Master of Space and Time (8 page)

Abie snarled something incoherent and pushed his selections toward the checker. She shrugged, and scanned first the product codes and then the invisible code on Abie's forehead. Nothing happened, and I breathed a sigh of relief. We were next. I reached in my pocket, feeling for some bills. Surely you didn't
have
to use credit. I hoped not, because all our foreheads were blank, which might . . .

FFZZZAAAAAATT!

A great sheet of electricity filled the supermarket entrance. Those two air-curtain grates were electrodes, powerful energy sources programmed to crisp anyone who ran up too high a tab. Abie's ashes spun raggedly. The floor grate sucked them out of sight.

“Oh, my,” Burnita sighed. “That's the second one this week. It's hard for them, you know, since there's no other way to get food. You folks just want these sodas?” I suddenly realized that the
little silver chair hanging from Burnita's neck was an electric chair.

“Uh, wait.” I drew out some money. “Can we pay cash?”

The checker's pleasant face grew tense and puzzled. “Is this some kind of joke? Come on, folks, which of you should I bill?” She raised the light pen toward my forehead. God only knew what would happen if they found out we were uncoded.

“Harry! Get us out of here!”

A moment of disorientation and then we were back outside in the parking lot. A harsh alarm bell was ringing.

“As long as you can do teleportation, Harry, why not just take us back to the blunzing chamber?”

“Aw, that wouldn't be any fun. I want to keep the super-stuff to a minimum. And what's the big rush to leave? We just got here!”

“Let's steal a car like Joe said,” urged Sondra. “I've always wanted to be a big blond in a stolen getaway car.”

“What are we getting away with?” I asked sourly.

“The soda!” Prettily she raised the two six-packs up like earrings. She looked like Marilyn in
The Misfits
.

“It's beer now,” said Harry. “Let's take that Cad.”

We piled into a big white Cadillac with black leather upholstery. Sondra got in front with Harry, and I got in back with the beer. It was nice and roomy in there, almost as big as my bedroom back in Princeton. I wondered if Nancy was worried about me yet.

Harry psych-started the car and peeled out.

“There must be a bad part of town,” he muttered, slewing into the traffic. “That's where we should go. Someone there'll tell us what's really going on here. I think we should try and overthrow the government.” Harry dodged some cars and gave a whoop of laughter. We were still accelerating.

“This is neat,” Sondra giggled. “Give me a beer, Joe.”

“You two are getting overconfident,” I warned. “If some cop shoots us from behind, then Harry's superpowers aren't going to be worth a damn.” Grudgingly I opened three beers. Ah.

Harry flipped on the radio. It was an evangelist, of course, this being a world of bad choices.

“. . . hatred,” said the radio. “Yes,
hatred
, my fellow Herberites. Gary came to preach hatred. I know this may sound strange to some of you out there in the radio audience, but it's
not
a matter of conjecture. God hates the unbeliever, just as the unbeliever hates Gary Herber. Yes, friends, it's true. Just look at the facts! On the one hand, we have Seth and Gary Herber bringing the clean wholesomeness of God's Laws. On the other, we have the unbelievers, with their trumped-up charges and their public electrocution. Seth Herber died, yes, he died for mankind. But thanks to the blessed Scionization, Gary Herber lives with thousands of us, friends, and he's ready to—”

A laser blast shattered our rear window. Cops behind us, gaining fast. I threw myself down on the seat. “Teleportation time, Harry. Can you handle the whole car?”

“No problem.”

Disorientation again, and then we were coasting
down a street of abandoned Moorish-style white stucco buildings with parapets around their flat roofs. Hard, midday sun overhead. The sirens were far away. Harry pulled up onto the curb and we got out. Shadows moved behind the buildings' broken windows.

“This looks like the right place,” said Sondra, radiant in her white evening dress. She finished her beer and threw the can in the street. “I wonder who that Gary person is.”

A rock flew down from one of the rooftop terraces and crashed through our car's windshield.

