Complete Stories (28 page)

Maundering on in such fashion, Harry drifted over to my equipment and began hefting this object and now that. Suddenly I didn’t feel so good. I decided to leave him on his own and check out Nancy.

She was pacing up and down the upstairs hall. Seeing her, the moment before she started talking, I knew again why I loved her. Her grace, her aliveness, the way she moved.

“Dammit, Joseph, what do you think you’re doing?”

“Nancy, I was
asleep
. And Harry showed up, so I let him in. He’s my buddy.”

“You smell like a distillery. Talking to him’s fine, but do you have to drink like him? You’re not built for it.”

A wave of dizziness hit me then. I grabbed the banister for support. Nancy spotted the move.

“Are you going to throw up, Joe? Are you all right?”

I felt a sickening lightness in my stomach. We’d drunk that stuff much too fast. Inertia. A giant’s fist clenched my Adam’s apple. Nancy helped me into the bathroom.

When I was through being sick, she wiped my face off with a washcloth and laid me down on our bed.

“Poor Joey. Poor baby.”

“You don’t really love me.”

“You don’t love
me
.”

“I
do
love you.”

“I love you, too, Joey. I love you a lot.”

It was good in bed. Sleep came.

I woke suddenly in the dark, feeling queasy. Three, four in the morning? My mouth was an agony of salt and mucus. Water, I needed water, lots of it. Aspirin. The toilet.

Painfully I eased up onto one elbow. For some reason my body rocked so far forward that my head bumped my knees. I was as wobbly as a Macy’s parade turkey float. I definitely had to get to the bathroom.

I creaked into a sitting position and swung my legs out of bed. Inexplicably, my legs took off across the room, dragging my body behind.
WHAM
, I crashed into an armchair;
SLAM
, I hit the floor;
CRASH
, I bounced across the room. My arms and legs were flying around like Styrofoam cups in a windstorm. Yet none of it really hurt. With sudden sick horror, I decided that I’d suffered some kind of brain damage. I was having a seizure for sure.

Just then there was a scream, and Nancy came bashing into me. I reached out to grab her, but the force of my touch flicked her away like a ping-pong ball. The objects she smashed into took off on their own random trajectories, and now our whole room was filled with dark, crazy bouncing. This was more than brain damage; this was a major breakdown of physical law. What …

I remembered Harry.
I’m going to build an inertia-winder.
I rose abruptly to my feet. Error. I ricocheted from the ceiling to our bed. I struck the bed at an awkward angle, and its springs catapulted me out our bedroom’s open French windows. I was traveling much faster than it seemed at all reasonable. Our second story porch shot under me, and an instant later I’d crashed. My fall was fortunately broken by the large Spirea bush that I landed on.

For a long minute I just lay there, assessing the damages. As far as I could feel, nothing was broken. Really, I hardly even felt bruised. The night air was mild and pleasant. From where I lay, I could see the lit-up windows of our basement. Harry was down there. Harry had made this happen. But how? Something to do with inertia. He’d taken my inertia away, and now my body could be pushed around like a dandelion seed. But if I didn’t weigh anything, why had I crashed to the ground so hard? And why hadn’t it hurt?

It didn’t matter. Right now the only thing that mattered was to go down to the basement and wring Harry’s neck. Slowly, slowly, I eased myself into an upright position. I felt as unsteady as a six-foot pile of plates. When I tried to step forward, my center of gravity shifted and I fell back down. Great progress: an inch per minute.

I decided to take my chances and leap.

Once again, I overdid it. The two stories of our house whizzed past, and then I was looking down at our streetlit roof—looking down at the roof and still climbing. Although I was getting frightfully high, I wasn’t too worried about it. My body had so little inertia that my legs would easily be able to absorb the shock of landing.

Slowly, not wanting to throw myself into a spin, I leaned my head back to look up at the sky. Nothing. There was nothing up there. Low clouds? Not likely; clouds would be reflecting some of the city lights back down at us. But tonight had been a full moon, the Harvest moon. I’d seen it rising earlier when …

Suddenly I could see the moon and stars again. I was high, high in the sky. Forgetting to move slowly, I looked back down. Despite my abrupt head-movement, I didn’t start spinning. The influence of the rest of the universe was acting on me again, and my inertia was back.

Below my feet was a huge black dome, the region that Harry had somehow cut off from the world. It was expanding. The air up here felt thick again. It had inertia; it dragged and beat against me. Rapidly my upward motion slowed, and then I was falling, falling heavily. I prayed that Harry wouldn’t pick this instant to turn off his inertia-winder.

