"I think it was down this way," Vernor said, heading down one of the aisles. Mick and Oily Allie followed him for about twenty yards, and he stopped, "I don't know, maybe it was—"
He was interrupted by a sudden blare of noise. A gigantic forklift was rumbling down the aisle after them. Allie whirled and blasted at it with her laser, but the machine was so huge, and the laser beam so weakened, that the blasts had no effect. Quickly they rose to the roof on their sky-suckers.
At first it seemed that they were out of the machine's reach, but then the prongs of the colossal forklift reared up to some three feet below the flat ceiling. The machine rushed murderously towards them. There was no hope of out-maneuvering it with the sky-suckers, which were designed for up and down movement in open spaces. Quickly they scrambled to safety on the top of one of the stacks of crates, cutting the sky-suckers' power.
The top of the stack was a fifty-foot square, so as long as they kept back from the edges they were safe from the forklift.
"We got to get back out that hole and wait for them to knock out the microwave towers," Oily Allie said. "Thing to do is jump off the other side of the stack and sneak on around that metal mother."
Almost as if it had heard him, the forklift took three crates from one side of the pile on which they were crouching, backed up to a position under the hole they'd cut and forced the crates up so that the top one became wedged in their exit hole.
"What a fucking drag," Mick said, punctuating their stunned silence. The forklift returned and began methodically demolishing their stack; carrying boxes from it to add to one of the other stacks with tireless, mindless industry.
When their stack of crates had been whittled down to the thickness of a few boxes, they jumped down on the opposite side; cushioning the fall with the sky-suckers, which they then used to pull themselves up to the top of the next stack. The machine finished stowing away the crates that remained in the old stack, and then set to work whittling down their new territory.
"And you see what it's doing?" Vernor asked. "It's going to make a solid block of all the crates at the other end of the warehouse so it can chase us around this end."
"This is just really dumb," Oily Allie complained. "I mean if it was really important to me I could probably blast that crate out of the hole."
"Pretend it's really important to you, Allie," suggested Vernor. She aimed the laser and pressed the blast button. The corner of the box charred slightly before the laser finally gave out.
The forklift transferred another load of crates—and the badness of the situation became acute. The new gap in the crate-piles revealed Professor Kurtowski, sitting in an armchair reading a book.
"Look out, Professor!" Vernor yelled, jumping down to his rescue. The forklift tooled forward at the same instant and bumped Vernor with one of its prongs. He'd been leaning down to make a daring Douglas Fairbanks snatch-up of the Professor and was consequently knocked off his T-bar. The sky-sucker shot up to the ceiling and Vernor fell into Kurtowski's lap. Triumphantly, the prongs of the forklift came plummeting down at them. Vernor glanced quickly at the Professor's face to see how the wisest man he knew would meet death.
"That's
quite
enough, Vernor," Kurtowski said, standing up and dumping Vernor onto the floor with a baffled expression.
"Look out!" Vernor screamed, cowering on the floor as he tensed himself for the splat of the prong on Kurtowski's head. But there was no splat.
There was silence, broken finally by Oily Allie shrieking, "Run, Vernor, run!" then breaking into helpless laughter. The forklift had stopped working.
Vernor stood up. "I guess they finally knocked out those microwave antennas," he explained sheepishly to no one in particular. The Professor was standing in front of him looking from Vernor to the forklift to Mick and Oily Allie, fifty feet above them. Finally he smiled at Vernor.
"And you took Phizwhiz for a ride?" he asked.
"Yeah," said Vernor. "We shrank all the way around Circular Scale. What's been bothering me is how did I manage to come back now instead of the future? I mean when we were half the size of the universe, a second of our time was like a billion years Earth time. But here I am."
"That's a good one," said Kurtowski. "What else?"
"I'm wondering about what adding the scale loop might have done to my mind," responded Vernor. "It gave Phizwhiz a soul, or free will, or
some
thing. But I can't quite figure out what it's done to
me
."
