by Rucker, Rudy
“Stout fellow,” said Alan.
Ulam glanced up as if he’d forgotten Alan were there. “I have to go on-site now,” said Ulam. “Project Utopia. Down in the canyon. This evening is my last chance to be making adjustments. I would not be going near that bomb tomorrow. It will be on countdown starting at midnight, and from then on in a risky condition.”
“Can I come along now?” asked Alan. “I’d like to see it.” His skug wanted him there. He already had a rough outline for a method to make the thing into a universal skugging ray. Perhaps he could overpower Ulam at the Project Utopia and—
“No, no, no,” said Ulam. “Only me. I am the only one with clearance to go down there. Well, I suppose that Dick Hosty has clearance as well. Just Hosty and me. None of the other LANL scientists is understanding what’s going on with Project Utopia—and none of is wanting to risk any blame. We’ll leave my office together, and I’ll be bidding you farewell out front.”
On the way down the windowed hallway, they saw that it was twilight and that the snow storm had returned with new force. The sky was yellow-gray with the teeming flakes. A security agent ordered up a tracked snow vehicle to ferry Ulam into the canyon.
Ulam almost forgot to say goodbye. All that was in his mind was correcting the Hermitian conjugate error in his V-bomb. But at the last minute he focused on Alan and again exhorted him to find a deskugging routine while there was time. The tank-like vehicle clanked off with Ulam aboard. Alan was on his own.
His mind was in turmoil. The skug was pressing him to pursue the path towards universal skugification, but by now Alan longed to somehow free himself. Not that he could safely think about these issues right outside the lab. He had to maintain his Pfaff cover.
The despised Dick Hosty appeared in his white ambulance. He had heavy, knobby chains on his tires, and he wore his pistol even more prominently than before. He wanted to drive Alan home. And once again he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Although Alan had his tiresome Peter Pfaff personality firmly in place, Hosty seemed even more suspicious than yesterday.
“Where are you actually staying?” he asked Alan as soon as the ambulance pulled away from the curb. As before the squawk-box was tuned to a police channel, and a hand-held microphone danged near Hosty’s head.
“Well, I was at the Cowboy Motel,” said Alan uncertainly.
“I checked there, and they don’t got any record of you, Pete,” said Hosty. “So I asked around at that Big Bow Wow where you like to eat. Waitress wouldn’t give me the sweat off her butt, but a good old boy eatin a steak said you was rentin a cottage from a vet lady down the road. Sue Stook? The waitress is Sue’s girlfriend, what I hear. I hate shit like that.”
“How is this any of your business at all?” said Alan, mustering his gumption. He needed to put an end to this conversation. It would be a disaster if Hosty and the skugsniffer got near his cottage.
“Aren’t you wanting to renew your security clearance tomorrow?” taunted Hosty. “Way you’re goin’, I don’t see that happening at all.”
“Frankly I don’t give a ruddy fuck,” said Alan, at the end of his rope. “Set me out at the Bow Wow and we’ll part ways for good.”
“Nice talk for a tech,” said Hosty. He addressed himself to the skugsniffer once again. “Hey, Roland, you really sure this guy ain’t a skugger?”
“No skuggers in sight,” said the skugsniffer in a weary tone. “This man checks out the same as yesterday. And don’t go shocking me for nothing.”
“Like this?” said Hosty, sadistically tapping his shock button. The skugsniffer in the tank sent out a howl of pure agony.
“That’s so you’ll keep your sniffer primed real good,” said Hosty. He motored past the friendly lights of the Big Bow Wow with no reduction in speed. “We gonna deliver Pete direct to his abode. Just in case he’s got something to hide. We got jeeps and soldiers on the ready at the labs.”
All the old fears and resentments came boiling up within Alan. Proctor Whitsitt caning him, Detective Jenkins arresting him, the MI5 men poisoning Zeno—always more enemies—Pratt in Tangier, Landers in Palm Beach, Rupert Small in New Orleans—and now Dick Hosty, who’d killed two of Alan’s ex-lovers with a flame-thrower.
“Skuggers up ahead!” blared the skugsniffer’s speaker. “A nest of them—a woman and two men.”
