Complete Stories

by Rudy Rucker

  The President’s inner circle hushed up my assassination attempt. Harry Watson, the guy who owned the estate, certainly saw what went down, but right away one of the President’s men gave Harry a light blast of buckshot to the face. The Secret Service took Harry to the hospital and loaded him up with those drugs that wipe out traumatic memories. Even if old Harry does remember anything, he’ll damn straight know to keep his mouth shut.

  There’s so much that the public doesn’t know. Thank Gaia I’ve got this subvocal laryngeal transmitter in my tooth. I’ve got nothing to lose by broadcasting the truth, that’s for sure. I’m doomed.

  The reason my jailers haven’t executed me yet is because they’re busy interrogating me. When my time’s up, they’ll stage my death as a suicide, like they always do. There’s been three “suicides” on my cell-block since I arrived.

  But it seems like there’s some kind of gap in the chain of command. Rather than grilling me for information about the Saucer Wisdom Network, my interrogators are bent on getting me to confess to being an Islamic terrorist. Which makes me a round peg in a square hole. Terrorism is square; UFOs are round.

  Agent Marc Walladi calls me in for debriefing every day. I keep telling him the truth about I why tried to kill the President: he’s hell-bent on steering our planet into nuclear war. But Walladi acts like he thinks I’m either lying or crazy when I try to give him the deep background: about the third bomb and the fizzled tests and the sea cucumbers. On the other hand, maybe he’s playing dumb to draw me out. Maybe, come to think of it, they deliberately put the transmitter into my tooth so I’d spill even more. Maybe my signals are going no place but to the titanium laptop on Agent Walladi’s steel desk. I better not give out any details about the SWN’s inner operations.

  It’s hot in this cell block, maybe a hundred degrees. We’re all tense and sweaty. The hideous country music warbles on; the guards suffer from it too. A passing guard beats his club against the bars of my cage; he’s yelling at me to stop moaning; he’s calling me names. Idiot. I yell back at him.

  “Storm trooper! Sold-out tool of the alien sea cucumbers!”

  I go back to my tooth-moaning, but a little quieter than before. I definitely don’t want the guard to come inside my cell.

  Two cells down, Jean-Claude starts singing “Gens du Pays,” a Quebec anthem. The guard goes to beat on Jean-Claude’s bars instead of mine. So now I have a little peace again.

  A German hippie girl named Ulrica told me about the third bomb a few years ago. Thing is, near the end of World War Two, the U. S. actually prepared three atomic bombs: one for Hiroshima, one for Nagasaki, and one for Berlin. The U. S. dropped the third bomb on Berlin after the blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  There are two seeming logical holes in the story: first of all, the U. S. would have had no legitimate motive for bombing Berlin, as by then Germany had already surrendered. Second of all, it’s a matter of historical record that Berlin was not devastated by an atomic blast on August 11, 1945.

  As for the motive — it’s not hard to suppose that our leaders authorized the Berlin bombing for financial gain, as a power-game gambit, for revenge, or simply out of inertia. As for the lack of historical record — yes, the third bomb was ignited over Berlin, but a flying saucer swallowed up the blast.

  Goddamit, here comes the guard again. I’m too excited, I’m moaning too loud. Maybe I can scare him off.

  “Lickspittle lackey! Don’t even think of coming in my cell! I’ll rip your face off.”

  Oh oh, he’s getting out his keys. But, thank god, there goes Jean-Claude again, even louder than before. The guard roars back to Jean-Claude’s cell, billy-club upraised.

  Quickly now. Ulrica showed me a notarized translation of a report by a Berlin beer-garden waitress named Vilma Hertz. Shortly before noon on August 11, 1945, Hertz was on break, smoking a cigarette and staring up at the sky from the shade of a chestnut tree. A US B-29 Superfortress was droning high overhead. Hertz spotted a black object dropping from the plane. Just as she formed the thought that the object might be a bomb, it bloomed into a pinpoint of blazing light. But a moment after that, a silvery disk swept across the sky to envelop the burgeoning explosion.

