Master of Space and Time (9 page)

1.
Gary's parents were scientists
. Two clean-cut people in white smocks. She holds a test tube, he holds a Geiger counter.

2.
Their world was full of trouble
. Weapons, broken liquor bottles, bloody faces, a background of psychedelic music symbols.

3.
And God had been forgotten
. A drunk sleeping on the steps of a looted temple.

4.
God spoke to Gary's parents
. They stand in a roomful of machines, staring up into streaming light.

5.
And told them what to do
. She leans over a microscope, while he handles some radioactive material with tongs. Her belly is swollen.

6.
Gary Herber was born on June 25
. The parents lean over a radiant cradle. The cradle contains a naked brain with a spinal cord.

7.
Gary's brother, Seth, was scared
. The brain floats
in a tank of nutrient. A dirty, unattractive boy peers at it from around a doorjamb.

8.
God told Seth to share
. Seth kneeling next to the brain's tank, his face blank with religious ecstasy.

9.
Seth and Gary grew together
. Gary is riding the nape of Seth's neck. Seth is clean and happy-looking, writing answers on a blackboard.

10.
They began to teach God's Laws
. Lean and charismatic, Seth is standing on a soapbox preaching to a crowd. The naked brain is hidden beneath Seth's coat.

11.
These are God's Laws
. A stone tablet with three laws chiseled in:

Tad thrust the bottle at me again. Reluctantly I looked up from the comic. The bottle was almost empty and Harry was drunk. He was sitting on Tad's bed with his arm around Sondra. They were kissing.

“No thanks, Tad.” I turned my attention back to the comic. “Is this all true?”

“They omit to mention where Gary wig and drink all a woman's spinal fluid. She croaked and the Herbers got the chair.”

I read on.

12.
Gary's disciples shared him
. Smiling Seth is setting Gary down on an attractive woman's naked
back. Many cheering faces in the background.

13.
But there were enemies
. Three swarthy, low browed men sitting at a table with money and whiskey. One shows a legal document to his gloating comrades.

14.
Seth and Gary were arrested
. Faceless police officers in riot helmets drag humpbacked Seth away from weeping women and children.

15.
The public electrocution
. Seth is strapped into an electric chair. A special wire leads to Gary, naked on Seth's back. A crowd is watching.

16.
The Blessed Scionization
. Seth is dead and smoking. But Gary is much bigger than before. He bulges out like a cauliflower, and pieces of him are splitting off.

17.
Soon Gary was everywhere
. An army of men, women, and children, each with a naked brain riding on his or her back. They are constructing a palace.

18.
Don't you want to share?
The tablet of God's Laws, the electric chair, and a cheerful brain float together in a space of light.

19.
Come to the Palace this Thursday!
Two happy children, a boy and a girl, walk up the marble steps of a splendid white building.

I closed the comic and looked up. Tad and Sondra were arguing. Harry was really out of it, and Tad had just given him another bottle.

“Why do you give him so much to drink?” Sondra demanded.

“It's like the sight of someone about to flip excites me,” Tad said, reaching up to fondle his hatband. “I like to crack them open and feed on the wonderful soft stuff that ooze out.”

Sondra looked at Tad with real dislike. “You're awful! A wirehead, a drunk, a gay—”

Tad leered at her, forming his face into a caricature of heterosexual lust. “What are these strange feelings that come over me when I look at those tits sticking out so cute? No, no!” He held his hand as if to shield his face, then sidled over to drape his arms across my shoulders. “You and me could really exist, Joe.”

Harry was taking this all in with drunken relish.

“We don't have very much time,” I said, fending off Tad's advances. He was a real old-time degenerate.

Harry chugged from the new bottle and tossed it back to Tad. I didn't see how they could stomach the stuff. I felt sick from the one taste of it I'd had.

“Just tell us where to find Gary Herber,” said Sondra. “And we'll be on our way.”

“It's not going to be as easy as we thought,” I told her. “Herber is all over the place. He's a sort of parasite that grows on people's backs. But what was that about a palace, Tad?”

“Gary's palace,” said Tad, smiling loosely. “Ten blocks east of here. The palace is for the boss slug. The king-size Herber that grows the buds. Granpaw brain. We'll hold him still with that pink gun and work out. Do it hard TV so's the citizens down home can share the harvest plenty.” Tad seemed almost as drunk as Harry.

Sondra and I exchanged looks of concern. It was well past eleven.

“We really have to get moving,” I repeated.

“Don't you want to try on my hat, Joe? It has a
left-brain/right-brain feedback loop. Feel real wiggy.”

“No!” cried Sondra. “Let's go before it's too late!”

We clattered down the stone stairs to the street, Harry leaning heavily on Tad and me. Sondra flew down ahead of us.

“Do you want me to drive, Harry?”

“Naw, naw, I'm shuperman. I'll shober up when I hafta. You wanna gun, Tad? Look in the glove compartment.”

Tad found himself a heavy .45 automatic. We all got in the Cad. Both of the windshields were broken—the police laser had broken the back, and Tad's rock had broken the front. Harry gunned the engine up to a chattering scream, and peeled out into a teleportation jump.

W
E
were speeding down a broad boulevard, a tropical
allée
with rows of royal palms: tremendous palm trees each with ten meters of bare trunk topped by a luxuriant green frizz-bop of swordy leaves. The pavement was smooth marble. There was quite a bit of traffic: official vehicles, merchants' vans, tour buses, commuters. But there was no real congestion—everyone drove according to the book. The cars moved like cautious ants, and the pedestrians marched back and forth like windup toys.