"Maybe you should ask Phizwhiz," the Professor replied.
"He doesn't talk anymore," Vernor protested. "He just sends out this sort of loud static. Anyway,
you're
the one to ask."
Kurtowski shrugged. "We can work on it. You need your own answers, though, not mine." He gathered up some papers, then shouted up to the others, "If the local robots aren't working, out let's go over to my lab. I've been in here for weeks. Every time I try to go anywhere some machine tries to kill me. This represents, in my opinion, only a slight improvement over having them try to jail me for my own safety."
The trip to Kurtowski's lab was without incident. With the coaxial cables and the microwave towers knocked out, the machines on the Eastside were no longer possessed by a malignant intelligence . . . they were simply machines.
The loaches had left most of the apparatus in the laboratory untouched, and Oily Allie was like a kid in a toy store. She soon settled down to fool with the Professor's matter degenerator, a device which made small black holes. You threw whatever was handy into the hopper, switched on the power and WHAM . . . gravitational collapse would hit whatever you'd thrown in. All the props which hold matter "up" would be knocked out, leaving the mutual gravitational attraction of the mass particles as the only operative force.
The end-result of gravitational collapse is a singular point in the spacetime manifold, inevitably veiled by a dark sphere—our friend the black hole. Although the notion of star-sized black holes in outer space was commonplace, it had only been a few years since Kurtowski's experiments had led to the laboratory creation of small and relatively stable black holes, such as those which powered Oily Allie's sky-suckers.
Oily Allie was delighted to have the opportunity to monkey with the machine which produced these small black holes. She was trying to figure out how to turn it into a portable weapon . . . enclosing your antagonists inside a one-way event horizon would certainly be an efficacious way of getting them off your back.
Mick had settled down to another session with the music of the spheres. He'd cranked the galactic signal analyzer to full, and crouched near the machine with the earphones on, occasionally exclaiming when he recognized something he'd seen from the scale-ship.
Vernor and the Professor sat on a battered couch near where the VFG had been before the loaches took it to the EM building. "Vernor," Kurtowski was saying, "I might as well tell you, I have no idea what the VFG
really
does."
"It makes things shrink," Vernor answered.
"Ja, but what is shrinking? There are many ways of looking at it. A viewpoint which does not seem unreasonable to me is that the shrinking is accomplished by moving in a direction perpendicular to every direction we can point to in our three-dimensional space. You get smaller because you are
further away
."
Vernor looked puzzled and the Professor tried again. "If you are looking through a window, and you see a man getting much smaller, what do you conclude?"
"That he's walking away from the window."
"Right. My idea is that our three dimensional space is a window on four-dimensional space. When the VFG makes something shrink in our 'window,' it is doing this by moving it away in the direction of a fourth dimension."
There was a peevish moan from Oily Allie, followed by a high singing note that faded into silence. "Shit," said Allie quietly.
The Professor chuckled appreciatively. "What happened?" asked Vernor.
"I dropped one through the floor," Allie responded.
"Dropped what?" Vernor said, going over to see. It looked as if someone had drilled a hole in the floor next to Allie's boot.
"I made this little tiny black hole and tried to move it with the magnetic clamp, but it slipped," she said, running her hand through her tangled hair. There seemed to be nothing which would prevent the black hole from eating its way straight through the Earth and back again. Anything which it touched would disappear into the singularity at the center.
"Is this going to screw things really bad?" Allie called to Professor Kurtowski.
"No, no," said the Professor. "It's got a built-in instability. It'll pop before it eats more than a few kilotons. Try dropping it on your foot next time."
The crisis over, Vernor returned to the couch and Allie began playing again, but this time with an exaggerated caution.
"About what you were just saying," Vernor resumed. "The VFG made me shrink by moving me in a direction perpendicular to our spacetime? That would fit in with Circular Scale if that new direction was bent into a huge circle."
The Professor was quiet for a few minutes, then finally answered, "Look, Vernor, what makes you so sure that you returned to the same Earth which you left from?"
