Decker 27

.Deckren concentrated hard on reviving memories of Decker, his former self. He (they?) tried to see the man who had fallen out of the Arizona desert into this strange trip....how long ago? Images of waiting tables, driving, lonely nights in that tiny apartment.... all seemed like reflections in a mist-veiled mountain stream. Eyes shut tightly, he struggled to bring that human self into focus as waves of disorientation washed over him. The sterile, flat echoes of the pressure chamber gave way to a chaos of voices, bells, electronic noises, clacking, ratcheting....the heavy smell of tobacco smoke, of deodorant and cologne, of alcohol and lust, so familiar....
Las Vegas! The three of them stood on psychedelic swirling carpet, surrounded by milling seekers. Flashing lights, green felt, spinning wheels, the ceiling perforated by constellations of color, boiling iridescent storms with chromatic lightning bolts, chandeliers, strange creatures and spacecraft circling under capacious vaults or close-hung skies. Reality was out of sync here too, Deckren thought, though the convolutions of inter-dimensional dancing somehow seemed less out-of-place in Vegas that it would elsewhere.
The games of chance all seemed to be operating normally, though the denizens at the various tables and machines were an odd mix of earthly and non-earthly species, still predominantly human but not overwhelmingly so. Scantily clad kangaroos served drinks and lit cigarettes, scaly rabbits fussed over their chips, bespectacled androids watched intently as dealers flipped cards, ambulatory octopoids monopolized rows of one-armed bandits, web-fingered humanoid bats plunked down stacks on red or black, odd or even. No one seemed perturbed by the incongruous mix of entities that swept like slow tides across the still-solid floors.
Still struggling to get their bearings, the Deckrens scanned the crowd for any sign of Furge or their Decker-self. Coxli leapt onto a row of slot machines and started pulling handles randomly. They crisscrossed the huge room, trying to cover as much territory as they could, while the little lizard-man scampered and scaled, fiddled and chittered. They were ready to give up on finding Furge when the noises of the big room began to dampen in a slow wave, starting from a down escalator near the center.
Behind crimson mirrored shades, resplendent in a bone-white Italian suit, matching oversized fedora with a blood-red band, broad, blood-red tie, and red patent leather penny loafers, surrounded by slender, well-endowed and near-naked females of several species, a gaunt, pale incarnation of Decker rode languidly down the moving stair.
He stepped off the escalator, moving like royalty through the obsequiously parting crowd. He was walking in their direction, though it was impossible to tell if he'd spotted them. He was smoking a long, slender cigarette and sipping from a brandy snifter, seeming little concerned by the fawning sycophants that approached him. Occasionally he'd bring his lips close to the ear of one of the females, whereupon she'd invariably break out in bell-like laughter.
The conversation in the big room had quieted to a bare whisper by the time the Decker incarnation was close enough for Deckren to speak to. The slot machines still chimed and beeped merrily, but all the roulette wheels had stopped and all the card tables had gone inert.
"Decker, or Furge, or whatever you're calling yourself," Deckren rasped uneasily, "remember me?"
The white-clad figure stopped and stared, unmanned at seeing two Degrens. His manner changed abruptly from gracefully regal to completely abashed. Fumbling off his sunglasses, he stuttered, "D-D-D....? Um, I..." Then his gaze hardened, and he thrust the glasses back on. There was only a slight quaver in his voice as he said, "Do I know you?"
"Of course you do, Furge!" The two Deckrens spoke simultaneously.
"I don't think I do," came the cold reply. "Now if you, er, gentlemen will excuse me, the ladies and I have some....business to attend to."
"Furge, or Decker, whoever you've become, look around you!" Deckren swung a pointed finger around the room. "Things are messed up. This is supposed to be a planet of humans, with an ordinary sky and ordinary ceilings. You don't belong here. We've got to get you out of here and back to our, er, your home planet! We might be the cause of all this weirdness!"
"Total bullshit," the confused Furge/Decker spat back. "You're with the casino, aren't you? Trying to get me to take off and leave my winning streak behind! I practically own this town now, you bastards! You know it, and you're scared shitless of me! Get out of my face!"
"Furge, you know who I am," Deckren said, "and you know who we are. This isn't right. It's messing things up in a whole lot of places, in a whole lot of ways. Come with us and we'll try to set things straight. You'll be able to come back to me-er, Degren. This set-up isn't going to hold together much longer. We've got to try!"
For a moment he looked convinced, ready to return to his old life. Then an icy glaze came over his face. "And give up this crazy party? You freaks must be nuts. C'mon, girls. Table seven is waiting for us, ready to spill poker chips on us until we've got more than we can carry. Have a nice life, er, gents!"
He made to continue on, but the two Deckrens blocked his way. A dark snarl curled his lip. "Best you step aside, boys," he uttered coldly. "The management doesn't take kindly to people messing with VIP's." He waved one hand and several large, dark-suited men materialized out of the crowd, sidling between the Deckrens and his posse, then he locked elbows with two of the girls and strolled toward the poker tables.
"Here's a little something to keep you happy," one of the thugs pulled a double handful of drink chits and ten dollar chips out of his jacket pockets and dropped them in front of the Deckrens carelessly. "You don't want to press the issue, take our word for it." He cracked his knuckles and spun on one heel, a move that he and his cronies must have choreographed, as they all turned in perfect synchronicity.
"Shit to the power of SHIT!" Deckren stood, teeth clamped firmly together; angry, indecisive. Then the seriousness of the situation galvanized him. He brushed through the crowd, the other Deckren at his shoulder. They marched past the small army of black-suited goons toward the poker tables. The goon who had spoken to them tried to grab him by the shoulder.
"Um, excuse me, si-" Taken aback by the adamant strength of Deckren's shrug, Goon One practically hit the floor, but managed to regain his balance. "Okay, we've got a couple of wise guys here," he said as he motioned to his crew to close on the two Deckrens, "but let's see if we can keep the disturbance to a minimum. Watch out, they're stronger than they look."
There were nine of them. They fast-walked up to make a semicircle behind the Deckrens, then closed it up to form a full ring. Goon One was at the nexus now, facing them. "Sirs, this is your last warning. If you don't intend to stop harassing the clientele, we will be forced to eject you from the premises."
The Deckrens shrugged and moved to walk past. Goon One grabbed his left shoulder, this time determined to hang on even if it caused pain. Deckren brought his left arm up and over, locking his elbow over the man's rather ham-like forearm, then let his knees go limp and his body drop straight down. When the pressure on the man's elbow was almost equivalent to Deckren's weight, he lifted his right knee and turned his left shoulder inward. Before the big man could get his legs under him, he was being urged painfully toward the floor. He tried to swing a left-handed roundhouse into Deckren's midsection, but Deckren had already set his feet and sprung into a forward roll, still holding the arm bar. The reversal of inertia was too quick to compensate for, and Goon one had no choice but to fall under the pressure or have his shoulder dislocated.
In the meantime, the other Deckren was keeping several of the other goons at bay by spinning like a dervish and leaping six feet straight into the air, unleashing with the occasional devastating circle kick when one of them got too close. Two were already incapacitated when Deckren bum-rushed Goon One's face into the stiff carpet and concurrently slipped in a well-placed palm edge at the side of the bullish neck.
