Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  The whole leap had taken less than a minute. I found myself right next to the cellar door outside my house. Now that I had a better under-standing of what was going on, I was able without too much difficulty to get one of the big doors open and go on down into the basement.

  “HELLO, FLETCHER!”

  My inertialess eardrum vibrated wildly with Harry’s greeting. He was comfortably seated in my desk-chair. I must have jerked an arm involuntarily, for I found myself on the floor again. Glaring fixedly at Harry, I crawled towards him, close enough to reach out and …

  “AREN’T YOU HAPPY?”

  This time I was braced for it.

  “Whisper, Harry, whisper.” Maybe it wasn’t really that loud; maybe it was the hangover. There’s no hangover worse than the one you have when you wake up at four A. M. I wondered what Nancy was doing now. I hoped she’d have the sense to just get back in bed. For some reason, thinking about her didn’t make me feel tense like it usually did. She was, after all, just another person, a person just like me …

  “I DID IT!”

  “You did it.” Gingerly I rose to my feet. “Please don’t talk loud or I’ll have to kill you. Did what?”

  “Come see.” Moving with the caution of an arthritic eighty-year-old on glare-ice, Harry eased out of my chair and led me back to the work-shop area. Sitting on a cleared part of the floor was the inertia-winder.

  It was basically just an electric gyroscope with a glob of something attached to the protruding rotor. Wound-up inertia?

  “Quarkonium,” breathed Harry. “I kept some back from the last shipment. It’s a cross between matter and antimatter. Last week I ran it through some high-energy vacuum-sputtering to build up a fractal surface-geometry. A lot of the quark pairs are split up now. Once I had that going for me, I just needed a gyro to spin them around.”

  “You could have warned me.”

  “I didn’t know you were going to rush back upstairs. How about another drink?”

  “No way. Turn that thing off now, before someone gets hurt. I was outside and I could see the sphere of influence growing. It’s just our house now, but if you let it go much longer, it’ll be the neighbors, too. I could get sued.”

  Harry looked acutely uncomfortable, but said nothing.

  “All right then, I’ll turn it off myself.” I leaned forward, fell down, righted myself on all fours, found the cord of the electric gyro, and yanked at it. The plug flew at me and bounced off my forehead. Harry had already unplugged it. I kicked at the gyro. The compassless rotor bobbed this way and that. The faint while of its spinning diminished not one whit.

  “The quarkonium’s surface is very…adhesive,” Harry murmured. “The field-lines of inertia are all wrapped around it. It has a lot of inertia and it keeps getting more.”

  “So when does it run down?”

  “I…I don’t think it ever will. It’s self-perpetuating.”

  “Come on, Harry. What about the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”

  “This is different, Fletch. This is quarkonium.”

  There was a sledgehammer over in the corner of the basement. I went and got it. It was amazingly easy to heft. I took a good solid stance in front of the gyro and let fly. The gyro skittered a few feet across the floor and I fell down. All right. I hadn’t expected to succeed on the first try. I kept at it for about ten minutes. Harry watched in silence.

  Finally a lucky blow cracked the gyro’s mount. The rotor snapped free, rolled around on the floor, then spun up onto one end. The shiny glob of wound-up inertia spun there like a child’s top. All that hammering had accomplished exactly nothing.

  I let my arms and legs go limp. Gravity bounced me around on the floor for awhile. I lay there. Harry stood over me, looking worried. With a quick, savage blow, I knocked his legs out from under him. Gravity bounced him around for awhile. Then he was lying next to me.

  I closed my eye, imagining a black sphere of inertialessness. The sphere grew and grew. Soon it included the whole Earth. Chaos. The sphere kept growing. After awhile it included the Moon. Without its inertia, the Moon would fall down. Without any heft fighting our gravity, we’d reel the Moon in like a poisoned catfish. Eventually…if anyone still cared…we’d both fall into the Sun.

  The whine of the spinning quarkonium blob seemed to have gotten higher. The thing was actually speeding up. How long did we have? Ten hours? Ten days?

  “JOEY! WHERE ARE YOU?” The distress-cry of my mate.