A calm golden light filled Alan’s head. Vassar was with him, giving him strength—the aethereal manta ray’s tail was plugged into the ambulance’s cigarette lighter. Everything seemed outlined with bright beads. The squawk-box police radio had gone dead. Vassar’s easy voice sounded in Alan’s ears.
“Go ahead, man. This is it. Even up the score.”
The next thing Alan knew he was choking Hosty, his hands gone huge and massive, digging into Hosty’s flesh, breaking his windpipe and snapping the vertebrae of his neck. Hosty clawed at his microphone to no avail.
In his final spasms, Hosty may have formed an idea that his skugsniffer had betrayed him. Pressing a hidden control with his foot, he sent a lethal bolt of power into the skugsniffer’s tank. Alan could smell the burnt flesh. Hosty was dying at the wheel, and poor Roland Gill was dead in back.
Meanwhile nobody was driving the ambulance. It lurched to a harmless stop in a roadside snowdrift. Fortunately no other cars were out in the storm. There in the dark, Alan saw Hosty’s soul, a small writhing turnip thing that drifted out the window and dwindled down to nothing against the snow-smeared sky.
“No curtain calls?” challenged Alan. “After all your honk and menace?” He heard no response, and he was glad. As for Roland Gill in back, his ghost has found its onward path unseen.
Alan laid Hosty’s corpse on the seat , took the wheel, and restarted the stalled car. He drove through the streaming flakes to Sue Stook’s and parked in the empty barn behind the lit-up granny cottage. He covered the ambulance—now a hearse—with tarps.
Now what? Go indoors? Alan studied his hands. The hands of a killer. He wasn’t quite ready to face his friends.
For their part, Neal, Susan, or Bill could readily have teeped Alan’s presence, but they were otherwise involved. An unobtrusive telepathic scan showed Burroughs to be necking with Ginsberg on the couch. Susan and Neal were having sex in Susan’s bed. To add spice to the love-making, Neal had grown an extra penis. And the wanton Susan had a second vagina. The couple were linked together like puzzle pieces.
The anatomical extravaganza was hardly Alan’s cup of tea. Unnoticed by his friends, he withdrew his telepathic tendrils. He was starting to shiver from the cold, and from his stormy emotions.
Neal’s fat Cadillac was only lightly coated with snow—presumably he’d cleared it off and taken it on the road for a drive today. Hopping into the behemoth, Alan fired up the engine and the heater. He sat in plush comfort for a bit, gathering his wits.
He did feel some slight remorse for so ruthlessly killing Hosty. But more than that, he felt pride, and a sense of safety. His greatest enemy was gone.
How he wished that he could do as Ulam had urged, and find a way to expel his skug. Ulam didn’t fully grasp, however, that working on this wasn’t an option for Alan. Not as long as a skug lived within him. Testing the bounds, Alan let himself wonder if some process along the lines of a hush-phone could be of any—
Instantly he felt disoriented and short of breath. His temples were pounding in pain. In another moment he’d be—
Dutifully he switched to his plan for a skugging ray. This was what his skug wanted him to think about, and it wouldn’t do to defy his ever-more-watchful master. Very well then.
Whether or not Ulam took the notion seriously, there was something to Susan’s remark about personal vibrations. She’d grasped the basic principal of skugging rays. It was a matter of nudging the human genomic vibrations to the level of skugger vibrations. And this was something that a V-ray ought be able to do.
Of course there were intricate theoretical details—having to do with a non-commuta
tive quantum-mechanical operator that renormalized the symmetries of the genome kernel in Hilbert space. But Alan had already solved this bit in his head. The issue now was to design the implementation details.
His approach would be to deform the V-bomb’s blast charge in a fashion that he was in fact designing even now, sitting alone in the DeVille, tracing curves in the haze that his breath made on the car’s windows.
At this point Susan teeped the fact that Alan was outside in the Cadillac—and that he’d killed Hosty. She threw on her clothes and rushed out to embrace him.
“You’re a hero, Alan! You avenged Vassar! I’ve had such a broken heart.”
“I teeped what you and Neal were doing in there just now,” said Alan, a little embarrassed.
“Just a game,” said Susan. “A pastime. You men take sex too seriously. Come on in and let’s celebrate the fall of Hosty. You’ll freeze to death out here!”
Back in the granny cottage, Neal was out of bed, cooking a steak and smoking a marijuana cigarette. He’d driven to Santa Fe in the Cadillac that afternoon, loading up on supplies.
