Mad Professor (29 page)

The two great mouths chewed up the red and blue Pumpti meat, spitting, drooling, and passing the globs back and forth. Odd ripples began moving up and down along their bodies like ghost images of ancient flesh.

“What's that a-comin' out of your rib cage, Tuggie?” crowed Revel.

“Cootchy-coo,” laughed Tug, twiddling the tendrils protruding from his side. “I'm expressing a jellyfish. My personal best. Feel around in your genome, Revel. It's all there, every species, evolved from our junk DNA right along with our super-duper futuristic new bodies.” He paused, watching. “Now you're keyin' it, bro. I say—are those hooves on your shoulder?”

Revel palpated the twitching growth with professional care. “I'd be reckoning that's a quagga. A prehistoric zebra-type thing. And, whoah Nellie, see this over on my other shoulder? It's an eohippus. Ancestor of the horse. The cowboys of the Pullen clan got a long relationship with horseflesh. I reckon there was some genetic bleedover when we was punchin' cattle up the Goodnight-Loving Trail; that's why growin' these ponies comes so natural to me.”

“How do you like it now, ladies?” asked Tug, glancing over toward Janna and Veruschka.

“Ask them,” hissed Veruschka in Janna's ear.

“No, you,” whispered Janna.

Brave Vero spoke up. “My friend is wondering now if you will sign those Magic Pumpkin founders' shares back over to us? And the patents as well if you please?”

“Groink,” said Revel, hunching himself over and deforming his mouth into a dinosaur-type jaw.

“Squonk,” said Tug, letting his head split into a floppy bouquet of be-suckered tentacles.

“You don't need to own our business anymore,” cried Janna. “Please sign it back to us.”

The distorted old men whooped and embraced each other, their flesh fusing into one. The meaty mass seethed with possibilities, bubbled with the full repertoire of zoological forms—with feelers, claws, wings, antennae, snouts; with eyes of every shape and color winking on and off; with fleeting mouths that lingered only long enough to bleat, to hiss, to grumble, to whinny, screech, and roar. It wasn't exactly a “no” answer.

“Kelso,” shouted Janna up the stairs. “Bring the papers!”

A high, singing sound filled the air. The Pullen-Mesoglea mass sank to the floor as if melting, forming itself into a broad, glistening plate. The middle of the plate swelled like yeasty bread to form a swollen dome. The fused organism was taking on the form of—a living UFO?

“The original genetic Space Friend!” said Veruschka in awe. “It's been waiting in their junk DNA since the dawn of time!”

As Kelso clattered down the stairs, the saucer charged at the three of them, far too fast to escape. Kelso, Janna, and Veruschka were absorbed into the saucer's ethereal bulk.

Everything got white, and in the whiteness, Janna saw a room, a round space expressing wonderful mathematical proto-design: a vast Vernor Panton 1960s hashish den, languidly and repeatedly melting into a Karim Rashid all-plastic lobby.

The room's primary inhabitants were idealized forms of Tug Mesoglea and Revel Pullen. The men's saucer bodies were joyous, sylphlike forms of godlike beauty.

“I say we spin off the company to these girls and their lawyer,” intoned the Tug avatar. “Okay by you, Revel? You and I, we're more than ready to transcend the material plane.”

“There's better action where we're going,” Revel agreed. “We gotta stake a claim in the subdimensions, before the yokels join the gold rush.”

A pen appeared in Tug's glowing hand. “We'll shed the surly bonds of incorporation.”

It didn't take them long to sign off every interest in Magic Pumpkin. And then the floor of the saucer opened up, dropping Janna, Veruschka, and Kelso onto the street. Over their awestruck heads, the saucer briefly glowed and then sped away, though not in any direction that a merely human being could specify. It was more as if the saucer shrank. Reorganized itself. Corrected. Downsized. And then it was gone from all earthly ken.

And that's how Janna Gutierrez and Veruschka Zipkinova got rich.