The other six goons stood confused for a second before rushing silently but menacingly toward the two Deckrens. When the two sinuous, gray-furred men passed through each other in a front flip phalanx, they were too dumbfounded to defend themselves; four heels struck behind four ears, and then there were two. The two took up defensive crouches, to little avail; the Deckrens feinted, then blurred in with sleeper holds. With minimal fuss, the nine big security men were sleeping like babies.
Furge was oblivious to the fray, firmly ensconced in his poker game. When the Deckrens appeared behind him and each put a hand on his shoulder, he jumped like a scared armadillo.
"You're going to need to show us to your room immediately," they both urged him. With a meaningful glance at the prostrate goons, they lifted him from the chair. He allowed them to lead him to the up escalator.
"Um, Stephie's got my room key," he said, pointing at a lissome female with mouse fur and semi-human but splendidly attractive features. Gotta get it from her."
"Bring all your girlfriends, Furge," Deckren said, "Wouldn't want any of them to feel left out!"
They made it to Furge's suite without further incident. It took up an eighth of the twenty-second floor, stretching out before them in wide-open opulence.
"Call the main desk and tell them you don't want to be disturbed, Fu-er, Decker, or whatever you are," Deckren growled. It was really disconcerting to be looking at this odd incarnation of himself, his lover, feeling homesick, feeling.....what? Unrequited? Alienated?
Coxli appeared at the door just as it was starting to close behind the other Deckren, dragging a tablecloth full of coins and chips behind him. "Holy Hindu headwrap, Hedwig, here's a helluva hootenanny, hey?" He was winded by his exertions, but obviously exuberant.
"Coxli, what the hell are you going to do with all that?" Deckren shook his head, then turned to make sure Furge was making the call. "You are coming with us, Fu-" another combination name popped into his head, almost making him laugh out loud, "u-um, Decker... you know that, right?"
"I don't know anything of the sort, fuzzball! Yeah, kick my ass if you want, but I'm not coming with you willingly! Where the fuck would you take me, anyway? Fuzzball land?"
It suddenly dawned on Deckren. "You don't remember anything, do you? Your spirit quest, our home together... do you remember any of it?"
Being in this odd incarnation of Las Vegas wasn't helping Deckren's memory, either. He tried to bring back scenes from his time in Arizona, from Minnesota... it was all pretty hazy. The only things that held clear came after he'd eaten the peyote. So Furge probably only had memories going back to the moment when he'd come to Earth.
"You don't really have much of a memory, do you, Furge? You probably don't even remember that name, Furge... don't you want to know who you are, where you came from? I mean, are you content with just falling out of the sky, full grown, in Sin City? What a shallow, meaningless little existence, Furge!"
"I-I don't know who this Furge dude is you keep calling me, but I'm Decker, Decker Quall! Here, wanna see my driver's license?"
"Where did you grow up, Decker Quall? Who's your mother, your dad? Who did you know before you came to this freaked-out, avalanching cesspool of a bad movie?"
"This is my life, and I'm keeping it!" Decker/Furge seemed to be deeply upset about his lack of a past, but not so much that he wanted to give up the party. "I may not know who I was, but I know who I am, and it's all going my way here! Why would I want to change my luck?"
"Because you're changing everybody's luck, dickweed, and yours isn't gonna stay so good if you stay here, I can assure you!" Deckren's head was starting to reel, and the walls of the suite were beginning to breathe in color. "We've got to get you out of here before the whole timespace shittle-crack does a big ol' backflip, leaving nothing but some dirty toilet paper where Aunt Wednesday's back yard used to be!"
"You're making less and less sense, fuzzball. What difference could I possibly make?"
"Look at how your luck is running, pasty-boy. How could that be normal? You're at the nexus of something, or something."
"Your lizard buddy is having the same luck as me, fuzzball," Furge said as he scratched at his cheek, discomfited to feel a thin coat of soft fur there. "Now what the hell... what did you do to me?"
Deckren squinted in the pulsing light. Dude was growing fur just like his... what did that mean? "You... um, we...." Why couldn't he think? "Coxli! Deckren! We've got to get back to, um, the turtle guy, the duck..." He made a grab for Furge, who almost managed to elude him, then dragged him toward the other Deckren, concentrating as hard as he could on the weird pressure chamber he was pretty sure he'd come from, not too long ago... Furge seemed to melt into him a little, but the other Deckren was still a long arm's reach away as the suite started to fade....

Decker 26

The two Aidas stood at dueling distance, eying each other suspiciously, uncharacteristically taciturn. Degren and Decker kept a careful distance from one another as well; the ramifications of their recent body-swap was more a motivation for this than their disquieting mutual attraction. Coxli perched on one of the three arcing tables in the huge hyperbaric chamber, munching something that looked like a granola bar and letting his saucer-eyed gaze flit nervously from one face to the next in no discernible order.
"By Bacchus' absinthe-steeped bib, I've no plausible explanation for the temporo-spatial distortion you experienced." Tut's left flipper tapped meaningless Morse code on the flat of his shell as his right adjusted and re-adjusted his huge soda-bottle-bottom spectacles. "I've read and re-read the manual, and the settings I engaged were for surveillance only. According to current science, physical laws disallow any possibility of reality transference when the device is so engaged. There should have been no physical interaction possible while you were in the Cradsell 4 virtual transmission!"
"The only change is constant, or some such drivel, I seem to misremember," Coxli addressed the distant metal ceiling, trying to imitate the disgruntled turtle's professorial tone."Methinks the machine is kaput-ski."
"With shit as warped as it is," one of the Degren/Decker clones observed, "who's to say whether anything is real or virtual? I'm less and less convinced that I'm not laying on a piss-stained mattress in a busted-up shack in the Arizona desert, tripping my brains out. Or maybe more and more convinced. I mean, hells bells, people! How could this be a hallucination, or...how could it not? Am I making any sense?"
Degren/Decker nodded his head, confused, wondering whether he'd been the one who'd spoken. "Anyway, what's next?"
The walls of the chamber were beginning to distort; a little like pea soup coming to a slow simmer under dull cellophane with areas of color glowing through. The floor still seemed stable. Decker/Degren had a minor epiphany. "Okay, so what if it wasn't the device that caused the temp-er, made us actually 'go there'?"
Tut's leathery pate crinkled dubiously. "The odds against gratuitous travel to the point specified by the device while in surveillance mode are astronomical."
"But what if it wasn't gratuitous? What if it was our intent that, er, took us there? Everyone here knew where we were, um, going."
Tut still appeared dubious, but it was easy to imagine the gears turning inside his skull. "Cognizance and collective intent...conscious sine wave alignment...hmm.." He seemed almost to vanish into his own thought processes.
"Well, we've lost Tut for the moment," Decker/Degren said, and nodded to himself. "Let's do a little layman's experiment. Let's imagine a scene we've all witnessed and see if we can bring it up without the machine."
Coxli quivered as warning-light colors radiated across his scaly hide. "Negative, negative, numbskull! Never nudge neck into noose, ninny!"
The two Aidas were as rotating poles around the chamber, still eying each other suspiciously. "I'm not imagining anything," one said, pointing a wing, "until we identify this feathered hussy!" The other giant duck doppelganger-ed the pose, replying, "Everyone here knows who I am. Who are you?"
