Complete Stories (23 page)

The ride from his school to the Army apartment blocks usually spun past in a happy blur of physical power. Joe was good on his bike, a ten-speed his Dad had given him for his fourteenth birthday.

But today the bike felt like an Exercycle. Like a pedal-powered generator feeding hidden movie projectors busily back-imaging filmed Heidelberg scenes onto a spherical plastic screen, a ten-meter fake universe centered on Joe’s head. Only then the middle wouldn’t be infinitely …

KLA-BRANG-BRANNG-BRANNNNG! Ow. Almost hit by a street-car. Easy there, Joe, you’re freaking out. Wasn’t he ever going to get home? It was like he just kept going half the remaining distance.

Feeling too shaky to ride anymore, Joe dismounted and wheeled his bike down the crowded four P. M. sidewalk. Alien faces streamed past. All he could think of was the infinite universe in his knapsack.

“Joey! Hey, Joey!”

Vivian came skipping up to him, smiling and breathing hard. She was a pre-teen pest, a real Army-brat. She lived in the same building as Joe.

“What are you doing off the base?” he asked.

Vivian’s eyes glowed. “My mom sent me to buy some wine. I’m allowed in Germany. How was
German school
today, Joey?”

Joe was one of the few Army kids who didn’t go to the Army school. He had hopes of growing up cosmopolitan. With a full-blooded gypsy for a father, he had a leg up on it. Vivian already thought he was an inter-national playboy.

“It was highly stimulating. Look, will you watch my bike while I go in the market?” He could have locked it, of course, but if Vivian was watching it, then she couldn’t follow him into the store.

“Sure, Joey. I was already in there. Look.” She held up her shopping bag. “Real wine, and I bought it.” She stuck out her bud-breasts and pursed her pinkened lips.

Joe walked past the bright vegetables and into the store. Inside he selected a twenty-pfennig sweet-roll and opened his knapsack to get out the empty soda bottle.

A face filled with womanly pleading stared up at him. The handkerchief had come undone. The little ball-universe provided its own light…Joe could make out the bright pinpoint of a distant sun. Some trucks were driving around on the field behind the woman.
Out
, she gestured, holding her hands together and rapidly parting them.
Take us out of the bag!

Joe vibrated his hands in front of his face in the
calm down
gesture. He tapped his watch and held up a
just a minute
finger. Smiling and waving
goodbye for now
, he took out the bottle and rebuckled the knapsack.

“Do you have a little animal in there?” asked Frau Wittman as he traded the bottle for the sweet-bun. She was a pleasant skinny lady, who liked Joe for knowing German. Most other Germans didn’t trust him, since his skin was so dark. But ever since Frau Wittman had wormed out of Joe that his mother was a suicide, she’d treated him like a grandson.

“
Ja
,” Joe nodded, thinking fast. “
Ein Meerschweinchen
.” A guinea pig.

“How nice,” Frau Wittman beamed. “Take yourself another sweet-roll.”

“Thanks.”

On the sidewalk Vivian was acting her age for once…staring blankly at the traffic and picking her nose. Feeling like a big brother, Joe gave her the extra bun. He wondered what it would be like to have a sibling…someone close enough to share his secret with. Maybe he could show it to Udo tonight…if Udo’s parents let him come. But they probably wouldn’t—they didn’t like the Army, and they didn’t like Joe’s olive skin.

He said goodbye to Vivian and rode the rest of the way home without any trouble. He’d probably just been hungry. The apartment was a pigsty, an empty pigsty. Joe’s Dad usually went straight to the noncoms’ bar as soon as he got off duty for the day. Joe checked the fridge…nothing but milk and his father’s beer…then went on to his room.

Joe’s room was the one nice spot in the apartment. He had a good stereo from the PX, travel posters on the wall, a couple of plants and an Indian bedspread for a window curtain. The furniture was GI, but at least it was neat.

His heart pounding with excitement, Joe rolled the mirror-ball out onto his bed. The woman…he was sure it was a woman…waved her hands in greeting, then began staring this way and that, taking it all in.

She could only see half the room from the side she was on, and Joe was about to turn the ball so she could see the rest. But then she…turned it herself.