“I met with your man Naranjo,” Neal told Turing. “Sniffed him out with my skug-brain. He steered me to some weed.”
“How’s Naranjo faring?” asked Alan.
“Unloaded his stash, flush with cash, wife back at last, and he’s buying a plane,” said the cheerful Neal. “Turning legit. He survived his last deal. In the movies that’s when the reluctant gangster always gets popped. One last bank job, Louie, one last job. Bam! But Naranjo’s all dapper and hale.”
Meanwhile Susan and Burroughs were teeping Turing’s thoughts, learning of his plan to create a ray to turn everyone into a skugger—and spotting his forlorn and forbidden hope of expelling his skug from his own body. Alan could sense that these two would have enjoyed getting into a discussion about how to get rid of their skugs, but the parasites were clamping down on them all—more so than ever before. The scent of a final victory was making the skugs less tolerant.
“You’re talking behind my back,” said Ginsberg, sensing the ebb and flow of the teep. “Like I’m the crazy person who doesn’t hear voices in his head. So here’s my brainwave feed.” He launched into a Hindu chant.
Susan got into playing acousmatics recordings on her new reel to reel, rather softly and solemnly, as if at a wake. Summoned by the sounds, Vassar’s ghost reappeared, a cheerful, golden manta ray fully six feet across. Everyone could see him but Ginsberg. For Ginsberg’s sake, Neal danced over and sculpted the shape of Vassar, running his hands along the flanks of the twinkling manta.
“Thank you, Neal,” said Ginsberg. “You populate the void.”
In an unexpected gesture of hostility, Vassar now flew right through Neal’s chest.
“Oof,” said Neal aloud. “Here comes the husband.”
“I don’t like you moving in on my wife,” teeped Vassar, banking around for another pass at Cassady. “Bonehead.”
Turing jumped to his feet and waved his hands to distract Vassar. “Come on, Vassar, you and I fought Hosty together just now. Help me some more. Tell me how Ulam’s been physically tweaking the V-bomb. I bet you saw.”
“I bet I did,” teeped Vassar, settling down to a slow ripple of his wide golden wings. “I’m omnipresent, almost. Me and my ghost buddy Xurt.”
“Hemisemiubiquitous,” said Neal aloud.
“Ulam gets inside the bomb,” teeped Vassar. “Kinky as that seems. Like a guy inside a clown car.”
“I see a round metal shell resembling a submarine to be lowered into an oceanic trench,” interpolated Burroughs, also speaking aloud. They were running the live commentary for Ginsberg’s sake.
“The bomb is soft like lead and I can see radiation coming out,” continued Vassar’s teep. “Ulam pounds the stuff with a ball-peen hammer. Sculpting it, like. He wears a lead-foil suit, and then he showers off. ”
“I’ll go in there myself tomorrow,” said Turing aloud. “I’ll undo what Ulam did.”
“In where?” said Ginsberg, a few steps behind.
“Inside the V-bomb,” said Turing.
“I have no idea what’s going on,” said Ginsberg.
“Neal has two dicks,” Burroughs told him.
“Side to side or one atop the other?” asked Ginsberg. “Like a whale or like a kangaroo? Show us, Neal.”
“I’m various,” said Neal making magician gestures with his hands above his crotch.
Vassar wrapped his wings around Susan and bid her a last farewell. A final tenderness filled the two. Susan’s face showed a calm that Alan hadn’t seen in days.
And now the parting scene was done. With an odd motion, Vassar withdrew towards heaven. It wasn’t that he went up or down or left or right. He went—elsewhere. When Alan had seen Hosty’s ghost do this, he’d mistaken it for shrinking. But it was something other than that. It was a motion into a higher dimension.
As an elegy, Susan turned up the volume on her machine and put on the tape they’d made in Ulam’s lab—the sounds of higher-order nonlinear feedback.
“I’m getting a fine high buzz off this,” said Ginsberg. “Maybe I feel like a skugger.”
“Here’s an appropriate visual track,” said Alan. Drawing on his experience in the Tangier radio repair shop, he took off the back of the granny cottage’s TV and tweaked the tubes until a wave of outré blips and zags began rolling across the screen.
Burroughs stood by Turing, quite taken by the images.
