Master Of Space And Time

When I opened the door, Serena squealed and toddled off at high speed. I followed her into the kitchen and popped the top on a Bud. One thing about Nancy, she kept the fridge well-stocked. I inhaled the first beer and started a second. That regress had been bad news. In a way it had taken place outside of time. I wondered what would have happened if I'd wrung the neck of the thumbsized Fletcher in the toy car. The giant would have done the same to me, of course, while being choked himself and uh uh uh. Hall of mirrors. Harry's doing. Master of space and time. I'd ask him for five million.

I got out the phone book and looked under Appliances, Service and Repair. Harry had taken over his family's business when his parents died last winter. I'd never seen the place yet. The ad was pure Harry:

Don't Think We Don't Think Don't Think Don't Robotics and Appliance Repair GERBER CYBERNETICS Twenty Years at the Same Location! Yes, We Take Cash! 824-1301 501 Suydam St. New Brunswick Cybernetics. That was a word Harry and I had always laughed about. Nobody has any idea what it means, it's just some crazy term that Norbert Wiener made up. Gerber Cybernetics. I dialed the number.

"Hello?" An old woman's questioning quaver.

"This is Joseph Fletcher. Is Mr. Gerber in?"

"I'll get him. Haaaaaaaary!" There were footsteps, the sound of breaking glass, a curse, some yelling. The person at the other end knocked the phone off the counter, then picked it up.

"Hello?"

"Harry! What do you have?" I lowered my voice so that Nancy wouldn't hear me. "I can spare two grand, but no more."

"Who's this?" He sounded confused. In the background the old-woman-voice was still yelling.

"Who's this. Who do you think it is, space cadet?"

"Is this Joe Fletcher?"

"I'm supposed to come tomorrow, right?"

"We're open ten to five on Saturdays."

"I'll come in early and we can have lunch together. Like real businessmen. Do you have any circuit diagrams for the thing?"

"You want me to invent something?"

"I thought you already had it. Master of Space and Time, right?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, Fletch. Are you drunk?"

This was getting nowhere fast. If the little Harrys had been from the future, then maybe he really didn't know what I was talking about. "You're going to be master of space and time," I explained. "I want five million dollars."

"Hold on." There were voices in the background. "Yes, it's ready, ma'am. Fletcher, I'm going to have to hang up. Customers. See you tomorrow!"

Serena had climbed onto my lap while I was talking. She was about as short as you can be and still walk. I planted a kiss on her fat little cheek. "You're not really a brat, are you?"

"Dada hand." She starfished her little paw against my palm. "Serena hand!"

I looked around our shabby living area. Everything plastic, piles of laundry, and the TV always on. I wished I'd bought some good furniture when I'd had the money. Nancy and Serena deserved better than this.

3. The Peasant and the Sausage

Saturday was cool and rainy. I stopped by my bank and then drove to New Brunswick. Harry's shop was in a crummy neighborhood near the train station. There was a bus station too, and next to it was a place called the Terminal Bar. Some terminal-type guys gimped past in the wet, one of them an obvious wirehead. He was so far gone that he used a mechanical walker. You could see the bulge of his stim-unit under his overcoat. "Where's Gerber Cybernetics?" I asked. "Man."

"Gug-ger-bub-ber? Ruh-hight thu-there. Man." The shop had a big plate-glass window, a dirty window crowded with junk: a plastic toad wearing a crown, an old cookie tin with cityscapes embossed on its sides, an out-of-date girlie calendar from the Rigid Tool Company, an oriental lamp, some listless houseplants, a coiled-up orange extension cord, and a terrarium with a mean-looking little lizard in it. I squatted down to get a better look at the lizard. He was like a miniature Godzilla, with powerful rear legs and a long, toothy jaw. He looked as if he'd been in a fight recently, and seemed to be in some pain.

The letters GERBER APPLIANCE arced across the plate-glass window, but with the APPLIANCE only a pale, scraped-off shadow. In place of it, crudely brushed in, was the new designation: CYBERNETICS. I opened the door and entered, feeling like a twelve-year-old come to play with his best friend's train set.

The front of the shop was cramped, with a waist-high counter. A partition behind the counter divided the store from the actual work area in the rear. A robot stood behind the counter, sca

"What can we do you for?" The machine was programmed to sound like a friendly old woman. I'd talked to it on the phone.

"I'm Joe Fletcher. Mr. Gerber's expecting me."

"You can call me Antie," said the robot. "A-N-T-I-E. Harry's in back."

"Thank you, Antie."

She — with the voice you had to think of Antie as female — stepped aside and I went through the door behind the counter. It was a regular workshop back there, with shelves of parts, a wall of tools, and a number of partially disassembled electronic devices. The resinous tang of solder smoke perfumed the air. I felt right at home.

Harry looked up from a robot torso and gave me a big smile. "Fletcher! It's been a long time."

"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 pla

"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?"