  I leaped to my feet shouting, “I’M COMING, DARLING!” Error. I smashed the naked light bulb on the ceiling with the nape of my neck. I bounced into a shelf full of radio tubes. I landed right on top of the inertia-winder. For a horrible moment the inertia-wrapped glob of quarkonium spun right against my cheek. It felt silky and sly as a vampire’s first kiss.

  The light in the stairwell snapped on and there was Nancy.

  “What is it, Joey? Why don’t we weigh anything? I keep falling and …” She tumbled down the stairs and came to rest next to me and Harry and the inertia-winder. A square of light from the staircase spot-lit us like three degenerates in a Tennessee Williams play.

  “Harry built this machine?”

  “That’s right, Nancy.” Harry was actually trying to sound friendly. I think he’d realized, as I had, that we’d all be dead soon. I took Nancy’s hand.

  “Why are you just lying here? Why don’t you turn the machine off?”

  “We can’t.”

  “Well, what exactly is it doing?”

  “It cuts us off from the rest of the world’s inertial influences,” said Harry. “You know what inertia is?”

  “It’s you and Joey getting drunk again for no reason. It’s Joey and me fighting just because we fought yesterday. It’s you and me not liking each other because the other one doesn’t like us.” Nancy paused, considering what she’d just said.

  “That’s all true, Nancy. And in physics inertia is an object’s tendency to resist changes in its motion. Inertia is an overall property of the universe. We only have inertia because of the stars.”

  “You mean like the zodiac influences your moods?”

  “Well…maybe. But I’m talking physics. This thing I put together,” Harry gestured at the inertia-winder. “This thing produces an expanding shell of unconfined quarks. Wherever the shell crosses inertial field-lines, the lines snap. It’s snapping more and more field-lines all the time. Soon the whole block will have no inertia, then all of Princeton, then the whole state and the world and then …”

  “How long, Harry?” My voice was husky and brittle.

  “Well, you’re asking me to solve a non-linear partial differential equation there …” Harry hummed a distracted snatch of verse. ”…fine-structured constant…hyperbolic tangent of that…oh, call it 26.34 hours. Give or take.”

  “Until what?” demanded Nancy.

  “Until the Moon loses all its inertia,” I said. “When that happens it falls down.”

  “But why would it fall if it doesn’t weigh anything?”

  “There’s inertia and there’s gravitational mass,” said Harry patiently. “This doesn’t change gravitational attraction. It just takes away the ability to resist gravitational attraction.”

  “DAMMIT HARRY!” The force of the accompanying gesture threw Nancy against me. “Goddammit, Harry, what’d you build it for?”

  “It would have wonderful applications,” I said placatingly, “if we could just turn it off. Like for a jet-liner. Get rid of its inertia for awhile and you could launch it with a rubber-band. Or you could use an inertia-winder for real cheap energy generation. Accelerate something when it’s inertialess, then let it have its inertia back and take advantage of the free momentum. If there were a way to turn it off, we’d be rich instead of dead.”

  The spinning glob on the rotor was the size of a softball now. Nancy reached out a finger to touch it. “Ugh! It’s so soft and…greedy feeling.”

  “What did you just say?” asked Harry.

>   “Soft. Greedy feeling.”

  “That’s the broken quark-bags. But I meant Fletch. What did you say, Fletcher?”

  “You could accelerate something inside the inertialess sphere and when it got out, it’d have a lot of momentum.”

  “Pret-ty damn good. Call the Kennedy Center.”

  “What for? Tickets to the ballet?”

  “Kennedy Space Center. We’ll put this sucker on a Saturn rocket and let the Crab Nebula worry about it.”

  “Sure, Crab Nebula. You’ll be lucky to find a rocket that moves faster than the black sphere is expanding.”

  “The change-up, Fletcher. When the rocket exhaust gets to the edge of the sphere, it gets a sudden increase in momentum. The same speed but a lot more inertia. Action equals reaction. Momentum down means momentum up. It’ll kick the whole sphere like a mule. I don’t see why …” Distracted humming again. “Yes. The system should reach nine-tenths the speed of light at…forty-seven minutes after launch. We’ll have lost part of the night sky but what the hell. It beats having the Moon land on your head. Call Max Moritz.”

