A piece of paper appeared on the Governor's bench. Boingy signed with a shaking hand. The Hollows disappeared, and a door to the street slid open. Trying not to run, Boingy and Vernor exited and started down the sidewalk.
"I don't get it," Vernor said. "Why did they let you off?"
"I already
been
here three years, Vernor. When you go in they decide how long to keep you, and when the time's over they give you the trial with a suspended sentence. This way there's no hassles with appeals and real lawyers. I don't think there
are
any real lawyers anymore, even."
"How long would they have kept me, do you think?"
"You would have found out at your trial." Boingy walked a few more steps in silence. "You better hope it was for a long time, because when it's time for your trial they're going to notice that you left early."
"Unless they notice sooner," Vernor added, glancing back towards the prison.
"Right," Boingy said shortly. "Right. And so, old pal, I bid you farewell. Good luck, and forget my name until you strike it rich." They shook hands and Boingy Baxter went off down a side street, bouncing on the balls of his feet.
"See you in paradise," Vernor shouted, and headed for the walktube entrance.
Forty minutes later Vernor was in front of Waxy's. It was the first place the loach would look for him, but for some fucked-up reason it seemed more important to come here than to go straight to Alice. In any case, it would probably be at least a day before they noticed that he'd escaped.
He opened the door cautiously, but the place was just about empty. There was some odd music playing on the Hollowjuke, a recording so old that there was no visual track at all. " . . . just to raise me up a crop of dental floss . . . ," a voice sang. Vernor looked around. There was only one person who listened to music like that.
Mick Turner was sitting at the bar, his hands cupped around a shot glass of synthesmack. Vernor walked up and greeted him effusively, but Turner seemed to be on the nod. His eyes were closed and he was rocking back and forth to the music. Vernor ordered a beer and a reefer. The place was so empty that Waxy himself was tending bar.
"Big bust?" Vernor inquired.
Waxy shook his head sadly. "They came in and got 'em all. Except for him." He rolled his eyes in Turner's direction. "And he might as well be gone. Spends every day junked out of his mind and listening to the Zap." Last winter Mick had somehow talked Waxy into the routine of playing records from his fifty-three-album Frank Zappa collection afternoons. This seemed to be the only remaining tradition from the glory days of the Angels.
Waxy set the beer down in front of Vernor and handed him his reefer. His face brightened with a sudden hope, "Are
all
the boys getting out today?"
"No, no. I snuck out." Vernor lit his stick of weed and inhaled deeply. This was going to feel good. "How about Turner. How did
he
keep from getting busted? Haven't they come in here looking for him?"
"They did for awhile. They really wanted him, came in every day. But he has this trick. Look." Waxy pointed to Mick's shot glass.
The glass appeared strangely distorted, now shrunken, now swollen, warped in impossible curves which shifted with the slow twitching of Turner's skinny hands. Vernor looked at his joint, then at Waxy. Waxy shrugged. "He can do it to himself."
Do what? This was getting too mysterious. Vernor shook Mick's shoulder. "Hey, Mick! Come on, man. It's
Vernor
. I'm out of jail and we've fucking got to
do
something!" Still no response. Turner's lips were moving slowly, but only to the sounds of the record.
Vernor looked helplessly at Waxy, but the proprietor's sallow face was bent into a rare smile. "Spike him," he said, handing Vernor a loaded syringe. "On the house."
Vernor recalled the evening after he broke up with Alice. Turner had it coming to him. He plunged the needle into Mick's leg. As Vernor watched, his friend's nodding became less fluid, more stroboscopic. His eyelids snapped up like window shades, and his eyes began to focus—
"Loaches coming! Get down!" It was Waxy, who had stationed himself near the window. A blast of adrenalin pulsed in Vernor's skull, but before he could run he realized that this was part of Waxy's practical joke. He turned to tell Mick not to worry, but his friend had disappeared.
"Where'd he go?" Vernor asked, feeling unpleasantly confused.
Waxy was actually grinning. "He's right there. In his chair."
Vernor leaned over and looked. There were Turner's ectomorphic hands, all right. The hands were cupped together as if in prayer. Fine. But the rest of Mick Turner was nowhere to be seen.
"That's how he hides," Waxy explained happily. "He gets inside his hands."
