Mad Professor (31 page)

“You forgot to mention the stabilizer ring,” said Dad.

“You see?” said Manda. “I told you guys we needed a physicist.”

“What ring?” said Barley.

“A space bubble is inherently unstable,” said Dad. “It wants to tear loose or flatten back down. The whole secret of the DeGroot tech was to wrap a superquantum nanosheet around the bubbles. Bubble wrap. In your Flatland model it's a circle around the neck. Make a new bubble, Barley.”

A new bubble bulged up, and this time Wendel noticed that there was indeed a bright little line around the throat of the neck. A line with a gap in it, like the open link of a chain.

“That's the entrance,” said Dad, pointing to the little gap. “The navel. Now show me how you model a tunnel.”

“We're not sure about the tunnels,” said Puneet. “We're
expecting you can help us with this. I cruised the Bharat University Physics Department site and found a Chandreskar-Thorne solution that looks like—can you work it for me, Xiao-Xiao?”

Xiao-Xiao leaned toward the Flatland simulation, her lavender eyes reflecting the scene. She too wore a modern uvvy-style computer controller. Following Puneet's instructions, Xiao-Xiao bulged a second bubble up from the plane, about a foot away from the first one. A Square slid into the first one of them and A Pentagon into the other. And now the bubbles picked up a side-to-side motion, and lumps began sticking out of them, and it just so happened that two of the lumps touched, and now there was a tunnel between the two bubbles.

“Look at the screens now,” said Barley. “That's Square's view on the left. And Pentagon's view on the right.”

Square's view showed a lattice of Squares as before, but the lattice lines were warped and flawed, and in the flawed region there was a sublattice of nodes showing copies of the Pentagon. Conversely, the Pentagon's view lattice included a wedge of Squares.

“That's a start,” said Dad. “But, you know, these pictures of yours—they're just toys. You're talking all around the edges of what the pockets are. You're missing the essence of what they're really about. It's not that they spontaneously bulge up out of our space. It's more that they're raining down on us. From something out here.” He gestured at the space above Flatland. “There's a shape up there—with something inside it. I've picked up kind of a feeling for it.”

Barley and Xiao-Xiao stared silently at him, their mirrored eyes shining.

“That's why we need you, Rothman,” said Manda, finally.

“That's right,” said Puneet. “The problem is—when it comes to this new tech, we're bozos too.”

+   +   +

“I'll tell you what I think,” Wendel said gravely. “I think you're lying to them about what you can do, Dad.”

It was nearly midnight. Wendel was tired and depressed. They were sitting in the abandoned DeGroot plant's seemingly endless cafeteria, waiting for their daily time-slot with the nanomatrix. Almost the only ones there. The rest of their so-called team hadn't been coming in. Manda and Puneet preferred the safety of San Jose while Barley and Xiao-Xiao had completely dropped out of sight. What a half-assed operation this was.

Wendel and his Dad were eating tinny-tasting stew and drinking watery coffee from the vending machines along the wall opposite the defunct buffets. It was a long, overly lit room, the far end not quite visible from here, with pearly white walls and a greenish floor, asymmetrical rows of round tables like lily pads on the green pond of the floor, going on and on. Endless Media shared the cafeteria with the other scavenging little companies that had licensed access to the nanomatrix. None of the reputable firms wanted to touch it.

“Don't talk about it in here, son,” Dad said, listlessly stirring his coffee with a plastic spoon. “We're not alone, you wave.”

“The nearest people in here are, like, an eighth of a mile away, I can't even make out their faces from here.”

“That's not what I mean. The other groups here, they might be spying on us with gnat-audio, stuff like that. They're all a bunch of bottom-feeders like Endless Media, you know. Nobody knows jack from squat, so they're all looking to copy me.”

“You wish. It's good to have work, but you're going to get in deep shit, Dad. You're telling Endless Media you're down with the tech when you're not. You're telling them you can stabilize a Big Bubble when you can't. You say you can keep tunnels from hooking into it—but you don't know how.”