  Yes! A UFO ate the third bomb. The aliens were on the spot and ready for it; they’d been alerted by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts of August 6 and 9. And why did the alien craft swallow the blast? Obviously they use nuclear blasts for fuel. Oh shit, the guard is back.

  “Leave me alone, you monkey redneck! I’ll moan all I want. You want me to throw my slops at you?”

  Gaia help me, he’s coming in. He’s holding — are those pliers? He knows about my special tooth! Walladi doesn’t like the information I’m sending out!

  Listen fast now. UFOs are very commonly sighted near nuclear test sites. The army shot down a couple of the saucers, everyone knows that sea cucumber aliens are preserved in Area 51. Here’s something new: the government hushes up the fact that most of the above-ground nuclear tests have been duds. The blasts were soaked up by the saucers, and that’s why they went to underground tests.

  “Get away from me, you filthy animal! I’ll kill you!”

  The UFOs want a regular series of blasts taking place in Earth’s open air and that’s why they want unending nuclear war. That’s why we have a so-called war president in office! He’s not a human being! He’s an alien sea cucumber!

  Oh no, here come the pliers! Rise up for peace, people of the earth! Rise up!

  ============

  Note on “The Third Bomb”

  Written December, 2006.

  Flurb #2, 2006.

  I wrote “The Third Bomb” in the sour, waning years of the final George Bush administration, shortly after Vice-President Dick Cheney had shot one of his hunting partners in the face. I cast the story in the mode of a tale told by an unreliable and possibly insane narrator. I felt free to write such a strongly political story because I knew I could publish it in my popular free online webzine, Flurb, which can be found at www.flurb.net.

  The Imitation Game

  It was a rainy Sunday night, June 6, 1954. Alan Turing was walking down the liquidly lamp-lit street to the Manchester train station, wearing a long raincoat with a furled umbrella concealed beneath. His Greek paramour Zeno was due on the 9 p. m. train, having taken a ferry from Calais. And, no, the name had no philosophical import, it was simply the boy’s name. If all went well, Zeno and Alan would be spending the night together in the sepulchral Manchester Midland travelers’ hotel — Alan’s own home nearby was watched. He’d booked the hotel room under a pseudonym.

  Barring any intrusions from the morals squad, Alan and Zeno would set off bright and early tomorrow for a lovely week of tramping across the hills of the Lake District, free as rabbits, sleeping in serendipitous inns. Alan sent up a fervent prayer, if not to God, then to the deterministic universe’s initial boundary condition.

  “Let it be so.”

  Surely the cosmos bore no distinct animus towards homosexuals, and the world might yet grant some peace to the tormented, fretful gnat labeled Alan Turing. But it was by no means a given that the assignation with Zeno would click. Last spring, the suspicious authorities had deported Alan’s Norwegian flame Kjell straight back to Bergen before Alan even saw him.

  It was as if Alan’s persecutors supposed him likely to be teaching his men top-secret code-breaking algorithms, rather than sensually savoring his rare hours of private joy. Although, yes, Alan did relish playing the tutor, and it was in fact conceivable that he might feel the urge to discuss those topics upon which he’d worked during the war years. After all, it was no one but he, Alan Turing, who’d been the brains of the British cryptography team at Bletchley Park, cracking the Nazi Enigma code and shortening the War by several years — little thanks that he’d ever gotten for that.

  The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart. Alan’s work on universal machines and computational morphogenesis had c
onvinced him that the world is both deterministic and overflowing with endless surprise. His proof of the unsovability of the Halting Problem had established, at least to Alan’s satisfaction, that there could never be any shortcuts for predicting the figures of Nature’s stately dance.

  Few but Alan had as yet grasped the new order. The prating philosophers still supposed, for instance, that there must be some element of randomness at play in order that each human face be slightly different. Far from it. The differences were simply the computation-amplified results of disparities among the embryos and their wombs — with these disparities stemming in turn from the cosmic computation’s orderly exfoliation of the universe’s initial conditions.