Vernor felt like crying. It was weird enough just being out of prison after seven months, but . . . "Come on you guys," he pleaded. "Give me a break."
Waxy gave a sharp whistle, and the hands on Mick's chair parted, clam-like, to reveal a homunculus, a tiny, distorted Mick Turner. He seemed to be talking, but the voice was so high and quick—and the whole scene so unpleasant—that Vernor's brain couldn't pick out the words. As he watched, the hands seemed to massage the space between them and the tiny figure began to grow.
In a few seconds a very wired Mick Turner was squatting on the bar stool next to Vernor, with one hand beneath his feet and the other on the top of his head. Vernor dragged on his reefer, but it had gone out. On second thought, that seemed like a fortunate thing.
"Vernor Max. I was waiting for someone to break out." As he spoke, Mick was glancing around. In seconds he had made himself comfortable in the new situation. He removed the syringe from his leg—where Vernor, in his excitement, had left it—and he threw it at Waxy.
"Professor K. laid this on me," Mick said to Vernor, holding up his hands. There was a small disc of foil glued to the center of each palm. Wires ran up his arm and under his shirt from the discs. Apparently they were connected to some type of power unit which he wore under his coat. "Probably coulda used this to get some of you guys out, but then I figured anyone who deserved to be out'd make it on their own."
"What is it?" Vernor asked.
"VFG," Mick said, suddenly cupping his hands around Vernor's head. The room around Vernor seemed to be growing, everything seemed to be growing, and his shoulders appeared to stretch out for a yard on each side. "Now your head's shrunk," Mick explained.
"Stop." Vernor gasped, though he felt no actual physical discomfort. "Turn it off."
Mick took his hands away and things snapped back to normal. "This is a portable model of Professor Kurtowski's Virtual Field Generator. VFG. You're the one who spent five years in the library. You must know what it is."
Vernor was incredulous. "The Virtual Field? Sure, his last paper was all about it. But I never thought he could build something that would actually generate it!"
"Yeah," Mick answered. "That's what he's been doing most of these last twenty years. Only now that he's got it, he doesn't know what to do with it. He wanted me to talk to Oily Allie about it, so he gave me this portable model. Only Allie got busted with the rest of them same day I got this thing."
Vernor didn't answer immediately. Something was nibbling at this mind. Circular Scale . . . could he
test
it with the VFG? Mick was stall talking. The injection had certainly done its work. "So when the loach came busting in I decided to use this on myself. Actually I was going to blow myself up big and scare them, but I turned the dial wrong. Worked good, though, I must of hid from them twenty times the way you just saw."
"Isn't it bad for you?" Vernor interrupted. "I mean getting squashed up like that?"
"You saw how it felt when I shrank your head," Turner replied.
"It didn't feel like anything," Vernor admitted. "Really it felt more like everything else was growing than that my head was shrinking. Relativity."
Turner nodded. "Right. Just now the space inside my hands looked like a little bed to me. Outside you think there's not much space inside my hands, but the VFG stretches the space so there's all the room I need."
"Negatively curved space." Vernor mused.
"Right on," Mick answered. "
Geometry and Reality
by Dr. Alwin Bitter."
"That's the book I got you to read."
"Sure. That's how I knew this field wouldn't hurt me. It's just like I was a man painted on a sheet of rubber. You can fit the man into a tiny circle painted on the sheet if you just stretch the rubber inside the circle. Or shrink the rubber inside the man."
Vernor was beginning to remember more of Kurtowski's paper on the Virtual Field, "The Geometrodynamics of the Degenerate Tensor." The idea behind the Virtual Field was that it introduced a localized rescaling of the space and time coordinates, but the apparent forces could be renormalized away at any point—which was to say that the field could shrink, expand or bend you without hurting. You shrank, but not by being crushed—all your atoms shrank at the same time, and none of your internal structure was strained or disturbed.
"The Geometrodynamics of the Degenerate Tensor" had ended with some fairly specific suggestions for the experimental investigation of the principles expounded, but by the time the paper came out, laboratory science had been banned in the Us. The dangers of uncontrolled scientific investigation had been deemed too great, and those who insisted on obtaining physical data were requested to send their experiment specifications to Phizwhiz, who would simulate the experiment and produce a set of data. The data Phizwhiz produced were obtained by straight calculation with a touch of randomization . . . no actual physical measurements were made at all. The experimental data obtained in this way tended to conform rather nicely to one's expectations—unfortunately these were of no scientific value.
