Master of Space and Time (18 page)

“You have to think about the genes,” I said. I'd heard a theory about this. “Basically all a person wants is to perpetuate his or her genes. The best strategy for men is to have lots of children with lots of different women. The best strategy for
women is have children and make sure the father stays around to help take care of them.”

“Ha!” snapped the woman next to me. “Some man must have told you that.
All a person wants is to perpetuate their genes
. Boy, is that stupid.”

“Well, yes,” I said after a time. “I guess it is.”

I got a taxi at Penn Station. “The Plaza Hotel,” I told the driver.

“Sure thing, little lady.”

I sat back and watched the buildings sweep past. People, people, people. And all of them thinking, all of them just as conscious as me. When I'd been a kid I'd always thought of grown-ups as a race apart—big meat robots, really. Then once, when I was in my twenties, my father had said something funny to me. We were playing golf behind a foursome of businessmen in colored trousers and billed caps.

“Look at them, Joe,” my father had said. “They really look like they know what they're doing. I'd always thought I'd be like them someday. I'd always thought I'd get to be a grown-up. But I'm not. I still don't feel any different. I'm sixty and I still don't know what I'm doing.”

As the years passed, I'd come to understand what my father meant. Even though I was almost forty, I still didn't feel like a grown-up. I didn't really feel much different from how I had in high school.

And now in the taxi I was thinking that the same thing is true for men and women. As a man I'd always assumed that women are somehow not like real people. Of course I never put it that baldly, but the feeling had been there all along.
Yet now here I was, with the tits and ass and lipstick—still just a person. The woman on the train—I'd never quite talked to a woman that way before, without the sex game somewhere in the background. As she'd unselfconsciously told me about her boyfriend and her job and her roommates, I realized something that I'd only seen in flashes before.

Everyone is just a person trying to be happy. Everyone is really alive
.

What a liberation to know this! What a burden!

“Do you expect me to have sex with you?”

“Well, sure. I'd rather do it with you than with anyone else.”

“The way I feel now, Joe, I'd rather do it with anyone else
but
you. How could you pull this on me?” She paced back and forth across the enormous living room. Outside the big French windows lay the wonderful clutter of Manhattan. “We could have been so happy.” There were tears in her eyes.

“Come here, Nancy. Come sit on the couch with me.”

“No. And you killed the fritter trees, too.”

“They were taking over. You know that. That's what you got arrested for: distributing dangerous, nonapproved seeds.”

“I suppose the police will be coming for me again?”

“I don't think so. I repaired the damages, and I erased all the documents relating to your case. With no documents and no more fritter trees or porkchop bushes, I don't see how—”

Someone was pounding on the door. It was the police, two of them.

“Hello, ladies,” said the older of the two. He was a white-haired man with a weathered face. “Is this the residence of Joseph Fletcher?”

“Yes,” said Nancy. “But—”

“He's not here,” I interrupted, getting up from the couch and swiveling over to the cops.

“Do you mind if we take a look around?” asked the old cop, giving me an appreciative once-over. “You see, we have a warrant for his arrest.”

“Come on in, boys,” I cooed. Nancy look disgusted. I winked at her and sat back down on the couch. I was too tired to stay standing.

The police left after a while, and Nancy finally came over to sit next to me. The sun was going down. I wished we could go to bed, but I knew better than to suggest it. We held hands and the silence deepened.

“I could have you declared dead,” Nancy said after a while. “And then remarry.”

“You can not,” I snapped, letting go of her hand. “Joseph Fletcher may be missing, but without a corpse he's not legally dead.”

“Serena needs a father.”

“Where is Serena, anyway?”

“I left her with Sybil Bitter.”

“Alwin Bitter's wife?”

“That's right. I went back down to Princeton
before coming to New York. My TV interview was really exciting, Joe, you should have seen it.” As the room darkened, Nancy was finding it easier to talk to me. “They arrested me right on the Brad Kurtow show. I was in jail all day, and then suddenly I saw this thumb-sized little man who looked like you.”

“That was me, all right. An echo of me.”

“And then I was here in this wonderful penthouse. I still haven't looked at all of it yet. And I can fly, Joe. I've only tried it a little but—”

“Would you take me flying with you now? It's dark and no one will see us. We could fly over to the World Trade Center and back.”

“But you can't fly, can you, Joe?”

“I can ride on your back. I did it with Sondra.”

“Well . . . take that silly dress off first.”

In the bedroom there was a dresser that looked like mine. The top drawer was filled with money—Nancy had stored all our money in here for me. The other drawers were filled with Joseph Fletcher clothes. I selected a pair of corduroys and a flannel shirt. Stepping into the bathroom, I noticed a pair of scissors. I took them and cropped my long hair short. Then I used a washcloth to get the makeup off my face.

Nancy was in the living room, hovering above the floor. She smiled when she saw me, appreciative of the gesture I'd made

“That's much better, Joe. You look almost like your old self. I was just thinking—with all our money, maybe you could get surgery to . . . you know . . .”

She flew down and hugged me. “Oh, Joe, why did you do it?”

I gave a quick shrug. “A subconscious desire. I've always wanted to be a beautiful woman.”

“Me too,” laughed Nancy.

“But you are.”

“Not the kind that drops men in their tracks. I thought those policemen were going to pass out when they saw you.”

“Hey, let's go flying. If you really want me to be dead, you can just drop me on Times Square.”