It was strange to watch this happen. one of the woman’s hands came closer and closer to the ball’s surface, and the image of her fingers covered almost everything. The fingers seemed to hold and turn the surface, and the whole little universe turned along. The fingers let go, the hand drew back, and the woman was on the other side of the ball. Joe could see the back of her head.

He leaned over the ball and looked down at her from above. That put the mouth and eyes in the right places, and she looked human, almost familiar. The mouth smiled kindly.

She could see his bookcase from where she was now, and it seemed to be of particular interest to her. She raised an arm and pointed. The arm-image curved halfway round the ball.

Still leery of actually touching the ball, Joe went and got a book and brought it over…a tattered copy of Heinlein’s
Starman Jones
. The woman held up what seemed to be a camera and he riffled through the pages for her. Maybe her machines would be able to learn English!

Excited by this idea, Joe brought over book after book. His fat, illustrated dictionary seemed to be a particularly big hit. He riffled its pages slowly to be sure they got it all down.

At the end of an hour Joe was feeling weak and hungry again. The Christmas-ball people were busy setting up something that looked like a console-model TV set. Maybe they planned to show him movies? He went out to the kitchen to drink some milk.

When he came back, the little TV screen was on. The woman spoke into a microphone, and words crawled across the screen. English words.

HELLO. MY NAME IS TULPA. WHAT IS YOUR NAME?

Hands shaking with excitement, Joe fumbled out a pen and one of his little blue school-paper pamphlets.

Hello, Tulpa
, he printed.
My name is Joe. Where are you from?

WE ARE NOT FROM. WE ARE HERE. WE HAVE LANDED YOU HERE WITH OUR MACHINES.

That didn’t make sense. It was Tulpa who had landed on Earth in her little space-squeezed ball. A strange, mind-numbing idea began to form… .

You landed
, Joe insisted.
You are inside a tiny ball.

Tulpa smiled, her eyes, staring out from under the microphone.
YOU LOOK THE SAME TO US. YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE INSIDE A LITTLE BALL
.

To prove this she reached out her hand and pressed two fingers against the ball’s surface. Then she…picked up the surface and moved it around. The images in the ball swept and curved. Now he saw the top of her head, now the back of the TV, now the distant sunset. One of Tulpa’s companions danced towards the surface, then away.

No
, Joe wrote shakily.
You’re inside and I’m outside. I can prove it.
He covered the ball with his handkerchief, then pulled it away.
I can cover you up!

SO CAN I
. Tulpa produced a black velvet pouch. Her fingers grew out to the surface, the images swept, and suddenly the little ball was all black. A shiny, black, imageless mirror.

Just then the apartment door slammed. His father!

“Joey?” the drink-blurred voice called. “Are you here?”

“Yeah, Dad.” Joe put his handkerchief over the ball.

“What a day,” his father called. “What a bitch of a day.” Joe heard him get a beer out of the fridge and snap it open. “What are you doing in there?” The light footsteps approached, and the door swung open.

Joe’s father was a slight man, a bantam-weight gypsy with a metallic voice. He was an alcoholic, a lifer retread sergeant, a lonely man who had never forgiven his wife for escaping into suicide. His eyes looked flat behind his flesh-colored GI glasses. Flat but observant.

“What’s all the books out for? And what’s that under the hankie? You’re not smoking pot are you?”

Joe snorted contemptuously. “Sure, Dad, I’m high on angel-dust. I’m really flying.” He tucked his hands into his underarms and flapped his elbows like chicken-wings. “And meanwhile I’m writing up a report for my literature class.”

“So what’s with the snot-rag? What’s under it?” Veteran of twenty years of barracks inspections, Joe’s father was not to be distracted.

“It’s just a ball I found. A funny glass ball.” Chancing it, Joe raised a corner of the hankie. Okay. It was still black from Tulpa’s pouch. He took the hankie all the way off.

Joe’s father leaned wonderingly over the ball. “Funny how it doesn’t reflect. It looks like one of those crystal balls. You know your Aunt Rosie…she used to do that stuff. Show people their dead relatives.”

“That’s interesting,” Joe said, not really listening. He had to put the ball away before …

Three pink spots appeared on the ball’s surface. The blackness slid down off the ball. Tulpa stared out at them, smiling uncertainly.