Far ahead of us, tiny in the distance, was a cordon of white-uniformed palace guards. Beyond the guards lay bright ornamental gardens leading to the palace itself, a vast, minaretted structure something like the Taj Mahal.

I was in the back seat with Tad Beat. He twitched
his head this way and that, keeping a restless eye on things. Harry, in front, lolled drunkenly in his seat, pawing at Sondra's exposed thighs and protesting in slurred tones each time she slapped his hand away. Our Cadillac lurched through the traffic, narrowly missing several collisions.

“He's juiced,” Tad said to me, jerking his head toward Harry's slumping shoulders. Tad kept one hand on his hat, holding it tight against the slipstream of air that whistled through the car's two broken windshields. “That's the cool way to be around the palace. The slugs can't handle juice. You, Joe, you're nowhere. You'll end up dead or a Herberite, I'll tell you now.”

Tad's words sent a chill through my veins. With Harry so drunk, what chance did we stand against those guards? If I died here, would I really be dead? This was really just a kind of dream, wasn't it? Yet what if you have a dream so bad that you die of a heart attack during the dream? Perhaps
every time
someone dies in his sleep of a heart attack, the attack is in fact coupled with a dream of overwhelming power in which the person experiences death in great detail. Who can tell?

The palace guards were only some fifty meters ahead of us now. They could see there was something fishy about us. As we drew closer, they raised their weapons and aimed.

“All right,” said Harry in his normal voice. He'd willed himself sober, just like that. He sat up straight and stepped on the gas. “Beam them, Fletch. You can shoot over my shoulder.”

I dialed my disintegrator ray to maximum fan and blasted away. I was already a murderer from
smashing that supermarket manager's spine-rider. Kill one, kill twenty. Most of the palace guards turned to dust. The survivors took to their heels. I retched up a mouthful of stomach acid. Killing wasn't something I could learn to enjoy.

Harry kept the hammer down, and we smashed through a set of ironwork gates. There were marble stairs up ahead. We took them like we had square wheels. The lovely gardens were all around us, fountains and geometric beds of flowers. Some pretty women with bare backs were lounging on the lawns.

A hot beam of red laser light speared down from one of the palace's slim watchtowers. The beam burned a hole in our Cadillac's hood, and then the engine died.

“I'll handle that,” said Harry. He aimed his time-reversing ray gun at the distant laser cannon. Our engine started back up, the hole in the hood sealed over, and the laser energy returned to its source. Smoke poured out of that slim minaret—smoke and screams.

Our car stumbled up a last marble staircase and coughed to a stop. The four of us jumped out, guns at the ready. We were standing under a huge, pillared portico. Before us was the palace entrance, a Moorish arch with massive bronze doors. The doors were open and unguarded.

I felt weak and sick, but Harry's drunkenness was miraculously gone. Master of space and time.

Sondra was in high gear. “What's your anti-self going to look like, Harry? Tad and Joe say it's a giant slug. Let's be sure to steal some jewels after we kill it. I guess you know it's already eleven
twenty-five? We better hurry. I can't wait for my friend Donna to see my new look. Maybe I'll go on TV. Do you think Dr. Bitter will approve?”

“That big Gary Herber's in the central courtyard,” said Tad. “Let's hang real tight.”

He went in first, then Harry and Sondra, then me.

Something dropped onto the nape of my neck just as I walked through the door
.

Oh, no! The soft moist Herber-slug slid down between my shoulder blades and plugged itself into my nervous system. I felt a wild tingling.

“duck into the next doorway,”
said a little voice in my head. The voice of the parasitic glob that had just taken over my will. I struggled to yell to the others, but instead I whipped in through the first doorway we passed.

“Fletch?” called Harry from the hall. “Where'd he go, Sondra? HEY, FLETCHER!”

I was running as fast as my legs would carry me. Through a cloakroom, out into a courtyard, through a door, and into a bedroom. There was a woman, a naked odalisque on a big mound of cushions. She had jet-black hair and lily-white skin. Almond eyes, a long straight nose, large nipples, heavy-duty thighs. I burrowed under her cushions like a rat taking cover. It felt nice down there: the silky cushions, the woman's odor and weight. I tried to wriggle into a position where I'd be able to . . .

“be still,”
said the voice in my head.

I stopped moving and thought a message back:
“who are you?”

“i'm a scion of gary herber, thank you for your body.”

“i wasn't really done with it yet.”
For some reason I was kind of enjoying this. The parasite kept a pleasant tingle going all through my nerves,
“you'll have to release me, i'm from another world.”

“i know, we want to go there.”

“no! you can't! it's
—”

“shhh!”

Footsteps sounded in the courtyard outside. Fat Harry, weird Tad, and sexy Sondra. They'd never find me here. I should have been screaming for help, but instead I felt like giggling. The slug had really taken me over.

“Uh, excuse me, miss, have you seen my friend?” Harry's voice.

The odalisque shifted about, but she didn't answer.

“She won't pick up on you,” said Tad. “Herber's dollies don't talk to strangers.”

“What would a giant brain want with slave girls?” asked Sondra.

“What Gary wants with women? He milks them, like. GABA fluid from their spines. You dig that plastic coupling down on her back?”

“Oooooo! Awful! Well, read her mind, Harry. You can do telepathy, can't you?”

“Stap my vitals!” exclaimed Tad. “Telepathy!”

“Yeah, I can do it,” rumbled Harry, “but that would be too—”

“Harry, in less than half an hour, our magic door out of this place is going to disappear. And now something's happened to Joe. Use your goddamn telepathy or I'll—”

“Oh, all right.”

“. . .
cushion
. . .” was all that me and my rider were thinking. A masquerade. We held our joint consciousness in the mind-set of a “. . .
cushion . . .
”