Master of Space and Time (6 page)

“No problem. You want gold, or what?”

“Gold's too high profile. Give me five million bucks in paper currency. Used bills, small denominations.”

“Okay. What else?”

“Well—this is Nancy's idea. She wants you to make something that will turn dirt into food. A machine or something that's simple to reproduce and—”

“No more world hunger,” said Harry expansively. “Fine by me. If I can do it, I will. Let's go downstairs.”

“One last thing. All that money isn't going to do me any good if you turn the solar system into cheese or something.”

“I don't like cheese.”

“You know what I mean, Harry. The blunzer's effects have to be self-limiting. It has to stop working after an hour or two. And then everything has to go back to the way it was.”

“Back to the way it was? You don't want your money to disappear, do you? Or Nancy's cure for world hunger?”

“Make a few reasonable changes in our world, fine. And then let's go over to an alternate universe, like I said yesterday. First you do the jump to
Friday, and make the money and everything, and then we go over to another world so you can work out without wrecking things here.”

“That sounds good. As long as I'm master of space and time I'll be able to hold open a magic door to the world of my heart's desire. We'll stay two hours and then come back here just before the blunzing wears off. As soon as it wears off, the magic door'll close, and we'll be free to enjoy the few changes I made here.”

“Well”—I hesitated, still worrying—“it sounds pretty reasonable. But what if one of the changes you make in our world turns out to be really lethal? If we don't realize till after the blunzing wears off, we'll be stuck with it.”

“No we won't. We'll only use up half of those red gluons, so there'll be enough for you to get blunzed and fix everything.”

“Like a second wish.”

“Sure. ‘The Peasant and the Sausage.' ”

“Then I guess we've got an agreement.”

“How do you know I'll stick to it?” Harry gave me one of his horrible smiles.

“Do I have a choice?”

“You worry too much, Fletch. Come on, let's get started.”

Jack McCormack had delivered the goods. The stuff was all in Harry's workshop, stacked by the back door.

“Here's the basic idea,” said Harry, slowly pacing back and forth. “We put the hotshot table in the fridge and I lie on it. It's cold in there, and we've got it electromagnetically isolated with the copper foil. Just before I get the injection, the
chamber is flash-pumped to vacuum. I'll have an air tank, so no problem.”

“No problem? What about the shot? What kind of shot do you get? What happens to you then?”

“Planck juice. I get blunzed.” Two made-up words. Harry was flying.

“Blunzed
I've heard, Harry. But what's this
Planck juice?
”

“Okay. That's going to be your and Antie's job. The idea is that you get Antie to pour half the gluons out of the magnetic bottle and into the microwave cavity. It makes a super-quantum fluid, right?”

“I guess.”

“Do you know what gluons
are
, Fletcher?”

“Well, they're real small. They have something to do with quarks.”

“Gluons are the particles that stick quarks together. A proton is three quarks with some gluons in there holding the quarks together. The gluons come in three colors: red, blue and yellow. Red are easiest to get.”

“Fine. You've got gluons mixed with microwaves to make a super-quantum fluid. Then what?”

“The fluid is guided into the vortex coil.”

“The vortex coil!” This was getting exciting.

“The vortex coil. Think of a food processor, Fletch. The super-quantum fluid plops into the vortex coil and
skaaaaazzt!
”

“It's blended.”

“Blended into Planck juice, Fletcher, Planck juice being a continuous pre-quark force-medium with no distinguishing characteristic features whatsoever.
It doesn't know what the value of Planck's constant is supposed to be.
”

“It doesn't know.”

“But I'll tell it! I'll lie to it! The first thing I'll show the Planck juice will be a one-meter tunnel of wave guide! So the Planck length will seem like one meter instead of 10
^-33
centimeters! That's a hundred-decillion-fold amplification, Fletcher!”

“Harry, I don't know what you're talking about.”

“The Planck length is the size level at which quantum uncertainty takes over. The Planck juice will be manipulated into behaving as if the Planck length were one meter. And I'll absorb the juice. What the blunzer is going to do for me is to greatly magnify the uncertainty around me. Things will do what I tell them to!”

“Let's backtrack a little, Harry. We've got the Planck juice in the wave guide now. The wave guide takes it to the hotshot table, which injects it into your brain and—”

“I get blunzed.” Harry jumped up and down with excitement. “Let's get to work, Fletch. You're going to be in charge of the sequencing.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“It's possible that all of central Jersey'll go up when those gluons hit the vortex coil. But of course—”

“We
know
it's going to work,” I chortled. “Or you wouldn't have been able to make Godzilla happen yesterday.”

Harry and I went over the procedure a few more times, and then he and Antie and I got to work putting everything together. Time passed.
Before I knew it, night had fallen. Someone was pounding at the front door.

“Who is it?” called Antie in her old woman's voice. “Who's there?”

“Sondra. Let me in, guys.”

“S
ONDRA
, the point is to see it work. We know it works. That's why we built it. Fletcher, you talk to her. I'm going in the chamber now.” Harry hovered near the heavy, copper-swathed door like a fat man entering a steam-bath.

“Good luck, Harry.” I stepped forward and shook his hand. “The effects will last till midnight, right?”

“If I've got it calibrated correctly. We'll only use a hundred grams of the gluons. First I'll take care of the time travel and then I'll open up a door to another world.”

“Why?” Sondra burst out. She'd been asking questions ever since we'd let her in, and she didn't seem to like the answers she'd been getting. I wished she would go away and let us destroy the universe in peace.