“Maybe I can. I have to test it some more.”

“You test it every night.”

“Not enough. I haven't actually gone inside it yet.”

“Come on. I'm the one who has to put you back together after a bubble binge. It's great having an income from this gig, Dad, a better place to live—but I'm not going to let you vanish into that thing. Something just like it killed the whole DeGroot team five years ago.”

His dad gave Wendel a glare that startled him. It was almost feral. Chair screeching nastily on the tile, Dad got up abruptly and went across the room to a coffee vending machine for another latte. He ran his card through the slot, then swore. He stalked back over to the table long enough to say, “Be right back, this card's used up, I've got another one in my locker.”

“You're not going to sneak up to the lab without me, are you? Our time-slot starts in five minutes, you know. At midnight.”

“Son? Don't. I'm the Dad, you're the kid. Okay? I'll be right back.”

Wendel watched him go.
I'm the Dad, you're the kid.
There were a lot of comebacks he could've made to that one.

Wendel sipped his gooey stew, then pushed it away. It was tepid, the vegetables mushy, making him think of bits of leftover food floating in dishwater. He heard a
beep,
looked toward the vending machines. The machine Dad had run his card through was beeping, flashing a little light.

Wendel walked over to it. A small screen on the machine said,
Do you wish to cancel your purchase?

Which was only something it said if the card was good. Which meant that Dad had gone to the lab without him. Wendel felt a sick chill that made his fingers quiver . . . and sprinted toward the elevators.

+   +   +

The pocket was so swollen he could hardly get into the big testing room with it. Maybe two hundred feet in diameter, sixty feet high. Mercuric and yet lusterless. The various measuring instruments were crowded up against the walls.

“Dad?” he called tentatively. But Wendel knew Dad was gone. He could feel his absence from the world.

He edged around the outside of the Big Bubble, grimacing when he came into contact with it. Somewhere beneath the great pocket was the nanomatrix mat that produced it—or attracted it? But it wasn't like you could do anything to turn the pocket off once it got here. At least nothing that they'd figured out yet, which was one of the many obstacles preventing this thing from being a realistic public attraction. “Show may last from one to ten minutes world time, and seem to take one hour to three months of your proper time.” Even if there were a way to shut the pocket off now—what would that do to Dad?

Facing a far corner was the dimpled spot, the entrance navel. On these Big Bubbles, the navel didn't always seal over. When Wendel looked into the navel, it seemed to swirl like a slow-motion whirlpool, but in two contradictory directions. Hypnotic. It could still be entered.

Wendel made up his mind: he would go after his dad. He leaned forward, pressed his fingers against the navel, thinking of
A Pentagon sliding up over the warped neck that led to the sphere of extra space. His hands looked warped, as if they were underwater. They tingled—not unpleasantly. He pushed his arms in after and then, with a last big breath of air, his head. How would it feel to stop breathing?

It was a while till Wendel came back to that question. The first feeling of being inside the pocket was one of falling—but this was just an illusion, he was floating, not falling, and he had an odd, dreamlike ability to move in whatever direction he wanted to, not that the motion seemed to mean much.

There was a dim light that came from everywhere and nowhere. Spread out around him were little mirror-Wendels, all turning their heads this way and that, gesturing and–Yes–none of them breathing. It was like flying underwater and never being out of breath, like being part of a school of fish. The space was patterned with veils of color like seaweed in water. Seeing the veils pass, he could tell that he was moving, and as the veils repeated themselves he could see that he was moving in a great circle. He was like A Pentagon circling around and around his bulged-up puffball of space. But where was Dad? He changed the angle of his motion, peering around for distinctions in the drifting school of mirror shapes.

The motion felt like flying, now, with a wind whipping his hair, and he found a new direction in which the space veils seemed to curve like gossamer chambers of mother of pearl, sketching a sort of nautilus-spiral into the distance. Looking into that distance, that twist of infinity, and feeling the volume of sheer potentiality, he felt the first real wave of bubble-rush. His fatigue evaporated in the searing light of the rush, a rippling, bone-deep pleasure that seemed generated by his flying motion into the spiral of the pocket.

