by Rudy Rucker
“What a brat.”
“Oh, but be nice to her. I was just like Serena when I was little.”
Unable to turn the knob, Serena began kicking the door. “Dada! Dada! Dada! Dada!”
“Here I come. Don’t break the door.”
When I opened the door, Serena squealed and toddled off at high speed. I followed her into the kitchen and popped the top on a Bud. One thing about Nancy, she kept the fridge well-stocked. I inhaled the first beer and started a second. That regress had been bad news. In a way it had taken place outside of time. I wondered what would have happened if I’d wrung the neck of the thumb-sized Fletcher in the toy car. The giant would have done the same to me, of course, while being choked himself and uh uh uh. Hall of mirrors. Harry’s doing. Master of space and time. I’d ask him for five million.
I got out the phone book and looked under Appliances, Service and Repair. Harry had taken over his family’s business when his parents died last winter. I’d never seen the place yet. The ad was pure Harry:
Don’t Think We Don’t Think Don’t
Think Don’t
Robotics and Appliance Repair
GERBER CYBERNETICS
Twenty Years at the Same Location!
Yes, We Take Cash!
824-1301 501 Suydam St.
New Brunswick
Cybernetics. That was a word Harry and I had always laughed about. Nobody has any idea what it means, it’s just some crazy term that Norbert Wiener made up. Gerber Cybernetics. I dialed the number.
“Hello?” An old woman’s questioning quaver.
“This is Joseph Fletcher. Is Mr. Gerber in?”
“I’ll get him. Haaaaaaaaryr!” There were footsteps, the sound of breaking glass, a curse, some yelling. The person at the other end knocked the phone off the counter, then picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Harry! What do you have?” I lowered my voice so that Nancy wouldn’t hear me. “I can spare two grand, but no more.”
“Who’s this?” He sounded confused. In the background the old-woman-voice was still yelling.
“Who’s this. Who do you think it is, space cadet?”
“Is this Joe Fletcher?”
“I’m supposed to come tomorrow, right?”
“We’re open ten to five on Saturdays.”
“I’ll come in early and we can have lunch together. Like real businessmen. Do you have any circuit diagrams for the thing?”
“You want me to invent something?”
“I thought you already had it. Master of Space and Time, right?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Fletch. Are you drunk?”
This was getting nowhere fast. If the little Harrys had been from the future, then maybe he really didn’t know what I was talking about. “You’re going to be master of space and time,” I explained. “I want five million dollars.”
“Hold on.” There were voices in the background. “Yes, it’s ready, ma’am. Fletcher, I’m going to have to hang up. Customers. See you tomorrow!”
Serena had climbed onto my lap while I was talking. She was about as short as you can be and still walk. I planted a kiss on her fat little cheek. “You’re not really a brat, are you?”
“Dada hand.” She starfished her little paw against my palm. “Serena hand!”
I looked around our shabby living area. Everything plastic, piles of laundry, and the TV always on. I wished I’d bought some good furniture when I’d had the money. Nancy and Serena deserved better than this.
3
The Peasant and the Sausage
SATURDAY was cool and rainy. I stopped by my bank and then drove to New Brunswick. Harry’s shop was in a crummy neighborhood near the train station. There was a bus station too, and next to it was a place called the Terminal Bar. Some terminal-type guys gimped past in the wet, one of them an obvious wirehead. He was so far gone that he used a mechanical walker. You could see the bulge of his stim-unit under his overcoat.
“Where’s Gerber Cybernetics?” I asked. “Man.”
“Gug-ger-bub-ber? Ruh-hight thu-there. Man.”
The shop had a big plate-glass window, a dirty window crowded with junk: a plastic toad wearing a crown, an old cookie tin with cityscapes embossed on its sides, an out-of-date girlie calendar from the Rigid Tool Company, an oriental lamp, some listless houseplants, a coiled-up orange extension cord, and a terrarium with a mean-looking little lizard in it. I squatted down to get a better look at the lizard. He was like a miniature Godzilla, with powerful rear legs and a long, toothy jaw. He looked as if he’d been in a fight recently, and seemed to be in some pain.
