Complete Stories (20 page)

Micha didn’t say anything, just pouted and flashed her eyes from the one to the other. Where Jack was skinny, almost hollow-chested, Daryl was big and muscular. Jack had a visionary’s wide brown eyes, Daryl a soldier’s green slits. Now that he’d taken over the family farm, Daryl liked to play the redneck.

“You’re a real idiot,” Jack said quietly, “Shooting off that gun.”

“Whatsamatter, bro?” Daryl laughed. “Didn’t you get a chance to shoot
yours
?” He chuckled lewdly, ingratiatingly, and stuck a corner of his tongue out at Micha. “Y’all come on up to the house and have a drink,” he called then, and drove off in his pickup.

“Let’s not stay long,” Micha urged, as they followed Daryl in Jack’s old VW.

But they had stayed long, too long. For all their resentment of each other, the two brothers did enjoy drinking bourbon together. Daryl needled Jack about getting so educated at Daryl’s expense, and Jack needled Daryl about hogging most of their inheritance. But on another level, each respected the other for being different. And here, on the family farm, in the haze of alcohol, it was almost like being kids again, kids with all the time in the world. Daryl’s wife brought out food and old jokes. Micha quietly sipped at a glass of white wine, setting and resetting her full lips.

They’d finally left around ten, and on the drive back downtown, Micha had spoken her piece. “So, so, Jack, you still wish you were a farmboy. And you let you bully of a brother walk all over you. Did you see the way he looked at me? Thank God I waited for my suit in that disgusting cave, or he probably would have shot you and raped me on the spot! And I thought you came from a nice family.”

“But,” Jack protested, staring hard at the drink-blurred road, “It was
nice
in the cave, I thought. That…that wasn’t so disgusting, was it?”

“Oh, it was all right,” Micha said coldly. “Until your brother came. A horrible big bug crawled on me when you were getting my suit. And then him staring at me like that all evening…oh, just take me home.”

In the car, outside her apartment-house, Micha had sat with him for five minutes, passively letting herself be kissed and apologized to…but she’d refused to let him set their next date.

Jack had driven the five blocks to his own apartment building, parked the car, and, too depressed to go in, had taken a walk. There had been a storm brewing, with high flashes of heat lightning, and he had wandered onto the University of Louisville campus, finally sitting on the administration building’s steps, next to their copy of Rodin’s
The Thinker
. The rain had started, all at once, and Jack just sat there, lashed by the liquid curtains. Lightning had forked and zigzagged down the sky, striking once, twice, three times nearby.

And then the Tulpans’ spherical ship had touched down. At first Jack had thought it was ball-lightning. He’d even fumbled out a pen, useless in the rain, to take some notes on the phenomenon…but by then Fefferfuff had flown out and begun pulling him towards the ship. With Micha mad at him he hadn’t even felt like struggling.

On the comm-unit’s screen, an ugly man was reading a sheet of paper. The five-thirty local news. School board. Sewage. Lay-offs at Ford and GE. “And now the weather. Charlie?”

The weatherman’s bald head filled the screen. He scribbled the usual incomprehensible bullshit on a plastic map. He was so bald that when he turned his head, you could see a lot of folds and meat-tucks in back. Jack amused himself by pretending that these mashing wrinkles made up the weatherman’s
real face
. But then he heard something which brought him up with a start.

“Today is Friday, August 21, 1981. The hottest temperature on record for this date was 104 in 1956, the lowest a cool 64 in 1949. The weather for tomorrow, Saturday, August 22, 1981, will be hot, with thundershowers expected in the late afternoon and evening.”

The date was printed right there on the screen. This was the day before Jack had left! But …

Jack dialed his receiver up and down the spectrum, and picked up another news show. The same thing. One of the Tulpans, he now recalled, had said something about this:
Uncontrolled hyperjumping very bad, come back yesterday
.

Come back yesterday. What an opportunity! At the very least he could head off the fight with Micha by giving himself some sound advice when it would do the most good. Or, even better, he could somehow head off Daryl…prevent him from fouling up Jack’s big chance to get laid.

Grinning with excitement, Jack nudged the ship out of orbit. The Earth fell up at him, huge and welcome as Micha’s ass.

