The Mad Scientist Megapack

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  As far as Harriet and I go, everything has happened. We’re getting married just as soon as we have time. Right now we’re busy, busy, busy all day with inquiries, investigations, and inquests. The Police Department keeps thinking up new questions, and drops hints about large sums of money waiting to be divided as a reward for the capture of the robbers. The War Department is interested in the green compound. This week a chiropractic delegation arrived from Indiana with questions on allergies. It’s been like that every day, except the one when I was allowed to see Myshkin.

  It was just for a few minutes and we couldn’t get to talk about much, but of all the things I could have asked about, the one question that occurred to me was: “Myshkin, did all the chicken-men look like you?”

  Characteristically, Myshkin didn’t answer me.

  “You know,” he said softly, “I don’t believe what they say about Roscoe. On my word, no.” And he shook his head.

  But I see I haven’t made clear what he was referring to, so I will. Remember I said that Siegman’s plan to make Boris talk wasn’t what saved Myshkin, but this effort was nevertheless responsible for one of the most far-reaching results of the affair? After Myshkin had been saved, the robbers captured, and we’d all returned to the house, we suddenly remembered that Roscoe and Boris were still upstairs—but when we went up we found only Roscoe, sound asleep, with a peaceful smile stretched across his beard.

  The dark suspicions that have since attached to him are based, first, on the fact that the stove was warm; second, the pile of chicken-bones on a plate beside him. Roscoe swears that Boris left unharmed, and that he merely warmed up the remains of the chicken and turkey that Harriet had brought earlier. I haven’t seen any of the rumored reports that supposedly followed studies of the pile of bones, and claimed there proved to be too many of some kinds and too few of others.

  I don’t believe them. I like to think Roscoe fell asleep peacefully, and that Boris peacefully made good his escape. I feel as Myshkin did the day I was allowed to see him. “Somewhere in this world,” he said, “Boris is seeking another like him. I don’t think he’ll find him,” Myshkin concluded. “I don’t think I will either.”

  A LIGHT THAT SHAMED THE SUN, by C. J. Henderson

  “I mean it, Goddamnit…where in hell’s my flying car, anyway?”

  It was that particular moment in the outburst that got through to the heavy-set individual with the curly hair and sweetly vacant disposition. A round-faced man, he was, one as large of frame as he was of heart. He had, at the moment of disturbance, been pondering the problem of cross-wiring fate with exactitude, as a cure for menopause, no less, when the shouting gentleman at the other end of the counter there in the Cold Crab Cafe interrupted his mental gymnastics.

  Of course, jumping back just a moment before said eruption, merely for a chance to analyze his mental project, one might decide that such a presumptuous experiment would not only be beyond the grasp of mankind’s current collective of thinkers, but also that the very imagining of its possibility should be considered grounds for involuntary commitment to the nearest competent couch jockey or licensed state institution. Such would be perfectly reasonable, and any one would be excused for thinking that it would constitute a proper course of action—any one that is, who was not familiar with that singularly remarkable cooperative…

  “I mean, I’m sixty years old, and I’m tellin’ ya…”

  That most charmingly whimsical of scholarly business concerns…

  “I remember.…”

  That most unbelievably fantastic hotbed of intellectual mayhem and scientific hooliganism…

  “Back in the day.…”

  The Pelgimbly Center for the Advanced Sciences, complete with the wonderfully unique brand of inquiring minds which staffed its halls so completely. They were, as its brochures promised, titans of research, giftedly tremendous brains, the kind of venerable cranium-stuffing that routinely conquered multi-verses, rolled consistent D20s and made uniquely damn fine cups of amaretto cocoa. Minds like that of Dr. Aristotle T. Jones.

  “Every time you turned around…”

  Holder of 25,603 personal patents, devisor of the bundled dimensions theorem, and universally applauded creator of the thirty-second flavor…

  “Someone was sayin’ it was just a matter of time before we were all gonna be hikin’ it around in flyin’ cars like the freakin’ Jetsons.”

  And the perfect rung on the evolutionary ladder if ever there was one to bring mankind such a boon, if indeed, there was any hairless ape capable enough to do such a thing in all the known stretches of research and development. For this discussion, it is important to remember that Aristotle Jones was not an inventor’s inventor, not in his heart. No, the soul of his tinkerer’s happiness was enriched by the cobbling together of things that, in the classic sense of the phrase: Benefitted Mankind.

  The thing-a-ma-bobs and wozzling-do-giggies that he created were universally loved by all peoples. The grand majority of the world, of course, had no idea that every day when they gave silent gratitude to this or that convenience, conveyance or cocktail, that it could be counted on that the designs, theories and random cosmic hiccups of Dr. Aristotle T. Jones could be found frolicking there somewhere in the background. Dr. Jones simply adored creating things which made people go “ahhhhhhh,” and he spent as much time as he possibly could out in the real world, searching for ways to hear that sound, accompanied by the indescribable joy of seeing their faces light up in a smile that shamed the sun.

  Which is why, at 11:30 in the A.M., on a perfectly reasonable and altogether ordinary Wednesday, he was situated on a stool at the counter in a perfectly reasonable and ordinary Baltimore-style crab diner several blocks from the fable Pelgimbly facilities, rather than hard at work in his lab.