Degren/Decker let an exasperated groan slip between his teeth. "Aida, meet Aida. We've somehow managed to pull versions of you from different timelines into the same one. I had read in some old science fiction books that there was some kind of physical law that would make that impossible or dangerous or some such, but here you both are, one and the same. I'd say kiss and make up, but you might explode, or tear the fabric of space/time, but then...well, who knows? Are we going to just hang around marking time until something even weirder happens? If this is my peyote dream, I'm vetoing that plan."
Each Aida stood dumbfounded for a moment, then cautiously waddled in for a closer inspection of the other as recognition dawned simultaneously in their eyes.
"Heavens, I'd thought Tut was tossing me over for one far more attractive than I! You are a gorgeous example of the species, aren't you, dear?"
"My thoughts exactly, Lady Aida," the other giggled. With the tension broken, the two ducks waddled off to the perimeter to converse.
"That's one distraction taken care of," one of the Degrens muttered."Shall we get down to cases? What's our next move?"
Tut seemed to be surfacing from the sea of equations that he had been immersed in. He pulled off his glasses and absentmindedly wiped at the lenses. "I begin to see an hierarchy of integration emerging. The temporo-spatial matrix is at some sort of duality or multiplicity nexus, as evidenced by the recent doubling of Aida and the uncanny morphing of the Decker/Degren fractal. As the time/space segregation fabric dissolves, the laws of coincidence manifest as a fractal paradox. By my surmise, more such doublings are likely to manifest, possibly at an exponential rate. I am troubled, however, by the notion that there may be a third Decker/Degren entity in the flux. The Furge entity is, logically, another "doubling". But that would indicate a fourth, you see? It doesn't seem to fit that we haven't any evidence of a complementary entity for Furge."
"Whatever. Shit shit SHIT, man! You're the damned genius turtle, what do we do now? Do we have time for all this goddamned extrapolation?"
"Er, you may have a point, Deg-er,... you may have a point. Perhaps the search parameters of the device will allow us to focus on...no, there doesn't seem to be a function for DNA coding... but we would be well served to locate the Furge entity...."
"I have an idea," A Deckren said. "Get me to the southwestern U.S., and I'll focus my thoughts on my Decker memories; look for myself in your, um, timespace matrix. Furge has most likely transformed into me, right?"
"That is one possibility. What leads you to surmise that you could direct the focus of the device?"
"We directed the function of it on Cradsell. We were only supposed to be able to view the scene, not interact in it. That was us, not the machine."
A glowing blue-green trickle on the chamber wall caught Deckren's eye. He blinked and looked again. Still there. It oozed out of a pea soup bubble and seemed to flow back into another a foot or so below. Scanning the chamber brought several more little streams to his attention. "Um, well, whatever we're gonna do, we'd better get on it, unless those leaks are just me hallucinating."
"Though I can no longer discern which of you Deckrens is speaking at any moment, I will confess that your line of reasoning seems sound." Tut waved a flipper toward the device. "My own cogitative process seems less transparent. Though your limited. er, plan would stretch the definition of advisability, evidence suggests that you are more attuned to this temporo-spatial disturbance than I."
While Tut prepared the device, Deckren tried to remember who he had been before the peyote trip. It brought his heart into his throat to note that he saw himself as a soft-furred desert denizen; his memories of life on "Earth" were almost as dreamlike as his current existence. "Decker. Decker..." Wait. Furge! Wasn't it Furge they were looking for? He glanced at his other self, who was just looking up at him. "We need to think of both", they blurted simultaneously.
"Here is a map of the Southwestern United States," Tut offered. "Kindly offer me a coordinate."
"Well, Decker was here," Deckren pointed to the middle of Arizona, "but his destination was way up here." His finger now rested over east central Minnesota. "What Furge would do is beyond me. He would probably go where the wind took him."
"Let us assume, then, that his movements would be random with a slight bias to the north northeast." Tut calibrated the unit and waved them into the device's area of effect.
"Anyone else coming?" Deckren intended it as a joke, but Coxli surprised them all by racing over.
Numb my nictating nostrils, I never needed numbskull nudges, but now I'm not feeling nice about napping in this nervous now. Engage, ninny!" He shook his scaly finger at the dumbfounded turtle. The three strange beings clustered up and Tut hit the switch

Decker #25

Aida and Coxli, brought together by their shared disinterest in the technical aspects of Tut's explanations, occupied a small table strategically placed at the greatest distance from Tut's work station and conversed over a light lunch that she had brought back from the cafeteria.
"The device, described in the instructions as a chronospace projector, is designed to operate in a stable space/time matrix," Tut said. "With the level of flux as it is, I'd strongly caution against using any of its features other than surveillance."
"But we could bring Furge back with it, right?" Decker eyed the open case hopefully.
"Under ideal circumstances, I would postulate it had that capacity. I am somewhat dubious that it will even serve its virtual functions within the parameters of the current disturbance. Additionally, it draws a rather significant quantity of energy for even its simplest operations. With the additional strain on both the projector and our generation capacity, I am less than hopeful regarding our ultimate success."
"So you're saying it's risky."
"That is one potential permutation of what I am saying."
"There seems to be little to lose," Degren said, "and a lot to gain. Bringing Furge back and returning us all to our proper places could go a ways toward healing this rift, don't you think?"
Tut sighed. "It's impossible to speculate as to the cause or effect of our current situation without significantly more information. It is much more likely that your displacement was a minor side effect of some greater disturbance."
"Well, let's investigate, then!" Decker pointed at the machine. "Get that thing fired up and we'll go on a fact-finding mission or three. In the process of investigation, we'll look for Furge."
"If it's all the same to you guys," Coxli said, "I'll stay here and take notes. My dear mother, rest her soul, told me I was allergic to chronospace projection. I'm not ready to find out if I've outgrown my sensitivity."
"As far as I can tell, no one will be doing any actual traveling when we engage the initial function of the projector," Tut said. "According to what I've been able to discern from the instructions, the subjects find themselves surrounded by a complete sensory virtuality of the target event sequence. The subjects never actually leave their origin modality. So, if the projector is operating optimally, there will be little risk. However, given the overlap we are experiencing, it's difficult to hypothesize as to what mode of reality will be represented within its field."
"Sounds sketchy to me," Coxli shrugged, "so if it's all the same to you...."
"Yeah, yeah." Decker shot the lizard-man an impatient glare, then turned to Tut. "Let's get this show on the road, Professor!"
"Very well." Tut pulled a pair of gossamer-thin, almost invisible suits out of the case and handed one to Decker and one to Degren. "Put these on. They are designed to form-fit to most known sentient somatypes. They provide a locus for the chronospace projector, as well as generating a simulacrum of the target events for the wearer. In the actual travel mode, they become the vehicle for the subject, able to transceive energy from the projector and real-time data from the subject's current locus. As long as you are in the surveillance mode, you will remain here where we can see you. Should the 'travel' mode be engaged, our only contact with you will be aural. It should be a reciprocal link."
"So we'd be able to talk with you, but that's all."
"Yes. Should we decide to use the 'travel' function, I'll send a few recording devices with you so that we aren't only relying on your perceptions."