The ship maneuvered surprisingly well, and in the space of five hours, Jack had it down to an altitude of what looked like two or three km. He was hovering somewhere out over the Pacific Ocean, sunny blue wave-patterns marching past below. By now it would be almost midnight in Louisville. He set his wristwatch to twelve. He toyed with the idea of whipping across America and slitting his sleeping brother’s throat…but thought better of it. He was too tired.

So Jack Stalk lay down on his jellybed and slept.

When he awoke it was night on the Pacific. Ten in the morning, Louisville time. He flew east, into the dawn. As he flew, he kept searching up and down the radio bands, nervous about military pursuit planes…but no one seemed to notice him.

He was crossing the Mississippi when he first suspected that something might be wrong. A swallow flew at him. This was surprising in itself, since it looked as if he was about two km up. But the real shocker was the bird’s size. The thing was as big as a jetliner! Powering along with its maw spread, it attacked him!

Jack Stalk took evasive action and increased his altitude. By the time he’d found Louisville, he had himself convinced that the business with the bird had just been an illusion. After all, the porthole had still been set on a pretty high magnification.

He knew Louisville well, and it wasn’t hard to find his brother’s farm. Before landing, Jack checked the time. Two in the afternoon. Great. Daryl hadn’t busted in on them till about three-thirty. All he had to do was land in the woods, cover the ship with brush, and go distract his brother for a couple of hours. Meanwhile his past self would get laid in the cave and, hopefully, drive downtown to spend the night with Micha. When that thunderstorm started, he’d be happy in Micha’s soft bed—instead of out getting kidnapped by the Tulpans.

But then…? Jack had a moment of doubt. If he didn’t get kidnapped by the Tulpans, then he wouldn’t be here in a second body to do all this. So what! So this body would disappear or something. Jack looked at his hands, white and slender. Disappear? So what, so what. His other self, the real self would wake up in bed with yummy milky Micha. Could any man die for a better cause?

Jack centered the ship over a copse of trees in the middle of the pasture nearest Daryl’s house. He could see Daryl on his tractor, mowing the next pasture over, too busy to look up. Jack cut the engine power and let the ship slide down to Earth.

He had to fight back a moment of panic as he came down into the trees. They were
so big
! How could they be so big? Gently jiggling the attitude jets, he wriggled past the huge trunks and branches. It seemed to go on for kilometers. Finally there was the grass…coming up…and up…a jungle of high golden stalks scissoring past the porthole…what?

With a tiny thud the ship finally hit solid ground. Jack was beginning, vaguely, to get the picture. Cautiously he opened the hatch. The yellow-grey field grass rose a hundred meters above him. Beneath him were root-tendrils, as big as the tunnels in a man-sized, 3-D maze, twined this way and that. Something large, dark and chitinous was scrabbling towards the ship …

Jack slammed the hatch and powered back up into the treetops. Now he understood why the trees looked so big. His ship was the size of a tennis ball. He was the size of a grasshopper. He had jumped into the past and it had made him small.

Suddenly he remembered a paradox he’d read about in the first pages of Martin Gardner’s classic,
Relativity for the Million
. It had been called Poincaré’s Paradox:

“Suppose that one night, while you were sleeping, everything got a hundred times as small as it was the day before. EVERYTHING—electrons, atoms, wavelengths of light, you yourself, your bed, your house, the Earth, the Sun, the stars, the spaces between the stars. When you awoke would you be able to tell that anything had changed? Is there any experiment you could perform that would prove you had altered in size?”

“No,” Poincaré and Gardner had answered. “There would be no way to tell. For size is relative.” Fine. But, Jack Stalk thought,
what about time-travel?
What if the universe really is shrinking…maybe not quite uniformly, and that’s why the galaxies seem to get farther apart…what if it does get a hundred times smaller every week…what if that’s true and one day some poor guy manages to travel back in time?

Relative to the time-traveler, all the yesterday people are two hundred meters tall. And a tree is two kilometers high. And …

A crow protecting its territory darted out and struck the Tulpan spaceship a glancing blow with its beak. Bobbing and weaving, Jack took the ship back up high. From there things looked fine. It was just that he wasn’t nearly as high as it felt like he was.

What could he possibly accomplish now, two centimeters tall? As long as he stayed on Earth, floating along the normal timestream again, he was going to be, almost literally, a shrimp.

