showed real class.
14
'What now, Arthur?' I said wearily.
'I'm supposed to go fetch Sam and the rest of the washouts when Prime gives me thq all clear.'
'When will that be?'
'I don't know, dearie. When the current flap has subsided. h won't be safe until then.'
'Okay, say you go and get them,' I said. 'Then what?'
'I take you to the egress portal and show you what cylinders to shoot in order to get back where you belong.'
For which there was no need, since I had the Roadmap. I looked around, throwing up my arms. 'What do we do till then? Fill out a time card and punch in?'
'Make something,' Arthur said, 'like Carl did.'
'Do you need any ashtrays?'
'How about a hand-tooled leather wallet, monogrammed?'
'You only have one initial,' I told him.
'And I don't have any pockets, either. Well, then, I'm stumped.'
So was I. But there was nothing to do. We couldn't leave for the master portal, and we couldn't very well drive all the way to the other side of the world, back to Emerald City. We were at Arthur's mercy.
There was sleep to catch up on, though, and thinking to do. Lay yourself open to the dream-teaching, Prime had advised. I wasn't sure I was ready for that yet. I thought about it. I needed answers, but falling into a swoon and getting infused with divine enlightenment wasn't my style. Besides, didn't you have to fast for forty days and nights in the desert first? l had left my hairshirt at the cleaners back in T-Maze.
I was tired of searching for ever-elusive answers. Damn tired of it. As Darla said, we keep getting pushed around by unseen forces. A phrase Prime had used kept echoing: 'whatever forces are at work behind you.' Indeed, what forces? If neither Prime nor the White Lady were really calling the shots, who was? Were there other aspects of the Culmination? Was it something outside the Culmination entirely? More whispers in the darkness, more missing pieces of a puzzle I had grown weary of fumbling with.
I lay in the bunk, Darla asleep beside me. No dreams for her. It seemed that if you didn't want to hear the propaganda, you simply turned off your receiver.
I listened. The plant was quiet except for a faint background hum. Now and then came a faraway thump or bangmaintenance attendants about their chores, perhaps. Perhaps not. Were we safe here? Of course not. But Arthur had his funnel-ears pricked for any intruders-and whatever other sensors he had were tuned in, too.
I got up and went out to the cab, sat in the driver's seat. Arthur had inflated the spacetime ship to about half its full size, and had gone inside. Said he had things to do.
I regarded Carl's vehicle. Everyone, including Carl, had wondered about its origin. Had Carl created it himself? The answer, in gleaming chrome and whitewall tires, lay out there on the floor of the receiving bay.
The time comes, as the saying goes, when a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. Push me, and I push back. Time to take the offensive. From now on it would be Jake McGraw, Master of Space and Time.
I woke Darla up. 'Hmph?' she said.
'C'mon. I got an insane idea.'
'Hmph.'
I went back to the cab while Darla dressed. 'Bruce?'
'Yes, Jake?'
'Patch me through to the plant foreman.'
A short delay, then: 'He's on the line.'
'Hello?' I said.
'Greetings!' the foreman beamed.
'Hi. Uh, would it be possible to use the Product Ideation and Design Facility again?'
'Certainly! At this moment?'
'Yes, please.'
'Will send transportation immediately.'
But could I do it, make that insane idea a reality? Reality seemed a fluid, changing thing here on Microcosmos, a malleable lump of stuff that could be beaten and pummeled into whatever shape was desired. I'd take a whack at it myself.
I told Darla to take a blanket along. I thumbed the intercom button, thought better of it, and punched up the interior trailer monitor. Oops, Carl and Lori were busy back there. I hoped those kids knew at least the rudiments of birth control. I should talk, I thought.
The robocart arrived, and we stepped on.
'It is revolutionary concept,' the design chief said. I thought I detected a note of awe in its voice.
'Yeah, it sure is.'
I peered into the depths of the drafting board. Since the object I wanted to create was immaterial, there wasn't much to look at except geometry. But it was fascinating. There were all sorts of things: planar sheaves warping and folding back on themselves, torus shapes and saddle shapes distending and contracting, Moebius strips and Klein bottles and things that neither gentleman had dreamed of; a matrix bound up in knottcd tufts of nothing- at-all, forming the very fabric of space itself-and of time, and even of matter; point-masses migrating across limitless dimensions; impossible constructs, singularities, parallel lines meeting at the edge of infinity…
'However,' the chief went on, 'technique of dimensional impaction is not unknown. Scale here is much larger, but in theory can be done.'
'Can be done in practice?' I asked.
'Would be honored to try. May suggest to begin by postulating isotropic homogeneity throughout entire metrical frame?'
'Sure, let's do that thing. What's an isotrope?'
Two hours later, I had a terrific headache, but the design chief seemed confident that the major theoretical obstacles had been overcome. Problems concerning the actual production of an artifact loomed large, though. The production manager was called in for consultation.
'Retooling necessary,' the PM stated.
'How extensive?' the chief asked.
'Possibly entire facility.'
'Can be done?'
'Affirmative.'
Later, my head seemed about to burst. They brought me a bed-it was a big round cushy thing, very comfortable-and I racked out after trying to rouse Darla, who preferred the floor. Her back, she said.
I slept for an hour, got up and went to the board, where I was served a cup of hot beverage and a sweet roll. 'Anything?' I asked.
'Design almost complete,' the chief told me. 'Must tell you that entire plant staff is much enthused and excited by this particular project. Retooling is progressing on schedule.'
'Jeez, you guys must make a bundle in overtime.'
'Say again, please?'
I took a slurp of ersatz coffee. 'Sorry, just thinking aloud.'
We went on an inspection tour of the retooling effort, visiting buildings that I didn't think we'd been in before. They were tearing the place apart. What we witnessed surpassed anything we had seen of the plant's 'conventional' production operations. We watched an army of robots storm an assembly facility and reduce it to junk, then cart in new material and build a titanic contraption that looked like a particle accelerator married to an exciter cannon. We stood by, spellbound, as whole new wings were added onto existing buildings-slap, dash, bang- to accommodate new oversized equipment. One of the larger facilities now housed a monstrous affair that had been