Joe’s father grunted like a man punched in the heart. “That’s her,” he croaked. “That’s your no-good traitor mother who left me all alone.”

Tulpa stared intently at Joe’s father, trying to read his expression.

“You’re crazy,” Joe said, shaking his father’s shoulder. “This has nothing to do with you.”

His father twisted out of Joe’s grip and shoved him aside. “It’s her, I tell you. Safe in heaven and laughing at me.”

Tulpa had both hands up, waving the
calm down
gesture she’d learned from Joe. She looked frightened.

Joe’s father’s voice rose to parade-ground intensity. “I’LL GET YOU, ARLENE!”

Before Joe could stop him, his father snatched up the ball and threw it against the wall.

The ball winked out of existence. Two punctured sheets of spacetime snapped apart…too far. The universe shattered.

============

Written in Spring, 1981.

The 57th Franz Kafka
, Ace Books, 1983.

“The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge” has an odd history. After writing it, I sent it to Robert Sheckley, who was then the fiction editor at
Omni
. He called back to say he was going to buy it, provided I made a small change to the ending. I was overjoyed, as
Omni
was at that time the top-paying SF market. My wife and I were about to go to New York for a conference anyway, so we arranged to meet Sheckley, which was great fun. Sheckley suggested the Hamlet quote for the head of the story. My wife and I had dinner with him and his then wife, Jay Rothbel. The waiter behaved like an out-of-control Sheckley robot and Sheckley and I almost got run down crossing the street. It was all perfect. But then I didn’t hear anything from Sheckley for quite some time.

When I next talked to him, he told me that his boss at
Omni
had told him not to use “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge.” Also Sheckley told me that he was being eased out of the
Omni
job. So in the end I never did sell a story to
Omni
. I was working on my novel
The Sex Sphere
around this same time, and just to get some immediate use out of “The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge,” I used an altered from of it as Chapter Twelve of that book.

It was hot. Polly was driving Rhett home from work. Pretty Polly, fresh out of college, driving her husband home from his job at the arcade. Rhett had been fresh out of college three or four years earlier, but it hadn’t took.

“Eat her, Polly, eat her fast,” cried Rhett. A fifty-year-old woman in a pink alligator shirt and lime-green Bermudas was in the crosswalk.

“Pac-Man, Rhett?”

Rhett made change and serviced the machines at Crasher’s, a pinball and video arcade in the new Killeville shopping mall. He left about a third of his pay in the machines, especially Pac-Man and Star Castle. Sometimes, when Rhett had been playing a lot, he’d come home still in the machine’s space, the Pac-Man space today, a cookie-filled maze with floorping monsters that try to eat you while you try to eat all the cookies, and there’s stop-signs to eat too: they make the monsters turn blue and then you can eat them back till they start flashing, which is almost right away on the third and fifth boards …

“Yeah. I broke a hundred thousand today.”

“My that’s a lot.” The uneaten fifty-year-old preppie was out of the road now. Polly eased the car forward.

“Sixteen boards,” added Rhett.

In Pac-Man, each time you eat all the cookies and stop-signs, the screen blinks and then goes back to starting position. Almost all the video games include some similar principle. Killing off all the monsters in Space Invaders, blowing up the central ship in Star Castle, making it through the maze in Berzerk: in each case one gets a reset, a new board. The rules of the game usually change somewhat with each new board, so that as one moves to higher levels, one is exploring new space, probing unknown areas of the machine’s program.

“There was an incredible show after the fifteenth board,” Rhett continued. “All the monsters came out and took their robes off. Underneath they were like pink slugs. And then they acted out their roles. Like the red one is always first?”

Polly smiled over at Rhett. He was long and skinny, with a pencil-thin mustache. He knew that he was wasting his life on the video machines, and she knew, but it hadn’t seemed to matter yet. They had time to burn. They were married and they both had college degrees: till now that had been enough.

“I went for the interview, Rhett.”

“Yeah? At the bank?”

“I think I can get it, but it looks kind of dinky. I’d just be a programmer.”

“You don’t know computers.”

“I do too. I took a whole year of programming, I’ll have you know.”

“A useful trade,” mused Rhett. “Killeville College prepares its students for a successful career in modern society. The New South. Why did I have to major in English?”

“You could get a better job if you wanted to, Rhett.”