WHEN 
the woman from Endless Media called, Wendel was out on the fake balcony, looking across San Pablo Bay at the lights of the closed-down DeGroot Chemicals Plant. On an early summer evening, the lights marking out the columns of steel and the button-shaped chemical tanks took on an unreal glamour; the plant became an otherworldly palace. He'd tried to model the plant with the industrial-strength Real2Graphix program his dad had brought home from RealTek before he got fired. But Wendel still didn't know the tricks for filling a virtual scene with the world's magic and menace, and his model looked like a cartoon toy. Someday he'd get his chops and make the palace come alive. You could set a killer-ass game there if you knew how. After high school, maybe he could get into a good gaming university. He didn't want to “go” to an online university if he could help it; virtual teachers, parallel programmed or not, couldn't answer all your questions.

The phone rang just as he was wondering whether Dad could afford to pay tuition for someplace real. He waited for his dad to get the phone, and after three rings he realized with a chill that Dad had probably gone into a pocket, and he'd have to answer the phone himself.

The fake porch, created for window washers, and to create an impression of coziness the place had always lacked, creaked under his feet as he went to climb through the window. The narrow splintery wooden walkway outside their window was on the third floor of an old waterfront motel converted to studio apartments. Their tall strip of windows, designed to savor a view that was now unsavory, looked down a crumbling cliff at a mud beach, the limp gray waves sluggish in stretched squares of light from the buildings edging the bluff. Down the beach some guys with flashlights were moving around, looking for the little pocket-bubbles that floated in like dead jellyfish. Thanks to the accident that had closed down the DeGroot Research Center, beyond the still-functioning chemicals plant, San Pablo Bay was a good spot to scavenge for pocket-bubbles, which was why Wendel and his dad had ended up living here.

To get to the phone, he had to skirt the mercury-like bubble of Dad's pocket, presently a big flattened shape eight feet across and six high, rounded like a river stone. The pocket covered most of the available space on the living room floor, and he disliked having to touch it. There was that sensation when you touched them—not quite a sting, not quite an electrical shock, not even intolerable. But you didn't want to prolong the feeling.

Wendel touched the speakerphone tab. “Hello, Bell residence.”

“Well this doesn't sound like Rothman Bell.” It was a woman's voice coming out of the speakerphone; humorous, ditzy, but with a heartening undercurrent of business.

“No ma'am, I'm his son Wendel.”

“That's right, I remember he had a son. You'd be about fourteen now?”

“Sixteen.”

“Sixteen! Whoa. Time jogs on. This is Manda Solomon. I knew your dad when he worked at MetaMeta. He really made his mark there. Is he home?”

He hesitated. There was no way to answer that question honestly without having to admit Dad was in a pocket, and pocket-slugs had a bad reputation. “No ma'am. But . . .”

He looked toward the pocket. It was getting smaller now. If things went as usual, it would shrink to grapefruit size, then swell back up and burst—and Dad would be back. Occasionally a pocket might bounce through two or three or even a dozen shrink-and-grow cycles before releasing its inhabitant, but it never took terribly long, at least from the outside. Dad might be back before this woman hung up. She sounded like business, and that made Wendel's pulse race. It was a chance.

If he could just keep her talking. After a session in a pocket Dad wouldn't be in any shape to call anyone back, sometimes not for days—but if you caught him just coming out, and put the phone in his hand, he might keep it together long enough, still riding the pocket's high. Wendel just hoped this wasn't going to be the one pocket that would finally kill his father.

“Can I take a message, Ms., um . . .” With his mind running so fast he'd forgotten her name.

“Manda Solomon. Just tell him . . .”

“Can I tell him where you're calling from?” He grimaced at himself in the mirror by the front door. Dumbass, don't interrupt her, you'll scare her off.

“From San Jose, I'm a project manager at Endless Media. Just show him—oh, have you got iTV?”

“Yeah. You want me to put it on?” Good, that'd take some more time. If Dad had kept up the payments.