“
Whuh
-oaaaah …” he murmured, afraid of the feeling and yet
liking it. So this was why Dad came here. Or one of the reasons. There was something else too . . . something Dad never quite articulated.

The bubble-rush was so all-consuming, so shimmeringly insistent, he felt he couldn't bear it. It was simply too much; too much pleasure, and you lost all sense of self; and then it was, finally, no better than pain.

Wendel thought, “Stop!” and his motion responded to his will. He stopped where he was–an inertialess stop partway into the receding nautilus spiral. The bubble-rush receded a bit, damped back down to a pleasing background glow.

“Dad!” he yelled. No response. “DAD!” His voice didn't echo; he couldn't tell how loud it was. There was air in here to be sucked in and expelled for speaking. But when he wasn't yelling, he felt no need to take a breath. Like a vampire in his grave.

He tried to get some kind of grasp of the shape of this place. He thought with an ugly
frisson
of fear: Maybe I'm already lost. How do I find my way back out?

Could A Pentagon slide back out the neck into the ball? Or would he have to wait for the ball to burn out its energy and flatten back into space?

There were no images of Wendel up ahead, where the patterns of the space seemed to twirl like a nautilus. It must be a tunnel. If pockets were dangerous, the tunnels from pocket to pocket were said to be much worse. But he knew that's where Dad had gone.

He moved into the tunnel, flying at will.

The pattern haze ahead of him took on flecks of pink, human color. Someone else was down there. “Dad?”

He leaned into his flying—and stopped, about ten yards short
of the man. It wasn't Dad. This man was bearded, emaciated, sallow . . . which Dad could be, by now, in the time-bent byways of this place. But it wasn't his Dad, it was a stranger, a man with big, scared eyes and a grin that looked permanently fixed. No teeth: barren gums. The man sitting was floating in fetal position, arms around his knees.

“Ya got any grub on yer, boy?” the man rasped. A UK accent. Or was it Australian?

“Um—” He remembered he had two-thirds of a power bar of some kind in a back pocket. Probably linty by now, but likely this 'slug wouldn't care. “You want this?”

He tossed over the power bar, and the pocket-slug's eyes flashed as he caught it, fairly snatched it out of the air. “Good on ya, boy!” He gnawed on the linty old bar with his callused gums.

It occurred to Wendel that at some point he might regret giving away his only food. But supposedly you didn't need to eat in here. Food was just fun for the mouth, or a burst of extra energy. Right now the scene made him chuckle to himself—the bubble-rush was glowing in him; it made everything seem absurd, cartoonlike, and marvelous.

Between sucking sounds, the 'slug said, “My name's Threakman. Jeremy Threakman. 'ow yer 'doin.”

“I don't know how I'm doing. I'm looking for my Dad. Rothman Bell. He's about . . .”

“No need, I know whuh 'e looks like. Seen 'im go through 'ere.” Threakman looked at Wendel with his head cocked. A sly look. “Feelin' the 'igh, are ya? Sure'n you are. Stoned, eh boy? Young fer it.”

“I feel something—what is it? What causes it?”

“Why, it's a feelin' of being right there in yerself, beyond all uncertainty about where yer might go, and fully knowin' that
yer hidden and on your own. And that'll get you 'igh. Or some say. Others, like me, they say it's the Out-Monkeys that do it.”

“The Out . . . what?”

“Out-Monkeys,” said Threakman. “What I call 'em. Other's call 'em Dream Beetles, one 'slug in here used ter call 'em Turtles—said he saw a turtle thing with a head like a screw-top bottle without the cap and booze pouring out, but he was a hardcore alkie. Others they see'm more like lizards or Chinese dragons. Dragons, beetles, monkeys, all hairy around the edges, all curlin' out at yer—it's a living hole in space, mate, and you push the picture you want on it. Me and the smartuns calls 'em Out-Monkeys cause they're from outside our world.”