Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online Page A

A perfect wife, a perfect mother. How comfortable she made me feel!
    I accepted a glass of kirsch before lunch. The clear, dry alcohol went straight to my head, but Ion assured me that Klara’s after-dinner coffee would remedy that. Then the two children, twin ten-year-old girls, came crashing in.
    The German school-day ends before one o’clock, and it is not unusual for the whole family to have their big meal together at midday.
    “Do you fix such a big supper as well?” I asked Klara as we sat down to our cauliflower soup.
    “This is not big,” she said, looking down the loaded table. “This is nothing.”
    Besides the soup, there was a roast stuffed with hot sausage, a platter of fried potatoes, creamed spinach, cucumber salad, smoked cheese, two kinds of salami, dishes of pickled peppers, and a large carafe of excellent white wine.
    “I have never seen such a magnificent meal in my life!” I exclaimed.
    The twins giggled, and Ion laughed appreciatively. “You see, Klara? William is already learning the art of Hungarian exaggeration.”
    In the course of many happy hours spent at the Stepaneks’ over the next three months, I was to become very familiar with this sort of conversation. A Hungarian is never happy without being ecstatic, never sad without being suicidal, never your friend without being ready to give you everything he owns, never displeased without being ready to kill. But there was, for all that, a consciously playful element to their exaggerations which somehow kept them from ever being oppressive.
    Klara was thirty-five, about halfway in age between Ion and I. Before long I was thoroughly infatuated with her, and flirted shamelessly. Ion must have noticed, but perhaps he welcomed the excitement for Klara. Or perhaps he pitied me too much to object.
    I got in the habit of dropping my spoon at most of our frequent common meals. Bent and straining under the table, I would stare at Klara’s legs. She could feel my gaze, and would slowly rub her nylons against each other. When I sat up she would give me a look of dreamy speculation, her full lips parted to show a few of her perfect teeth. I hoped my hopes and dreamed my dreams.
    Meanwhile, Ion and I were working long hours on our joint project. His intention was to push the Feynman time-reversal theory of antimatter hard enough to get time-travel. He had the clout to get the necessary components and material—some of them totally new. My job was to assemble the components into a working system.
    There is something magical about scientific apparatus. A witch doctor assembles decorated stones, special herbs, pieces of rare animals…and he expects that putting these valued objects together will cause something unusual to happen. Spirit voices, levitation, miracle cures …
    The constructions of engineers and physicists are not really so different. Bits of etched silicon, special chemicals, oddly shaped pieces of metal…the experimentalist places them together, and suddenly one has a radio, or an airplane, or an X-ray machine.
    Stepanek’s design for a time-machine was a bit more obviously allied to sorcery than is customary. The key components were six of the brand-new “phase-mirrors.” It was only as a result of his years-long friendship with the director of the Max Planck Institute that Ion was able to get these fantastically rare and valuable plates of…what?
    The phase-mirrors were made of a completely new type of substance called quarkonium, a hyperstable compound something like metallic helium—but with some of the protons’ component quarks replaced by the newly obtainable “bottom” quarks. Quarkonium is, strangely enough, neither matter nor antimatter. The stuff exists in some fantastically charged tension between the two. The fact that quarkonium is thus hyperstable made it possible that, in certain circumstances, the phase-mirrors could emit or absorb almost their entire mass-energy without disintegrating.
    Two of the thin,