He carried the phone over to the iTV screen hanging on the wall like a seascape; there was a fuzzy motel-decor photo of a sunset endlessly playing in it now, the kitschy orange clouds swirling in the same tape-looping pattern. He tapped the tab on the phone that would hook it to the iTV, and faced the screen so that the camera in the corner of the frame could pick him up but only on head-shot setting so she couldn't see the pocket too. “You see me?”

“Yup. Here I come.”

Her picture appeared in a window in an upper corner of the screen, a pleasant looking redhead in early middle age, hoop earrings, frank smile. She held up an e-book, touched the page turner which instantly scrolled an image of a photograph that showed a three-dimensional array of people floating in space, endless pairs of people spaced out into the nodes of a warped jungle-gym lattice, a man and a woman at each node. Wendel recognized the couple as his dad and his mother. At first it looked as if all the nodes were the same, but when you looked closer, you could see that the people at some of the more distant nodes weren't Mom and Dad after all. In fact some of them didn't even look like people. This must be a photo taken inside a pocket with tunnels coming out of it. Wendel had never seen it before. “If you print out the picture, he'll know what it's all about,” Manda was saying.

“Sure.” Wendel saved the picture to the iTV's memory, hoping it would work. He didn't want Manda to know their printer was broken and wouldn't be repaired anytime soon.

“Well it's been a sweet link but I gotta go–just tell him to call. Here's the number, ready to save? Got it? Okay, then. He'll remember me.”

Wendel saw she wasn't wearing a wedding band. He got tired of taking care of Dad alone. He tried to think of some way to keep her on the line. “He'll be right back—he's way overdue. I expect him . . .”

“Whoops, I really gotta jam.” She reached toward her screen, then hesitated, her head cocked as she looked at his image. “That's what it is: You look a lot like Jena, you know? Your mom.”

“I guess.”

“Jena was a zippa-trip. I hated it when she disappeared.”

“I don't remember her much.”

“Oops, my boss is chiming hysterically at me. Bye!”

“Um—wait.” He turned to glance at the dull silvery bubble, already bouncing back from its minimum size, but when he turned back, Manda Solomon was gone and it was only the showy sunset again. “Shit.”

He went to the bubble and kicked it angrily. He couldn't feel anything but “stop,” with his sneaker on. It wasn't like kicking an object, it was like something stopped you, turned you back toward your own time flow. Just “stopness.” It was saying “no” with the stuff of forever itself. There was no way to look inside it: once someone crawled in through a pocket's navel, it sealed up all over.

He turned away, heard something—and when he looked back the pocket was gone and his dad, stinking and retching and raggedly bearded, was crawling toward him across the carpet.

+   +   +

Next morning, it seemed to Wendel that his Dad sucked the soup down more noisily than ever before. His hands shook and he spilled soup on the blankets.

His dad was supposedly forty—but he looked fifty-five. He'd spent maybe fifteen years in the pockets—adding up to only a few weeks in outside time, ten minutes here and two hours there and so on.

Dad sat up in his bed, staring out to the bay, sloppily drinking the soup from a bowl, and Wendel had to look away. Sitting at the breakfast bar that divided the kitchenette from the rest of the room, he found himself staring at the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. They needed some kind of hamper, and he could go to some Martinez garage sale and find one next to free. But that was something Dad ought to do; Wendel sensed that if he once started doing that sort of thing, parental things, his dad would give a silent gasp of relief and lean on him, more and more; and paradoxically fall away from him, into the pockets.

“I was gone like—ten minutes world-time?” said Dad. “I don't suppose I missed anything here in this . . . this teeming hive of activity.”

“Ten minutes?” said Wendel. He snorted. “You're still gone, Dad. And, yes, there was a call for you. A woman from Endless Media. Manda Solomon. She left her number and a picture.”

“Manda?” said Dad. “That flake? Did you tell her I was in a pocket?”