Fantasy is cool

I had a jar of cocktail sauce to go with the crabs, and Jena had put together a fancy salad from the supermarket salad bar. While I’d been out, she’d gone to the store, too. We sat down at our little table and I opened the champagne, with Jena telling me to be careful. The cork bounced off the low ceiling and just missed her. I caught the first big spurt of foam in her glass, then filled mine. Here’s my business card. We’ll do more than talk the talk… It was one of my favorite phrases. She tapped my wrist with the sharp end of the crab leg. You should have seen these puppies with their shells on.

Like aliens or giant insects. Tonight’s special is Venusian cockroach. Not like those frozen King crab things back in Colorado. Did you ever have those? Buck Sawyer was always taking me to the Red Lobster and ordering King crab. It tastes like cardboard.

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Fletcher, you talk to her. I’m going in the chamber now. We’ll only use a hundred grams of the gluons. First I’ll take care of the time travel and then I’ll open up a door to another world. She’d been asking questions ever since we’d let her in, and she didn’t seem to like the answers she’d been getting. I wished she would go away and let us destroy the universe in peace. What if I call the cops? We’re not doing anything illegal.

Is there something you’d like me to do for you during that period of time? Wouldn’t you like to have blond hair and a bod that won’t quit? Beva was the latest Hollywood sex symbol, the Marilyn Monroe of the 1990s. A cloud of frost crystals billowed out, and then the refrigerator door slammed shut. I slid aside a piece of the copper sheathing and peered in through the window we’d set into the door.

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But he still thought we were kidding him. Where did you really meet her, Joe? A great bulge moved down her arm, and when it reached her hand, the hand disappeared like a melting ball of wax. She was lifting it vout of our space. As I watched Momo in action, I paid attention to the ways in which my new subtle vision affected my view of her. My third eye projected Momo’s unimaginable four-dimensional shape into a very odd three-dimensional form. I could see a whole solid, just like when I looked at Jenabut I didn’t see innards. Momo was, rather, like the tangled roots of a stump, with her arms and legs and torso seeming to grow through each other.

Very gnarly, very hard to describe. Momo must have noticed me staring at her, and she answered my unspoken question, even as she continued bearing down on Spazz. That’s what your subtle vision is showing you. You can see inside Jena and Spazz because your extra eyes up above space peek over the three-dimensional shells of their skins. They are quite open to the fourth dimension, on both their vouter and vinner sides. Unlike you, in your newly augmented form. Right about then Spazz made a muffled noise and began trying to spit something out. With my subtle vision I could see one of Momo’s fingers inside his mouth, a pink fingertip resting on his tongue like a stone sausage.

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But all this time, more than anything else, I was thinking about Jena and Spazz. Jenawell, maybe I could forgive her. I’d been treating her poorly, and perhaps this was what I had coming to me. It didn’t have to count. But as for SpazzI wanted to kill him, pure and simple. I even got to the point of wondering if I should go buy a gun. That would be something. Walk right up to the smug son of a bitch and pump a clip into him. Shoot him in the heart and stomach so I could watch his face. And, yeah, use my subtle vision to look into his body and see his punctured heart pumping his blood into his abdominal cavity and see his stomach acid digesting the adjacent organs.

Thinking this way made me start shaking again. I did my best to push the hate thoughts back. If I killed Spazz I’d go to jail instead of ending up rich. If I was rich I could get a better woman than Jena. A woman who wasn’t moody and didn’t get drunk all the time. I looked over at my attache case. I needed to stay focused. Back at the house, I switched on my phone and saw on its screen that I’d gotten three messages from Jena’s phone. I deleted them without listening. I needed to vacate.

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As far as Baumgard was concerned, I was a sleazy carnival barker and Harry a dangerous, tinkering geek. I didn’t look forward to visiting him. SIPL is the only facility in the country that can reach the energies needed to produce blue gluons. Makes it easier to build the loop, which is in the shape of a figure eight, ten kilometers long. One loop of the eight holds protons, and the other loop holds antiprotons. The particles circle and circle around their loops till they get up to speed and then someone throws a switch to make the two beams collide. I’ll get breakfast while you get dressed. Ham steaks and frozen waffles. Antie set to work heating them up. I could hear some of the guards moving around downstairs.

I grabbed Harry and put my lips to his ear. Otherwise ” “Gotcha,” murmured Harry. He rummaged in the hall closet and found a small knapsack to wear under his sweater. There were a lot of pretty dresses in the closet; apparently the spine-riders had let Sondra do some clothes shopping. I reached into the closet and touched the prettiest dress of all: a red-and-white-candy-striped number. He clattered downstairs and called a bright hello to the guards. Sondra stepped out of the bedroom, looking great in tight jeans and a frilly white top.

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They felt warm, hard, very firmly anchored in the air. Do you wish to see more of me? I’m going to bed. I was imagining things. It was time to be safe in the dark bed with Jena. I got to my feet.

Five of the skin-covered balls grew longer, bunched themselves together, and formed a palm-sized blob at their base. The hand pushed me and I flew back onto the couch. It changed shape and ballooned out to one side. Something like cheeks and a nose and chin appeared. A cloud of hair on one side, partly brown, partly blonde. The blank skin near the top of the face puckered and two eyes popped up, not quite the same size, the eyes shifting about in the face like yolks in eggs. At the same time, a neck had appeared beneath Momo’s head, a neck and a lumpy body with arms connecting it to the two hands.

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The thing to make water radioactive? Harry had lost the plans for the demonstration model, and we’d been unable to duplicate it. The machine scurried to open the glass doors. Ah bet yore foreign, ain’t yew? And, unlike you, with a full command of the English language. The three of us piled in, me in the middle.

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. Used costs extry

The hairdresser was chic and in his twenties. He cluck-clucked over the way I’d butchered my hair. Can you fix it up?

He’ll love the new you. Not too much off the sides and make it spiky on top. I told the makeup girl I wanted to look like I was from Detroit. She got the picture. When they were done, I looked even better than I had yesterday.

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Eventually Mom died from a series of increasingly debilitating strokes. I used to go see her twice a year in this little nursing home at Centerville, a slightly bigger town near Matthewsboro. Even when Mom was in her wheelchair with half her face paralyzed, I was still a little scared of her pulling a knife, my fear mixed in with heartbreaking pity. Mom had hated it in the home, the food especially. Raised on a farm as she’d been, she was very particular about the purity of what she ate.

Mom’s final stroke came while she was eating. She died choking on a mouthful of canned, over-salted, cut-rate chicken soup. It had been five years now. As for Dad, he drifted down to Denver, where he worked for a ranch supply wholesaler. He still kept up his interest in collecting comics, branching out from Westerns to include Batman and Donald Duck.

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I reminded myself to stop staring at her. By the time we’d finished breakfast, Harry was done with the windfoil. It was a little box with a parabolic antenna on top. The box was supposed to generate a kind of special ray that would force the wind to streamline around us instead of beating our faces.

Harry showed me how to turn it on and adjust its dials. Follow I-80 west to Des Moines and turn right