The letters GERBER APPLIANCE arced across the plate-glass window, but with the APPLIANCE only a pale, scraped-off shadow. In place of it, crudely brushed in, was the new designation: CYBERNETICS. I opened the door and entered, feeling like a twelve-year-old come to play with his best friend’s train set.
The front of the shop was cramped, with a waist-high counter. A partition behind the counter divided the store from the actual work area in the rear. A robot stood behind the counter, scanning me. It was a multipurpose Q-89, with the small, bullet-shaped head and the long, snaky arms.
“What can we do you for?” The machine was programmed to sound like a friendly old woman. I’d talked to it on the phone.
“I’m Joe Fletcher. Mr. Gerber’s expecting me.”
“You can call me Antie,” said the robot. “A-N-T-I-E. Harry’s in back.”
“Thank you, Antie.”
She—with the voice you had to think of Antie as female—stepped aside and I went through the door behind the counter. It was a regular workshop back there, with shelves of parts, a wall of tools, and a number of partially disassembled electronic devices. The resinous tang of solder smoke perfumed the air. I felt right at home.
Harry looked up from a robot torso and gave me a big smile. “Fletcher! It’s been a long time.”
“I’ve been busy with the job and the wife, Harry. Great to see you.” I looked around the crowded workroom. “So this is the Gerber family business, eh? You making any money?”
“Yeah, some. But it’s boring. I’m all alone here except for Antie.”
“Why does she talk like an old woman?”
“My mom did that. She programmed Antie to talk and act just like her . . . before she died. I keep meaning to change it, but I don’t know, it’s sort of soothing.” Harry sighed and laid down his soldering ray. “But what was that phone call of yours all about? Master of space and time?”
Before I could really start, Antie interrupted.
“Would you like some soup, Dr. Fletcher?” The robot shuffled into the room, bearing a tray with two steaming bowls of thick, dark lentil soup.
“Well . . . I’d really been planning to take Harry out for lunch.”
“You two can still go out. It won’t hurt my feelings. I’m just a machine. Should I put some quark in that, boys?”
“Quark?” I inquired.
“Quark,” confirmed Harry with a chuckle. “But not the particle. Quark is a German word for a kind of yogurt. My family always used it to mean sour cream. That’s a big Hungarian thing, you know, lentil soup with sour cream. Try it, it’s delicious.”
“Okay.”
Antie served us our soup with quark and, at Harry’s urging, went out to the Terminal Bar for some Utz pretzels and Blatz beer. I gave Harry a detailed account of my experiences of the day before. He was particularly interested in the fact that when he traveled back in time, he’d only looked two inches tall to me.
“So Fred Hoyle was right,” Harry exclaimed. “Everything is shrinking!”
“Nothing’s shrinking, Harry. I’m the same size every day.”
“That’s what you think. But your house shrinks, your car shrinks, your wife shrinks—everything in the universe is shrinking at the same rate. That’s why the distant galaxies keep seeming farther away. I’d always wondered how to test it. But now—”
“Time travel!” I exclaimed. “I get it. If everything’s smaller now than it was yesterday, then if I jump back through time to yesterday, I’m much smaller than the people there.”
“That’s it, Fletch. That’s why the time-traveling Harry you saw yesterday was so small. He was from the future. And the other way would be the opposite.”
“You mean that if we could jump something a few days forward in time it would come out seeming huge?”
“Yeah.” Harry beamed at me for a second. We were having fun. “You say I called the machine a blunzer?”
“That’s right. A blunzer. You said we built it and it made you master of space and time.”
“Blunzer . . . I like that. Did I say when we built it? Or how?”
“We build it tomorrow, and today we get the parts. You said that if I came to see you today, you’d know what to do. The very fact that you were able to come back from the future means that the blunzer is going to work, right?”
