WE left Antie in charge of the store and took off in my Buick. Without Harry having to tell me, I knew where we were headed. Jack McCormack’s Stars ’n’ Bars Government Surplus.
Harry handed me a pretzel and an open beer. “Utz and Blatz, Fletcher, just think about it.”
“Tzzzz.”
We were on an incredibly built-up divided highway. There were lots of potholes. The traffic was light but intense. The government had recently repealed all speed limits in an attempt to boost oil consumption.
Businesses were slotted in side by side, not only along both edges of the highway but also all up and down the broad median strip. Such dense social tissue needs a vast traffic flow to nourish it, a flow that was no longer available in these depression times. Many of the businesses stood empty. Fly-by-night operations flitted in and out of the abandoned rent-free shells like fish in a coral reef.
COSMO FLEXADYNE!
PERSONA SCREAM-FLASH!
BLOOD AND ORGANS BOUGHT AND SOLD!
FETISH MEGAMART!
ETHICAL REPROGRAMMING!
FLESH FISH!
NORTH JERSEY’S ONLY DOG BUTCHER!
EXCRETION THERAPY!
SKIN SHIRTS—WE MAKE OR EAT!
BAG BODY BOXING!
STARS ’N’ BARS SURPLUS!
“There it is.”
We pulled into the vast empty lot of what had once been a Two Guys discount center. The building was a weathered yellow cube with half an American flag painted on one side. A few robots loitered outside the entrance, standing guard. Jack McCor-mack, the proprietor, was a displaced redneck, deeply suspicious of city folks.
When we pulled up, Jack had been standing behind the glass doors, watching the traffic. But when he saw Harry and me, he turned and disappeared into the gloomy recesses of his domain.
“Plllease state youuur business,” intoned one of the robots, a squat K-88 with a flare ray bolted to its arm.
“Joseph Fletcher and Harry Gerber, out shopping. Jack knows us.”
“Nnnnnegatory. You willl leave the area.”
“Come on, McCormack,” shouted Harry, “you remember us. We built that beam weapon for General Moritz. The thing to make water radioactive?” That had been one of our less successful designs. Harry had lost the plans for the demonstration model, and we’d been unable to duplicate it.
“Nnnnnegatory,” hummed the robot, leveling its flare ray. “Therrre willl be no furrrtherrr warnings.” The flare ray looked truly vicious: it was something like a small industrial laser with a superheterodyne unit in back.
“We’ve got cash!” I screamed. “Two thousand dollars!”
“Well, why dintcha say so?” At the mention of money, the robot’s speaker switched from taped threats to McCormack’s lively drawl. The machine scurried to open the glass doors. “Y’all boys still owes Stars ’n’ Bars right much.”
“That’s right,” I confessed. “Five hundred dollars, wasn’t it?”
“Hot golly, les call it three!” Jack McCormack stepped forward from behind some giant spools of cable. “Assumin y’all boys is really goan spend two kay.” He was a leathery little gnome with hard blue eyes.
“Oh, we’ll spend more than that,” said Harry breezily. “Though you should realize, McCormack, that Fletcher & Company qualified for the Emergency Bankruptcy Act of ’95, so that any debts or obligations of the aforesaid corporation are void.”
“Yew fat ugly toad. Ah bet yore foreign, ain’t yew?”
“Hungarian-American. And, unlike you, with a full command of the English language.”
Looking at the two short men glaring at each other, one fat, one skinny, I had to laugh. “Look, Jack.” I took out my wallet. “Real cash. Get the truck.”
McCormack had a small pickup that you could drive around his huge store. The three of us piled in, me in the middle.
“First we need a hotshot table,” said Harry.
“Good God!” I exclaimed. “Whatever for?” The hotshot table had been a popular execution device during the early nineties, when capital punishment had made a big comeback. A hotshot table was like a hospital gurney, a bed on wheels, but a bed with certain built-in servo-mechanisms. It was a kind of mechanical Dr. Death, equipped to give fatal brain injections to condemned criminals. Lying down on a hotshot table was like lying down on a black widow’s belly. The needle would stab right down into the top of your head. The point of the thing was that it had helped resolve the AMA’s scruples about helping to kill people. But now capital punishment had been voted out again.
“That’s aw-reet,” McCormack was saying. “We got ’em in stock. New or used? Used costs extry—people buy ’em for parties, like.”
“Good God! A new one!”
“Got me one still in the crate. Over on aisle naaane.” Great mounds of machinery slid past, lit by our little truck’s headlights. Some heavy robots pounded along behind us, ready to help with the loading.
“A large vacuum pump,” said Harry. “And a walk-in refrigerator.”
“Kin do, kin do.”
“Thirty square meters of copper foil.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A mater-driven microwave cavity.”
“Got one on sale.”
The truck darted this way and that.
“A vortex coil,” said Harry. “And two meters of sub-ether wave guide.”
“Yowzah!”
“And the key ingredient—a magnetic bottle with two hundred grams of red gluons!”
“Great day in the mornin’!”
“And that’ll do it.”
“Don’t he beat all?” McCormack asked me. “Some of these bohunks is smart, and that’s no lie.”
Before too long we had everything hauled to the front of the store. McCormack fiddled with his calculator. “Ah make it tin thousand dollar.”
“Get serious.”
“It’s them gluons. They’re high, even in red.”
“Pay him,” Harry urged. “Once I get blunzed, we’ll have it all.”
“Blunzed?” inquired McCormack, glancing at Harry.
“Once I get blunzed I’ll be able to control reality,” Harry explained. “I’ll get you all the money you want.”
“Ah don’t want all the money. Ah want tin thousand dollar.”
“Uh, I have two thousand in cash, Mr. McCormack. Can I give you a check for the rest?”
McCormack threw back his head and laughed. There were cords in his skinny neck.
“How would you like to be a partner?” I suggested. “We’ll issue you some shares of stock.”
McCormack laughed harder. It wasn’t really a pleasant sound.
Harry had been off to one side, looking over our intended purchases, but now he rejoined me. “Let’s go out to the car for a minute, Fletcher. I just thought of something.”
“Ah hope ah din’t haul all this gear up front for nothin’!” complained McCormack.
“We’ll be right back,” Harry assured him. “I believe we’ve got some more money out in the car.”
McCormack’s guard robots followed us out to my Buick. “You left money out here?” I asked Harry. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Well, it just now occurred to me that I might have. When I came back from the future to your car yesterday, I could have created money and put it under your seat. It would be the obvious thing to do, right?”
I got the door unlocked and reached under the driver’s seat. Sure enough, a dense wad of bills: eight thousand dollars’ worth, exactly what we needed.
“If these are from the future, then why aren’t they real small?” I asked Harry. “Like you were.”
“I made them the right size, is all. It’s obvious. Master of space and time!”
I stared at him for a long time. “Why couldn’t you create the whole ten thousand? Why make me put up my only two?”
“You offered your money of your own free will, Fletch. You’re in this, too.”
I sighed and took all our money in to Jack McCormack. “Ten thousand, right?”
“Tin thousand and the three hunnert from before.”
Suddenly I lost my temper. The fact that I’d had eight thousand bucks in my car without knowing it really got to me.
“The deal’s off, Jack.” I turned to leave. I had an overwhelming urge to take the money back to Nancy and forget about these little guys.
“Hey now,” McCormack cried. “Y’all kin still owe me that five hunnert. And tell you whut. Ah’ll truck yore goods home free.”
“Give him the money, Fletch. Bring it to 501 Suydam, McCormack. Gerber Cybernetics. There’s an alley in back.”