"Alright," Decker said, "let's give it a go."
"I'll start with a locus that's familiar to all of us," Tut said. "Target A: House Thure on Cradsell 4. Let's see, spectrum blue, phase shift at the seventeenth harmonic factor...yes, that should approximate the locus.....ready, gentlemen?"
The two men gave the thumbs-up.
"...and off you go!"
Suddenly, Degren felt a breeze and the warmth of the sun on his face. The random angles of House Thure loomed before him, seemingly returned to normalcy since the last time he'd seen it on the screen of Tut's hastily-assembled, now-defunct time/space contraption. He thought he caught a glimpse of Aida in one of the house's upper windows; he blinked and shook his head, knowing she'd come through the old device with Tut. When he looked back up, she was gone.
The water of the pond seemed to be boiling as it overflowed its boundaries. It cascaded across terraces, spreading down the hillside as he pond welled, impossibly mushroom-like, above its stone boundaries, seeming to defy gravity. There was a sort of slow-motion feel to things as he followed Decker toward the side door of the house. He sensed that Decker, too, had glimpsed Aida in the upstairs window, and was going to investigate.
Tut's voice rang from nowhere in his ears. "What do you see, gentlemen?"
"Thought I saw Aida in the house," Decker said. "Going to check it out."
"I'm not certain how the projector will handle your change in elevation," Tut cautioned, "Kindly attempt to keep up a running dialogue so that we can monitor your situation. For some reason, you are not visible to us at this time."
"OK. Degren, maybe we should stick together, huh? Seems like they always split up in the stories to cover more ground, and it's always a bad idea."
"Will do. Who's going to be the jabberer first?"
"You asked, you got it. Remember which stairs led to Aida's room?"
"Nope. Never came in or out this door, either. And things look different in here anyway. More halls."
"More halls?" Tut sounded perplexed. What do you mean?"
"I mean more halls," Degren said, "like you could go a bunch more different ways at every turn now than the last time we were here. It seemed weird then how there were no right angles, but now it's like, I dunno, four-dimensional."
"Disturbing," Tut muttered. "Four dimensional tessellation? Tesseract effect? I don't like it, gentlemen. Perhaps you should return to the projection site."
Degren glanced out a window toward the pond. "I don't think that's going to be possible, Tut, unless our projections can walk on water. The spot we started from looks pretty flooded."
"Flooded? What?"
"Yeah, the pond is acting weird, overflowed its walls like a floppy souffle. Getting pretty crazy out there. Water is turning kind of glow-y turquoise, blopping around like slow-motion gelatine."
"Water! It's not just the river anymore!" Tut was in a panic. "The river has suffused into the normal water supply on Cradsell 4! Things are decaying faster than I had anticipated. Gentlemen, I am going to bring you back now."
"Wait!" Decker raced down a narrow corridor, with Degren hot on his heels. "That's Aida's room right over there. She was here, Tut. This won't take long."
"Decker, the paradox effect..."
"Just a sec, Tut!" He swung the door open, and there she was. "Aida! Quick, come with me!"
"Do I know you, sir? What are you doing in my-"
"No time!" He pulled open his suit, stretching it as far as he could from his body, and dived over the flustered duck. "Okay, Tut, bring us back!"
"I'll try, Decker, but there seems to be an extra strain on the projector. Perhaps due to your spatial displacement. Engaging parallax re-integration...now."
The twisted Medieval lines of House Thure wavered and faded, and Degren found himself standing on the comfortingly solid floor of the hyperbaric chamber. Decker was sprawled on top of the vigorously protesting Aida, who calmed as she caught a glimpse of Tut.
"My dear Tut, you look so old! What in the seven moons is going on? Who are these men, and where are we?"
"This is highly irregular," Tut said. "The projector was definitely in surveillance mode, but..."
"But we were really there, weren't we, Tut?" Decker extricated himself from the suit and the duck, stood in front of the befuddled turtle. "The projector's fucking up, isn't it? Shit shit shit SHIT!"
"Perhaps it's not the projector, Deg-er, Deck...ummmmm-mm? Well, I suppose it doesn't matter. I'll call both of you Deckren. Anyway, I wonder if the barriers between realities are attenuated enough so that the projector no longer has a capacity to merely survey. This may ultimately make our task easier, though perhaps more dangerous. Of course, we merely engage in speculation at this point. I'll study the manual further."
"Tut, do you think we have time for caution? Let's keep this ball rolling, or we'll run out of time."
"Darling, you haven't answered me," Aida number two whined. What's going on here? And who is that other duck?"

Decker #24

The coat was pale blue silk, perfectly tailored to his now-gaunt form. The pants, also silk, were bone-white. His sand-colored huaraches were Italian-made, and caressed his feet as he strolled through the bustling casino, martini in hand. He noted the way the floor staff watched him; watched his drink to ensure it was never empty, watched his movements at the blackjack and roulette tables. He was a "high roller" in this casino, and in most of the other casinos on the Strip. Everywhere he went in Las Vegas, he was treated like visiting royalty.
He barely remembered how he'd gotten here, only that it was toward the end of a long debauch; cocaine lifted the alcohol's haze, and a stiff drink took the paranoid edge off the coke. A blur of motel rooms and torrid rendezvous, each more opulent than the last, had drawn him to "Sin City" along a crooked line from the Arizona desert where his memories began. It seemed as though fortune must favor him; he'd started off destitute and ill-versed in the system of exchange that these people used, but at every turn a new boon would fall on him. The jaded blonde time-share sales woman who'd picked him up on the roadside in her tall, rectangular vehicle (she'd called it an SUV, he'd since learned what that was) and offered him money to be her companion for the night, and taught him what this "money" was; the two floozies who'd come to sit at his table at the diner where the blonde had left him, who'd spent the next night in a seedy room with him, "teaching" him about sex, and next morning talked him into spending all his money on scratch-off tickets, then left him with one un-scratched ticket (it had been a ten thousand dollar winner, but they were long-gone by then); Brian, the trucker who'd befriended him and taken him into Scottsdale to get him some decent clothes and a shower; by the time he'd found himself in Las Vegas, he had a bank account that would have supported him in luxury for the rest of his life.
The days and nights of a high roller were very entertaining, he'd learned, especially when it didn't seem as though he ever lost. As he learned more about the games of chance that treated him so well, he'd begun to wonder where his luck could be coming from. Though the casinos scrutinized his every move, there was never so much as a hint that he might be cheating them, so they let him play. Through the advice of various other gamblers, he'd learned to "spread it around", going from one casino to another, only staying long enough to pocket ten thousand or so from each.
He'd developed a reputation along the Strip; there were always hangers-on who'd watch him carefully, looking for his "system", and no shortage of beautiful women willing to ply him with their "assets" to let them in on his "secret". He'd gotten to the point where he didn't even care to know it himself. As long as the money, the drugs, the drinks and the women kept coming like iron to a magnet, he'd ride the tide.
He'd called himself Decker Quall, for the purpose of opening a bank account and such things. Some papers and plastic cards he'd found among the clothing and detritus in the caved-in Arizona shack he'd woken up outside of had that name on them, written in a language that seemed unfamiliar but that he could somehow comprehend, and other information that he'd later learned was important to surviving in this land. Brian had taught him how to use the information. Now it seemed that, every time he looked at the little rectangle of plastic on which Decker's name and address were embossed, the image of the man the card had belonged to came to resemble him more and more.