“Well, yes. The idea of controlling space and time does happen to be something I’ve been thinking about recently. The way I see it, it’s simply a matter of increasing the value of Planck’s constant by many orders of magnitude.”
“That’s what you’ve been working on?”
“After a fashion.” Harry smiled lopsidedly and fell silent. I realized then that he’d been unable to work without me. It had been a shame to let Nancy come between us.
“Have you done any experiments?”
“No, I didn’t have the energy. This is all so strange. First I have some ideas, then the ideas decide to become real. The blunzer sends me back in time to get you to help me build the blunzer. It’s a closed causal loop. But where did it come from?”
“God, maybe. Or another dimension. You’re telling me you actually know how to build the blunzer?”
“I had a dream about it last night, as a matter of fact. I dreamed that you were explaining it to me. It was a very vivid dream.” Harry stared into space, thinking. “The materials are going to cost,” he said finally. “You only brought two thousand dollars?”
“It’s all I have. I work and work and the savings never grow. It’s horrible to have a real job, Harry, they treat me just like anyone else. I’m ready to gamble everything on you.”
“Well, thanks, Fletch. I’m really touched. With you helping me, the blunzer might work. Planck’s constant, you know, it’s a measure of the effect that the observer has on the universe. If I can temporarily increase the value of Planck’s constant in my body, then the world will look more and more like I want it to.”
“Here’s the beer, boys.” Antie came shuffling back from her run.
We each opened a can. I drank deep and sighed with pleasure. “Drinking beer in a back room on a rainy Saturday. This is the life, Harry, with no women around. Nancy and Serena—”
“It’s rough, huh? Well, living alone gets pretty old, too.”
“Do you have any girl friends?”
“There’s one woman I’ve been seeing. She’s a student at the Scientific Mysticism Seminary here. Kind of plain, but very pleasant. She slept here last night. I just wish I could get her to stop talking about God.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sondra Tupperware. Sondra with an o.”
I burst out laughing. The name was too ridiculous to be believed. “You lying toad. Has anything you’ve told me yet been true?”
“It’s all true. You’re the one who saw me come back from the future.”
“Nobody’s called Tupperware.”
“You want to phone her up?”
“I’ll have another beer instead. Tell me more about what you think the blunzer will do.”
“We’ll talk about the technical details later. The main thing is that it’ll make me master of space and time. For a while, anyway. Whatever I wish for will come true.”
“And me? Do I get a turn?”
“Sure. First I’ll do it, then you.”
“That’ll be safer,” I observed. “So I can undo anything you screw up too badly.”
“Like The Peasant and the Sausage,’” said Harry. “You know that story?”
“No.”
“Well, there’s a peasant who finds a little man trapped in a bramble bush. He gets the little man out, and the little man says, ‘In return for your help I grant you three wishes. Use them wisely!’ So the peasant runs home and talks it over with his wife. They’re trying to decide what to wish for. They’re talking and talking and suppertime comes, and she’s been too busy to fix anything, and she’s real hungry. ‘I wish I had a nice big sausage,’ the wife blurts out, and there on the table in front of her is a crisp white bratwurst. ‘God, you’re stupid!’ the husband shouts, beside himself with rage. ‘I wish that sausage would grow onto your nose!’ So there’s the poor wife with the big gross sausage grown onto her face.”
“And they have to use the third wish to get the sausage off, right?”
“Yeah. Three wishes and all they end up with is a sausage.”
“But the blunzer gives you more than three wishes, doesn’t it?”
“It gives all the wishes I make, but only for a limited period of time. A session with the blunzer is like one super-wish.”
“Couldn’t you wish for infinitely many wishes?”
“I don’t think so. You have to wish for something concrete.”
“So what are you going to wish for, Harry?”
Harry smiled and rubbed his face. “That’s the hard part, isn’t it? I’ll get you some money—I know you’ll want that, and—”
“That’s right,” I put in. “Five million bucks.”
“Yeah. And I wish Sondra was prettier. And I wish the blunzer would work. And . . . I don’t know. I’d like to have some big adventure happen. Subconscious wishes count too, which means that—”
“Try to do the big adventure in some other universe,” I suggested. “So this one doesn’t get totally wrecked.”