  Of late Alan had been testing his ideas with experiments involving the massed cellular computations by which a living organism transforms egg to embryo to adult. Input acorn; output oak. He’d already published his results involving the dappling of a brindle cow, but his latest experiments were so close to magic that he was holding them secret, wanting to refine the work in the alchemical privacy of his starkly under-furnished home. Should all go well, a Nobel prize might grace the burgeoning field of computational morphogenesis. This time Alan didn’t want a droning gas-bag like Alonzo Church to steal his thunder — as had happened with the Hilbert Entscheidungsproblem.

  Alan glanced at his watch. Only three minutes till the train arrived. His heart was pounding. Soon he’d be committing lewd and lascivious acts (luscious phrase) with a man in England. To avoid a stint in jail, he’d sworn to abjure this practice — but he’d found wiggle room for his conscience. Given that Zeno was a visiting Greek national, he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a “man in England,” assuming that “in” was construed to mean “who is a member citizen of.” Chop the logic and let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.

  It had been nearly a year since Alan had enjoyed manly love — last summer on the island of Corfu with none other than Zeno, who’d taken Alan for a memorable row in his dory. Alan had just been coming off his court-ordered estrogen treatments, and thanks to the lingering effects of the libido-reducing hormones, the sex had been less intense than one might wish. This coming week would be different. Alan felt randy as a hat rack; his whole being was on the surface of his skin.

  Approaching the train station, he glanced back over his shoulder — reluctantly playing the socially assigned role of furtive perv — and sure enough, a weedy whey-faced fellow was mooching along half a block behind, a man with a little round mouth like a lamprey eel’s. Officer Harold Jenkins. Devil take the beastly prig!

  Alan twitched his eyes forward again, pretending not to have seen the detective. What with the growing trans-Atlantic hysteria over homosexuals and atomic secrets, the security minders grew ever more officious. In these darkening times, Alan sometimes mused that the United States had been colonized by the lowest dregs of British society: sexually obsessed zealots, degenerate criminals, and murderous slave masters.

  On the elevated tracks, Zeno’s train was pulling in. What to do? Surely Detective Jenkins didn’t realize that Alan was meeting this particular train. Alan’s incoming mail was vetted by the censors — he estimated that by now Her Majesty was employing the equivalent of two point seven workers full time to torment that disgraced boffin, Professor A. M. Turing. But — score one for Prof. Turing — his written communications with Zeno had been encrypted via a sheaf of one-time pads he’d left in Corfu with his golden-eyed Greek god, bringing a matching sheaf home. Alan had made the pads from clipped-out sections of identical newspapers; he’d also built Zeno a cardboard cipher wheel to simplify the look-ups.

  No, no, in all likelihood, Jenkins was in this louche district on a routine patrol, although now, having spotted Turing, he would of course dog his steps. The arches beneath the elevated tracks were the precise spot where, two years ago, Alan had connected with a sweet-faced boy whose dishonesty had led to Alan’s conviction for acts of gross indecency. Alan’s arrest had been to some extent his own doing; he’d been foolish enough to call the police when one of the boy’s friends burglarized his house. “Silly ass,” Alan’s big brother had said. Remembering the phrase made Alan wince and snicker. A silly ass in a dunce’s cap, with donkey ears. A suffering human being nonetheless.

  The train screeched to stop, puffing out steam. The doors of the carriages slammed open. Alan would have loved to sashay up there like Snow White on the palace steps. But how to shed Jenkins?

  Not to worry; he’d prepared a plan. He darted into the men’s public lavatory, inwardly chuckling at the vile, voyeuristic thrill that disk-mouthed Jenkins must feel to see his quarry going to earth. The echoing stony chamber was redolent with the rich scent of putrefying urine, the airborne biochemical signature of an immortal colony of microorganisms indigenous to the standing waters of the train station pissoir. It put Alan in mind of his latest Petri-dish experiments at home. He’d learned to grow stripes, spots and spirals in the flat mediums, and then he’d moved into the third dimension. He’d grown tentacles, hairs, and, just yesterday, a congelation of tissue very like a human ear.