Sometimes he'd have dreams in which he was someone else entirely, living in a totally different world. He'd always wake up in a cold sweat. In that other world, there were no casinos, no endless stream of attractive women ready to do his bidding, no raucous, glorious nights full of flashing lights and alcohol. Just a sparse desert with nothing to do but look for food, pray, and make love to...another man? He was repulsed at the idea, but it somehow pulled at him, too. It was a frightening idea, much like standing on a cliff edge and wondering what it would be like to....just leap. He vowed he'd never try it, and when such thoughts breached his consciousness, he shoved them frantically back into the depths. He'd occasionally been approached by other men, and at first he'd tried to be polite in declining them, but recently he'd started unleashing scorn and vitriol on those who offered such affront.
Here in the heart of organized chance, there were very few manifestations of the strange occurrences that were happening elsewhere. He was not one to listen to the news, but he'd catch an occasional snippet when he was riding in someone else's car; outside of Las Vegas, the laws of physics seemed to be unraveling and becoming fluid. Even here, every now and again, out of the corner of his eye, he'd see something coming out of nowhere that obviously didn't belong there. Well, no big deal, as people here liked to say. As long as he could keep on partying, he'd play "Decker Quall", and nothing was going to stop him. This, he thought, is the life!

Decker #23

"I, er....well, it's kind of a long story, fellas," Coxli said, leaning back on his tail and scrutinizing various patches of ceiling, "maybe there's not really time for me to tell you about it."
"By all means, Mr. Coxli," Tut said, "regale them with the details. This is not a device I have had the instance to familiarize myself with; in fact it is technology entirely beyond my ken. We shall hope that the instructions included will provide me with the necessary familiarity to utilize it, but I will require some time to peruse them." With that, he adjourned to a chair and immersed himself in the thick pamphlet.
Both men gazed fixedly at the lizard-man; his throat sac puffed in and out and blushed tangerine. "Well, um, it's kind of like...look, liver lickers, lose the litigious leers; life has likely laid me low already, lousy Limburger- "
"Coxli. Hey, Coxli!" Decker interrupted. "Relax, man. Nobody's gonna eat you, or beat you. We're just curious about where you've been for the last couple of...um, days, I guess."
"Right. Well, er...when that 'Lizzy' person came with her little army, I didn't figure you-um, we had a chance, so I decided to wait for my moment to slip out the door. They were concentrating on the two of you, which left me free to grab the thingie in the box, which I figured you wouldn't want them to get, even if they got you. And it did cross my mind that you'd get killed or captured, in which case the thingie wouldn't be worth much to you, so....I, you know, figured it might be worth something to somebody else. Hey, a guy's gotta look out for his own interests, right?"
"Anyway, I wandered around in these halls for a while, took a look at the river a couple of times- which, by the way, is getting a lot higher- and had a little nap and a snack here and there, and I was just starting to feel pretty lonely and lost when I run into Tut here. He tells me you guys are alright, and I get this really happy, tickly feeling in my belly, and even though I was raised to be a good, honest thief, I find myself wanting to bring your thingie back to you. So here I am!"
" My faith in lizard-kind," Degren exclaimed, "is restored."
Decker noticed a cool, damp sensation on the pads of his feet. "Guys, I think we're going to have to move up a level. Coxli is right; the river is coming up fast." The water was puddling in from the door, oozing through the carpet and rilling over the tile. Odd little whirlpools formed and vanished; a variety of fins, plants, periscopes, fountains and other assorted spectral anomalies appeared and faded before the two men's eyes. Decker tried to write them off as river water-induced hallucinations, but he noticed Coxli's curious downward glances and realized the lizard-man was seeing what Decker saw.
"Might be a good idea, too, to find ourselves a room that's hard to break into," Degren said. "Even though the river's probably not very navigable, our friend Lizzy seems like the resourceful type. We shouldn't count on her to get discouraged."
"Good point," Decker replied. "Let's grab Tut and move on up."
Tut seemed irritated by the interruption, but when he noticed the now-ankle-deep water around his scaly, purple-green feet, he acknowledged their concerns. "By Romulus' milk-sopped beard, this is most disheartening!" He carefully re-packed the device back into the case, slipped the thick pamphlet back into its slot, and strode for the door. "We shall give ourselves a bit of time by ascending to the fifth level; I think the hyperbaric chamber will provide the necessary security, and perhaps will serve as a last defense against the rising water, should it continue to defy cosmic laws."
"Cosmic laws?" Decker sneered. "Seems even scientific legislation is subject to the whims of criminals. What do you think is happening out there, Tut?"
"Whatever is happening isn't just 'out there', friend Decker, or Degren, or whoever you are. It's in here, over there, down there, up there, and everywhere along the stretch of cosmos connected to this temporo-spatial flow-way you know as 'the River'. Let's try the elevator, right over there. I couldn't begin to form conjecture as to cause, but it appears that a significant percentage of the normal phase barriers that prevent singularity intermix has been attenuated. The laws of chance, the laws of integration, and the laws of entropy would seem to be waltzing a tango polka, thrash-worm-style. My surmise is that events within each existential singularity, for instance the reality surrounding the place you came from, Decker, are intermingling with events taking place anywhere along the River. Event nexuses appear to be losing their integrity, thus generating plausibility overlaps. Normal entropy for each nexus has been disturbed. Down this hall, gentlemen. Rather than having a tendency toward the random, by agglomerating all timespace in a given area, one might surmise a tendency toward eventual crystallization. Leading up to that, however, my hypothesis would tend toward the illusion of chaos as possibility fields repolarize before coalescing."
"Could you give that to me in layman's terms?"
Tut cast an exasperated glare at Decker, then raised a webbed finger and blinked his eyes rapidly. "Er, the toilets of our individual realities are being flushed onto an iceberg."
"Huh?"
"Left at this juncture.As the possibility fields of all the singular realities along the river intermingle, the dimensional planes of all possibility will have to fold in on each other into a single space/time variability grid. The number of possibilities, after churning together as the fields intermix, will be divided by the number of individual space-time webs that intermix. Randomness and entropy will attenuate accordingly. The multiverse will organize."
"What's that gonna mean for us?"
"Hard to say."
"Why did I bother asking? No way we can do anything about it, right?"
"Up these stairs. I wouldn't assume that to be the case. Given that we have seen no other instances that we can identify of personality intermingling such as you have experienced, there is the possibility that, by locating the third member of your reality intermix and bringing the three of you into near proximity, we might mend the phase ruptures between the nexuses. Probabilities are slim, but we have little other recourse. To the right, the large hatch on the left side of the hall."
It looked like the entrance to Nemo's submarine, but with an LCD display and a control pad at the center instead of a sight glass. Tut handed the case to Degren and went to work on the keyboard. His clumsy-looking fingers were a blur of motion; there was no way Decker could decipher what Tut had input to the panel. There was a long, loud buzz and a mechanical hum, then a whoosh of air from a pair of floor vents that bracketed the hatch; a series of metallic "snicks" orbited the hatch twice and it swung smoothly inward. Tut beckoned them inside.