“You'd make quite a splash.”

We opened a big French window and flew out into the night. Nancy's wiry body felt nice between my soft thighs. The cool air beat against us as the staggering city perspectives swept past. We looped around the Empire State Building, zoomed along a cable of the Brooklyn Bridge, and finally alighted on the flat top of one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

“You fly well, Nancy.”

She closed her eyes and let me kiss her. The kiss felt just like it always had.

“Are you still my same Joe?” said Nancy after a while.

“I'm still the same. I'm still the same inside.”

“Then let's go back. Let's go back to our new house and try to be happy together.”

I'd like to be able to say that we had a steamy night of all-girl sex, but it didn't work out that way. I ended up sleeping on the couch. When it came right down to it, Nancy couldn't face the thought of me sleeping with her. Ever again.

The morning TV news was bad, too. Harry Gerber had been arrested and charged with criminal negligence in the deaths of seventeen people who had died of shock when the slugs got them in New Brunswick. His laboratory was under heavy police guard, and Sondra Tupperware had been arrested as an accessory. Joseph Fletcher was still being sought, but charges against Nancy Lydon Fletcher had been dropped. All the mutant food plants had disappeared, and their depredations had been undone. Some scientists speculated that perhaps the fritter trees had been a kind of mass hallucination brought on by the Gary-brains.

Someone was pounding on our door again. Nancy was still asleep. I went to look through the peephole. Newsmen, with video cameras.

“Go away,” I fluted. “I don't want to see anyone.”

“Please, Mrs. Fletcher,” shouted back the reporters. “Just a few questions.”

I went to the phone and called Security. After a while the noise at our door died down. Nancy was up now, and I made us breakfast.

“Sooner or later, one of them's going to talk,” I said over the eggs.

“Who?”

“Sondra and Harry. Sooner or later they'll tell the police that I've turned into a woman. And then I'll get arrested, too.”

“Arrested for what?”

“It was on the news. Seventeen people died from having the spine-riders on them, and they're charging Harry with criminal negligence. Sondra and I are supposed to be accessories. And I bet Professor
Baumgard is going to charge me with armed robbery.”

“You'd better call Don Stuart. The lawyer I hired yesterday.”

“Oh, lawyers . . . There must be a better way to fix all this. Don Stuart isn't going to give me back my sausage, is he?”

“Well, with plastic surgery—”

“I want my
real
body back. This just won't do. I want to have more children with you, Nancy. And I want poor Harry out of jail.”

“What about Sondra?”

“Oh, she'll get out. The first time they put her in an exercise yard, she'll fly away. If they handcuff her to a guard, she'll just take the guard with her. You don't have to worry about Sondra, Nancy. It's just Harry and me that are getting screwed.”

“Not literally, I hope.” Nancy smiled and ruffled my spiky hair. As long as we weren't in the bedroom she felt able to act affectionate.

We took our coffee out on the terrace and stared down into the chunked canyons of Manhattan. This was really a neat place to live. If only . . .

“Why don't you use the blunzer again?” asked Nancy suddenly.

“Didn't I tell you about the red and blue gluons?”

“Yes, but you said there were yellow gluons, too. If you find some yellow gluons, then the blunzer should work one last time, shouldn't it?”

“It's a thought. But I don't think anyone has yellow gluons. They're even rarer than the blue ones. If I could only talk to Harry—”

“Well, you can. Find out where he's locked up and go visit him. No one'll recognize you.”

“They don't let just anyone off the street come visit killers, Nancy. I'd have to be a relative.”

“So get a fake ID. Say you're his sister. Does he have a sister?”

“Yes! I've heard him talk about her. Sister Susie. She lives in Detroit.”

“Good. That means she's not likely to be here yet.”

“Right. But where do we get a fake ID?”

“You're the criminal, Joe, not me.”

“All I can think of is Eddie Match.” Eddie was an old friend of ours who lived way uptown. He made a generally honest living as a photographer, but he did know a lot of criminals. I'd heard him talk about forging IDs. “Let's take a cab uptown to see Eddie.”

“Okay. Wait here while I get dressed.”

“Can't I watch?”

“No.”

She went in the bedroom and closed the door. I really hoped we'd find those yellow gluons today. It had been uncool to use a gun on Baumgard. This time I'd use money. I found a big purse in the hall closet and stuffed it with a little over two million dollars' worth of thousand-dollar bills.

Nancy was still dressing. I decided to phone up Alwin Bitter to see how little Serena was doing. His wife answered the phone.

“Hello, Mrs. Bitter?”

“Yes.”

“This is . . .” In sudden panic, I realized I didn't know how to finish the sentence. “How's Serena?” I blurted.

“Serena is fine. Who am I speaking to, please?”

I hung up.

I had on my Joe Fletcher clothes from last night. I looked in the hall mirror and wondered whether to put on makeup. Just because Nancy was so uptight didn't mean I couldn't get a little fun out of my new body. My hair was a real mess.

“Hey, Nancy,” I called.

“Hold your horses, I'm not ready yet,” she shouted through the closed bedroom door.

“I'll be downstairs in the beauty salon.”

I left before she could protest. I'd spent my whole life waiting for women to finish dressing; now it was my turn to get back.

The hairdresser was chic and in his twenties. He cluck-clucked over the way I'd butchered my hair.

“Whatever possessed you, dear?”

“I—I thought someone would like me better with short hair. Can you fix it up?”