  General Moritz was a guy we’d done some ordnance development for, a few years back. A Pentagon big-wig. “All right. I’ll call him.”

  “Where does he live?” Nancy wanted to know.

  “Right in D.C. Georgetown.”

  “Do you think the sphere has reached them yet?”

  “I doubt it. What’s the difference? The telephone’ll work. It’s just electrons moving down a wire. If your husband can move through the sphere, then so can an electron.”

  “The phone won’t work,” I insisted. “Except for local calls. Long-distance is all by microwave these days. There’s something about your expanding quark sphere that blocks electromagnetic radiation. That’s why you can’t tell if the Sun’s up yet.”

  “Even if you could call Moritz, he wouldn’t believe you yet,” added Nancy. “He still has his stubbornness.”

  “Not stubbornness, Nancy. Inertia.”

  “This is more than just physics.” Her voice was light and amused. “People keep acting the same way because other people are watching them. You get trapped into acting out the role that society assigns you. It’s the same with matter. If all the stars and galaxies say, ‘Well, so and so is sitting right there,’ then it’s really hard to move over here. Peer pressure. It’s inertia. But now we’re all covered up together. Like kids hiding under a blanket. None of the big people know what we’re doing.” She put her arms around me and gave me a wet kiss. “Come on, Harry, you kiss me too.”

  “I’d better not. You two just go on and enjoy yourselves. I’m going upstairs to call Max.”

  Harry banged around upstairs for awhile. Then he was talking to someone, an operator. Nancy and I ignored him. We were enjoying our-selves. The only fly in the ointment was that I kept imagining that I saw people out of the corner of my eyes, glowing people like elves and fairies. That was just the alcohol abuse acting up on me. But making love with no inertia was fantastic, so …

  “Ahem.”

  “Are you already back, Harry? Can’t you see …”

  “You were right about the phone. I think we better go see Moritz in person.”

  I sat up and straightened my clothes. “What?”

  “Didn’t you say you could jump real high? We’ll walk to Washington in seven-league boots!”

  “What if we move too fast and land outside the sphere? If we landed from one of those jumps with all our inertia along, it’d be like falling out of an airplane. Certain death.”

  “We’ll carry the inertia-winder with us. We’ll need it to show Moritz anyway.”

  Well…why not. I began looking around for something to carry the spinning inertia-winder in.

  “I’m coming, too,” said Nancy, standing up carefully.

  “Aw, Nancy …”

  “Yes, I’m coming.”

  My Nancy. “Okay, honey. You come, too. Maybe we can see some sights in D.C. Be sure to bring your checkbook if we need to get the bus back. And what should I carry the inertia-winder in?”

  “How about your old lunch-box that you used to use when you had an office to go to.”

  “Good idea.” I found the old grey lunch-box in a corner of the basement and nudged the inertia-winder on in. It sat in the bottom of the box, spinning like a top, making a whining buzz against the metal. I hoped it wouldn’t drill its way through.

  “Let me get us some sweaters,” suggested Nancy. “Even though it’s warm, we could get cold flying through the air.”

  The trip got off to a good start. The three of us went out in the back yard, linked arms, and took off like superheroes. I’d never jumped harder in my life. It felt like we were going a thousand miles an hour. A limp wind whistled past us as we rose up and up and up. I held my shrilly buzzing lunch-box clutched in one hand. With the winder right with us, there was no danger of leaving the region of no inertia. We continued to rise. The whole suburban sprawl of Princeton was just a dotty smear of light, far, far below.

  “Joey!” Nancy was worried. “We shouldn’t have jumped so hard! What’s going to happen when we land? And we’re still climbing!”

  All at once the ground was invisible. As far as I could make out, we were passing through some clouds. A very unpleasant thought crossed my mind. What if we kept climbing indefinitely? What if the force of our combined jump had been enough to zap us up to escape velocity? As long as we stayed inside the sphere, there was virtually no wind-resistance to slow us down. Earth’s gravity was pulling at us all the time, slowly chip-ping away at our velocity, yet the turnaround point was nowhere in sight. We were going to rise and rise until we either froze to death or asphyxiated. The air streaming past me felt cold and thin as ice picks.