They found themselves standing in a cylindrical room, about thirty feet in diameter, which extended upward like a missile silo to a domed ceiling that was dwarfed by perspective. At the apex of the dome was a circular hatch, served by an open metal ladder that was bolted to the center of the floor. Built into the walls of the chamber were various instrument and control panels, each with a high, swiveling chair mounted on a pneumatic tube in front of it. There were three long, curved tables that formed a dashed circle halfway out from center. Tut took the case to the table most distant from the hatch.
"Occupy yourselves as you will, gentlemen," he said, "but I shall need a modicum of peace as I attempt to decipher these instructions. The green lever to the left of the hatch, when raised, will open the door, provided there is no pressure differential. When lowered, it will close the door. Down the hall to your left, right at the first corridor and three doors down on your left, there is a cafeteria and facilities for your, er, ablutions. I recommend you go in twos, leaving one behind with me to open the door on each group's return. I have programmed the door so that it may only be opened from the inside; we must protect the device from Lizzy and her minions at all costs. Now kindly leave me to my research."
"I'll be happy to stay here," Coxli volunteered, "if you'll bring me back some water and a nice snack of some bug salad."
"Chickenshit," Degren laughed, "you just don't want to risk leaving your new 'panic room'!"
"Well, let's go grab a snack and a shower," Decker said, "and decide along the way if we're brave or stupid."

Decker #22

"Holy shit. Holy triple shit!" Decker wasn't sure if he had said it, or just thought it, or if Degren had said it. "We are in a heap of fucked."
"I completely agree," Degren replied, and both men felt hysterical laughter surging in their bellies.
They dragged Tut out of the epicenter of destruction and used the recesses that his limbs had retracted into to roll him onto the flat of his shell. Only the tip of his beak-like nose protruded.
"I wonder how long he'll be in there," Decker said.
"Probably doesn't matter much," Degren replied. "The machine doesn't really look repairable, and even if Tut could fix it, I doubt there's enough time. Have you looked around recently?"
"Yeah, the walls melting and all that. I'm starting to wonder if I'm still on the same peyote trip as when I met you!"
"Fucking quadruple shit," Degren muttered despondently, causing Decker to wonder further as to who was thinking and who was talking. "I'm about to throw in the towel and start looking for something to get drunk on!"
"There's always the river water."
"What the fuck? What does it matter?"
They stared into each others eyes for a moment. Both men were still hesitant to give up completely, but what could they do? There was no way to get upriver at this point, and even if they could find their way back to Degren's world, the way was impassable where the bridge had collapsed, nearly beneath their feet. Furge was a fading memory for both of them now. Reality as they knew it, it seemed, was about to become a hodgepodge of incongruous possibilities, most from times and places neither of them could probably find familiar or even survive in.
"River water it is. Grab a cup, we'll take it 'to go' so we can come back and keep an eye on Tut."
They didn't have to go far to collect their hallucinogenic cocktail. There were six inches of water on the first landing of the stairs to the "boardwalk" level; the river had risen halfway to their floor. With a sinking feeling, they each filled their cups from the bubbling, glowing blue-green water.
Tut was still out cold when they returned, though they could see his nose move slightly in and out of his neck cavity, and an occasional flash of finger- and toenails.
One raised his cup. Throat quivering, he said, "It's been a helluva ride, and even though we've really barely met, I feel like we've known each other all our lives. There's nobody I'd rather go out with. Let's go out with a flash!"
"Pretty much what I was going to say. Bottom's up!"
They flung their empty cups at the wall; away from the wreckage of the space/time machine, just in case Tut could do anything with it. One of them sat on Tut's shell, the other dragged a chair over.
"I remember hanging around with friends, getting high in the wilderness or in someone's basement. We'd always end up laughing our asses off about the stupidest shit. Then we'd say even stupider shit, and pretty soon we couldn't stop laughing. It was weird, because I always thought, at least partly, that life generally sucked, like all that happened was you grew up and went off to spend the rest of your life workin' your ass off and having kids that were just going to do exactly what we did. Maybe it was hysterical laughter even then, you know? Like maybe there really wasn't anything to laugh about at all."
"This is getting way too much like talking to myself. Did we have the same childhood? In different realities? Oh, hey, look...the walls are changing color. The water's working."
"Water works."
Somewhere very near them, a line of Can-Can dancers in rainbow feather boas kicked and smiled while hypno-swirl-eyed koalas smoked corn cob pipes and rode carp-shaped high-speed trains over cherry jello La Brea pits where jabberwocks swam; just behind the infield wire, a gaggle of animated blue cacti cheered enthusiastically for a leprechaun pitcher who had just struck out his third seven-armed orangutan in a row, even though they swung three bats and shot eucalyptus candy laser beams from their hip-mounted anuses.
"I think it's working."
"Either that or the universe is turning inside out."
Deep melancholy came over them, and the scenes around them settled in to the end of the night at Rick's Café Américain, in shadowy black and white. Bogie was sad-eying women as they left in groups of five and six, partner-less and desperate. Nazi penguins, outraged that last call had come so soon, were shooting at the lone, slowly spinning ceiling fan, spraying clouds and shards of plaster over the remaining, depressed barflies, half of whom had their heads on the bar and hardly seemed to notice. Lizzy stood behind a potted palm, talking on a cell phone that looked like an open oyster; she still stares hatefully at them, though her eyes seemed somehow blurred and cartoonish. The gendarmes had no mouths, and they were rushing in the door, pistols drawn. Both men reached for their whiskey glasses, only to realize that they had none.
"Can I kiss you?"
"Yes."
"Will it hurt, do you think?"
"It doesn't matter."
"I don't know if I love you...not that way, I mean."
"That's okay. Gotta do something."
And shades of gray became as flesh, as blood, as tangerines and honey, as fireworks, as tropical canopies, as Aegean shores and olive groves, as rainbows touching, weaving, as kaleidoscope tapestries and June tulip beds, and it didn't matter if they loved; they were one and it was good.
Some eons or minutes later, they rolled apart on a wet, sandy shore as the last rumbles of thunder shook great warm drops on them from a lightening sky.
The cafeteria came sailing back to them with laser-woven sails gently luffing; the walls breathed color and the bits of broken machine were a carousel, a calliope, a gently dying firework fountain. Let this be the eternal moment, they both thought as they once again became two.
It was hard to tell if the walls were breathing harder or if the river water still had a grip on them. They looked for Tut but he was gone. They staggered to the cafeteria door, looked down the undulating hall, which was much longer than they remembered. At the vanishing point, bobbing like the tip of a kite tail in a wind tunnel, was Tut, and....someone else.
They stood waiting for half an eternity, until the two figures stopped oscillating in their eyes.
"Coxli!" They both shouted, and indeed it was, and he was carrying something that looked suspiciously, inspiringly like a futuristic suitcase.

