Complete Stories by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online Page B

inflexible quarkonium plates were square, and four were longish rectangles. I assembled the six into a box, setting an evacuation nozzle into the hole with which one plate had been provided. The material was strange to work with, slippery and utterly rigid. Although they were supposed to be a sort of mirror, the plates did not reflect images in any ordinary way…at least not most of the time. But, over and over, as I was assembling the phase-mirrors into a box, I seemed to glimpse isolated images of my fingertips here and there on the mirrors’ surfaces.
    We spent forty-eight hours pumping the box out to a state of near-perfect vacuum, and then sealed it off. While the pump was running, Ion instructed me to mount a series of wire loops on the table, loops which could be charged to produce a weakly guiding magnetic field. We set the box in the middle of the loops, and that was about it. A transparent box like an aquarium with a glass top. Ion called the box a time-tunnel, but I found this colorful description misleading.
    We ran our first tests with an electron beam. The idea was that a signal could come out of one end of the box before it went in the other. It’s called an advanced potential in quantum mechanics. We got the results Ion had predicted, so we moved up to atomic nuclei, and then to a series of larger and larger iron bullets.
    Shooting the bullets into that phase-mirror box made me a little nervous… . I expected the box to shatter. But somehow it didn’t. I assumed it was because the quarkonium plates were, in some sense, liquid, and thus able to close up after a rapid enough object.
    I believed that for a while, anyway. But before long I had come to believe something stranger…that the box was able to create and destroy matter/antimatter pairs. But where was the energy coming from? And where did it go?
    Ion had an explanation. But I was not ready to accept his description of what we had built. That way lay madness.
    “Do you know what your husband and I have done?” I asked Klara at lunch the last day of February. The twins had already left the table to do their homework. I glanced at Ion, and he gave me an encouraging nod. Until now I had been sworn to silence.
    Klara looked a bit nervous at my question. Ion was, I had learned, something of a philanderer. What a fool to betray a woman as wonderful as Klara!
    “Nothing too depraved, I hope?” Her voice was gay, but with the faintest tremolo of real worry. She drew out a cigarette and placed it between her wonderful lips, waiting for the touch of my lighter…the lighter which I had bought solely so that I could light Klara’s cigarettes. She tilted her head back, away from the smoke, and looked at Ion questioningly.
    He smiled his broad, mirthless smile. “William and I have assembled a rather interesting piece of apparatus. It creates and destroys matter, according to William’s way of looking at things.”
    Klara arched her eyebrows at me. “Is that true, William? Perhaps you have solved the energy crisis?”
    I laughed, a bit exasperated by Ion’s misdirection. “No, no. This is a very expensive machine to build. We have used most of the quarkonium in the world to build it. And really it creates and absorbs matter/antimatter pairs , rather than just matter. But Ion thinks …
    Ion was pouring himself a glass of wine, and the carafe clattered against his glass. “I do not think , William, I know . We have built a time-machine.” Suddenly, on some level, we were fighting over Klara.
    She blew a thick stream of smoke and put out her cigarette. “I would like a time-machine. Then I could see what the castle looked like in 1400, before the French blew it up. And I’d like to see dinosaurs. And fashions one thousand years from now.” It was clear she didn’t believe Ion. “Dearest, do you think you could bring me back a kitchen-robot from the future? It would be even nicer than that dishwasher you’re always promising to get me!”
    Ion was