“That sounds like a good idea. I’ll wish for a magic door to another world and we can go over there for a while.”
“Hey, I’m psyched, Harry!”
“Let’s go shopping.”
4
Stars ’n’ Bars
WE left Antie in charge of the store and took off in my Buick. Without Harry having to tell me, I knew where we were headed. Jack McCormack’s Stars ’n’ Bars Government Surplus.
Harry handed me a pretzel and an open beer. “Utz and Blatz, Fletcher, just think about it.”
“Tzzzz.”
We were on an incredibly built-up divided highway. There were lots of potholes. The traffic was light but intense. The government had recently repealed all speed limits in an attempt to boost oil consumption.
Businesses were slotted in side by side, not only along both edges of the highway but also all up and down the broad median strip. Such dense social tissue needs a vast traffic flow to nourish it, a flow that was no longer available in these depression times. Many of the businesses stood empty. Fly-by-night operations flitted in and out of the abandoned rent-free shells like fish in a coral reef.
COSMO FLEXADYNE!
PERSONA SCREAM-FLASH!
BLOOD AND ORGANS BOUGHT AND SOLD!
FETISH MEGAMART!
ETHICAL REPROGRAMMING!
FLESH FISH!
NORTH JERSEY’S ONLY DOG BUTCHER!
EXCRETION THERAPY!
SKIN SHIRTS—WE MAKE OR EAT!
BAG BODY BOXING!
STARS ’N’ BARS SURPLUS!
“There it is.”
We pulled into the vast empty lot of what had once been a Two Guys discount center. The building was a weathered yellow cube with half an American flag painted on one side. A few robots loitered outside the entrance, standing guard. Jack McCor-mack, the proprietor, was a displaced redneck, deeply suspicious of city folks.
When we pulled up, Jack had been standing behind the glass doors, watching the traffic. But when he saw Harry and me, he turned and disappear
ed into the gloomy recesses of his domain.
“Plllease state youuur business,” intoned one of the robots, a squat K-88 with a flare ray bolted to its arm.
“Joseph Fletcher and Harry Gerber, out shopping. Jack knows us.”
“Nnnnnegatory. You willl leave the area.”
“Come on, McCormack,” shouted Harry, “you remember us. We built that beam weapon for General Moritz. The thing to make water radioactive?” That had been one of our less successful designs. Harry had lost the plans for the demonstration model, and we’d been unable to duplicate it.
“Nnnnnegatory,” hummed the robot, leveling its flare ray. “Therrre willl be no furrrtherrr warnings.” The flare ray looked truly vicious: it was something like a small industrial laser with a superheterodyne unit in back.
“We’ve got cash!” I screamed. “Two thousand dollars!”
“Well, why dintcha say so?” At the mention of money, the robot’s speaker switched from taped threats to McCormack’s lively drawl. The machine scurried to open the glass doors. “Y’all boys still owes Stars ’n’ Bars right much.”
“That’s right,” I confessed. “Five hundred dollars, wasn’t it?”
“Hot golly, les call it three!” Jack McCormack stepped forward from behind some giant spools of cable. “Assumin y’all boys is really goan spend two kay.” He was a leathery little gnome with hard blue eyes.
“Oh, we’ll spend more than that,” said Harry breezily. “Though you should realize, McCormack, that Fletcher & Company qualified for the Emergency Bankruptcy Act of ’95, so that any debts or obligations of the aforesaid corporation are void.”
“Yew fat ugly toad. Ah bet yore foreign, ain’t yew?”
“Hungarian-American. And, unlike you, with a full command of the English language.”
Looking at the two short men glaring at each other, one fat, one skinny, I had to laugh. “Look, Jack.” I took out my wallet. “Real cash. Get the truck.”
McCormack had a small pickup that you could drive around his huge store. The three of us piled in, me in the middle.
“First we need a hotshot table,” said Harry.