Determined to get a real test of his theory, Kurtowski had dropped underground, and was said to have constructed a large laboratory for himself somewhere in the Eastside. Andy Silver and Mick Turner were the only Angels who had met him, and Vernor gathered from their elliptical comments that the years of dedicated work had turned Kurtowski into something more than a guru.
"Mick," Vernor said, "you've got to take me to the lab." The VFG was what he needed to test his theory. "I had this idea in jail. Just before jail, actually. I call it Circular Scale. If we could get a big Virtual Field Generator I think we might be able to do something really amazing." His head swarmed with ideas.
"Just make sure it's
really
bizarre," Turner cautioned. "The Professor keeps telling me that he doesn't want his invention to be used as a tool of fascist oppression or beer-fart consumerism. Like, he didn't spend twenty years getting it together just to shrink turbines for shipping, or enlarge some lame dude's ass for his hemorrhoid examination. He was counting on Oily Allie to do something really dangerous with it. Like she says, Freedom
is
Danger."
"Did he already know that it's safe to use the VFG on people?" Vernor asked. "I mean, before he gave it to you?"
"On paper. He wasn't going to turn it on himself until someone else tried it, though. Freedom is also staying alive, y'know. For him anyway. I figure the reason he gave
me
the VFG was that if anyone was going to turn it on themself it'd be me." The shot was wearing off and Mick was beginning to look less alert. "I was gonna go tell him about how things are going, but I've been in a bag. Just couldn't get out of it, you know, waiting for something to turn up."
"Here I am," Vernor said.
Mick patted him on the shoulder. "It's good to see you." His speech was beginning to slur. "Hey, Waxy, gimme another bang before I fade."
Another injection and Turner was ready for a civilized evening. "I heard Moto-O was supposed to build Phizwhiz a soul to replace the Angels," he said. "Is that true?"
"Yeah," Vernor answered. "He was telling me about his idea a couple of weeks before the big bust. I don't think it worked, though. It's not crazy enough. There
might
be a way—"
"Well, where
is
that pimp," Turner interrupted. "It's thanks to him that the Angels are gone."
"He didn't know that was going to happen. Anyway he's probably in jail by now. He had until last month to finish the job . . . There hasn't been any big talk about a new Phizwhiz has there?"
Turner was feeling around in his pocket. "No, I don't think so. Look, as long as we're going to go to Kurtowski's lab tomorrow morning, we might as well use up what's left of the ZZ-74."
They split seven of the clear gelatin capsules—a hefty dose; although it proved not to be that easy to sort the ZZ-74's effect out from the rest of the evening's excitement.
The high point came when they played Zappa's classic cut, "Stink-Foot", with the VFG turned up to full warp. The room around them wagged and twisted like a melting plastic shoebox, but in full synchronization with the steady beat of the song.
The bent notes rippled in new but inevitable chord progressions, as Zappa's happy voice talked and sang, telling a story about a talking dog and a disbelieving man.
"You can't say that," objected the man in the song...and the dog responded, "I do it all the time. Ain't this boogie a mess?"
Vernor slept upstairs at Waxy's. The room was equipped with a pornographic Hollowcaster. It was nice having a beautiful naked girl posing herself for him, right on his bed, but it would have been a lot nicer if she had been somewhat less ethereal. He was stoned enough to attempt mounting her, and he just about broke his cock with his first mighty thrust through her and into his mattress. His last thought was one of anger with himself for not yet having called Alice to patch things up.
The next morning he showered, dressed, and went downstairs for breakfast. "What's the menu today, Waxy?"
"Green. How do you want it?"
"With a glass of beer." Waxy filled a bowl with lumpy green paste from the wall-tap, and drew a glass of beer at the bar. Green was Vernor's favorite color Dreamfood. They called it Dreamfood because all the Dreamers ate it. It came free for anyone in Dreamtown. A different color-coded flavor for every meal. Green
tasted
like scrambled eggs with bits of toast and bacon. If you were going to eat it, you didn't ask what it
was
.