"There's only one Earth, Professor, and this is it," replied Vernor.
"That's only what you think. Remember how the electron cloud looked to you?"
Mick had finished listening to the space music, and had ambled over to sit on a chair near them. "I remember that," he interjected. "It looked like you
thought
it looked."
"That's right," the Professor responded. "There is, at certain levels, no objective external reality. There is only a probability function which interacts with your brain-states to produce illusions."
"But wait," Vernor protested. "The one thing that I see is what the real thing is. For me anyway." He didn't like this line of thought.
"But imagine that someone was observing
you
, Vernor. Perhaps you would have the appearance of existing in many simultaneous states." The Professor peered at Vernor comically. "Remember that the world you find yourself in now was found at a level
below
the atomic level."
"Remember all those different hyperspheres?" Mick put in. "He's saying that each one of them was an alternate universe!"
The Professor nodded. "Floating in Hilbert space. And...since they were shiny, there was an image of you in each of them."
"Hold on," Vernor interrupted. "Are you saying I came back in many different universes at once? Why do I just see one?"
"You just
think
this is the only one," the Professor explained. "But you think that in all the others, too."
Vernor felt confused. "Then what are you guys doing here? I mean if this isn't the same Earth that I left how did you get here?"
"Our brain states, my dear Vernor, are coupled," the Professor responded, waving his hand back and forth between their three heads. "As was borne in upon me when you dropped into my lap back in the warehouse. I was alone in there for two weeks, you know."
"Getting uncoupled," Mick suggested.
The Professor nodded. "I had always believed in principle that I exist in many parallel worlds, but by the end of those two weeks, I . . . " He broke off with a smile, then turned to Vernor. "This is
your
dream, Vernor, are you ready to wake up?"
A chasm seemed to open up around Vernor. For an instant he forgot the names of the things around him. He lost the internal monologue by which external reality is kept unique. There was no feeling of panic, rather an immense feeling of freedom.
An object moved towards him, and he SPLIT took-it/didn't-take-it, he SPLIT blinked/stared, and he SPLIT talked/kept-silent. Which?
In some world he was saying, "Do you feel this way all the time?" to a Professor Kurtowski who responded with . . . what? Every possible answer.
"How do you ever get anything done?" Vernor continued, and received another infinite response, perfectly tailored to the endless nuances that his question took on.
"It takes care of itself . . . " Mick Turner was saying when SNAP, Vernor was back to single vision. Mick and the Professor were on the couch and he was sitting on a chair near them, holding a reefer. Vernor opened his mouth, then closed it.
"So you see," the Professor continued. "It is not at all certain that your trip consisted of going around a circle of scale. I am inclined to think, rather, that what you did was jump out of one window and into another."
"And that would explain why I didn't end up a billion years in the future?" Vernor asked slowly.
"You may have jumped out the window, but you kept your glasses on," Mick suggested with mock sincerity.
"But, dammit, I saw how I went around the Circular Scale," Vernor repeated. "That's the way the universe
should
be made, anyhow. No matter, just form. No big and no small . . . every level is right in the middle. A galaxy, a person, and an atom are equally important. A billion years fit inside a nanosecond."
"It's a nice universe, Vernor," the Professor said kindly. "It's just not the only one. But you're right. For you, for all of our brain-states coupled together here, scale is circular. Fine.
As above, so below
."
There was a loud crash and Oily Allie hollered, "Duck!" Vernor turned to see a deeply black ball flying across the room towards his chest. He hit the floor and the object sailed over him, passing through the wall on the other side of the room without slowing down.
"Allie," the Professor said. "You're a walking, talking argument for the revival of the public safety movement."
"That's how we can kill off Phizwhiz," Allie was saying as she walked over. "Just lob black holes through him."
Vernor felt the justifiable annoyance of one who has narrowly escaped being killed. "Phizwhiz consists of about three-hundred linked installations all over the world, you fucking moron."