Complete Stories (54 page)

“Dleiy!” croons Doctor Miracle.

“Daeha thgil ciffart!” goes Feynman, all weaseled in on Leda’s other side.

“Kcuf em won syob!” says Leda, who’s gone seven dry weeks without the straight-on loving these scientists are so clearly ready to provide.

So they pull into the next tourist cabins and get naked and find out what factorial three really means. I mean…do they get it on or
what
? Those stagfilm stars Candy Barr and Smart Alec have got nothing on Leda, Dickie and Doctor Miracle! Oh baby!

And then it’s near dawn and they have breakfast at a greasy spoon, and then they’re on Route 85 South. Johnny’s got the brain programmed to drive them right to the 7:57 A. M. White Sands spacetime coordinate; he’s got the program tweaked down to the point where the Cad will actually cruise past ground zero and nestle itself behind the observation bunker, leaving them ample time to run inside and join the other top bomb boys.

Right before the turnoff to the White Sands road, von Neumann decides that things are getting dull.

“Dickie, activate the jacks!”

“Yowsah!”

Feynman leans over the front seat and flips a switch that’s breadboarded into the dash. The car starts to buck and rear like a wild bronco, its front and tail alternately rising and plunging. It’s another goof of the wondercaddy—von Neumann has built B-52 landing gear in over the car’s axles.

As the Caddy porpoises down the highway, its three occupants are laughing and falling all over each other, playing grabass, champagne spilling from an open bottle.

Suddenly, without warning, an
OOGA-OOGA
klaxon starts to blare.

“Collision imminent,” shouts von Neumann.

“Hold onto your tush!” advises Feynman.

“Be careful,” screams Leda and wriggles to the floor.

Feynman manages to get a swift glimpse of a nightblack Buick driving down the two-lane road’s exact center, heading straight towards them. No one is visible in the car.

Then the road disappears, leaving only blue sky to fill the windshield. There is a tremendous screech and roar of ripping metal, and the Caddy shudders slowly to a stop.

When Feynman and von Neumann peer out their rear window they see the Buick stopped back there. It is missing its entire roof, which lies crumpled in the road behind it.

For all Neal’s bragging, M’s not something he’s totally used to. He has to stop and puke a couple of times in El Paso, early early with the sky going white. There’s no sympathy from Jack, ‘cause Jack picked up yet another bottle of sweet wine outside San Antone and now he’s definitely passed. Neal has the machinegun up in the front seat with him; he knows he ought to put it in the trunk in case the cops ever pull them over, but the dapperness of the weapon is more than Neal can resist. He’s hoping to get out in the desert with it and blow away some cacti.

North of Las Cruces the sun is almost up and Neal is getting a bad disconnected feeling; he figures it’s the morphine wearing off and decides to fix again. He gets a syrette out of the Buick’s glove compartment and skinpops it. Five more miles and the rosy flush is on him, he feels better than he’s felt all night. The flat empty dawn highway is a gray triangle that’s driving the car. Neal gets the idea he’s a speck of paint on a perspective painting; he decides it would be cool to drive lying down. He lies down sideways on the driver’s seat, and when he sees that it works he grins and closes his eyes.

The crash tears open the dreams of Jack and Neal like some ravening fatman’s can-opener attacking oily smoked sardines. They wake up in a world that’s horribly different.

Jack’s sluggish and stays in the car, but Neal is out on the road doing dance incantation trying to avoid the death that he feels so thick in the air. The Thompson submachinegun is in his hand and he is, solely for the rhythm, you understand, firing it and raking the landscape, especially his own betraying Buick, though making sure the fatal lead is only in the lower parts, e.g. tires as opposed to sleepy Jack back seat or gastank, and, more especially than that, he’s trying to keep himself from laying a steel-jacketed flat horizontal line of lead across the hapless marshmallow white faces of the rich boys in the Cadillac. They have a lownumber government license plate. Neal feels like Cagney in White Heat, possessed by total crazed rage against authority, ready for a maddog last-stand showdown that can culminate only in a fireball of glorious fuck-you-copper destruction. But there’s only two of them here to kill. Not enough to go to the chair for. Not yet, no matter how bad the M comedown feels. Neal shoots lead arches over them until the gun goes to empty clicks.