  Impossible as it was for many of his colleagues to comprehend, Dr. Jones found the vast majority of his inspirations, not surrounded by test tubes, refractors and pestles, but from within the drama, torment and comedy of the realities created by ordinary people. It was the needs and fears of the common man which drove his intellectual curiosity, and now that he had heard this phrase, this practically tortured wondering over why our physical world was not the one predicted in the 1950s, suddenly his own intellectual curiosity over the matter was reborn anew.

  And so, having been snagged from his own churning cauldron of thought by this random query, having fallen far enough into at least a slice of the world’s actual reality to be able to interface with a fellow human being, if only for a moment, his mind caught by a sudden gust of white-hot curiosity, Dr. Jones solicited a proposal.

  “Tell me, my good man,” he asked politely, if somewhat absently, “what exactly would you do with a flying car if indeed it were possible for you to have one?”

  The man snapped back the standard nugget one might expect from someone whom, on a daily basis, could be counted on to slap their fists against crumb and crab juice-spattered counters, spewing their words over perfectly decent people as if those poor souls did not have enough morons yammering at them throughout their day already without the addition of yet another slack-jaw into their lives who was neither their employer or a minion of the legal professions.

  “Hey, whatd’ya expect?” The man fixed the doctor with a belligerent stare, then dropped the other shoe, “I’d freakin’ fly it.”

  And, for some reason which flickered in the subconscious of Aristotle T. Jones at that particular alignment of the planets, the doctor joined with the man at the counter in feeling the over-riding need for that question to finally be answered. For, once he had calculated the number of times a particular age-group had made that same impassioned query, he realized Destiny was practically screaming out for some research to be done. And also, suddenly remembering that his All-Round-Researcher’s license would soon require him to log some additional flight time anyway, he nodded his head in the grumbling man’s
direction and answered;

  “Well then, Mister…?”

  “Terill, Harry Terill…”

  “Well then, Mr. Terill, let’s go get you one, shall we?”

  * * * *

  “So, okay Doc,” the growling man said to Jones, “explain again why we’re powering up a blimp?”

  “Zeppelin, actually,” the doctor absently corrected. “It’s quite simple, really. “You see, travel between dimensions is possible only in lighter-than-air ships.”

  The man stared at Jones as if he had announced he was about to pull an African elephant from his back pocket. Having spent most of his life being stared at in such a manner, the good doctor, of course, failed to take note of his travelling companion’s confusion. Unfettered by such mundane embarrassments, in a moment he related how Dr. Wendel Q. Wezleski had discovered the way to move sideways through reality. The good doctor had, of course, learned how to move forward and backward through commonly shared reality earlier on—“time travel,” he had called it. But, the vastly more tricky, and extremely delicate operation which Wezleski had been attempting to learn while constantly, albeit accidentally, inventing new ways to shatter the chronos barrier was the movement through parallel dimensions.

  “You see,” Dr. Jones told the excitable counter-slammer sitting next to him in the airship, “to effect a journey through dimensions takes steam power. It’s the only sufficient energy source we have that doesn’t depend on any sort of delicate electronics. Electronics in operation keep the sideways gates from opening, don’t you see? So, once our steam-powered generators have gotten a doorway opened, then we still have to depend on lighter than air travel for the same reason—only such vessels can be navigated without the aid of electronic devices. Once safely through a gate, of course, additional power sources can be brought on line, but until then…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I dig it,” Terill interrupted. “But how does this get me a flyin’ car?”

  “Well, simply put,” answered Jones, his attention split between his easily distracted charge and maintaining his white-knuckled grip on his seat—maintained so because the good professor had an absolute and over-whelming dread of air travel, “we have targeted the nearest possible dimensions which show as likely for having based their major modes of transportation on something other than automobiles.”

  As soon as Dr. Wezleski had opened the passageways to inter-dimensional exploration, every government in the world had, as one might expect, expressed their typical, extreme disapproval. The Americans, with characteristic disdain for their own interests when faced with stern frowns from their current friends, such as France and China, or their traditional friends, such as Japan and Germany, responded by clamping firmly down upon Pelgimbly, installing their own military people to monitor even the most minute movements within the Institute being made outside of agreed-upon-reality.

  Now to be fair, in the favor of the current regime, they had not been so utterly disapproving at first. But, after the mighty thinkers in Hollywood quickly rallied public sentiment along the same lines as the rest of the world with such blathering drivel as 10 Million Dimensions to Earth, I was a Teenage Zep Jockey, and The Next Dimension Needs Women, the government became far more nervous about allowing research to continue unfettered by their “expert” supervision. The scientific community, as one might imagine, rallied behind Pelgimbly for the obvious reasons, but the films had been released within months of a major election, and that was, as anyone outside of the omnipotent ostriches of the liberal left could tell you, all there was to say about that.