“I wish we had some guns,” I said.

“Look in the trunk,” offered Harry.

The trunk was unlatched, of course, and there were three bright plastic pistols, real sf-looking, with fins and knobs and dials all over them.

“This is a matter disintegrator,” said Harry, handing me the purple one. “That dial up there makes the beam fan out.”

“Thanks.”

“Sondra, you take the pink one. It's a demotivator. Makes things stop moving.”

“Ooooooo,” she squealed, and snatched her toy. Sondra was really starting to camp it up. She'd waited a long time to be beautiful.

“And I'll keep this green one.”

“What does the green one
do
, Harry?”

“It makes time go backwards.”

“Oooooooo!” A toss of her pretty blond hair. Sondra and Harry were having fun. I wished I could relax and enjoy this, too.

Three more rocks came flying down, one at each of us. We raised our pistols and fired.

My rock shattered and was gone. Sondra's rock stopped falling and hung in midair. Harry's rock reversed its motion and flew back up to the rooftop it had come from. There was a faint scream.

“Let's fly up and meet our friend,” I suggested.

O
N
the roof was a gaunt man wearing a fedora. The rock Harry had sent back was lying at the man's feet. Sondra froze him with the demotivator and we frisked him. He seemed clean: no weapons, no machinery.

“Check in his hat” Harry suggested.

Sure enough, the hat's sweatband hid a ring of circuit cards and microprobes. Apparently the hat had been feeding signals in and out of the gaunt man's brain—probably for pleasure. The guy had the wasted air of a stim-addict.

“Okay, Sondra,” said Harry, “turn off your ray.” Harry was taking chances, too many chances. I decided to break things up.

“Wait a second, Sondra. Just hold it right there. Before this goes any further, I think the three of us had better have a talk. What time is it?”

“It's ten-thirty,” said Harry, glancing at his watch. “Okay, now, Sondra—”

“Will you just let me talk? It's ten-thirty. Does that mean we have one and a half hours left?”

“Yeah, that's right. Thursday noon here matches Sunday midnight in New Brunswick. Everything backward, simple as pie.”

“What?”

“From
Thursday noon
to
Sunday midnight
it's three and a half days either way, so—”

“Will I still be able to fly after twelve?” interrupted Sondra. “And will I still look like this?” I turned away from Harry to watch her talk. The movement of her red lips. Her breathy voice. Her platinum hair. “Because I'm getting used to it, and I think I could do a lot of good for Scientific Mysticism. We have to be sure to go back through that magic door before twelve, Harry darling.” She batted her eyes at him.

“Yeah,” said Harry, slipping his arm around her waist. “The changes will stay, but the magic doors will stop working. Keeping them open is like a constant series of wishes. We could get stuck in this looking-glass world if we're not careful. But don't worry, I'll teleport us all back to the door in plenty of time.”

“How about now?” I demanded. “While we're still alive and everything.”

“You are so uptight, Fletcher. Don't you like it here? I'm having fun.”

Something dawned on me then. “This really is the perfect world for you, isn't it, Harry? Of all the possible worlds in superspace, this is the one you'd pick even if you knew what you were doing.”

“That's right,” said Harry, grinning broadly. The bright sun made his face look like a black-and-white photograph. The roof was tiled, with a waist-high parapet. There was a staircase set down into the roofs center. “What's the good of having superpowers if you don't have a world to save?” Harry went on. “Sometime during the next hour and a half we're going to get to that God-pig Gary Herber and assassinate him. The people here will thank us forever. I've never seen a religion that wasn't basically evil.”

“Gary Herber?”

“Gary Herber's the one that preacher was talking about on the car radio. He's some kind of big prophet here. I figure everything bad here is Herber's doing.”

Gary Herber
. I turned the name over in my mind. Of course. It was all beginning to make sense. “I guess you realize who Gary Herber really
is
, don't you, Harry?”

“Harry Gerber!” squealed Sondra. “Gary Herber!”