Slowly, black Jack opens the holey Buick door, feeling God it’s so horrible to be alive. He vomits on the meaningless asphalt. The two strange men in the Cadillac give off the scent of antilife evil, a taint buried deep in their bonemarrow, like strontium 90 in mother’s milk. Bent down wiping his mouth and stealing an outlaw look at them, Jack flashes that these new guys have picked up their heavy death-aura from association with the very earth-frying, retina-blasting allbomb that he and Neal are being ineluctably drawn to by cosmic forces that Jack can see, as a matter of fact, ziggy lines sketched out against the sky as clear as any peyote mandala.

“Everyone hates me but Jesus,” says Neal, walking over to the Cadillac, spinning the empty Thompson around his callused thumb. “Everyone is Jesus but me.”

“Hi,” says Feynman. “I’m sorry we wrecked your car.”

Leda rises up from the floor between von Neumann’s legs, a fact not lost on Neal.

“We’re on our way to the bombtest,” croaks Jack, lurching over.

“Ve helped invent the bomb,” says von Neumann. “Ve’re rich and important men. Of course ve vill pay reparations and additionally offer you a ride to the test,
ezpecially
since you didn’t kill us.”

The Cadillac is obediently idling in park, its robot-brain having retracted the jacks and gone into standby mode after the oilpan-scraping collision. Neal mimes a widemouthed blowjob of the hot tip of the Thompson, flashes Leda an easy smile, slings the gun out into the desert, and then he and shuddery Jack clamber into the Cad’s front seat. Leda, with her trademark practicality, climbs into the front seat with them and gives them a bottle of champagne. She’s got the feeling these two brawny drifters can take her faster farther than science can.

Von Neumann flicks the RESET cyberswitch in the rearseat control panel, and the Cad rockets forward, pressing them all back into the deep cushioned seats. Neal fiddles with the steering-wheel, fishtailing the Cad this way and that, then observes, “Seems like this tough short’s got a mind of its own.”

“Zis car’s brobably as smart as you are,” von Neumann can’t help observing. Neal lets it slide. 7:49.

The Cad makes a hard squealing right turn onto the White Sands access road. There’s a checkpoint further on; but the soldiers recognize von Neumann’s wheels and wave them right on through.

Neal fires up a last reefer and begins beating out a rhythm on the dash with his hands, grooving to the pulse of the planet, his planet awaiting its savior. Smoke trickles out of his mouth; he shotguns Leda, breathing the smoke into her mouth, wearing the glazed eyes of a mundane gnostic messiah, hip to a revelation of the righteous road to salvation. Jack’s plugged in too, sucking his last champagne, telepathy-rapping with Neal. It’s almost time, and Doctor Miracle and Little Richard are too confused to stop it.

A tower rears on the horizon off to the left and all at once the smart Cad veers off the empty two-lane road and rams its way through a chain-link fence. Nerve-shattering scraping and lumbering thumps.

“Blease step on za gas a bit,” says von Neumann, unsurprised. He programmed this shortcut in. “I still vant to go under za tower, but is only three minutes remaining. Za program is undercompensating for our unfortunate lost time.” It is indeed 7:57.

Neal drapes himself over the wheel now, stone committed to this last holy folly. Feeling a wave of serene, yet exultant resignation, Jack says, “Go.” It’s almost all over now, he thinks, the endless roving and raging, brawling and fucking, the mad flights back and forth across and up and down the continent, the urge to get it all down on paper, every last feeling and vision in master-sketch detail, because we’re all gonna die one day, man, all of us—

The Caddy, its sides raked of paint by the torn fence, hurtles on like God’s own thunderbolt messenger, over pebbles and weeds, across the desert and the sloping glass craters of past tests. The tower is right ahead. 7:58.

“Get ready, Uncle Sam,” whispers Neal. “We’re coming to cut your balls off. Hold the boys down, Jack.”

Jack bodyrolls over the seat back into the laps of Feynman and von Neumann. Can’t have those mad scientists fiddle with the controls while Neal’s pulling his cool automotive move!

Leda still thinks she’s on a joyride and cozies up to Neal’s biceps, and for a second it’s just the way it’s supposed to be, handsome hardrapping Neal at the wheel of a big old bomb with a luscious brunette squeezed up against him like gum.

And now, before the guys in back can do much of anything, Neal’s clipped through the tower’s southern leg. As the tower starts to collapse, Neal, flying utterly on extrasensory instincts, slows just enough to pick up the bomb, which has been jarred prematurely off its release hook.

No Fat Boy, this gadget represents the ultimate to date in miniaturization: it’s only about as big as a fifty-gallon oildrum, and about as weighty. It crunches down onto the Caddy’s roof, bulging bent metal in just far enough to brush the heads of the riders.