“Look,” I said, “could you please just get out of the way?”

“So it's no girls allowed, huh? What if I call the cops?”

“Antie's a girl,” said Harry. “Sort of. We're not doing anything illegal.” He stood there, thinking, his hand on the fridge's door latch. “Sondra, I'm going to be master of space and time for two hours. Is there something you'd like me to do for you during that period of time? Wouldn't you like to have blond hair and a bod that won't quit?”

“He can make you look like Beva LeClaire,” I suggested. Beva was the latest Hollywood sex symbol, the Marilyn Monroe of the 1990s. “Wouldn't you like that, Sondra?”

“I'd rather be able to fly.”

“Done,” said Harry. “Now shut up and watch.” With a last nervous smile Harry stepped into the cubical blunzing chamber. A cloud of frost crystals billowed out, and then the refrigerator door slammed shut.

I slid aside a piece of the copper sheathing and peered in through the window we'd set into the door. Harry lay down on the hotshot table, waved his fist, and fitted on a breathing mask.

“Turn on the microwave, Antie.”

“Check, Dr. F.”

Harry slid back into a posture of noble ease. I covered up the little window and energized the copper sheathing.

“Antie, get the gluons.”

Antie pincered up the heavy little magnetic bottle with one hand, grasping the lid with her other hand.

I opened the microwave cavity, which was a little black box like a miniature woodstove. A broad spectrum of radiation streamed out.

“Pour, Antie.”

Antie came close and began pouring the gluons into the cavity. The gluons made up a sort of fluid, precious and sparkling as Christ's blood. The microwave energy field soaked the fluid right up.

As the gluons merged into the microwave field, the room filled with ethereal singing: faint, shifting notes almost too high to detect. A droplet of gluons slid down the lip of the magnetic bottle and burned the tip off one of Antie's fingers. I slammed the door of the little microwave cavity and breathed a sigh of relief. The first stage was completed.

“What was that stuff you poured in?” Sondra wanted to know. “It looked all irridescent, like fire and water mixed.”

“Those were red gluons,” I explained. “Usually they're hidden inside the protons and neutrons. I think they come in blue and yellow, too.”

“Buried jewels,” marveled Sondra. “Did they cost much?”

“You know it. We're saving half of them for the next time.”

“Shall I energize the vortex coil, Dr. F.?”

“Check, Antie.”

Antie threw the knife switch on the heavy power cable leading to the vortex coil, which was a hulking cone-shaped unit right next to the blunzing chamber. Ozone filled the air, and sparks crackled up and down the vortex coil's ridgy slopes. I saw the streetlights outside begin to dim.

“Initiate stage two.”

I stepped back from the machinery as Antie devalved the subether wave guide, a heavily
chromed duct leading from the microwave cavity to the vortex coil's rounded summit.

“Brace yourself, Sondra. This is—”

My words were drowned out by the chatter wild scream crash of tortured energy. The vortex coil was tearing into the gluons like a chain-saw hitting railroad spikes in water logs. The whole room went spastic shudder cow-eye thub scree thubby; my mind seized up. Flames, then a heavy sheet of sparks arcing from the coil to Antie's body. The faithful robot fused into dead smoking junk.

“Oh, poor Antie,” wailed Sondra, starting forward.

“Stay back!” The screaming energy chatter slid up the scale to an insane mantric hum. The windows shattered. The fillings in my teeth were buzzing.

“Turn that knob!” I screamed to Sondra, pointing to the nozzle where the vacuum pump hooked into the blunzing chamber. “This is it!”

All I had to do now was to devalve the meter-long wave guide that led out of the vortex coil and in through the refrigerator wall to the needle at the hotshot table's head. But the wave guide was glowing hot. I cast about wildly, then spotted a broom. The handle would do the job. Just then there was a heavy thud: chamber at vacuum. Right on, Sondra. I forced myself forward and stabbed that final valve . . .

White light.

An angel was hovering over me, Beva LeClaire with big soft white wings. I was lying on a rustly mattress and the angel was floating over me.

“Are you all right, Joe?”

The voice: Sondra Tupperware! I sat up and looked around. This was Harry's workshop, same as before, and Antie was all well again, well and busy straightening up the mess we'd made. But Sondra—Sondra was hovering three feet off the floor, her wings gently aflutter. She wore a low-cut white evening dress; her face was a lovely cameo framed by ringlets of purest gold.

“I don't believe this,” the angel was saying. “All my life I've hated women like this, and now I'm one.”

“At least you can fly.” I looked around for
my
goodies. And there they were, right under me, packs and packs of twenties and hundreds and five hundreds, a whole mattress of them! And next to my money-bed was a small wood box containing, no doubt, a simply reproducible device for turning dirt into food, just like I'd asked Harry for. Harry?

I hurried over to the blunzing chamber and dragged the big door open. “Harry!”

There he was, standing in the middle of the blunzing chamber. The hotshot table was gone. Harry was standing there with a swarm of little Harrys in the air around him. The little Harrys were all sizes, numberless as a column of spring gnats.

“Holy science, Harry! You really did it!”

“I've already done the trip back to Friday, and the lizard's trip, and I made your money and Nancy's cure for world hunger, and I moved the hotshot table out of the way.” I noticed the table standing off to one side of the room. “And I fixed Antie—”

“What about me?” interrupted Sondra. “Flying milk van. I don't like it, Harry.”

“Well, I do.” Excitement parted his big lips. He stepped out of the blunzing chamber and looked around. “I like it this way.” The swarm of little Harrys followed him out of the chamber.