  “Drop it, Fletch,” said Harry. His thoughts were, as usual, a step ahead of mine. “Drop the inertia-winder so we can get out of its sphere of influence and have the wind slow us down.”

  I dropped my lunch-box, or tried to. At first it just hung there in front of me, buzzing like some giant horsefly. Finally I took hold of it and threw it down past my feet. The other two hung onto me as the recoil pushed us yet higher. The air was really getting cold now. With the clouds below and the black sphere’s boundary still above, it was utterly dark. Nancy began sobbing.

  Just then we broke out into blinding sunlight. We were so high that the sky overhead was dark purple instead of blue. A terrifyingly immense dome of black curved down away from us, cutting the Earth’s spread-out surface in a vast circle. Out past it I could see the wrinkled surface of the sea, the huge expanse of the Chesapeake Bay. With any luck we’d be landing right in Washington.

  “It’s beautiful,” gasped Nancy.

  The air was so thin that we had to pant rapidly to keep from blacking out. But it was thick enough to stop our flight. Earth’s big gravity took over and we began to fall.

  “Just remember how Superman lands in the movies,” I advised Nancy. “Keep your legs bent and push up as you hit.” Then the lovely sunlight was gone again.

  Once we’d fallen back through the clouds we could make out the spread-out street-lights of Washington and its suburbs. The Potomac River’s black swath made a convenient landmark. Harry craned this way and that, trying to orient himself. Finally he pointed one of his stubby arms.

  “That’s Georgetown over there.”

  “The Pentagon would be better,” I suggested. “I’m sure General Moritz is over there by now. The Army’s going to be in a state of Red Alert wondering what happened. The whole city is without inertia. Let’s just hope they don’t start shooting missiles at the Russians.”

  “They couldn’t if they wanted to,” Harry observed. “No radio-links.”

  We were falling faster than ever. Here and there I could see other people flying through the air. Some of them looked very strange…not even like people, really. There was one in particular, a small man who glowed green all over. I tried to point him out to Nancy, but then he was gon
e. Probably just my imagination. A complex sound drifted up from the city, a generalized roar compounded of screams, sirens and horns.

  “You all better decide where to land,” said Nancy. “Or we’re going to end up in the river.”

  Indeed, the Potomac was directly beneath us, and getting closer all the time. “The Pentagon,” I urged, “over there to the right. We should throw something to the left to push us that way.”

  “My shoes,” offered Harry. Hanging onto me with his left arm, he reached down with his right to slip off his loafers, then threw them one, two, off to our left. This was enough. We streaked down towards a strip of park at the river’s edge.

  The landing was easy, but the one-mile walk to the Pentagon was a bit harder. Without inertia it’s impossible to walk normally, yet we were loath to try another big jump. Finally Nancy hit on a sort of modified bunny-hop. Harry and I hopped along after her.

  The George Washington Parkway was an incredible scene. Some people were still trying to drive. Their cars jerked around like in a speeded up stop-action movie. From zero to a hundred and back to zero in three seconds. The vehicles kept crashing into each other like bumper cars, but no one was getting hurt.

  The great lawn in front of the Pentagon’s main entrance was brightly lit by searchlights. A cordon of armed soldiers barred the entrance. The whole scene reminded me of the last time I’d been here: for the big outer-space peace-march.

  “HALT,” shouted a bull-horn.

  “Look out, Joey,” said Nancy. “They’ve got guns pointed at us.”

  “Think Superman, baby. With no inertia those bullets’ll just bounce off us.”

  “HUMANS,” hollered Harry. “WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU. TAKE US TO YOUR LEADERS.” He’d never sounded more like a Martian.

  We bunny-hopped closer. There was another warning, and then the soldiers opened fire. Just as I predicted, it was no worse than being barraged by pea-shooters. You just had to be careful that you didn’t get hit in the eye. We hopped closer.