And no, it doesn’t go off. Not yet. 7:59.

Neal aims the mighty Cad at the squat concrete bunker one mile off. This is an important test, the last step before the H-bomb, and all the key assholes are in there, every atomic brain in the free world, not to mention dignitaries and politicians aplently, all come to witness this proof of Amerikkkan military superiority, all those shitnasty fuckheads ready to kill the future.

King Neal floors it and does a cowboy yodel, Jack is laughing and elbowing the scientists, Leda’s screaming luridly, Dickie is talking too fast to understand, and Johnny is—8:00.

They impact the bunker at 80 mph, folding up accordian-style, but not feeling it, as the mushroom blooms, and the atoms of them and the assembled bigwigs commingle in the quantum instability of the reaction event. Time forks.

Somewhere, somewhen, there now exists an Earth where there are no nuclear arsenals, where nations do not waste their substance on missiles and bombs, where no one wakes up thinking each morning might be the world’s last—an Earth where two high, gone wigged cats wailed and grooved and ate up the road and Holy Goofed the world off its course.

For you and me.

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

Written 1986-1987.

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, September, 1988.

I wrote the first page or two of “Instability” in Lynchburg, Virginia, and then I didn’t see where to go with it. Paul Di Filippo was putting out a zine called
Astral Avenue
, and on a whim I sent Paul the start of “Instability” to print as a “Write A Story With Rudy Rucker” contest. Nobody at all entered! But then Paul got into it and added a few pages, and we mailed it back and forth until it was done. I didn’t actually meet Paul in person until 1998.

Richard Feynman was still alive when we wrote “Instability,” so we called his character “Richard Lernmore” in the first publication.

As an acute-care doctor in San Francisco, I have seen many strange things. Perhaps I’ve turned a bit strange myself. I work at a clinic twelve hours a week; I live alone; I wear my head shaved; I speak softly; I am a morphine addict; I am Jewish; I do not have AIDS. I am my own man, but I have turned strange and stranger since I met the man who was a cosmic string.

It happened two weeks ago, in late November. It had been a long, sun-drenched day over the chocked pastel city of my birth. I was idle at home, staring out the attic window. The phone rang; it was one of my patients from the clinic. Her husband was sick. Yes, she understood I was off-duty, but could I come in a private capacity? If only as a friend. Her husband was taken very bad. She would give me a gold coin. Please come right away.

The woman’s name was Bei-na Id. She was from Chaotiskan, a tiny island republic off the Thai-Burmese isthmus of Kra. I had treated Bei-na for numerous small complaints; she was something of a hypochondriac. Her English was odd, but comprehensible. Once she’d passed gas while talking to me. We’d ignored it, but it was something I usually thought of when I talked to her: popcorn fart. Of her husband I knew nothing. They lived in the Mission, a short bus-ride away.

I agreed to come.

It was growing dark when I got to the Id home, a tiny houselet on the back of a lot. It was a converted garage. TV light flickered from behind drawn curtains. I knocked and Bei-na came quickly to the door.

“Thank you for come, Doctor. My husband is sick two days.”

“Yes.”

Standing just inside the front door, holding the black lunch-box that I use for a medical bag, I could see the entire house. Here was the living/dining-room with two tiny girls watching TV and a boy on the couch doing homework. The children were long and pale, paler than Bei-na. Perhaps her husband was American. My imagination raced: a failed priest, a renegade vet, a retired smuggler? How big would the gold coin be?

Straight ahead was the kitchen and laundry room. A fourth child stood by the sink: a smooth perfect teenage girl, her skin like dirty ivory. The children all ignored me, letting social custom replace the walls their house lacked. The TV was turned down very low. I could hear the dishes clunking beneath the sinkwater, I could hear the chugging motor of the fridge. There was another sound as well, an odd, sputtery hiss. I looked alertly at Bei-na, waiting for info. The less I say, the more my patients tell me.

Bei-na was a short woman with prominent cheekbones and the kind of pointed glasses that lower middle-class white women used to wear. Like a cartoon coolie’s, her head was a blunt yellow cone spreading out from her neck. She seemed worried, but also somewhat elated, perhaps at having gotten a doctor to come to her home. The hissing was definitely coming from behind the bedroom door. I wondered if her husband were psychotic. I imagined him crouched behind the door, mad-eyed with a machete. But no, surely not, the children were acting calm and safe.