“Puts me in mind of those glass plates of slime you were experimenting with in Tangier,” said Bill. “Your orgasmatronic all-meat TV.”
“Where it all began,” said Alan. “Our Xanadu.” He gave Bill a hug. “I never thought it would end at a nuclear weapons lab.” His throat tightened. “I—I hate to say this, Bill, but I feel our romance is very nearly at an end.” He held his friend out at arm’s length, then kissed him. “Consider yourself free of me, Bill. No strands of guilt.”
“Dear Alan. Can we win the war against skugs?”
“We’ll skirt that issue, no? Look at this some more.” Turing busied himself in showing Bill how to diddle the TVs adjustment knobs to make the patterns dance with Susan’s sounds.
Perhaps jealous of the lovers’ moment of intimacy, Ginsberg went back to chanting, more insistently than before. For his part, Neal was circling around Susan, tootling a trumpet solo through the spaces of his cupped and reshaped hands.
Bill once again lifted his unlovely voice in his Los Alamos school song:
Far away and high on the mesa’s crest
Here’s the light that all of us love best
Los Aaallll—
He broke off abruptly, pressing his hands to his chest.
“What?” said Alan. “Are you all right?”
Bill looked at Alan in silence, locking eyes. Faster than thought, Alan felt an encrypted teep message flit into him. Bill’s expression told Alan not to unpack the message as yet. It was a secret to be used later—and somehow Alan was to know when. Not yet in any case. Don’t think about it.
Alan went to bed early, leaving the others to continue their party. Washing up in the bathroom, he studied himself in the mirror. His face was very like Chris Morcom’s indeed—jaunty, with a narrow head and a crooked smile, with kindness and humor in his eyes. As the long day’s final surprise, a diaphanous copy of the face rose from the mirror and spoke to Alan.
“You’ll be with me soon,” said Chris’s ghost. “I’m glad. It’ll be lovely.”
Before Alan could answer, the apparition had vanished.
He slept soundly, barely waking when Burroughs and Ginsberg tumbled into the bed.
Chapter 17: V-Bomb
In the morning the sky was pale blue, with a new round of potential snow clouds humping on the western horizon. The highway had been plowed, leaving a great wall of snow across their driveway. Sue Stook used a yellow tractor to clear the entrance.
Alan and his friends had a quiet breakfast around the ki
tchen table. It felt like the end of something. Neal put on a juggling act with a bag of oranges—at one point he had four in the air.
“You lot had best clear out,” said Alan finally. “There’s a slight chance that the V-bomb will kill everyone.”
“Everyone on Earth?” asked Ginsberg. “Our government would risk that?”
“Maybe just everyone in Los Alamos,” said Alan. “Or in New Mexico. I say you get in Neal’s car and drive fast.”
Alan was a little surprised by how readily the others took him at his word. All four of them got up from the table, preparing for flight.
“The rental guy in Albuquerque said I could keep the DeVille for two weeks,” said Neal, pulling on his coat. “Long as Bill pays the daily rate when I bring it back, including tax, wax, and pro-rate denture adjustments. You come too, Turing. We’ll drive to New York and come back here, if here’s still there, now or then. I’m due to make a surprise inspection of Ellen Sue Bonham in the Village.”
“I have to stay,” said Alan, wretchedly alone at the kitchen table. “I have no choice. So do this rapidly, please. Rip off the bandage. Bundle up, grab groceries, go.”
“Greenwich Village is perfect for me,” said Susan, already at the fridge filling a shopping bag. “The one true audience for my acousmatics! I’d like to get some shows and to sell some recordings. Maybe I’ll even teach again, if all else fails. As it usually does. Whatever. I’m ready for a fresh start. Assuming the world doesn’t end.”
“I’d like to go back to Tangier,” said Bill, rummaging through his belongings and pulling on a second layer of clothes. “This whole continent drags me. America isn’t young, you know. It’s ancient and evil. With aluminum siding.”
“Going to Tangier?” echoed Alan wistfully.
“All of our plans being contingent upon the whip and lash and whim of our rulers, the skugs,” added Bill, coming back to the table to lean over Alan. “But maybe the humans can win in the post-V-bomb world.” He shot Alan a heavily significant glance.
“I don’t dare think about rebellion, Bill,” said Alan quietly.
