Master Of Space And Time

"We've got cash!" I screamed. "Two thousand dollars!"

"Well, why dintcha say so?" At the mention of money, the robot's speaker switched from taped threats to McCormack's lively drawl. The machine scurried to open the glass doors. "Y'all boys still owes Stars 'n' Bars right much."

"That's right," I confessed. "Five hundred dollars, wasn't it?"

"Hot golly, les call it three!" Jack McCormack stepped forward from behind some giant spools of cable. "Assumin y'all boys is really goan spend two kay." He was a leathery little gnome with hard blue eyes.

"Oh, we'll spend more than that," said Harry breezily. "Though you should realize, McCormack, that Fletcher & Company qualified for the Emergency Bankruptcy Act of '95, so that any debts or obligations of the aforesaid corporation are void."

"Yew fat ugly toad. Ah bet yore foreign, ain't yew?"

"Hungarian-American. And, unlike you, with a full command of the English language."

Looking at the two short men glaring at each other, one fat, one ski

McCormack had a small pickup that you could drive around his huge store. The three of us piled in, me in the middle.

"First we need a hotshot table," said Harry.

"Good God!" I exclaimed. "Whatever for?" The hotshot table had been a popular execution device during the early nineties, when capital punishment had made a big comeback. A hotshot table was like a hospital gurney, a bed on wheels, but a bed with certain built-in servo-mechanisms. It was a kind of mechanical Dr. Death, equipped to give fatal brain injections to condemned criminals. Lying down on a hotshot table was like lying down on a black widow's belly. The needle would stab right down into the top of your head. The point of the thing was that it had helped resolve the AMA's scruples about helping to kill people. But now capital punishment had been voted out again.

"That's aw-reet," McCormack was saying. "We got 'em in stock. New or used? Used costs extry — people buy 'em for parties, like."

"Good God! A new one!"

"Got me one still in the crate. Over on aisle naaane." Great mounds of machinery slid past, lit by our little truck's headlights. Some heavy robots pounded along behind us, ready to help with the loading.

"A large vacuum pump," said Harry. "And a walk-in refrigerator."

"Kin do, kin do."

"Thirty square meters of copper foil."

"Uh-huh."

"A mater-driven microwave cavity."

"Got one on sale."

The truck darted this way and that.

"A vortex coil," said Harry. "And two meters of sub-ether wave guide."

"Yowzah!"

"And the key ingredient — a magnetic bottle with two hundred grams of red gluons!"

"Great day in the mornin'!"

"And that'll do it."

"Don't he beat all?" McCormack asked me. "Some of these bohunks is smart, and that's no lie."

Before too long we had everything hauled to the front of the store. McCormack fiddled with his calculator. "Ah make it tin thousand dollar."

"Get serious."

"It's them gluons. They're high, even in red."

"Pay him," Harry urged. "Once I get blunzed, we'll have it all."

"Blunzed?" inquired McCormack, glancing at Harry.

"Once I get blunzed I'll be able to control reality," Harry explained. "I'll get you all the money you want."

"Ah don't want all the money. Ah want tin thousand dollar."

"Uh, I have two thousand in cash, Mr. McCormack. Can I give you a check for the rest?"

McCormack threw back his head and laughed. There were cords in his ski

"How would you like to be a partner?" I suggested. "We'll issue you some shares of stock."

McCormack laughed harder. It wasn't really a pleasant sound.

Harry had been off to one side, looking over our intended purchases, but now he rejoined me. "Let's go out to the car for a minute, Fletcher. I just thought of something."

"Ah hope ah din't haul all this gear up front for nothin'!" complained McCormack.

"We'll be right back," Harry assured him. "I believe we've got some more money out in the car."

McCormack's guard robots followed us out to my Buick. "You left money out here?" I asked Harry. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Well, it just now occurred to me that I might have. When I came back from the future to your car yesterday, I could have created money and put it under your seat. It would be the obvious thing to do, right?"

I got the door unlocked and reached under the driver's seat. Sure enough, a dense wad of bills: eight thousand dollars' worth, exactly what we needed.

"If these are from the future, then why aren't they real small?" I asked Harry. "Like you were."

"I made them the right size, is all. It's obvious. Master of space and time!"

I stared at him for a long time. "Why couldn't you create the whole ten thousand? Why make me put up my only two?"

"You offered your money of your own free will, Fletch. You're in this, too."

I sighed and took all our money in to Jack McCormack. "Ten thousand, right?"

"Tin thousand and the three hu

Suddenly I lost my temper. The fact that I'd had eight thousand bucks in my car without knowing it really got to me.

"The deal's off, Jack." I turned to leave. I had an overwhelming urge to take the money back to Nancy and forget about these little guys.

"Hey now," McCormack cried. "Y'all kin still owe me that five hu

"Give him the money, Fletch. Bring it to 501 Suydam, McCormack. Gerber Cybernetics. There's an alley in back."

5. Godzilla Meets the Toad Man

"Let's take the Jersey Turnpike home," suggested Harry. "It's faster."

"Okay. And give me another beer." I was feeling happy again. "This blunzer is really going to work. I mean, here you've already traveled back in time and created eight thousand dollars. It's fantastic."

"One thing about time travel," said Harry musingly. "There probably has to be a counterweight. Action equals reaction, you know."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that if I travel from the future to the past, then something has to travel from the past to the future. To balance things out. When I jump back to Friday afternoon, I'll probably have to jump some organism forward a few days."

"If you jump an animal forward, it'll seem real big," I reminded Harry.

"That's right. Every object in the universe is shrinking, so if something jumps forward a few days it seems enormous. Did you ever see any Godzilla movies, Fletch? With the giant lizard?"

I shot a look over at Harry. His expression was bland and unreadable. I started to say something, then let it drop. He was just trying to get a rise out of me.

The Jersey Turnpike's pavement was in good repair today. A Porsche passed us, doing what looked like 120 miles per hour. Its tires threw up a long, blinding shock-cone of rainwater. I stuck to the slow lane and kept my eyes open. To the right were the refineries, to the left were docks and railyards.

Harry powered down his window and inhaled deeply. "Ah! This is the smell of American richness."

Many years ago Fletcher & Company had done some business designing stack scrubbers for one of these companies. But now times were so hard that nobody much cared about pollution. The main thing was just to keep the factories open. As long as they stank, you knew they weren't idle.

Although I couldn't share Harry's pleasure at the unearthly smells, this stretch of the Jersey Turnpike was one of my favorite places. I was particularly fond of the refinery cracking towers, those great abstract totems of knotted pipe and wire. And the big storage tanks, the code-painted conduits, the webs of scaffolding, the catwalks, the great pulsing gas flares — all sheerly functional, yet charged with surreal meaning. I felt like a cockroach in a pharmacy.