The Love Machine & Other Contraptions (9 page)

M. Curie went back to her apartment and took two radium pills for her headache. What was
that
all about?

~

“So tell me,” said Johnny. “When do you get off? Maybe we can...”

“What?” said Ada, who suddenly remembered that she was supposed to be angry with the (admittedly cute) redheaded guy. “What the hellerya talkin’ about? Getouttahere!”

“Look,” said Johnny with an expression of sincerity (or so he believed—to Ada it seemed as if he was trying to check for something in his teeth), “it’s just that, er, I like you, and I thought, you know...”

“I don’t know nothin’,” said Ada.

Johnny looked at her quietly.

“You know what?” she said. “Fine. Woist case, I punch yer face in, right? I get off at—”

“There you are!” said Galileo, strolling in gaily. “It works!”

“What woiks?” asked Ada.

“It works?” asked Johnny.

“It works! I met a girl, my neighbor, and the love machine... it’s amazing!”

“It does?” asked Johnny.

“A love machine?” asked Ada.

“It’s unbelievable! I suddenly felt, you know, kinda hot, I went downstairs, and the neighbor... her name is...”

“?” asked Johnny. “I didn’t believe it would work...”

“A love
machine
?!” asked Ada.

“Yes!” said Galileo.

“Where, if the twoayoos don’t mind, is this...
machine
?”

“Right there,” said Galileo innocently, and pointed at the chain on Johnny’s neck.

“You!
” snapped Ada at Johnny, “You bastard! Comin’ to me with a
machine
? You think a machine would make me to fall for you, you mangy little piece of—” And slapped him.

“Oy!” said Johnny, astonished by this new development, and touched his stinging cheek.

“Owwwww!” said Galileo, and fell in love with Ada on the spot.

~

How could such a thing be explained? On reflection, Galileo probably would have used Bell’s Law of Noble Gases or the Boltzmann’s Inequality Principle as illustrative examples, citing the probability collapse of identically-charged photons emitted from an atom with lowered... and that’s as far as he’d get before being interrupted by whoever he’d be talking to. That would, at least, be the most probable scenario.

At any rate, it happened: a slap, Johnny’s chain transmitted a sudden pulse, Galileo’s chain made its superposition-or-something-or-other, and Galileo found himself head-over-heels in love with an irritated waitress.

~

Galileo stood there astounded, as his heart pounded.

“You don’t understand,” said Johnny, “It’s not what it looks like!” And he reached for Ada, who promptly smacked his hand away and roared “Don’t touch me!”

Galileo stood there astounded, as his heart pounded, his mind floundered—

“Not what it looks like, eh?” said Ada. “What is it, then?”

Johnny explained.

“You see,” he said, “If ...”

“You wannanother smack?”

“Huh? No, no! All right, then...” And he explained, this time in people-speak, what little he knew about the operation of the love machine.

Galileo stood there astounded, as his heart pounded, his mind floundered, his essence empowered—

“And this friend of yours,” said Ada.

“Galileo,” said Johnny.

“Whatever. So this friend of yours built this
thing
and put it on you because you... fell in love with me?”

“Yes,” said Johnny, blushing slightly.

“That,” said Ada, “is the stupidest line I ever hoid in my entire life! Get the hell outta here, the bothayews! Out!”

And thus she banished them.

~

Galileo stood there astounded, as his heart pounded, his mind floundered, his essence empowered, his sanity disemboweled—

“Why did you cut in?” asked Johnny angrily. “Just when I finally managed to start up a conversation, almost got a date, you had to... Galileo?”

Galileo stood there astounded—

“Uh-oh,” Said Johnny. “Come here. Sit down. Relax. What’s the matter?”

“Her,” Said Galileo. “She’s... I... I have no words...”

“What?”

“Just... amazing... beautiful... smart... Oh, God...”

“Who, your neighbor?”

“Who?” asked Galileo. “No, not her—
her!
” And he looked forlornly at the door through which they had both been kicked a moment ago.

A long silence ensued.

“Her?”

“Yes,” said Galileo dreamily. “
Her
.”

Stillness.

“You,” said Johnny, “Are going home. Now. This experiment is over.”

“No!” said Galileo. “You don’t understand! This is my first time! Please!”

“It’s definitely my
last
time!”

Silence.

“Well,” said Johnny after a while, “Okay. Don’t look at me like that. Stop it.”

Galileo was smiling with the corners of his mouth. “I promise to reverse it as soon as I can,” he said. “This isn’t how I planned it. We must find out the reason. Given the strength of the pulse...”

“Of course,” said Johnny, “the pulse, absolutely! But before that, why don’t you go home, get some sleep, think it over, measure something—”

“Measure!” said Galileo, and started marching purposefully away. “Perhaps changing the matrix model... transformation... an imaginary Cartesian coordinate system...”

Johnny watched him until he disappeared down the street. Physicists are the strangest people, he told himself with a sigh. This would never have happened to a mathematician.

~

M. Curie had reached a decision. The odd neighbor from the attic, she told herself, is simply shy. People like that can sometimes take years to get over it—if ever. At least he was trying to be pleasant. Mariah felt a bit badly that she had not been nicer. The effort is probably taxing him quite a bit, she thought. Very well, then. She would be ready next time they met. She would manage a nice, friendly conversation, and, well, who knows?