What about using the hyperjump again, then? Presumably the thing worked like a shuttle, and he’d yoyo right back to Tulpa. Maybe he would gain a week back and show up normal-sized.
Lucy-sized
. Jack shuddered. And thought of another problem.

He’d changed his velocity a lot since the last jump. What if the next jump made him even smaller, or worse, bigger…enormously bigger. Jack visualized that for a moment, imagining his ship becoming the size of a whole galactic sector. The gentle patter of stars and planets raining down his gravity-well to patter on his hull. Still, if he were to carefully …

Just then the Tulpan ship’s engine sputtered. He began losing altitude. Out of fuel. Jack looked frantically out the porthole. There was the quarry over there.
Quick!

By using the last reserves of the altitude jets, Jack was able to crash-land in the quarry’s clear waters. Fortunately he got strapped down on the jellybed in time, and the crash felt no worse than getting kicked in the stomach by a mule. Even after he’d bounced up to the surface again, the ship kept tossing around for awhile. Through the porthole, Jack saw a whale-sized fish whizz past. The blue-gills were striking at him.

But after awhile they gave up. Fortunately the ship was too big to swallow whole. There was an dangerous-sounding gurgling from deep in the ship, but after awhile that, too, stopped.

“I’m glad it’s not
two
weeks back,” Jack muttered, and opened the hatch which was, providentially, somewhat above the water-line.

It was Saturday, August 22, 1981, the second time around for this shrunken future Jack Stalk. Over there, where the road sloped down to the quarry’s edge sat two people. A boy and a girl. Jack and Micha. A past Jack. Call him Jack*.

They were only twenty meters off, but it looked like two kilometers to poor little Jack. Even so, he almost dove in…before he remembered the fish. But then he noticed the mouth of the cave, not very far off at all.

For some reason the attitude jets still worked. Using what he supposed were the last drops of the fuel, Jack skipped across the water and beached himself on the cave’s wide shingle.

Jack* and Micha arrived soon thereafter. They lay down some five meters off. Grimly, hurriedly, Jack started the long trek over, struggling over the many large boulders in his path. What would he say? He didn’t even know anymore. Somehow the idea of getting Jack* laid and just quietly winking out of existence…somehow this had stopped seeming like such a noble and sensible idea. He wanted help!

But just as he came to the foothills of Micha’s wonderful white thighs, there was an explosion outside. Daryl. His stupid loudspeaker voice. Jack* and Micha exchanged words…so loud that Jack had to hold his tiny ears…and then Jack* splashed off. Micha just lay there on her side, resting her head on her arm, her back to Jack.

Jack wondered where to begin. He was standing on the rocky ground about even with the two pi point on Micha’s sine-curve, that is to say, right next to her most private parts, rear approach.

Her full, smooth thigh towered above him. To his right the celestial spheres of her buttocks joined. There was a fat, pleasant-looking wrinkle where buttock met thigh. Jack resolved to climb it. On a sudden sex-crazed impulse, he took his clothes off first.

“This makes it all worthwhile,” he muttered as he worked his way up. There was some pubic hair up ahead, almost within reach, just another step, she’d be glad to see him, sure she would, dear Micha, oh my God I love it so much here I think I’m going to …

“EEE-YAH!” Jack heard from afar. And then he was snatched and flung, head over heels, far out into the water.

By the time he’d struggled back to shore, that stupid and monstrous Jack* had come and taken his fine, big Micha away. Jack lay down on a rock, gasping like a fish out of water.

It was hard to get his breath properly…the air wasn’t really right for him, now that his lungs and hemoglobin molecules were a hundred times too small. Fortunately he’d left the ship’s hatch open, and its air-generator was working overtime, filling the cave with shrunk air. But the mixture wasn’t rich enough. He had to get back to the ship.

Had to get back to the ship. Jack staggered to his feet. And fell. He wasn’t going to make it. He didn’t care. He lay on his side, wet, naked and helpless, his chest heaving. His mind was a blank.

Something tickled Jack’s ass then, down at the bottom of the cheek where it meets the thigh. A spider? Eeeyah! He twitched himself into a sitting position, ready for something horrible…but it was only a little ball of some kind. A floating little ball nudging at him.