Decker #21

"I can only speculate that the spatial and temporal boundaries of a great number of causality matrices have warped, or lost integrity," Tut explained as he dug through the pile of tools and instruments. "I have seen minor temporo-spatial anomalies on occasion, but never anything of this magnitude. Deck-, ah, Deg...um, would one of you take the back panel off the protein modulus assessment unit? The big orange device on the end. This will defeat the mag-latches." He tossed Degren a clear, hot-dog-sized cylinder full of colored wires with a button on the side and a pencil-eraser-shaped gray protrusion at one end. "Hold it over each red dot and press the button once. Don't press the button unless you are directly on a red dot, or it may degauss the molecular degradation inhibitors. There are records of a similar disturbance in the Pentrax Cluster three galactic revolutions ago, but the causality grid there is at least three factors denser than here in the Spiral Arm Sector. While he's doing that, will you lay out all the small equipment we brought from the apartment and organize it by shape and size? Use that table, but drag it right over...here."
Tut kept up a constant flow of instructions and speculations as he bustled from device to device, rewiring circuits and stringing wires. They gleaned from his discourse that their odds of success were not very good, and that cataclysmic events involving a large part of the universe could be the result if they failed. Tut bemoaned the loss of the "temporo-spatial grid monitor", as he called the device they'd brought back from the shipwreck, as, apparently, it offered them a much better chance of success.
"My hypothesis is that we are witnessing an extreme example of the 'butterfly effect', in which the permutations of one small occurrence stimulate phase reverberation throughout the cosmic fabric of an area, sending out ripples that amplify as they recede from the point of occurrence. I am operating under the assumption that your, er, friend, Furge, is the nexus of this event. Hand me that oscillation inhibitor, would you? Blue oval with a yellow filament cluster at the narrower end. Thank you. If my hypothesis is correct, we will find that the reality matrix of Decker's world is as yet relatively undisturbed, as the amplification only begins compounding after the third return. Ah, good; the tesseract redundancy detector is intact. It's the octopus at the top right in the case, next to the large gold sphere. Carefully pinch each snake tip to disconnect it, then reach underneath and toggle the release mechanism set in the bottom, then gently....gently...slip it out and bring it here. There's no way we can be certain regarding calibration of our extemporaneous assembly, but we will hope that I can open a window onto your...Earth, do you call it? Yes, open a window to the site of the disturbance, hypothetically where Furge will be, and surround him with a time-space insulation bubble until we can find a reverse harmonic that rectifies his field."
"What if it isn't Furge that's disrupting the um, temporo-spatial grid?" Decker asked, "What if it's somehow connected to Lizzy and her people?"
"That possibility did cross my mind," Tut answered, "but I find it unlikely that they would need the device if they were able to generate such a causal disturbance without it, and have knowledge of it in the first place. It's existence must have been revealed to them during your exploration for it; they do have a rather sophisticated espionage network for their state of advancement. It would worry me greatly that they have discovered this survey locus if there weren't much larger concerns at hand. I haven't ruled out the possibility of their culpability in this catastrophe, but given my interpretation of the data, I must pursue the Furge line first."
"Then why do they want the device, and what if they have it?"
"It is likely that they wish to defeat the causality reverberations generated by Furge, too, but we have studied their development more closely than yours, and I calculate our chance of success to be better by several factors of ten. The screwdriver, please, Phillips head number two. Additionally, my assessment of your recount of the skirmish indicates that Lizzy had little opportunity to abscond with the device. Something else must have happened to it. Spilled milk at this point. Several trillion cattle's worth, but spilled milk nonetheless."
After several hours of work, Tut indicated that their services were no longer necessary. "It's just a matter of circuit tracking and tweaking now," he said. "I'll need to apply my full attention to the rest of the process, so kindly excuse yourselves to an hour or two of leisure. Browse the stasis pods and the freezers for refreshment if you like; the blue-labeled storage should be within your digestive parameters. The radiant cooker is a veritable antique, very likely acquired from "Earth" as you call it. Its workings may very well be familiar to you. Decker, you can be proud to know that your people made a tangible contribution to the cosmic culinary arts."
Decker was amused to find a chrome-and-black, ceramic-topped Kitchenaid electric range among many less familiar devices in the galley. They dug around in the various coolers, freezers, and other storage units for blue-labeled items, ending up with a selection of snacks that most resembled the packaged junk food of Decker's home. Degren found himself oddly comforted by a bowl of smooth, creamy, red-orange soup that Decker muttered "mmm mmm good" over.
It amazed both men how accustomed they had become to such fantastic environments. "In my world, we have authors that write books about such things," Decker said. "This is like Castenada meets Clarke, with a twist of Laumer."
I recall nothing like this from where I lived," Degren said, "but these names sound somehow familiar to me. I'm beginning to doubt that Taruan was my home in the first place. I am finding more affinity to your world, Earth, than to Taruan, and more memories that align with yours of Earth as well. Shit and shit, Decker, who am I?"
"You're starting to sound a bit like me, pal."
They sat silently for a while, each lost in his own thoughts as they snacked on chips and cakes, candies and compartment-ed dinners. Occasionally they'd note a brief flickering of the lights or a wavering of the walls, and a general sense of displacement tickled the edges of their senses, as though the ground under them was moving imperceptibly in every direction at once. They were both starting to feel sleepy when Tut appeared.
"Gentlemen, I believe we are ready to make our initial test. Kindly bring a few of your food items with you; we'll use those to determine the efficacy of my alterations."
They gathered up a selection of processed meats, chips, cakes, and bottled beverages and followed Tut to his impromptu work station. He had transformed their mess of assorted parts into something that most resembled Decker's idea of a miniature, futuristic metropolis, with lights glowing and pulsing everywhere and tubes coursing with holograph holographic images up and down the tower-like elements of the tiny city. At the center of it all, at the junction where two broad tables had been pushed together to accommodate the circle of interconnected devices, was a bulls-eye of tubes similar to the ones that ascended the sides of the devices, overlaid with a thick, circular disc of bluish, transparent material some four feet in diameter.
"Place your food items in the center of the circle," Tut said, "and then come over here and stand with me." He was behind a small console some six feet away from the main cluster. The console was connected to the cluster by a braid of cables and tubes, along which light and holograms pulsed to and fro from the console to the cluster. Once they stood on either side of him, he made a brief explanation of the console.
"The three central dials govern the temporal nexus location. As far as we have discovered, time seems to operate in three dimensions, much as perceptible space tends to. The lever below those, oriented side to side, is a linear representation of the river, which is, as far as we've come to understand, the operating parameters of our matrix of conjoined realities. Top right, top left, and bottom center are the dials for spatial coordination in the singular reality we will attempt to enter. The video screen above will, hopefully, offer an image of the physical location we home in on; the side slider under the screen is for magnification, which controls not just the view size but the transmission window size. The three vertical slide levers at the lower left control the percentage of power we apply to each function: Time, space, and river position. The large red button, lower right, is the power. Beside that is the actuator lever, which is pulled down slowly to finalize the transmission. For our first test, we will attempt only to move your food items in space within the parameters of this reality. I intend to place them back on the table where you were eating."
He pressed the red button and the miniature cityscape pulsed bright blue, while the screen lit up in static snow. He brought the center vertical slide up to 10% and green undertones pulsed in the tubes. He centered the three middle knobs on zero, then moved the bottom one clockwise a half degree or so. An image of the cafeteria emerged from the fuzz, with a black circle outline at the center. He fiddled with the side slider below the screen, adjusting the circle size to accommodate the volume of the items in the center of the apparatus.