And then, just as she had finished checking her mailbox and was mulling over the best topic to discuss (Sports? Cars? Certainly not homemade cybernetics), the shy neighbor appeared in the entryway and passed her with complete indifference.

“Hel—” she said and was cut short by the slamming of the foyer door.

M. Curie went back to her apartment and took a lithium tablet for her headache. What was
that
all
about?

~

“I love!” said Galileo, if only to hear the sound of these two words coming from his own lips. “I... Love! I...”

He became dizzy. He tried to picture the object of his affection and failed.

“Love?”

He remembered that he had not slept since the morning of the previous day.

“I? Love?”

He collapsed on his bed.

“Love?”

Galileo dreamed.

And who can tell what the machine was doing at the same time? A man may dream of a love machine, but does a love machine dream of a man?

~

Galileo dreamed.

And in his dream, seven fetching women were cleaning a dirt-encrusted kitchen, and all seven had the face of the waitress of his dreams.

“Screw love,” said one, “I’d rather have a dishwasher.”

~

At the end of her shift, Ada grabbed her purse and went out to the street, where she stumbled over Johnny’s outstretched body.

“You!” she said angrily. “Whadyathink yer—”

“I’m really sorry,” said Johnny. “I never meant... Galileo didn’t mean... look...”

“Getouttahere!”

“Please, hear me out! Then, if you tell me you don’t want to see me anymore, I’ll...”

“Then you’ll getouttahere, and I won’t see ya no more. Fair enough. Spill it.”

Johnny spilt it. He told her of Galileo’s problem and how, being his friend, he had become an accessory, of the nature of motion in emotion, of the resolution of sciences through appliances—

~

In Galileo’s dream, the seven pretty maids melted into a single, wizened old woman, who hung laundry on a high voltage line while reading from an equally decrepit copy of
Romeo and Juliet
.

“Oh, my torment!” he said.

“You
,” said the old woman. “What do
you
know about it?”

“I’m in love,” he said.

“It is but one more step on the road to death,” she said.

“True,” he said, “But so is birth. Love, at least, is a pleasant step.”

“If that is so,” said she, “Then what are you bitching about?”

~

Johnny kept talking, telling Ada about his affinity to infinity, about how fractals are rascals, about how functions malfunction, and about how strange attractors make strange bedfellows—

~

A voice came forth from the tool shed. “I do hereby take your hand in holy matrimony!” it said.

Galileo stirred in his sleep. The dream was beginning to disturb him.

~

—taking a can of spray paint from his pocket, he etched in graffiti on a conveniently placed billboard a poem for her right there and then:

“What’s that?” asked Ada.

“A love poem,” said Johnny.

“Oh.”

~

Refrigerators roared over his head, robots sounded calls of hunting; a herd of rampaging washing machines charged him to the ends of the Earth.

“Surrender!” roared their leader in an axle-grinding voice.

“Never!” he shouted. “Not now, not when I’m in love!”

“Love?” the machines chuckled. “Better use soap—it’s cleaner!”

They surrounded him, lids banging up and down, their great wheels set to spin, humming, rinsing, buzzing, knocking.

Hum hum hum buzz buzz knock knock knock.

Galileo shuddered, and awoke.

A knock on the door.

Then another.

“Come in,” he said groggily.

The door opened slowly, revealing the hesitant form of M. Curie.

Galileo glanced quickly back toward his washing machine, fearing this to be merely a continuation of the dream. It wasn’t. The machine was simply standing there, as silent as ever. That is, since he’d removed its bearing, as part of an attempt to construct a cyclotron in his bathtub.

“What... ” he croaked.

Mariah was beside herself with embarrassment. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that, we spoke earlier, on the stairs, and then, when you came back—”

~

A long silence ensued. Johnny watched Ada. Ada watched Johnny.

“Well,” she said. “You definitely ain’t no regular Joe.”

Johnny remained quiet, his face reddening a bit.

“I’d be willing,” said Ada, “To give it a chance. You doofus couldn’t get any sillier than this anyway.”

~

“... And that’s it,” said M. Curie. “I had to find out why you’ve been ignoring me.”

Galileo, also embarrassed, and still somewhat fuzzy, stared at her.

She was looking around at the contents of the room—resistors and mirrors, computer parts and shooting darts, clock-wheels and dried-up meals, a random number generator and a worn-out old defibrillator, a bicycle chain...

A dented metal box in the trash bin caught her attention. “Say,” she said, pointing, “that thing, in the can, isn’t that an electric shrink?”

“Eh, yes,” said Galileo, cursing himself for not having thrown the useless thing away. “I... I make experiments.”

“Really?” she said. “Do you mind if I take a look?” She pulled a Phillips screwdriver out of her pants pocket, and in ten seconds the shrink was disassembled on the worktable.

A great light surrounded Galileo.

“Eureka!” he roared, as Pythagoras had in his bath in the days of yore. “Eureka!”

~

At this or another point in time two random functions flew together and merged—