Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online

features. The women stared back with bold and clinical eyes. I gave my heart a thousand times, without ever saying a word. But I could never muster the courage to approach one of those tantalizing aliens. I am, after all, soft and funny-looking.
    On a normal day I would get out at Bismarckplatz and walk over the bridge. Crossing the Neckar always took me a long time. In the middle of the bridge I would stop and watch the fifty-meter-long barges speeding by beneath me. The river is like a highway, with coal and wrecked cars being lugged upstream, and great beams of steel gliding downstream. There are the locks to see, and the hazy old town, and above it all, the great hallucinatory castle.
    Other darker thoughts detained me on the bridge as well. Surely you have seen Edvard Munch’s painting, The Cry ? Why do you think Munch chose to place this most anguished figure in modern art…on a bridge? On a bridge one is neither here nor there; one is rootless…and anything can happen. Did you know that in the 1800s the most commonly attempted method of suicide was none other than…jumping off a bridge? Out there, in the wind, one need not choose this bank or that. There are other alternatives.
    During my first two months in Heidelberg, the Institute was deserted. The sole secretary present showed me my desk in Ion Stepanek’s large office. As I later learned, Stepanek was spending the semester break visiting relatives in Budapest. Both he and his wife, Klara, were Hungarian refugees.
    The first time I met Stepanek, he caught me by surprise. I had spent those first lonely months at the Institute by going over various treatments of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox. My slow understanding of the solution was expressed in a large, three-dimensional figure, a sort of solid letter “Y,” which I was amusing myself with by drawing on the office blackboard.
    “William,” a voice cried suddenly. “What a pleasure to find you here, hard at work!” I turned a bit too abruptly—he had startled me—and we shook hands.
    Ion Stepanek was a short, wiry man, given to wearing suede vests and jackets. His hair was thinning, and rather greasy. He had a large nose and a wide, amused mouth. His eyes were very quick, and he had a disconcerting habit of staring me in the eye when he sensed I might be holding something back.
    Although he was ten years my senior and, nominally, my supervisor, Ion began by treating me as an equal. He had read my experimental work and my recent, unpublishable theorizings. In return I had read everything he had written, even including a stack of freshly typed pages I had found on his desk.
    His sharp eyes took in my diagram of the EPR paradox, and then he turned to gesture at the window. “So, William? Do you like the fog? The indeterminacy?”
    I shrugged. “I can live with it. Did you enjoy your vacation?”
    “Must it be yes or no?” I didn’t know quite what to answer. Stepanek savored the moment, then clapped me on the shoulder. “Have you read my latest?”
    “You mean this?” I pointed to the pages on his desk. “Yes, I took the liberty. But …” I stopped, not wanting to offend him.
    He plucked the thought out of my eyes and answered it. “You are wondering why I would waste my energy on a chimera like time-travel.”
    I nodded. “Surely you are aware of the paradoxes. One can so easily produce a yes-and-no situation with a time-machine.”
    Ion smiled widely, mirthlessly. “Do you not understand your own work? This is just what you want.”
    We dropped the matter for then, and went on to discuss the bus routes, my apartment, the restaurants…the minutiae of life in a foreign country.
    Ion insisted on taking me home with him for the midday meal. His house was only a few hundred meters from the Institute. His wife, Klara, greeted me like a long-lost cousin.
    “Ion has been so looking forward to your visit, William. It is wonderful that you are here!” She had soft eyes and dark, sensual lips.