Руди Рюкер - Master Of Space And Time

1. This Is the Name of This Chapter

My screen began flashing. I had the console rigged to measure quitting time to the nanosecond. Softech had a flexitime system, which meant that you could quit for the week after putting in forty hours. A few quick keypunches and I'd logged off for the weekend. I yawned and looked around the too-familiar room. I was pretty old to be working this hard. A couple of years ago I'd had it made — my own company and my own signature on the paychecks. But now …

"Finished so soon, Dr. Fletcher?"

It was my supervisor, an angular young blond woman named Susan Lacey. Dr. Lacey. No one used first names at Softech. Company policy.

"No, I'm not finished. But I've clocked in my forty hours. It's Friday afternoon."

She flashed her human-relations smile. "It's two forty-seven, Dr. Fletcher. I don't have to tell you that they're in an awful rush for your program. You know how anxious they do get."

They. Lacey was always talking about her higher-ups as if it were her and me against some abstract impersonal them. It was her way of trying to win my sympathy, even though she was a slave driver. A pathetically transparent con job. I wished I could be my own boss again; I was too good for this noise.

"Don't worry." I snapped shut my briefcase. "The deadline's only Wednesday, you know. I'll bring the thing in under the wire. I always do."

All around me, my coworkers were still tapping away at their terminals. I was the only one with the nerve to take flexitime seriously. I'd never move up the Softech corporate ladder this way, but so what? All I needed from them was a steady paycheck. Soon I'd find a way to get my engineering firm back on its feet. I gave Lacey a curt nod and headed for the parking lot.

It was a hot day in late September. Buzzing around the trash cans were hornets, drunk with a summer's fatness. My car was the biggest on the lot — I had a black and white 1956 Buick, black on the bottom and white on top. Little Serena called it Dada's saddle shoe. I'd bought it just before Fletcher & Company went bankrupt, as a final present to myself. The guy I'd bought it from had gotten it off the original owner, a little old lady who only drove it to church, no lie.

As I unlocked my big old bomb, I noticed some things moving around in there. Bees? The biggest one was perched right on top of the white plastic steering wheel. But that was no bee. A wave of strangeness swept over me — a thick, airless feeling as if the world had suddenly turned into a giant movie set.

Harry Gerber was sitting on my steering wheel. He was two inches tall. A much smaller version of him was perched on the gearshift as well. And the tiny dots darting around on my dashboard — something told me they were a flock of yet tinier Harrys. All of them wore gray polyester suits, white shirts, and no neckties. Oh, my. Who else but Harry?

Harry Gerber: the out-of-it genius who'd been the inventor at Fletcher & Co. We'd had some wild times together, Harry and me. But now I hadn't seen him for over a year. He'd had a big fight with my wife Nancy — something about overpopulation and world hunger — and after that we'd drifted apart. He lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and I lived twenty miles away, in Princeton.

The little figure on the steering wheel hailed me with a cheerful wave of its tiny arm. "Hey, Fletch! Pretty slick, huh?" He sounded like Mickey Mouse.

I glanced over my shoulder to see if anyone from Softech was watching. Buzzing hornets and thick, sweet sun. I got in my car and closed the door. I took the thumb-sized Harry off my steering wheel and set him down on the dashboard. The smaller Harrys moved right along with him. They all stood there in a row, staring at me.

"Why all the copies, Harry?"

"I'm real, and the others are correction terms," said the thumb-sized man. "A convergent series of echoes. You've been reading The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, haven't you?"

"Yeah, I was reading it to Serena last night." I didn't bother asking how Harry knew. "You must be thinking about the scene where the Cat has a smaller cat in his Hat, and the smaller cat has a yet smaller cat in his hat, and the yet smaller cat has a still smaller cat, and so on forever, right?"

"You're a rational man, Fletcher. Watch this!" Each of the little Harrys squatted down by the next smaller one. The big one — the thumb-sized Harry — stuck some fingers in his mouth and attempted a sharp whistle. It came out as a wet hiss. But this was enough.

The smallest Harry I could see, a speck-sized one, jumped into the coat pocket of the next larger one, a flea-sized Harry. The flea-sized Harry jumped into the coat pocket of the ant-sized Harry. The ant-sized Harry jumped into the coat pocket of the thumb-sized Harry. They nested themselves together like Chinese boxes. I wondered how many levels there were.

"You like it better now?"

"I like it better."

"Aren't you going to ask me how I got this way?"

"I figure you'll tell me — if you can." A frustrating aspect of Harry's inventions was that he rarely understood how they worked. He was like some drunken chef who never writes down a recipe. This idiosyncrasy of Harry's had prevented Fletcher & Company from getting patents on any of his inventions, and had eventually made people unwilling to contract with us.

"I needed your encouragement, Fletcher. I've come back here to make sure you really are going to see me tomorrow. I remember that when you showed up tomorrow you'd seen me tiny in your car."

This was a very strange mixture of tenses. I thought for a minute, then got the picture. "You mean you're from the future? You've invented time travel?"

The little man on the dashboard glowed with pride. "Time travel's nothing compared to what I'm going to do. I'm master of space and time, Fletch."

I fought back a laugh. Dumpy, rope-lipped Harry, the king of creation? "Do you write that with capital letters, Harry? Master of Space and Time?"

"It's not funny. I could kill you right now if I wanted to. But you're the one who'll give me the idea to build the blunzer. You have to come see me tomorrow. I'll be at the shop. Tomorrow we get the parts, and Sunday night we build the machine."

"I suppose you want money?" I looked around the car, expecting to spot a holocaster. This had to be some kind of trick.

"Money? As I recall, you took two thousand out of your bank account. And you can stop looking around like that, Fletcher. This is for real. I'm master of space and time."

"Prove it. Do something weird. Put me — put me in an infinite regress."

"I knew you'd say that. You're so anal, Fletcher. Too much math. Here, you can light this to get back out."

The little figure tossed something at me. A tiny stick of dynamite, bright red and with a wispy unlit fuse. Something went funny with the time just then; it was like my time line branched right off from reality. Instead of hitting me in the face, the little stick of dynamite just hung there in midair, barely moving. Meanwhile, Harry was shrinking, moving away from me in some unknown dimension. Everything was getting dark and Harry's voice was too faint and high to understand.

Then Harry was all gone, and the world went black, blacker than night, zero photons black. I fumbled around, found the controls, and turned on my headlights. I could see outside, but I couldn't figure out what I was looking at. My car seemed to be resting on black felt, and ahead of the car was a soft, horizontally grooved wall. There was more black cloth to the left of me, and to the right there was a cliff with a big white pole swooping up from its edge. White plastic with sebaceous cracks. The scene made no sense whatsoever.

Although my dome light wasn't on, the inside of my car was lit up. I glanced around to find the cause. Resting on the seat next to me, there was a sort of toy car, a scale-model 1956 Buick with blazing headlights. The headlights were aimed at my corduroy-clad right leg. It looked as if the little car even had a toy driver. I put my hand on it, then drew back with a scream.