  On the other hand, of course, a chore as simple as sliding 598 feet of helium-filled, steam-driven steel and plasti-canvas past the keen and watchful eyes of military intelligence is not all that great a problem for the typical Pelgimblian. Within minutes of Dr. Jones’ assistant, the twenty-two year old ginger-haired Adora Feldstein, wandering “accidentally” into the Prime Security Chamber with a plate of fresh brownies, and a carafe of ice-cooled milk, all monitor screens covering the launch bays became temporarily unmanned and the mighty airship, the Thomas Alva was able to slide gracefully through the electro-flux barrier between unreality and possibility off to the first target dimension, some one thousand, eight hundred and forty-seven realms over.

  “What do you mean, ‘nearest possible dimensions?’”

  “Ah, you see,” explained Jones, stuffing the bowl of his pipe, “there are an infinite number of dimensions parallel to our own. If we were to simply travel to the nearest one, we would find things to be, well…almost exactly the same as in our own. No flying cars to be found there. Oh, my—no. But…”

  Jones paused to set the flame of his lighter to his pipe. Torching the mix within its bowl, he continued, spitting his words out in small bunches in between puffs.

  “If we hop outward into the sideways void…then our chances of finding an Earth…where the average motorist has left the ground behind…well then…there we might indeed discover what you’re looking for.”

  Terill nodded, actually comprehending what he had been told. He made a few further inquiries, several even bordering on the intelligent. Jones puffed on his pipe, watching the screen in front of him, answering Terill’s questions and advising the pilot on likely short-cuts until finally, an announcement from the navigator’s chair told them they had arrived at candidate dimension number one.

  “We’re here!”

  “Well,” corrected Jones, knowing which “here” Terill meant and how likely he was to be accurate in his assessment, “we’re ‘somewhere’ at any rate.”

  Racing to an observation port, Terill began to scan the airways, his eyes craning in all possible directions, searching for the winged, four-on-the-floor of his dreams. His search went on, sadly, unrewarded. Whether high or low, East or West, back, forth, or any other direction available for scrutiny, Harry Terill spotted many a plane, several helicopters, and a few points of light which he thought might have been UFOs, but he could lay his eyes on nothing that appeared to be a flying car in any reasonable way, shape or form.

  “I don’t get it,” he said finally. “I thought this dimension was guaranteed far enough away to be different from ours.”

  “Indeed it is,” Jones told him honestly. “Perhaps an excursion to the surface will tell us something further.”

  It only took a matter of a few moments for the professor to calibrate the proper charge to resinate his body and his guest’s so they could wander about on the surface of the world below them. Leaving the Thomas Alva uncharged, of course, so that it might remain invisible to the locals, they then descended to the ground outside the nearest town and hiked into the suburbs.

  “You know, I don’t think I remember seein’ any roads from up above,” Terill announced as they accomplished their first quarter mile.

  “I wouldn’t think we would find any anywhere in this world,” responded Jones. Releasing a great billow from his pipe, he mused, “That was the whole reason for sliding this far over, dimensionally speaking.”

  “But,” asked Terill, “if they don’t have flyin’ cars, or roads for regular cars, then how do they get around?”

  Eighteen more steps gave them the answer. Coming to a break in the wooded area into which they had descended, they suddenly came to a row of suburban-style apartment buildings. Rounding the corner of the closest, they emerged into the open to find something the good doctor had not anticipated.

  “My, my, would you look at that now.”

  “The goddamned sidewalk is movin’.”

  As the two explorers watched in rapt fascination, people mounted and dismounted the conveyors stretched out before them. Many merely stood while they were propelled along, reading newspapers or listening to this or that being piped through headphones, but far more seemed quite comfortably at rest atop small, one-legged chairs upon which they remained stably poised by using both of their legs for counterbalance. T
wo belts moving in opposite directions were needed to keep things flowing, and people had to step across several moving belts to continue onward when one set of belts crossed another, but they seemed to do so with relative ease.

  “Jeez’it, Doc, how do they do that?”

  “How do they do what?”

  “Get across the lanes so quick?” Terill stared in awe-struck wonder at the sight of a woman in her early sixties along with her dachshund as they skipped nimbly across the five feet of a belt headed West, then an identical set of feet found on the one next to it headed East, finally catching up to their own belt, still headed South, which had traveled underneath the other two.

  “I would surmise it was simply a matter of growing up with it,” Jones conjectured. “After all, think about it for a moment. If we were to take them home and show them people weaving five ton automobiles through traffic, bicycles and pedestrians, I’m certain they’d be just as impressed with any of us as you seem to be with them.”

  “Makes sense, I guess,” Terill admitted. “Makes me wonder how they move packages, groceries, you know—furniture, bigger loads. Is this all they have—these movin’ sidewalks? How does really big stuff get around? And what do they do when it rains? Or in the winter time? Or…”

  Deciding he would like to know such things himself, Professor Jones moved them forward until they intercepted the older woman and her dog at the front door of her building. Claiming to be doing a survey, they asked their questions and discovered that everything they wanted to know had the most mundane of answers. People simply took carts and wheeled baskets and all manner of dollies, et cetera, with them when they shopped. Delivery trucks in Dimension Starboard/1847 were merely platforms on wheels, most of them a type of remarkable automated platform that delivered packages to destinations then returned to their point of origin as programmed. Bad weather was apparently compensated for with protective clothing. And so on and so forth.