Harry looked a little unsettled. He
hadn't
realized. “Uh . . .”

“It's your mirror self,” said Sondra. “Your other nature. You've objectified the repressed side of your personality so as to do battle with it. How Jungian!”

Harry looked more and more uneasy. “Damn. I hope this Herber guy doesn't look too much like me.”

It made me feel better to see Harry look so worried. “You know the old line, Harry.
Inside every fat man there's a thin man fighting to get out
.
Gary Herber's probably real thin. And clean.” My mouth framed a hard grin.

“Our Harry's not dirty,” squealed Sondra, slipping back into her blond bombshell routine.
“Are
you, honey?” She gave a shrill giggle and pinched Harry's cheek.

“You can turn off your ray now, Sondra.”

Sondra lowered her pretty pink pistol, and the gaunt man started talking. “I need my hat.” His thin-lipped mouth formed a faint, gentlemanly smile. “The sun's mighty bright up here.”

I held the hat out of reach. “Just wait a minute. What's all the circuitry in the sweatband for? And why were you throwing rocks at us?”

“I've got to have my hat, mister.” His voice was papery and far away. Still I hesitated, and his faint smile twitched into an agonized rictus. His whole body began to shake, though his flat, burnt eyes stayed calm. “I'm not making it too good.”

“He's a wirehead,” said Harry. “His hat's a stim-unit. Let him have it back.”

I handed the gaunt man his fedora. With precise, twitching gestures, he got it snugged down on his bony skull. His eyelids dropped and the shaking stopped.

“Seeing with my mouth,” he murmured. “Should take off more often. Running out of lobes.” He got his eyes back open and fixed me with a hard stare. “You're coming on real tiresome.”

“Can you help us?” asked Harry. “We're from another world and we think we want to kill Gary Herber.”

The stranger chuckled slowly. “Kicks, man, kicks. But Herber's awful big. Used to be he was just a
yahoo and a brain full of truth. But ever since they electrocuted him . . .” The man in the hat chuckled again, and went off on a tangent. “I had a booth selling pieces of the electric chair. ‘Relics of the Scionization,' you dig, all splinters smeared with rancid ghee.” He paused to give me a look of unwholesome flirtation. “I threw the rocks because you look so rave.”

I cleared my throat. What kind of guide had Harry dreamed up for us? “I'm Joe Fletcher. And that's Sondra and Harry.”

“Joe.” He touched my face with his cool fingers. “It's a rare pleasure to meet an intelligent man. I'm Tad Beat.”

“How about a drink?” asked Harry. “Do you have any whiskey?”

“I have enough to get you boys country drunk. Let's make my pad.”

We followed Tad downstairs. His apartment took up one very large room on the building's top floor. His floor and walls were covered with Oriental carpets. A narrow bed, some boxes of food, and a desk with papers and a typewriter completed the furnishings.

“Stap my vitals,” muttered Tad, rummaging under his bed. “Just what the old doctor ordered. Keeps the slugs off, too.” He took out a clear glass bottle of oily liquid.

Harry drank from it, wiped his mouth, then passed the bottle to Sondra. She shook her head and gave the bottle to me. It was moonshine, sharp and with a bitter undertaste. I spit out half the mouthful I'd taken and gave the bottle back to Tad. I didn't trust wireheads.

“Tell us more about Herber,” I requested. “Did he start a religion, or what? You say they electrocuted him?”

“You're really elsewhere,” said Tad. “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. Scope this, age levels five through thirteen.”

He handed me a color comic book, the kind of thing that a child might bring home from Bible school. On the cover was a soft giant brain with a halo. That was Gary? Crowded all around the brain were laughing children with humps on their backs. It occurred to me that I'd seen a lot of round-shouldered people on the streets here. Why would being saved make you into a hunchback? Beginning to sense my answer, I sat down and read the comic book frame by frame. The writing was mirror-reversed, but I got used to that soon enough.