Tut adjusted his glasses, then rubbed his hands together and turned to look at the two men. "Of course, this is all based on unproven hypothesis, in fact uncollaborated hypothesis. Flusteun's First Law of Parallelity does seem to lead one to assume that temporo-spatial multiplicities can be aligned with non-cosmotic force, which has been proven to exist outside the plaxo-bubbles of all reality dynamics, so-"
"Push the goddamned button, Tut!" Decker put his palms up and shrugged his shoulders. "Prove your hypothesis pronto, 'cause if it fails, we've got to try another tack."
The turtle-man gave Decker a highly magnified glare, then pushed the button. There was a soft "pop" and a whoosh, and the items disappeared from the center of the apparatus. Tut watched the screen, but Decker and Degren gazed over at the table where they'd been sitting. Something wavered there, then all the items popped into view.
"Hooo-eee, sweet shittin' Jesus Tut, you did it!" Degren looked more surprised than either of his friends when he realized the string of epithets had dropped from his lips.
Decker laughed, "You took the words right out of my mouth, bro!"
"It isn't time for celebration yet, gentlemen," Tut said. Let's inspect the subjects of our little transportation experiment before we get too excited." He rushed anxiously to the cafeteria table and began taking small samples from each container and bag.
What're you going to do with that stuff?" Decker challenged.
"I'll take it up to the cosmotics lab one floor up for some chromatic assessment."
"Do we have time for that? Here, lemme." Decker stuffed one of the chips in his mouth. "Tastes just like it did before." He grabbed for the chip bag on the table. "Matter of fact, I'm feeling a mite pecki-" His lips slapped shut as he tried to pick up the bag and found that almost a third of it was imbedded in the table. "What the-" He tugged on the bag, then his face collapsed in dismay as he realized, "You transported the chips into the table! Fuck!"
"I'll have to realign the phase shift inverter relays," Tut said, dropping the items he'd gathered and heading back to the apparatus. "If you gentlemen would care to nap a while, I'll get this done in as few hours as possible."
"Wait a minute." Degren's face was a stone mask. Just set the thing to a little higher plane. It's like firing a mis-sighted rifle, you've just gotta adjust."
"Are you talking out of my side of your mouth, bud?" Decker stared at his friend. "Things just get curioser all the time, don't they?"
Tut shook his head vigorously. "No, no, the risks are too great. That much error over the time, distance, and singularity flux factors could put you at the core of a planet, or in orbit. I need to work these bugs out."
"Okay, wake us up in three hours no matter what, Tut," Decker demanded. "Whatever shape that thing is in, we'll need to roll the dice and go for it. Look around, professor! The walls are barely walls anymore!" Decker was right; there was an eerie, wavering blue-green glow to everything, just at the edge of perception.
"Oh, my!" Tut was horrified. "Perhaps you'd better not sleep after all. I'll just make a few quick tweaks and we'll make our next test."
Tut's hands were a blur over the control console, then he moved to the apparatus itself, twisting wires, bending tubes, shining odd lights in dark crevices, almost seeming to play the device like a musical instrument. Degren marveled at the odd grace the turtle-man possessed, and the bliss-filled look on his face. This was a maestro of science, he thought. There were odd movie scenes playing in the background of Degren's mind; images from films Decker had seen as a young man; mad scientists amid wild arrays of tubes and wires, dials and levers. None of these crazed-looking, babbling, white-frock-ed posers could begin to rise to Tut's level.
Suddenly, the graceful dance stopped. "Very well, it is time for the next test. We'll try sending a bag of chips again, and if we are successful, one of us will have to be the subject of a similar transport."
The bag went over perfectly. Decker, quivering from head to toe, volunteered to go, and the experiment went off without a hitch. Tut, after giving the apparatus a thorough going-over, aligned the video screen on the House Thure, Aida's ancestral home on Cradsell 4. "Now, my friends, for the real test. Someone has to test the inter-spatial efficacy of my apparatus. The trip may as well serve a dual purpose; I will make a brief visit to my darling Aida. I will align the coordinates and one of you will engage the red button. When you see me on the screen, you will know I've made it. Then you must watch the screen until I return to the exact spot I arrived at, and push the button again. If everything goes according to calculations, I will again appear in the center of the apparatus. Now, I'll just be a moment." He twiddled the power levers and the magnification slide until he was satisfied, then carefully clambered onto the tables, placing himself on the clear disc and orienting himself to face the console. "Ready," was all he said. Decker pressed the button.
A much larger "pop" and "whoosh" ensued, the draft of which jiggled some of the less rigid aspects of the apparatus. Decker glared at the machine nervously.
"Decker, look!" Degren pointed to the screen. "It worked! Tut is there!"
Both men raised their hands over their heads and danced from toe to toe. "Holy triple shit!" reverberated simultaneously from their mouths, then they watched Tut toddle off toward the randomly configured manse.
"I wonder if there's anything like a beer in these, er coolers," Decker said. "Deg, you watch the screen while I do a little on my own, er, research. I'll relay the results of my investigations momentarily." He wandered up and down the aisles of the storeroom, opening doors and drawers, until he found a blue-labeled cabinet containing a rack of what looked invitingly like wine bottles. The cabinet door had a hook on the inside, where there was hung a device not at all unlike a corkscrew. "Aha!" he cried, taking the corkscrew in his teeth and grabbing a likely bottle in either hand before head-butting the cabinet door shut. "Methinks, brother Degren, that we might celebrate just a smidge."
"Perhaps we'll wait just a bit," Degren replied, "Tut is returning, and he has Aida with him."
They watched Tut take Aida to the spot where he appeared, then give the "thumbs up" signal. Degren pressed the button and Aida flashed into the center of the apparatus, stunned and flapping.
"Aida, STOP!" Decker waved to her. "Aida, STOP FLAPPING OR YOU'LL BREAK THE MACHINE!"
She did, and luckily nothing seemed to have been disturbed. The two men helped her out of the circle as she expressed her surprise at seeing them, and her gratitude for their assistance. She continued chattering, but Degren spotted Tut on the view screen, waving frantically; the scene behind him was one of utter chaos as the house began shifting shape, the trees grew and shrunk, the gardens morphed, bloomed, un-bloomed, died, resurrected themselves in rapid succession. Tut somehow remained centered in the screen, but Degren could tell he was having trouble staying there. He pushed the button.
Tut obviously had come a little off his mark. When he appeared on the tables, he was off-center to their right, and the edge of his shell brushed against one of the pulsing towers of the apparatus. It teetered, but Tut seemed paralyzed. Decker rushed to prop it up, barely grabbing it in time, carefully standing it back on its spot.
Tut still hadn't moved. Behind his big, thick glasses, he looked dazed and unfocused. His shell still touched the nearly-stricken tower. Decker reached up to grab his hand, try to lead him out of the circle. When his fingers contacted the leathery wrist, Tut began jerking and whooping like a fence-zapped ostrich. His arms flew out, he spun, twitching and flapping; every twitch took out another segment of the apparatus. Parts went crashing off the table and onto the floor. Decker and Degren rushed about madly, trying to rescue the glowing, tumbling towers as sparks flew and shards tinkled. Tut's eyes suddenly came clear and he looked around just as the last tower fell, then his knees went limp and he followed suit.