirit moves us. My equipment’s good for a hundred meters. Last week I saw whales down there. A whole pod.”
It was four-thirty by the time they were actually in the boat. Everything happened late down there. Island time. As a gesture towards assimilation, Morris had stopped wearing his digital watch. Now he was sitting back by the boat’s electric motor, happy to be doing something. Up in the front of the boat with her brother, Jane smiled back at her husband.
“Don’t forget to exhale on the way up,” Andrew cautioned her. “And stay near me. Yesterday, every time I looked for you, all I could see was a flipper sticking out from behind a reef.”
“I love it down there,” said Jane. “The flip and flow of it, everything so alive and full of color. It’s a relief from my job at the cancer labs. All the doctors do is kill things. Sad, colorless little mice. There’s a sort of blender that liquifies a mouse every thirty seconds.”
“At least Morris doesn’t kill things,” muttered Andrew. “What’s he supposed to do with those computers anyway?”
“It was something to do with breaking codes. A universal decoder. But you should ask him yourself, Andrew. You never talk to him. Aren’t you glad to see us?”
“Oh, sure, Sis. At least he finally married you. I didn’t like the way he was living off you all last year, and still not committing himself. This way he can’t bug out when he gets his degree and the bucks start rolling in.”
“Morris would never do that, Andrew.”
The sun had filled the boat’s batteries with a good charge. Before long, they’d jounced out to where the water-color changes. Near the shore it’s turquoise, but when you get out to where the continental shelf drops off, the water suddenly looks deep green. Andrew threw an anchor out and signaled Morris to cut the motor. The air was hot and damp, palpable as wet silk. It’d be good to get underwater.
“Okay,” said Andrew, relaxed and professional. “Let’s get our wet suits on. It’s cold down there.”
Morris helped Jane into the tight rubber garment. “I can’t believe we’re doing this. Somehow I never thought that I would spend a honeymoon skin-diving in the Caribbean. This is just fantastic.”
“Stick near me and exhale on the way up,” repeated Andrew. “I think we’ll go down fifty meters today. No point going much further…it gets gloomy after that. And dangerous.”
“How deep is the water here?” asked Morris.
“Down off the shelf it’s over a mile. Two thousand meters.”
“Unreal. Can we bring up some sponges?”
“I’ll give you a knife for your belt. But I don’t really like bringing live things up. They belong down there. Up here they just lie around and stink.”
Andrew checked the anchor again, and then they donned facemasks, flippers, weights and airleaves. The airleaves were the latest in scuba equipment: folded packs of special gas-exchange membrane. Instead of carrying your air in a pressurized tank, you could simply extract it from the water around you. The airleaves were, in effect, artificial gills. They made it possible to stay down much longer.
Underwater now, Jane looked up at the boat, an odd slipper-shape black against the wrinkled mirror of the water’s surface. She took an almost sensual pleasure at drawing air in through her mouthpiece. When she breathed out, the vibrations of the bubbles filled her ears with lively sound. Morris was above her, Andrew below. All around them darted bright bits of color—parrot fish, tetras, clown-fish, lupes—vibrant flecks, wheeling like shattered light. Now Andrew was waving to Jane, gesturing her closer. He’d found something. Gently flapping her hands, Jane sank to his level.
Using the butt of his spear, Andrew prodded a small, untidy-looking fish. At the first touch of the spear, the fish stopped swimming and puffed itself up. A blow-fish! Now it was the size of a basketball, all spiny and uptight. As her smile was invisible, Jane showed her amusement with a happy hand-wave. Morris joined them, and they swam a bit deeper.
It was like being at the lip of a tremendous cliff. Directly beneath th
em was the sandy bottom which slopes up to become Grand Turk’s beach. But a few meters ahead the bottom stopped abruptly. Fighting a feeling that she would fall, Jane swam out over the edge. A sheer wall of fissured rock dropped down beneath her, down and down into invisibility. A mile of water.
Something touched Jane’s elbow. Morris. His eyes were wide and excited behind the glass of his face-mask. With a long outrush of bubbles, he kicked himself down past the cliff’s edge, down past a group of protruding sponges. Andrew and Jane followed.
With each few meters of further descent, things changed. At one level there was color, at the next everything was blue, then brown, then grey. Jane noticed that as the pressure increased, the shape of her air-bubbles changed. Instead of being lovely musical spheres, they were now squeezed into nasty sickle-shaped saucers. The sound of the bubbles seemed like mocking laughter. The pressure, the dark, the cold…she felt so confused. Her ears hurt. How long had they been down? How deep were they? Morris was far below, darkly twitching. He should come back!
Looking around desperately, Jane found Andrew at her side. He showed her his depth gauge. Sixty meters. Was that a lot? Stay, Andrew signaled to her. Don’t follow. Then he kicked his way down after Morris. Jane held her nostrils and blew. With a sticky pop, her ears finally cleared. As the pain went, so did her panic. The satanic cackling of her air-bubbles changed to sweet chiming. Beneath the music sounded something else, something profound and solemn, some giant song that set her whole body athrill. Behind her were the jumbled surfaces of the cliff; far beneath her were Andrew and Morris, but there, out there in the depths, something vast was moving.
Strange giant fish. Two, three of them, as big as whales, singing a deep, mysterious song that Jane felt more than heard. The song had a dense, packed quality—each note was filled with hidden cadences and falls.
The creatures were pale-green, mottled here and there with ugly splotches of red. The oddest thing was that each of them bore bunches of tentacles were the pectoral fins might have been. Five tentacles per bunch. These were not creatures of Earth. Their vast, pale-purple eyes glowed feverishly. Were they ill? Their immense tails seemed to beat with an unhealthy stutter. Impossibly huge, impossibly weightless, they circled once, as if to stare at the humans, then glided off into the endless volume of sea.