  Like a thieves’ treasure cave, the wonderful bathroom ran straight through to the other side of the elevated track — with an exit on the far side. Striding through the room’s length, Alan drew out his umbrella, folded his mackintosh into a small bundle tucked beneath one arm, and hiked up the over-long pants of his dark suit to display the prominent red tartan spats that he’d worn, the spats a joking gift from a Cambridge friend. Exiting the jakes on the other side of the tracks, Alan opened his high-domed umbrella and pulled it low over his head. With the spats and dark suit replacing the beige mac and ground-dragging cuffs, he looked quite the different man from before.

  Not risking a backward glance, he clattered up the stairs to the platform. And there was Zeno, his handsome, bearded face alight. Zeno was tall for a Greek, with much the same build as Alan’s. As planned, Alan paused briefly by Zeno as if asking a question, privily passing him a little map and a key to their room at the Midland Hotel. And then Alan was off down the street, singing in the rain, leading the way.

  Alan didn’t notice Detective Jenkins following him in an unmarked car. Once Jenkins had determined where Alan and Zeno were bound, he put in a call to the security office at MI5. The matter was out of his hands now.

  The sex was even more enjoyable than Alan had hoped. He and Zeno slept till mid-morning, Zeno’s leg heavy across his, the two of them spooned together in one of the room’s twin beds. Alan awoke to a knocking on the door, followed by a rattling of keys.

  He sprang across the carpet and leaned against the door. “We’re still asleep,” he said, striving for an authoritative tone.

  “The dining room’s about to close,” whined a woman’s voice. “Might I bring the gentlemen their breakfast in the room?”

  “Indeed,” said Alan through the door. “A British breakfast for two. We have a train to catch rather soon.” Earlier this week, he’d had his housekeeper send his bag ahead to Cumbria in the Lake District.

  “Very good, sir. Full breakfast for two.”

  “Wash,” said Zeno, sticking his head out of the bathroom. At the sound of the maid, he’d darted right in there and started the tub. He looked happy. “Hot water.”

  Alan joined Zeno in the bath for a minute, and the dear boy brought him right off. But then Alan grew anxious about the return of the maid. He donned his clothes and rucked up the second bed so it would look slept in. Now Zeno emerged from his bath, utterly lovely in his nudity. Anxious Alan shooed him into his clothes. Finally the maid appeared with the platters of food, really quite a nice-looking breakfast, with kippers, sausages, fried eggs, toast, honey, marmalade, cream and a lovely great pot of tea, steaming hot.

  Seeing the maid face to face, Alan realized they knew each other; she was the cousin of his housekeeper. Although the bent little woman feigned not to recognize him, he could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what h
e and Zeno were doing here. And there was a sense that she knew something more. She gave him a particularly odd look when she poured out the two mugs of tea. Wanting to be shut of her, Alan handed her a coin and she withdrew.

  “Milk tea,” said Zeno, tipping half his mug back into the pot and topping it up with cream. He raised the mug as if in a toast, then slurped most of it down. Alan’s tea was still too hot for his lips, so he simply waved his mug and smiled.

  It seemed that even with the cream, Zeno’s tea was very hot indeed. Setting his mug down with a clatter, he began fanning his hands at his mouth, theatrically gasping for breath. Alan took it for a joke, and let out one of his grating laughs. But this was no farce.

  Zeno squeaked and clutched at his throat; beads of sweat covered his face; foam coated his lips. He dropped to the floor in a heap, spasmed his limbs like a starfish, and beat a tattoo on the floor.

  Hardly knowing what to think, Alan knelt over his inert friend, massaging his chest. The man had stopped breathing; he had no pulse. Alan made as if to press his mouth to Zeno’s, hoping to resuscitate him. But then he smelled bitter almonds — the classic sign of cyanide poisoning.

  Recoiling as abruptly as a piece of spring-loaded machinery, Alan ran into the bathroom and rinsed out his mouth. Her Majesty’s spy-masters had gone mad; they’d meant to murder them both. In the Queen’s eyes, Alan was an even greater risk than a rogue atomic scientist. Alan’s cryptographic work on breaking the Enigma code was a secret secret — the very existence of his work was unknown to the public at large.

  His only hope was to slip out of the country and take on a new life. But how? He thought distractedly of the ear-shaped form he’d grown in the Petri dish at home. Why not a new face?