Master of Space and Time (3 page)

“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.”

W
E
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 disappeared 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.

“Good God!” I exclaimed. “Whatever for?” The hotshot table had been a popular execution device during the early nineties, when capital punishment had made a big comeback. A hotshot table was like a hospital gurney, a bed on wheels, but a bed with certain built-in servo-mechanisms. It was a kind of mechanical Dr. Death, equipped to give fatal brain injections to condemned criminals. Lying down on a hotshot table was like lying down on a black widow's belly. The needle would stab right down into the top of your head. The point of the thing was that it had helped resolve the AMA's scruples about helping to kill people. But now capital punishment had been voted out again.