As I tumbled back through the dark dome, my speed increased dramatically. The gravitational mass of my body was the same, so that the gravity of Earth pulled me as hard as ever. Yet in here my inertial mass, the mass which resists motion, was almost zero. The trees, the streetlight, my house—they all streaked past. I tensed my bent legs against the crash.

At just the moment of impact I pushed up, neutralizing the shock. When someone jumps off a building, it’s not the
falling
that kills them, it’s the sudden
stop
. But with virtually no inertia to resist changes of motion, a sudden transition from over one hundred miles per hour to complete rest is only mildly jarring.

The whole leap had taken less than a minute. I found myself right next to the cellar door outside my house. Now that I had a better under-standing of what was going on, I was able without too much difficulty to get one of the big doors open and go on down into the basement.

“HELLO, FLETCHER!”

My inertialess eardrum vibrated wildly with Harry’s greeting. He was comfortably seated in my desk-chair. I must have jerked an arm involuntarily, for I found myself on the floor again. Glaring fixedly at Harry, I crawled towards him, close enough to reach out and …

“AREN’T YOU HAPPY?”

This time I was braced for it.

“Whisper, Harry, whisper.” Maybe it wasn’t really that loud; maybe it was the hangover. There’s no hangover worse than the one you have when you wake up at four A. M. I wondered what Nancy was doing now. I hoped she’d have the sense to just get back in bed. For some reason, thinking about her didn’t make me feel tense like it usually did. She was, after all, just another person, a person just like me …

“I DID IT!”

“You did it.” Gingerly I rose to my feet. “Please don’t talk loud or I’ll have to kill you. Did what?”

“Come see.” Moving with the caution of an arthritic eighty-year-old on glare-ice, Harry eased out of my chair and led me back to the work-shop area. Sitting on a cleared part of the floor was the inertia-winder.

It was basically just an electric gyroscope with a glob of something attached to the protruding rotor. Wound-up inertia?

“Quarkonium,” breathed Harry. “I kept some back from the last shipment. It’s a cross between matter and antimatter. Last week I ran it through some high-energy vacuum-sputtering to build up a fractal surface-geometry. A lot of the quark pairs are split up now. Once I had that going for me, I just needed a gyro to spin them around.”

“You could have warned me.”

“I didn’t know you were going to rush back upstairs. How about another drink?”

“No way. Turn that thing off now, before someone gets hurt. I was outside and I could see the sphere of influence growing. It’s just our house now, but if you let it go much longer, it’ll be the neighbors, too. I could get sued.”

Harry looked acutely uncomfortable, but said nothing.

“All right then, I’ll turn it off myself.” I leaned forward, fell down, righted myself on all fours, found the cord of the electric gyro, and yanked at it. The plug flew at me and bounced off my forehead. Harry had already unplugged it. I kicked at the gyro. The compassless rotor bobbed this way and that. The faint while of its spinning diminished not one whit.

“The quarkonium’s surface is very…adhesive,” Harry murmured. “The field-lines of inertia are all wrapped around it. It has a lot of inertia and it keeps getting more.”

“So when does it run down?”

“I…I don’t think it ever will. It’s self-perpetuating.”

“Come on, Harry. What about the Second Law of Thermodynamics?”

“This is different, Fletch. This is quarkonium.”

There was a sledgehammer over in the corner of the basement. I went and got it. It was amazingly easy to heft. I took a good solid stance in front of the gyro and let fly. The gyro skittered a few feet across the floor and I fell down. All right. I hadn’t expected to succeed on the first try. I kept at it for about ten minutes. Harry watched in silence.

Finally a lucky blow cracked the gyro’s mount. The rotor snapped free, rolled around on the floor, then spun up onto one end. The shiny glob of wound-up inertia spun there like a child’s top. All that hammering had accomplished exactly nothing.

I let my arms and legs go limp. Gravity bounced me around on the floor for awhile. I lay there. Harry stood over me, looking worried. With a quick, savage blow, I knocked his legs out from under him. Gravity bounced him around for awhile. Then he was lying next to me.

I closed my eye, imagining a black sphere of inertialessness. The sphere grew and grew. Soon it included the whole Earth. Chaos. The sphere kept growing. After awhile it included the Moon. Without its inertia, the Moon would fall down. Without any heft fighting our gravity, we’d reel the Moon in like a poisoned catfish. Eventually…if anyone still cared…we’d both fall into the Sun.

The whine of the spinning quarkonium blob seemed to have gotten higher. The thing was actually speeding up. How long did we have? Ten hours? Ten days?

“JOEY! WHERE ARE YOU?” The distress-cry of my mate.

I leaped to my feet shouting, “I’M COMING, DARLING!” Error. I smashed the naked light bulb on the ceiling with the nape of my neck. I bounced into a shelf full of radio tubes. I landed right on top of the inertia-winder. For a horrible moment the inertia-wrapped glob of quarkonium spun right against my cheek. It felt silky and sly as a vampire’s first kiss.

The light in the stairwell snapped on and there was Nancy.

“What is it, Joey? Why don’t we weigh anything? I keep falling and …” She tumbled down the stairs and came to rest next to me and Harry and the inertia-winder. A square of light from the staircase spot-lit us like three degenerates in a Tennessee Williams play.

“Harry built this machine?”

“That’s right, Nancy.” Harry was actually trying to sound friendly. I think he’d realized, as I had, that we’d all be dead soon. I took Nancy’s hand.

“Why are you just lying here? Why don’t you turn the machine off?”

“We can’t.”

“Well, what exactly is it doing?”

“It cuts us off from the rest of the world’s inertial influences,” said Harry. “You know what inertia is?”

“It’s you and Joey getting drunk again for no reason. It’s Joey and me fighting just because we fought yesterday. It’s you and me not liking each other because the other one doesn’t like us.” Nancy paused, considering what she’d just said.

“That’s all true, Nancy. And in physics inertia is an object’s tendency to resist changes in its motion. Inertia is an overall property of the universe. We only have inertia because of the stars.”

“You mean like the zodiac influences your moods?”

“Well…maybe. But I’m talking physics. This thing I put together,” Harry gestured at the inertia-winder. “This thing produces an expanding shell of unconfined quarks. Wherever the shell crosses inertial field-lines, the lines snap. It’s snapping more and more field-lines all the time. Soon the whole block will have no inertia, then all of Princeton, then the whole state and the world and then …”

“How long, Harry?” My voice was husky and brittle.

“Well, you’re asking me to solve a non-linear partial differential equation there …” Harry hummed a distracted snatch of verse. ”…fine-structured constant…hyperbolic tangent of that…oh, call it 26.34 hours. Give or take.”

“Until what?” demanded Nancy.

“Until the Moon loses all its inertia,” I said. “When that happens it falls down.”

“But why would it fall if it doesn’t weigh anything?”

“There’s inertia and there’s gravitational mass,” said Harry patiently. “This doesn’t change gravitational attraction. It just takes away the ability to resist gravitational attraction.”

“DAMMIT HARRY!” The force of the accompanying gesture threw Nancy against me. “Goddammit, Harry, what’d you build it for?”

“It would have wonderful applications,” I said placatingly, “if we could just turn it off. Like for a jet-liner. Get rid of its inertia for awhile and you could launch it with a rubber-band. Or you could use an inertia-winder for real cheap energy generation. Accelerate something when it’s inertialess, then let it have its inertia back and take advantage of the free momentum. If there were a way to turn it off, we’d be rich instead of dead.”

The spinning glob on the rotor was the size of a softball now. Nancy reached out a finger to touch it. “Ugh! It’s so soft and…greedy feeling.”

“What did you just say?” asked Harry.

“Soft. Greedy feeling.”

“That’s the broken quark-bags. But I meant Fletch. What did you say, Fletcher?”

“You could accelerate something inside the inertialess sphere and when it got out, it’d have a lot of momentum.”

“
Pret
-ty damn good. Call the Kennedy Center.”

“What for? Tickets to the ballet?”

“Kennedy
Space
Center. We’ll put this sucker on a Saturn rocket and let the Crab Nebula worry about it.”

“Sure, Crab Nebula. You’ll be lucky to find a rocket that moves faster than the black sphere is expanding.”

“The change-up, Fletcher. When the rocket exhaust gets to the edge of the sphere, it gets a sudden increase in momentum. The same speed but a lot more inertia. Action equals reaction. Momentum down means momentum up. It’ll kick the whole sphere like a mule. I don’t see why …” Distracted humming again. “Yes. The system should reach nine-tenths the speed of light at…forty-seven minutes after launch. We’ll have lost part of the night sky but what the hell. It beats having the Moon land on your head. Call Max Moritz.”